Quick survey - machine shops and maker spaces

Recent events are very dire for research at US universities, and I will write further about those, but first a quick unrelated survey for those at such institutions.  Back in the day, it was common for physics and some other (mechanical engineering?) departments to have machine shops with professional staff.  In the last 15-20 years, there has been a huge growth in maker-spaces on campuses to modernize and augment those capabilities, though often maker-spaces are aimed at undergraduate design courses rather than doing work to support sponsored research projects (and grad students, postdocs, etc.).  At the same time, it is now easier than ever (modulo tariffs) to upload CAD drawings to a website and get a shop in another country to ship finished parts to you.

Quick questions:   Does your university have a traditional or maker-space-augmented machine shop available to support sponsored research?  If so, who administers this - a department, a college/school, the office of research?  Does the shop charge competitive rates relative to outside vendors?  Are grad students trained to do work themselves, and are there professional machinists - how does that mix work?

Thanks for your responses.  Feel free to email me if you'd prefer to discuss offline.

How badly has NSF funding already been effectively cut?

This NY Times feature lets you see how each piece of NSF's funding has been reduced this year relative to the normalized average spanning in the last decade.  Note: this fiscal year, thanks to the continuing resolution, the actual agency budget has not actually been cut like this. They are just not spending congressionally appropriated agency funds.  The agency, fearing/assuming that its budget will get hammered next fiscal year, does not want to start awards that it won't be able to fund in out-years. The result is that this is effectively obeying in advance the presidential budget request for FY26.  (And it's highly likely that some will point to unspent funds later in the year and use that as a justification for cuts, when in fact it's anticipation of possible cuts that has led to unspent funds.  I'm sure the Germans have a polysyllabic word for this.  In English, "Catch-22" is close.)

I encourage you to click the link and go to the article where the graphic is interactive (if it works in your location - not sure about whether the link works internationally).  The different colored regions are approximately each of the NSF directorates (in their old organizational structure).  Each subsection is a particular program.  

Seems like whoever designed the graphic was a fan of Tufte, and the scaling of the shaded areas does quantitatively reflect funding changes.  However, most people have a tough time estimating relative areas of irregular polygons.  Award funding in physics (the left-most section of the middle region) is down 85% relative to past years.  Math is down 72%.  Chemistry is down 57%.  Materials is down 63%.  Earth sciences is down 80%.  Polar programs (you know, those folks who run all the amazing experiments in Antarctica) is down 88%.  

I know my readers are likely tired of me harping on NSF, but it's both important and a comparatively transparent example of what is also happening at other agencies.  If you are a US citizen and think that this is the wrong path, then push on your congressional delegation about the upcoming budget. 

A science anecdote palate cleanser

Apologies for slow posting.  Real life has been very intense, and I also was rather concerned when one of my readers mentioned last weekend that these days my blog was like concentrated doom-scrolling.  I will have more to say about the present university research crisis later, but first I wanted to give a hopefully diverting example of the kind of problem-solving and following-your-nose that crops up in research.

Recently in my lab we have had a need to measure very small changes in electrical resistance of some devices, at the level of a few milliOhms out of kiloOhms - parts in \(10^6\).  One of my students put together a special kind of resistance bridge to do this, and it works very well.  Note to interested readers: if you want to do this, make sure that you use components with very low temperature coefficients of their properties (e.g., resistors with a very small \(dR/dT\)), because otherwise your bridge becomes an extremely effective thermometer for your lab.  It’s kind of cool to be able to see the lab temperature drift around by milliKelvins, but it's not great for measuring your sample of interest.

There are a few ways to measure resistance.  The simplest is the two-terminal approach, where you drive currents through and measure voltages across your device with the same two wires.  This is easy, but it means that the voltage you measure includes contributions from the contacts those wires make with the device.  A better alternative is the four-terminal method, where you use separate wires to supply/collect the current.  

Anyway, in the course of doing some measurements of a particular device's resistance as a function of magnetic field at low temperatures, we saw something weird.  Below some rather low temperatures, when we measured in a 2-terminal arrangement, we saw a jump up in resistance by around 20 milliOhms (out of a couple of kOhms) as magnetic field was swept up from zero, and a small amount of resistance hysteresis with magnetic field sweep that vanished above maybe 0.25 T.  This vanished completely in a 4-terminal arrangement, and also disappeared above about 3.4 K.  What was this?  Turns out that I think we accidentally rediscovered the superconducting transition in indium.  While our contact pads on our sample mount looked clean to the unaided eye, they had previously had indium on there.  The magic temperature is very close to the bulk \(T_{c}\) for indium.

For one post, rather than dwelling on the terrible news about the US science ecosystem, does anyone out there have other, similar fun experimental anecdotes?  Glitches that turned out to be something surprising?  Please share in the comments.

Updates, thoughts about industrial support of university research

Lots of news in the last few days regarding federal funding of university research:

• NSF has now frozen all funding for new and continuing awards.  This is not good; just how bad it is depends on the definition of "until further notice".  
• Here is an open letter from the NSF employees union to the basically-silent-so-far National Science Board, asking for the NSB to support the agency.
• Here is a grass roots SaveNSF website with good information and suggestions for action - please take a look.
• NSF also wants to cap indirect cost rates at 15% for higher ed institutions for new awards.  This will almost certainly generate a law suit from the AAU and others.  
• Speaking of the AAU, last week there was a hearing in the Massachusetts district court regarding the lawsuits about the DOE setting indirect cost rates to 15% for active and new awards.  There had already been a temporary restraining order in place nominally stopping the change; the hearing resulted in that order being extended "until a further order is issued resolving the request for a temporary injunction."  (See here, the entry for April 29.)
• In the meantime, the presidential budget request has come out, and if enacted it would be devastating to the science agencies.  Proposed cuts include 55% to NSF, 40% to NIH, 33% to USGS, 25% to NOAA, etc.   If these cuts went through, we are taking about more than $35B, at a rough eyeball estimate. 
• And here is a letter from former NSF directors and NSB chairs to the appropriators in Congress, asking them to ignore that budget request and continue to support government sponsored science and engineering research.

Unsurprisingly, during these times there is a lot of talk about the need for universities to diversify their research portfolios - that is, expanding non-federally-supported ways to continue generating new knowledge, training the next generation of the technically literate workforce, and producing IP and entrepreneurial startup companies.  (Let's take it as read that it would be economically and societally desirable to continue these things, for the purposes of this post.)

Philanthropy is great, and foundations do fantastic work in supporting university research, philanthropy can't come close to making up for sharp drawdowns of federal support.  The numbers just don't work.  The endowment of the Moore Foundation, for example, is around $10B, implying an annual payout of $500M or so, which is great but around 1.4% of the cuts being envisioned.  

Industry seems like the only non-governmental possibility that could in principle muster the resources that could make a large-scale difference.   Consider the estimated profits (not revenues) of different industrial sectors.  The US semiconductor market had revenues last year of around $500B with an annualized net margin of around 17%, giving $85B/yr of profit.  US aerospace and defense similarly have an annual profit of around $70B.  The financial/banking sector, which has historically benefitted greatly from PhD-trained quants, has an annual net income of $250B.  I haven't even listed numbers for the energy and medical sectors, because those are challenging to parse (but large). 

All of those industries have been helped greatly by university research, directly and indirectly.  It's the source of trained people.  It's the source of initial work that is too long-term for corporations to be able to support without short-time-horizon shareholders getting annoyed.  It's the source of many startup companies that sometimes grow and other times get gobbled up by bigger fish. 

Encouraging greater industrial sponsorship of university research is a key challenge.  The value proposition must be made clear to both the companies and universities.  The market is unforgiving and exerts pressure to worry about the short term not the long term.  Given how Congress is functioning, it does not look like there are going to be changes to the tax code put in place that could incentivize long term investment.  

Cracking this and meaningfully growing the scale of industrial support for university research could be enormously impactful.  Something to ponder.