- Essentially all the news pertaining to the US federal funding of science continues to be awful. This article from Science summarizes the situation well, as does this from The Guardian and this editorial in the Washington Post. I do like the idea of a science fair of cancelled grants as a way to try to get alleged bipartisan appropriator notice of just how bad the consequences would be of the proposed cuts.
- On a more uplifting note, mathematicians have empirically demonstrated a conjecture originally made by John Conway, that it is possible to make a tetrahedral pyramid that, under gravity, has only one stable orientation. Quanta has a nice piece on this with a cool animated gif, and here is the actual preprint about it. It's all about mass distributions and moments of inertia about edges. As others have pointed out including the authors, this could be quite useful for situations like recent lunar lander attempts that seem to have a difficult time not topping over.
- A paper last week in Nature uses photons and a microcavity to try to test how long it takes photons to tunnel through a classically forbidden region. In this setup, it is mathematically legit to model the photons as if they have an effective mass, and one can model the barrier they need to traverse in terms of an effective potential energy. Classically, if the kinetic energy of the particle of interest is less than the potential energy of the barrier, the particle is forbidden inside the barrier. I've posted about the issue of tunneling time repeatedly over the years (see here for a 2020 post containing links), because I think it's a fascinating problem both conceptually and as a puzzle for experimentalists (how does one truly do a fair test of this?). The take-away from this paper is, the more classically forbidden the motion, the faster the deduced tunneling time. This has been seen in other experiments testing this idea. A key element of novelty in the new paper is the claim that the present experiment seems (according to the authors) to not be reasonably modeled by Bohmian mechanics. I'd need to read this in more depth to better understand it, as I had thought that Bohmian mechanics applied to problems like this is generally indistinguishable in predictions from conventional quantum mechanics, basically by design.
- In other non-condensed matter news, there is an interstellar comet transiting the solar system right now. This is very cool - it's only the third such object detected by humans, but to be fair we've only really been looking for a few years. This suggests that moderately sized hunks of material are likely passing through from interstellar space all the time, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will detect a boatload of them. My inner science fiction fan is hoping that the object changes its orbit at perihelion by mysterious means.
This week is crunch time for a final push on US congressional appropriators to try to influence science agency budgets in FY26. I urge you to reach out if this matters to you. Likewise, I think it's more than reasonable to ask congress why the NSF is getting kicked out of its headquarters with no plan for an alternative agency location, so that the HUD secretary can have a palatial second home in that building.
