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Semiconductors power nearly every aspect of modern life – cars, smartphones, medical devices and even national defense systems. These tiny but essential components make the information age possible, whether they’re supporting lifesaving hospital equipment or facilitating the latest advances in artificial intelligence.

It’s easy to take them for granted, until something goes wrong. That’s exactly what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic exposed major weaknesses in the global semiconductor supply chain. Suddenly, to name just one consequence, new vehicles couldn’t be finished because chips produced abroad weren’t being delivered. The semiconductor supply crunch disrupted entire industries and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

The crisis underscored a hard reality: The U.S. depends heavily on foreign countries – including China, a geopolitical rival – to manufacture semiconductors. This isn’t just an economic concern; it’s widely recognized as a national security risk.

That’s why the U.S. government has taken steps to invest in semiconductor production through initiatives such as the CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to revitalize American manufacturing and was passed with bipartisan support in 2022. While President Donald Trump has criticized the CHIPS and Science Act recently, both he and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have touted their efforts to expand domestic chip manufacturing in recent years.

Yet, even with bipartisan support for new chip plants, a major challenge remains: Who will operate them?

Minding the workforce gap

The push to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. faces a significant hurdle: a shortage of skilled workers. The semiconductor industry is expected to need 300,000 engineers by 2030 as new plants are built. Without a well-trained workforce, these efforts will fall short, and the U.S. will remain dependent on foreign suppliers.

This isn’t just a problem for the tech sector – it affects every industry that relies on semiconductors, from auto manufacturing to defense contractors. Virtually every military communication, monitoring and advanced weapon system relies on microchips. It’s not sustainable or safe for the U.S. to rely on foreign nations – especially adversaries – for the technology that powers its military.

For the U.S. to secure supply chains and maintain technological leadership, I believe it would be wise to invest in education and workforce development alongside manufacturing expansion.

Building the next generation of semiconductor engineers

Filling this labor gap will require a nationwide effort to train engineers and technicians in semiconductor research, design and fabrication. Engineering programs across the country are taking up this challenge by introducing specialized curricula that combine hands-on training with industry-focused coursework.

Clean rooms, a vital part of semiconductor factories, are also where the next generation of tech innovators conduct research. Here, a Ph.D. candidate is seen in an air shower room before entering a clean room at Tokyo University on May 1, 2024.
Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images

Future semiconductor workers will need expertise in chip design and microelectronics, materials science and process engineering, and advanced manufacturing and clean room operations. To meet this demand, it will be important for universities and colleges to work alongside industry leaders to ensure students graduate with the skills employers need. Offering hands-on experience in semiconductor fabrication, clean-room-based labs and advanced process design will be essential for preparing a workforce that’s ready to contribute from Day 1.

At the Missouri University of Science of Technology, where I am the chair of the materials science and engineering department, we’re launching a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree in semiconductor engineering this fall. Other universities across the U.S. are also expanding their semiconductor engineering options amid strong demand from both industry and students.

A historic opportunity for economic growth

Rebuilding domestic semiconductor manufacturing isn’t just about national security – it’s an economic opportunity that could benefit millions of Americans. By expanding training programs and workforce pipelines, the U.S. can create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs, strengthening the economy and reducing reliance on foreign supply chains.

And the race to secure semiconductor supply chains isn’t just about stability – it’s about innovation. The U.S. has long been a global leader in semiconductor research and development, but recent supply chain disruptions have shown the risks of allowing manufacturing to move overseas.

If the U.S. wants to remain at the forefront of technological advancement in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and next-generation communication systems, it seems clear to me it will need new workers – not just new factories – to gain control of its semiconductor production. Läs mer…

Knowing which vaccines older adults should get and hearing a clear recommendation from their health care provider about why a particular vaccine is important strongly motivated them to get vaccinated. That’s a key finding in a recent study I co-authored in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

Adults over 65 have a higher risk of severe infections, but they receive routine vaccinations at lower rates than do other groups. My colleagues and I collaborated with six primary care clinics across the U.S. to test two approaches for increasing vaccination rates for older adults.

In all, 249 patients who were visiting their primary care providers participated in the study. Of these, 116 patients received a two-page vaccine discussion guide to read in the waiting room before their visit. Another 133 patients received invitations to attend a one-hour education session after their visit.

The guide, which we created for the study, was designed to help people start a conversation about vaccines with their providers. It included checkboxes for marking what made it hard for them to get vaccinated and which vaccines they want to know more about, as well as space to write down any questions they have. The guide also featured a chart listing recommended vaccines for older adults, with boxes where people could check off ones they had already received.

In the sessions, providers shared in-depth information about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases and facilitated a discussion to address vaccine hesitancy.

In a follow-up survey two months later, patients reported that the most significant barriers they faced were knowing when they should receive a particular vaccine, having concerns about side effects and securing transportation to a vaccination appointment.

The percentage of patients who said they wanted to get a vaccine increased from 68% to 79% after using the vaccine guide. Following each intervention, 80% of patients reported they discussed vaccines more in that visit than they had in prior visits.

Of the 14 health care providers who completed the follow-up survey, 57% reported increased vaccination rates following each approach. Half of the providers felt that the use of the vaccine guide was an effective strategy in guiding conversations with their patients.

A pamphlet at the doctor’s office can empower older patients to ask about vaccines.

Why it matters

Only about 15% of adults ages 60-64 and 26% of adults 65 and older are up to date on all the vaccines recommended for their age, according to CDC data from 2022. These include vaccines for COVID 19, influenza, tetanus, pneumococcal disease and shingles.

Yet studies consistently show that getting vaccinated reduces the risk of complications from these conditions in this age group.

My research shows that strategies that equip older adults with personalized information about vaccines empower them to start the conversation about vaccines with their clinicians and enable them to be active participants in their health care.

What’s next

In the future, we will explore whether engaging patients on this topic earlier is even more helpful than doing so in the waiting room before their visit.

This might involve having clinical team members or care coordinators connect with patients ahead of their visit, either by phone or through telemedicine that is designed specifically for older adults.

My research team plans to conduct a pilot study that tests this approach. We hope to learn whether reaching out to these patients before their clinic visits and helping them think through their vaccination status, which vaccines their provider recommends and what barriers they face in getting vaccinated will improve vaccination rates for this population.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Läs mer…

Baseball fans tuning into spring training games may have noticed another new wrinkle in a sport that’s experienced a host of changes in recent years.

Batters, pitchers and catchers can challenge a home plate umpire’s ball or strike call. Powered by Hawk-Eye ball-tracking technology, the automated ball-strike system replays the pitch trajectory to determine whether the umpire’s call was correct.

To minimize disruptions, Major League Baseball permits each team a maximum of two failed challenges per game but allows unlimited challenges as long as they’re successful. For now, the technology will be limited to the spring exhibition games. But it could be implemented in the regular season as soon as 2026.

Count future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer among the skeptics.

“We’re humans,” the Toronto Blue Jays hurler said after a spring training game in which he challenged two calls and lost both to the robo umps. “Can we just be judged by humans?”

Technological advances that lead to fairer, more accurate calls are often seen as triumphs. But as co-editors of the recently published volume “Inventing for Sports,” which includes case studies of over 20 sports inventions, we find that new technology doesn’t mean perfect precision – nor does it necessarily lead to better competition from the fan perspective.

Cue the cameras

While playing in a cricket match in the 1990s, British computer scientist Paul Hawkins fumed over a bad call. He decided to make sure the same mistake wouldn’t happen again.

Drawing on his doctoral training in artificial intelligence, he designed an array of high-speed cameras to capture a ball’s flight path and velocity, and a software algorithm that used the data to predict the ball’s likely future path.

He founded Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd. in 2001, and his first clients were cricket broadcasters who used the technology’s trajectory graphics to enhance their telecasts.

By 2006, professional tennis leagues began deploying Hawk-Eye to help officials adjudicate line calls. Cricket leagues followed in 2009, incorporating it to help umpires make what are known as “leg before wicket” calls, among others. And professional soccer leagues started using the technology in 2012 to determine whether balls cross the goal line.

A technician uses the Hawk-Eye system as part of a broadcast trial for the technology during the 2005 Masters Tennis tournament in London.
Julian Finney/Getty Images

Reaction to Hawk-Eye has been mixed. In tennis, players, fans and broadcasters have generally embraced the technology. During a challenge, spectators often clap rhythmically in anticipation as the Hawk-Eye official cues up the replayed trajectory.

“As a player, and now as a TV commentator,” tennis legend Pam Shriver said in 2006, “I dreamed of the day when technology would take the accuracy of line calling to the next level. That day has now arrived.”

But Hawk-Eye isn’t perfect. In 2020 and 2022, the firm publicly apologized to fans of professional soccer clubs after its goal-line technology made errant calls after players congregated in the goal box and obstructed key camera sight lines.

Perfection isn’t possible

Critics have also raised more fundamental concerns.

In their 2016 book “Bad Call,” researchers Harry Collins, Robert Evans and Christopher Higgins reminded readers that Hawk-Eye is not a replay of the ball’s actual position; rather, it produces a prediction of a trajectory, based on the ball’s prior velocity, rotation and position.

The authors lament that Hawk-Eye and what they term “decision aids” have undermined the authority of referees and umpires, which they consider bad for the games.

Ultimately, there are no purely objective standards for fairness and accuracy in technological officiating. They are always negotiated. Even the most precise officiating innovations require human consensus to define and validate their role. Technologies like photo-finish cameras, instant replay and ball-tracking systems have improved the precision of officiating, but their deployment is shaped – and often limited – by human judgment and institutional decisions.

For example, today’s best race timing systems are accurate to 0.0001 seconds, yet Olympic sports such as swimming, track and field, and alpine skiing report results in increments of only 0.01 seconds. This can lead to situations – such as Dominique Gisin and Tina Maze’s gold medal tie in the women’s downhill ski race at the 2014 Sochi Olympics – in which the timing officials admitted that their equipment could have revealed the actual winner. But they were forced to report a dead heat under the rules established by the ski federation.

With slow-motion instant replays, determining a catch or a player’s intention for a personal foul can actually be distorted by low-speed replay, since humans aren’t adept at adjusting to shifting replay speeds.

One of the big issues with baseball’s automated ball-strike system has to do with the strike zone itself.

MLB’s rule book defines the strike zone as the depth and width of home plate and the vertical distance between the midpoint of a player’s torso to the point just below his knees. The interpretation of the strike zone is notoriously subjective and varies with each umpire. For example, human umpires often call a strike if the ball crosses the plate in the rear corner. However the automated ball-strike system uses an imaginary plane that bisects the middle – not the front or the rear – of home plate.

There are more complications. Since every player has a unique height, each has a unique strike zone. At the outset of spring training, each player’s height was measured – standing up without cleats – and then confirmed through a biomechanical analysis.

Eddie Gaedel, the shortest player in major league baseball history, had a much smaller strike zone than his peers. He drew a walk in his only at-bat.
Bettmann/Getty Images

But what if a player changes their batting stance and decides to crouch? What if they change their cleats and raise their strike zone by an extra quarter-inch?

Of course, as has been the case in tennis, soccer and other sports, Hawk-Eye can help rectify genuinely bad calls. By allowing teams to correct the most disputed calls without eliminating the human element of umpiring, MLB hopes to strike a balance between tradition and change.

Fans have the final say

Finding a balance between machine precision and the human element of baseball is crucial.

Players’ and managers’ efforts to work the umpires to contract or expand the strike zone have long been a part of the game. And fans eagerly cheer or jeer players and managers who argue with the umpires. When ejections take place, more yelling and taunting ensues.

Though often unacknowledged in negotiations between leagues and athletes, fan enthusiasm is a key component of whether to adopt new technology.

For example, innovative “full-body” swimsuits contributed to a wave of record-breaking finishes in the sport between 2000 and 2009. But uneven access to the newest gear raised the specter of what some called “technological doping.” World Aquatics worried that as records fell simply due to equipment innovations, spectators would stop watching and broadcast and sponsorship revenue would dry up. The swimming federation ended up banning full-body swimsuits.

When managers argue balls and strikes, it can make for great TV.

Of course, algorithmic officiating differs from technologies that enhance performance and speed. But it runs a similar risk of turning off fans. So MLB, like other sports leagues, is being thrust into the role of managing technological change.

Assessing technologies for their immediate and long-term impact is difficult enough for large government agencies. Sports leagues lack those resources, yet are nonetheless being forced to carefully consider how they introduce and regulate various innovations.

MLB, to its credit, is proceeding incrementally. While the logical conclusion to the current automated ball-strike experiment would be fully electronic officiating, we think fans and players will resist going that far.

The league’s challenge system is a test. But the real umpires will ultimately be the fans. Läs mer…

The U.S. Department of Education cut its workforce by nearly 50% on March 11, 2025, when it laid off about 1,315 employees. The move follows several recent directives targeting the Cabinet-level agency.

Within the department, the Office for Civil Rights – which already experienced layoffs in February – was especially hard hit by cuts.

The details remain unclear, but reports suggest that staffs at six of the 12 regional OCR offices were laid off. Because of the office’s role in enforcing civil rights laws in schools and universities, the cuts will affect students across the country.

As education policy scholars who study how laws and policies shape educational inequities, we believe the Office for Civil Rights has played an important role in facilitating equitable education for all students.

The latest cuts further compound funding and staffing shortages that have plagued the office. The full effects of these changes on the most vulnerable public school students will likely be felt for many years.

Few staff members

The Education Department, already the smallest Cabinet-level agency before the recent layoffs, distributed roughly US$242 billion to students, K-12 schools and universities in the 2024 fiscal year.

About $160 billion of that money went to student aid for higher education. The department’s discretionary budget was just under $80 billion, a sliver compared with other agencies.

By comparison, the Department of Health and Human Services received nearly $2.9 trillion in fiscal year 2024.

Within the Education Department, the Office for Civil Rights had a $140 million budget for fiscal year 2024, less than 0.2% of discretionary funding, which requires annual congressional approval.

It has lacked financial support to effectively carry out its duties. For example, amid complaints filed by students and their families, the OCR has not had an increase in staff. That leaves thousands of complaints unresolved.

The office’s appropriated budget in fiscal year 2017 was one-third of the budget of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – a federal agency responsible for civil rights protection in the workplace – despite the high number of discrimination complaints that OCR handles.

Support for OCR

Despite this underfunding, the office has traditionally received bipartisan support.

Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for example, requested a funding decrease for the office during the first Trump administration. Congress, however, overrode her budget request and increased appropriations.

Likewise, regardless of changing administrations, the office’s budget has remained fairly unchanged since 2001.

It garners attention for investigating and resolving discrimination-related complaints in K-12 and higher education. And while administrations have different priorities in how to investigate these complaints, they have remained an important resource for students for decades.

But a key function that often goes unnoticed is its collection and release of data through the Civil Rights Data Collection.

The CRDC is a national database that collects information on various indicators of student access and barriers to educational opportunity. Historically, only 5% of the OCR’s budget appropriations has been allocated for the CRDC.

Yet, there are concerns among academic scholars that the continued collection and dissemination of the CRDC might be affected by staff cuts and contract cancellations worth $900 million at the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Science.

That’s because the CRDC often relies on data infrastructure that is shared with the institute.

The history of the CRDC

The CRDC originated in the late 1960s as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The data questionnaire, which poses questions about civil rights concerns, is usually administered to U.S. public school districts every two years.

It provides indicators on student experiences in public preschools and K-12 schools. That includes participation rates in curricular opportunities like Advanced Placement courses and extracurricular activities. It also provides data on 504 plans for students with disabilities and English-learner instruction.

Although there have been some changes to questions over the years, others have been consistent for 50 years to allow for examining changes over time. Some examples are counts of students disciplined by schools’ use of corporal punishment or out-of-school suspension.

The U.S. Department of Education building is seen in Washington on Dec. 3, 2024.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

During the Obama administration, the Office for Civil Rights prioritized making the CRDC more accessible to the public. The administration created a website that allows the public to view information for particular schools or districts, or to download data to analyze.

Why the CRDC matters

Our research focuses on how the CRDC has been used and how it could be improved. In an ongoing research project, we identified 221 peer-reviewed publications that have analyzed the CRDC.

Articles focusing on school discipline – out-of-school suspensions, for example – are the most common. But there are many other topics that would be difficult to study without the CRDC.

That’s especially true when making comparisons between districts and states, such as whether students have access to advanced coursework or participation in gifted and talented programs.

The data has also inspired policy changes.

The Obama administration, informed by the data on the use of seclusion and restraint to discipline students, issued a policy guidance document in 2016 regarding its overuse for students with disabilities.

Additionally, the data helps examine the effects of judicial decisions and laws – desegregation laws in the South, for example – that have improved educational opportunities for many vulnerable students.

Amid the Education Department’s continued cancellation of contracts of federally funded equity assistance centers, we believe research partnerships with policymakers and practitioners drawing on CRDC data will be more important than ever. Läs mer…

Homeschooling has exploded in popularity in recent years, particularly since the pandemic. But researchers are still exploring why parents choose to homeschool their children.

While the decision to homeschool is often associated with religion, a 2023 survey found that the two top reasons people cited as most important were a concern about the school environment, such as safety and drugs, and a dissatisfaction with academic instruction.

I studied giftedness, creativity and talent as part of my Ph.D. program focusing on students who are “twice exceptional” – that is, they have both learning challenges such autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as well as advanced skills. A better understanding of why parents choose homeschooling can help identify ways to improve the public education system. I believe focusing on twice-exceptional students can offer insights beyond this subset of the homeschooled population.

What we know about homeschooling

The truth is researchers don’t know much about homeschooling and homeschoolers.

One problem is regulations involving homeschooling differ dramatically among states, so it is often hard to determine who is being instructed at home. And many families are unwilling to talk about their experiences homeschooling and their reasons for doing so.

But here’s what we do know.

The share of children being homeschooled has surged since 2020, rising from 3.7% in the 2018-2019 school year to 5.2% in 2022-2023 – the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics. Over 3 million students were homeschooled in 2021-22, according to the National Home Education Research Institute.

And the population of homeschoolers is becoming increasingly diverse, with about half of families reporting as nonwhite in a 2023 Washington Post-Schar School poll. In addition, homeschooling families are just as likely to be Democrat as Republican, according to that same Post-Schar survey, a sharp shift from previous surveys that suggested Republicans were much more likely to homeschool.

As for why parents homeschool, 28% of those surveyed in 2023 by the Institute of Education Sciences said the school environment was their biggest reason, followed by 17% that cited concerns about academic instruction. Another 17% said providing their kids with moral or religious instruction was most important.

But not far behind at 12% was a group of parents who prioritized homeschooling for a different reason: They have a child with physical or mental health problems or other special needs.

This group would include parents of twice-exceptional children, who may be especially interested in pursuing homeschooling as an alternative method of education for three reasons in particular.

Some families have devoted significant resources, such as by creating home libraries, to homeschool their children.
AP Photo/Charles Krupa

1. The ‘masking’ problem

These parents may notice that their child’s needs are being overlooked in the public education system and may view homeschooling as a way to provide better individualized instruction.

Students who are twice exceptional often experience what researchers call the “masking” phenomenon. This can occur when a child’s disabilities hide their giftedness. When this occurs, teachers tend to provide academic support but hesitate to give these children the challenging material they may require.

Masking can also occur in reverse, when a student’s gifts tend to hide disabilities. In these cases, teachers provide challenging material, but they do not provide the needed accommodations that allow the gifted child to access the materials. Either way, masking can be a problem for students and parents who must advocate for teachers to address their unique range of academic needs.

While either type of masking is challenging for the student, it may be particularly frustrating for parents of twice-exceptional students to watch classroom teachers focus only on their child’s weaknesses rather than helping them develop their advanced abilities.

2. Individualized instruction

By the time a child enters school, parents have spent years observing their child’s development, comparing their progress with that of others their age. They’re also likely to be aware of their child’s unique interests.

While this may not be true for all parents, those who choose to homeschool may do so because they feel they have more of an ability and interest in catering to their child’s unique needs than a classroom teacher who is tasked with teaching many students simultaneously. Parents of students who demonstrate exceptional ability have expressed concerns about their child’s future educational opportunities in a public school setting.

Additionally, parents may become exhausted by their efforts to advocate for their child’s unique needs in the school system. Parents of students who demonstrate advanced abilities often pull their children out of public school after repeated efforts to improve communication between home and school.

3. Behavioral and emotional needs

Gifted students who have emotional or behavioral disabilities may find it difficult to demonstrate their abilities in the classroom.

All too often, teachers may be more focused on disciplining these students rather than addressing their academic needs. For example, a child who is bored with the class material may be loud and attempt to distract others as well.

Rather than recognizing this as signaling a need for more advanced material, the teacher might send the child to a separate area in the classroom or in the school to refocus or as punishment. Parents may feel better equipped than teachers to address both their child’s challenging behaviors and their gifted abilities, given the knowledge they have about their child’s history, interests, strengths and areas needing improvement.

Supporting students’ needs

Gaining a better understanding of the motivations driving parents to take their children out of the public school system is an important step toward improving schools so that fewer will feel the need to take this path.

Additionally, strengthening educators’ and policymakers’ understanding about twice-exceptional homeschooled students may help communities provide more support to their families – who then may not feel homeschooling is the only or best option. My research shows that many schools can do a better job providing these types of students and their parents with the support they need to thrive. Läs mer…

Every St Patrick’s day, thousands of Americans eat corned beef and cabbage as a way of connecting to Ireland. But this association sits uncomfortably with many Irish people.

That’s because the dish, while popular in the past, has nothing to do with St Patrick himself. St Patrick (also known as Patricius or Pádraig) was born in Roman Britain in the 5th century. He is the patron saint of Ireland and in later biographies, legend and folklore, he is depicted as almost single-handedly converting the Irish to Christianity, and breaking the power of the druids.

The entangled mix of history, myth and folklore that has been attached to the saint makes it difficult to isolate historical fact from hagiographical and folklore embellishments. So what, if anything, do the celebratory foods of today have to do with the real St Patrick? And would he have eaten any of those same foods himself?

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The real St Patrick

The little we know about the real Patrick comes from two, probably 5th-century, short Latin texts written by the saint himself. Those are the Confessio, which is believed to be Patrick’s autobiography, and the Epistola, a letter of excommunication to the soldiers of a British king Coroticus, after they killed and enslaved some of his converts.

A St Patrick’s Day greeting card from 1909.
Missouri History Museum

In these texts, food is only mentioned in the context of hunger and the miraculous appearance of pigs that are slaughtered to sustain starving travellers.

Other important biographies of St Patrick were written in the 7th and somewhere between the 9th and 12th century. The two 7th-century Latin texts were written by churchmen, Muirchú and Tírechán. The author of the later biography, The Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, is not known, but it was written partly in Latin and partly in Irish. These hagiographies (writing on the lives of saints) were works in legend-building with little connection to the real Patrick.

They do, however, give us a glimpse of the food culture of early medieval Ireland, when Patrick lived. They make references to dairy produce, salmon, bread, honey and meats, including beef, goat and a “ram for a king’s feast”.

Herb gardens are discussed alongside details of the cooking culture with mention of copper cauldrons, kitchens and cooking women. Grain and dairy foods would have most common, with white meats abundant in summer, and grain – especially oats – associated with the winter and early spring.

It is these foods, along with cultivated cabbage and onion-type vegetables and wild greens and fruit, that most likely would have sustained Patrick.

Delicious miracles

Food is frequently the subject of Saint Patrick’s miracles. As a child, he is said to have turned snow into butter and curds. On his missionary work, he was said to have changed water to honey, and cheese into stone and back to cheese again. In another miracle, he turned rushes into chives to satisfy a pregnant woman’s craving.

The bountiful fish stocks of certain rivers are also attributed to the saint’s blessing. One such example is the River Bann in Northern Ireland which was known for its salmon.

The food in Patrick’s world had a defined Irish signature. There is an emphasis in the hagiographies on a range of fresh, cultured and preserved dairy produce and the use of byproducts such as whey-water.

Corned beef and cabbage has become a popular St Patrick’s Day meal, but bears little connection to the real Patrick.
Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock

The extensive and later abandoned Irish cheese-making tradition is referenced in mention of curds and fáiscre grotha (pressed curds). The differentiation between new milk and milk may indicate a skills-based culture of working with dairy in the preparation of a family of thickened, soured and fermented milks. The associated communities, of which Patrick would have been part, probably had a taste for highly flavoured and cultured milk and cheese products.

These foods are typical of a self-sufficient agrarian economy, producing food that was suited to Irish soil and climatic conditions including wild and managed woodland, coastline and farmland. It is this vision of an untouched Ireland that continues to inspire Irish food culture today. Läs mer…

Barnard’s Star is a small, dim star, of the type that astronomers call red dwarfs. Consequently, even though it is one of the closest stars to Earth, such that its light takes only six years to get here, it is too faint to be seen with the naked eye. Now, four small planets have been found orbiting the star. Teams in America and Europe achieved this challenging detection by exploiting precision instruments on the world’s largest telescopes.

Diminutive Barnard’s Star is closer in size to Jupiter than to the Sun. Only the three stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system lie closer to us.

The planets newly discovered around Barnard’s Star are much too faint to be seen directly, so how were they found? The answer lies in the effect of their gravity on the star. The mutual gravitational attraction keeps the planets in their orbits, but also tugs on the star, moving it in a rhythmic dance that can be detected by sensitive spectrograph instruments. Spectrographs split up the star’s light into its component wavelengths. They can be used to measure the star’s motion.

A significant challenge for detection, however, is the star’s own behaviour. Stars are fluid, with the nuclear furnace at their core driving churning motions that generate a magnetic field (just as the churning of Earth’s molten core produces Earth’s magnetic field). The surfaces of red dwarf stars are rife with magnetic storms. This activity can mimic the signature of a planet when there isn’t one there.

The Maroon-X instrument installed at the Gemini North telescope.
International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Bean, Author provided (no reuse)

The task of finding planets by this method starts with building highly sensitive spectrograph instruments. They are mounted on telescopes large enough to capture sufficient light from the star. The light is then sent to the spectrograph which records the data. The astronomers then observe a star over months or years. After carefully calibrating the resulting data, and accounting for stellar magnetic activity, one can then scrutinise the data for the tiny signals that reveal orbiting planets.

In 2024, a team led by Jonay González Hernández from the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute reported on four years of monitoring of Barnard’s Star with the Espresso spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. They found one definite planet and reported tentative signals that indicated three more planets.

Now, a team led by Ritvik Basant from the University of Chicago in a paper just published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, have added in three years of monitoring with the Maroon-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope. Analysing their data confirmed the existence of three of the four planets, while combining both the datasets showed that all four planets are real.

Often in science, when detections push the limits of current capabilities, one needs to ponder the reliability of the findings. Are there spurious instrumental effects that the teams haven’t accounted for? Hence it is reassuring when independent teams, using different telescopes, instruments and computer codes, arrive at the same conclusions.

The Gemini North telescope is located on Maunakea in Hawaii.
MarkoBeg / Shutterstock

The planets form a tightly packed, close-in system, having short orbital periods of between two and seven Earth days (for comparison, our Sun’s closest planet, Mercury, orbits in 88 days). It is likely they all have masses less than Earth’s. They’re probably rocky planets, with bare-rock surfaces blasted by their star’s radiation. They’ll be too hot to hold liquid water, and any atmosphere is likely to have been stripped away.

The teams looked for longer-period planets, further out in the star’s habitable zone, but didn’t find any. We don’t know much else about the new planets, such as their estimated sizes. The best way of figuring that out would be to watch for transits, when planets pass in front of their star, and then measure how much starlight they block. But the Barnard’s Star planets are not orientated in such a way that we see them “edge on” from our perspective. This means that the planets don’t transit, making them harder to study.

Nevertheless, the Barnard’s Star planets tell us about planetary formation. They’ll have formed in a protoplanetary disk of material that swirled around the star when it was young. Particles of dust will have stuck together, and gradually built up into rocks that aggregated into planets. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, and most of them seem to have planets. Whenever we have sufficient observations of such stars we find planets, so there are likely to be far more planets in our galaxy than there are stars.

Most of the planets that have been discovered are close to their star, well inside the habitable zone (where liquid water could survive on the planet’s surface), but that’s largely because their proximity makes them much easier to find. Being closer in means that their gravitational tug is bigger, and it means that they have shorter orbital periods (so we don’t have to monitor the star for as long). It also increases their likelihood of transiting, and thus of being found in transit surveys.

The European Space Agency’s Plato mission, to be launched in 2026, is designed to find planets further from their stars. This should produce many more planets in their habitable zones, and should begin to tell us whether our own solar system, which has no close-in planets, is unusual. Läs mer…

The UK government has announced the abolition of NHS England, phased over two years. In practice, this will involve merging some functions and staff from NHS England into the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC). As part of the change, the government has stated that it expects to reduce duplication and save hundreds of millions of pounds.

NHS England was established under the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 (the Lansley reforms) and is responsible for commissioning care and overseeing the day-to-day running of the NHS. This involves negotiating budgets for local care provision with bodies like integrated care boards and hospitals; performance management such as monitoring waiting times and quality measures; and implementing national initiatives across NHS organisations.

NHS England was established to provide operational autonomy, shielding the health service from daily political interference. It is an “arm’s-length body”, meaning it operates independently from the government but remains accountable to it. The DHSC sets strategic goals and oversees NHS England activities.

In practice, NHS England and DHSC have distinct roles, although they overlap in some areas. DHSC staff typically have broader policy expertise – for example, many have worked in other areas of the civil service, whereas NHS England staff often have more detailed knowledge of how the NHS works on the ground.

Risks

The loss of expertise within NHS England is probably the largest risk of the abolition. Alongside very experienced NHS managers and analysts, NHS England employs senior doctors and other health care workers who contribute valuable practical knowledge from the NHS frontline into policy roles.

A major risk of this move is the potential loss of this clinical expertise and operational insight into policymaking. Lord Darzi’s report on the NHS specifically cited the loss in management talent that occurred as a result of the 2012 reforms, and cautioned against further reorganisation that might repeat that disruption.

Another risk is that bringing NHS England functions directly under ministerial control risks increased politicisation of day-to-day NHS management.

The government will argue that other policy areas like defence, education and policing do not have such a large arm’s-length body between the department and the frontline. However, health and social care is a uniquely large (11% of GDP) and highly political organisation, with a fast-growing budget and faster-growing challenges.

Keir Starmer announcing that he will abolish NHS England.
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

NHS policy is already highly politicised, but abolishing NHS England risks the DHSC and the ministers being on the hook for every operational decision. This could lead to operational decisions being made to appease public opinion rather than promoting public health.

The government faces significant practical challenges in merging two organisations with different cultures, working practices and pay structures. Currently, NHS England (about 16,000 staff) is much larger than DHSC (about 3,000 staff). Many NHS England roles will have to move into the much smaller DHSC.

The transition itself will require investment, so the promised savings are unlikely to be achieved in the short term.

Opportunities

The main opportunity of the abolition is the removal of duplication between DHSC and NHS England.

Currently, both organisations maintain separate policy teams covering similar areas – for example, elective surgery waiting times or cancer care. And sometimes, it is unclear how well they work together or why both are necessary.

By consolidating within the DHSC, there is an opportunity to strengthen policy analysis. With one strong policy team in the DHSC, policy advice to ministers (DHSC) and policy implementation on the ground (previously NHS England) could be better coordinated and aligned with the government’s objectives.

Lord Darzi’s report on the NHS highlighted the growth of regulatory roles within NHS England, questioning whether too much accountability could be counterproductive.

The abolition of NHS England is also an opportunity to streamline regulation while strengthening local management roles and valuable policy analysis.

Another opportunity from the abolition of the organisation would be the strengthening of local NHS bodies like integrated care boards. These local bodies, designed to tailor healthcare to local area needs, may sometimes have been stymied by excessive central control.

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has already expressed his desire to see more devolution of power and responsibility within the NHS. This process provides the opportunity to enact that promise.

What will happen next?

The abolition of NHS England and the transfer of some responsibilities back to the DHSC will take time and incur significant costs and disruption. Any benefits are likely to emerge only in the long term.

Before the introduction of NHS England, there were larger regional organisations (strategic health authorities) that were responsible for implementing policy at a regional level. Perhaps the re-emergence of similar regional bodies could smooth the transition from a central NHS England to a more decentralised health service. Läs mer…

The spat between Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform party, and Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, burst into the open when Lowe was suspended from the party. The allegation was that he had threatened violence to the party leadership, which he denies. The matter is currently being investigated by the police.

The row does not appear to have affected support for Reform in the polls. A YouGov poll completed on March 10, after Lowe’s suspension, shows Reform on 23% in vote intentions, compared with 24% for Labour and 22% for the Conservatives. It is still a three-party race at the top of British party politics.

In the 2024 general election a good deal of Reform’s support came from protest voters. These are voters who dislike all the mainstream parties and so see a vote for the party as a way of choosing “none of the above”. They are not attached to any party and can easily switch support when circumstances change. So why has support for the party not been affected by this row?

Protest politics and support for Reform

The answer to this question is that while Reform attracted a lot of discontented protest voters in the election, it has since acquired a more stable niche in British party politics. It is primarily a party of English nationalism, equivalent to the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales. These three parties differ greatly in outlook and politics, but they occupy a similar place in the public’s minds.

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To examine Reform’s support from protest voters we can look at the relationship between spoilt ballots in the 2024 general election and support for the party in the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. Normally, observers of British elections pay little attention to spoilt ballots (or “invalid votes” as they are described in official statistics). However, it turns out that they played an important role in the 2024 election which has a bearing on support for Reform.

Research shows that voters who spoil their ballots can be classified into two categories: those who simply make a mistake when filling in the ballot and those who are protesting about the current system.

Mistakes are easy to make in countries with complex electoral systems. However, in Britain, the first-past-the-post system in which everyone has just one vote, ensures that this is not a significant factor because ballot papers are so simple. The bulk of spoilt ballots are protests of various kinds, taking the form of blank ballots, write-in candidates, or abusive messages about parties and candidates.

This is illustrated in the Lancashire seat of Chorley, which is held by the speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle. By tradition none of the major parties challenge the Speaker by campaigning in his constituency. In the election there were no less than 1,198 spoilt ballots in his constituency. It is fairly clear that these were a result of some voters feeling disenfranchised by the absence of their preferred party on the ballot paper.

The relationship between the Reform vote share and the number of spoilt ballots in constituencies in the 2024 election

Protest voting takes different forms.
P Whiteley, CC BY-ND

There is a strong negative relationship (a correlation of -0.46) between the share of a constituency vote that went to Reform in 2024 and the number of ballots spoiled in that constituency. Where people were voting Reform, in other words, fewer people were spoiling their ballots. The implication is that the party picked up votes from people who would normally spoil their ballots or would not have voted at all if Reform had not stood in their constituency. These are the protest voters.

Identity politics and support for Reform

Not all support for Reform came from protest voters, however. The chart below compares the percentage of Reform voters with those who identified as English in the 2021 census in England. There is a strong relationship between the two measures (a correlation of 0.66). The more English identifiers there are in a constituency, the greater support for Reform. In effect, Reform has become an English national party.

The relationship between Reform voting and English identity in 2024

An English national party in the making.
P Whiteley, CC BY-ND

National identities can change over time, but the process of change is slow. There has been a growth in “Englishness” at the expense of “Britishness” over time and this is undoubtedly reinforcing support for Reform.

It means the party has a relatively solid base of supporters to rely on in future elections. While the row between the party’s leader and one of his MPs could play out in any number of different directions at this early stage, it would be wrong to suggest that Reform isn’t thinking big picture and long term.

Farage has clearly learnt from his past and will not let his current party disintegrate into chaos like UKIP or the Brexit party before it. Läs mer…

While Donald Trump’s special envoy was en route to Moscow to talk about a possible ceasefire deal with his opposite numbers in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin enjoyed a meet-up with his old friend Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, and the atmosphere was reportedly congenial.

According to the Guardian’s contemporaneous report, the pair even shared a macabre joke at a press conference after their meeting about Europe being “done for”. Putin hastened to clarify that when Lukashenko said if the US and Russia came to an agreement, Europe would be “done for” he had of course been enjoying a pun. Apparently, said Putin, “pipeline in Russian means also being done for, so this will be to Europe’s benefit, because they will get cheap Russian gas. So they will have a pipeline.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Lukashenko. “Yes, that’s what I thought you did,” Putin replied. Smiles all round from the Russian media audience.

Putin explained that while he’s technically in favour of a ceasefire, there were a few things that needed to be cleared up and that he and Donald Trump would have a phone call to do just that. Top of the list was “removing the root causes of this crisis”, which most observers are translating as Putin maintaining his demand for all four provinces Ukraine that Russian troops currently occupy and an undertaking by Kyiv never to join Nato.

It’s unlikely to meet with the approval of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky has said he thinks that Putin will do “everything he can to drag out the war” – and Putin’s approach appears to bear this out. This accords with what Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko wrote in reaction to the news that the US and Ukraine were at last seeing eye to eye, at least on the need for a halt to the killing.

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Wolff and Malyarenko, professors of international security at the University of Birmingham and National University Odesa Law Academy respectively, believe Putin will want to keep hostilities going as long as he can while still keeping in with the US president. They see Russia following a “two-pronged approach” – engaging with the White House over the ceasefire proposal while also pushing for further battlefield gains. They write:

The peculiar set-up of the negotiations also plays into the Kremlin’s hands here. Short of direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow, Washington has to shuttle between them, trying to close gaps between their positions with a mixture of diplomacy and pressure. This has worked reasonably well with Ukraine so far, but it is far less certain that this approach will bear similar fruit with Russia.

Read more:
US and Ukraine sign 30-day ceasefire proposal – now the ball is in Putin’s court

In all this shuttle diplomacy, one question that you hear more rarely is what the Ukrainian public will be prepared to accept. Over the past three years Gerard Toal of Virginia Tech University, John O’Loughlin of the University of Colorado and Kristin M. Bakke of UCL have provided us with some valuable insights based on polling of the Ukrainian public. They believe that while the majority of Ukrainians are war-weary and willing to make concessions, even ceding territory in return for peace, they are not willing to compromise their country’s political independence. They also don’t trust Putin and see the war in existential terms.

And, contrary to what Trump might have the world believe, Zelensky remains a popular leader. In fact the latest poll finds his support up ten points on the previous survey at 67%. (Incidentally, Trump posted on his TruthSocial website recently that Zelensky’s approval rating was 4%.) They conclude:

It will be in large part down to ordinary Ukrainians to shape what happens afterwards. An ugly peace may be accepted by a war-weary population. But if it has little local legitimacy and acceptance, peace is likely to be unsustainable in the long run.

Read more:
Are Ukrainians ready for ceasefire and concessions? Here’s what the polls say

Russia, meanwhile, has weathered the conflict remarkably well, certainly better than the analysts who forecast in the summer of 2022. It that stage, when Ukraine’s counter-offensive was pushing the invaders out of occupied territory, inflicting major casualties and destroying huge amounts of equipment, some observers thought that Russia’s economy would collapse under the weight of defeat and western sanctions.

Not so, writes Alexander Hill of the University of Calgary. Hill, a military historian, observes the ways in which the Russian war machine has adapted to conditions over the past two years, ditching the recklessness which saw it suffer such grievous losses in 2022 and using more conservative tactics coupled with smart adoption of new technology to give it an edge on the battlefield. He concludes: “While the Russian army remains a relatively blunt instrument, it is not as blunt as it was in late 2022 and early 2023.”

Read more:
Why Russia’s armed forces have proven resilient in the war in Ukraine

Turning off US aid

Of course, when the US suspended its intelligence-sharing for a few days last week it was a major boost for the Russians. Without data from US satellite coverage and other intelligence traffic, Ukraine’s defenders were left virtually deaf and blind at a crucial time. It gave Russia the space to push its advantage even further as it races to take more territory ahead of a possible peace deal.

The state of the conflict in Ukraine, March 10 2025.
Institute for the Study of War

It’s a bitter lesson for Ukraine to have to learn at this stage in the conflict, write Dafydd Townley and Matthew Powell, experts in international security and strategy at the University of Portsmouth. They believe relying too heavily on one ally for so much was never going to be a good idea and has been exposed as risky since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Perhaps even more risky, given the personality involved, is Ukraine’s dependence on data from ELon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Musk himself has boasted that: “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

Egotistical self-promotion aside, Musk is probably right about this, but less so when he says there’s no alternative. Townley and Powell believe that it’s in Ukraine’s best interests to look into other satellite systems available to them and note that shares in French-owned satellite company Eutelsat, a European rival to Starlink have recently climbed by almost 400%.

Read more:
The US has lifted its intelligence sharing pause with Ukraine. But the damage may already be done

Many of us who are watching this conflict closely cringed when Trump announced he would cut off military assistance to Ukraine after his (one-sided, it has to be said) shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky at the end of February. And the announcement that the Pentagon was halting intelligence-sharing as noted above simply made matters worse.

It felt like a spiteful move. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College, Dublin, has written a book about spite which delves into, among other things, exhibitions of spitefulness in the public arena. It’s a fascinating read. A spiteful approach to foreign policy, he writes, is when we abandon what he calls “humanity’s superpower” – cooperation.

Trump’s approach, as exemplified by his treatment of Zelensky and also by his baffling decision to impose tariffs even on his friends and allies, “embraces selfishness, treating international relations as a zero-sum game where there can only be one winner”.

Read more:
Donald Trump’s foreign policy might be driven by simple spite – here’s what to do about it

One of the sticking points between the US and Ukraine has been the question of security guarantees in case of a ceasefire or even a longer-term peace deal. It seems increasingly far-fetched that Ukraine will be allowed to join Nato any time soon, so Nato article 5 protections, which would mean that all other member states would be obliged to come to its defence, will not be an issue.

Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, has suggested that if Ukraine allows US companies access to its mineral resources this would in itself be a security guarantee feels equally improbable. And, in any case, how valuable have US security guarantees been in the past, asks historian Ian Horwood, of York St John University. Horwood pints to the Paris Peace accords of 1973 in which the Nixon administration promised to underwrite South Vietnam’s continued security, while withdrawing US combat troops. Within two years, North Vietnamese tanks were rolling into Saigon.

More recently the Doha agreement between the first Trump administration and the Taliban was made without involving the Afghan government and didn’t even last long enough for US and Nato troops to get out of Kabul. This sorry history will no doubt have given Zelensky food for thought.

Read more:
What is the value of US security guarantees? Here’s what history shows

Ukraine’s mineral wealth

All the while many of us have been asking what’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals. We’ve long known about the country as the “bread basket of Europe”, but what is not as widely understood is Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Geologist Munira Raji of the University of Plymouth, says Ukraine has deposits containing 22 of 34 critical minerals identified by the European Union as essential for energy security. This, she says, positions Ukraine among the world’s most resource-rich nations.

Where Ukraine’s minerals are and how much is in areas occupied by Russia.
Conflict and Environment Observatory: www.ceobs.org

Much of this cornucopia of geological booty is contained in what is known as the “Ukrainian shield” which sits underneath much of the country, writes Raji. Here she walks us through the riches beneath Ukraine’s soil and why America is so keen to get its hands on them.

Read more:
What’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals? A geologist explains

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