There’s a new largest known prime number in town, with a whopping 23,249,425 digits. The figure is calculated by multiplying 2 by itself 77,232,917 times and then subtracting 1. Announced on January 3, the number is almost a million digits longer than the last record-breaking prime.

A prime number can’t be divided by anything other than 1 and itself. If you started counting at 1, you’d encounter prime numbers relatively frequently at first. But as numbers get larger, primes become sparse.
Jonathan Pace, an electrical engineer in Germantown, Tenn., found the number using software provided by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. GIMPS is a volunteer-based project that’s seeking ever-higher Mersenne primes, which are found by multiplying the number 2 by itself some number of times and subtracting 1. These primes are easier to find than other types, Pace says, because the computer doesn’t need to calculate a number’s divisors to determine whether or not it’s prime.

Pace started hunting for primes 14 years ago, when there was a cash reward for finding a prime number with more than 10 million digits. “I missed out on the big prize,” he says. “But by then I was sort of hooked.” He runs the prime-seeking program in the background of the dozen or so computers for which he’s a volunteer network administrator. And, he says, the element of competition is fun.

Anyone can download the software for free. So you, too, could discover a record-breaking prime number — if you have enough patience.

With each new year, science offers a fresh list of historical occasions ideally suited for a Top 10 list.

Science’s rich history guarantees a never-ending supply of noteworthy anniversaries. Centennials of births, deaths or discoveries by prominent scientists (or popular centennial fractions or multiples) offer reminders of past achievements and context for appreciating science of the present day. To keep the holiday spirit pleasant, we’ll omit the plagues and natural disasters (so no mention of the centennial of the Spanish flu pandemic or the tricentennial of the Gansu earthquake in the Qing Empire). But that leaves plenty of math, medicine, astronomy and quantum stuff. Such as:

10. Quantum teleportation (25th anniversary)
    At a physics meeting in Seattle in March 1993, Charles Bennett of IBM thrilled science fiction fans everywhere by revealing the theory of quantum teleportation. (A few days later, a paper by Bennett and his teleportation collaborators appeared in Physical Review Letters.) Bennett described how quantum experimentalists Alice and Bob could use quantum entanglement to erase the identity of a quantum particle at one location and restore it at a remote location — just like Captain Kirk disappearing in the Enterprise transporter and reappearing on some dangerous alien planet. It’s not magic, though. Alice and Bob must each possess one of a pair of entangled quantum particles. If Alice wants to teleport a quantum particle to Bob, she must let it interact with her entangled particle and send the result to Bob by e-mail (or text, or phone call, or snail mail). That interaction destroys Alice’s copy of the particle to be teleported, but Bob can reconstruct it using his entangled particle after Alice e-mails him. In 1993, it was just an idea, but a few years later it was successfully demonstrated in the lab.
11. Arnold Sommerfeld (150th birthday)
    Born in Königsberg, Prussia, (now part of Russia) on December 5, 1868, Arnold Sommerfeld played a major role in advancing early quantum theory in the years after Niels Bohr introduced the quantum version of the hydrogen atom. Sommerfeld showed how to extend quantum ideas from circular to elliptical electron orbits, making him kind of like a Kepler to Bohr’s Copernicus. Earlier Sommerfeld had been one of the first strong supporters of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Sommerfeld also mentored an all-star cast of 20th century physicists, his students including Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe.
12. Jean Fourier (250th birthday)
    Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, born March 21, 1768, survived multiple arrests during the French Revolution and ended up working for Napoleon, who made him a baron. With Napoleon’s demise, Fourier struggled to regain political favor and acceptance in the academic world, and eventually succeeded, but his political and diplomatic embroilments consumed much of his time when he should have been doing math. Nevertheless he did important work on the mathematics of heat diffusion and developed useful techniques for solving equations. His most famous achievement, Fourier’s theorem, allows complex periodic processes to be broken down into a series of simpler wave motions. It has wide application in many realms of physics and engineering.
13. James Joule (200th birthday)
    James Joule was born into a family of brewers on December 24, 1818. The brewery provided a laboratory where he developed exceptional experimental skills. Despite no formal scientific training and no academic job, he still became one of England’s leading scientists. His experimental skill led him to precisely establish the amount of work needed to produce a quantity of heat and the relationship between heat and electricity.

Most famously, he demonstrated the law of conservation of energy. Whether mechanical, electrical or chemical, energy’s quantitative relationship to heat remained the same, regardless of the substances used in conducting the measurements, Joule showed. In other words, energy is conserved — a truth now known as the First Law of Thermodynamics. There were no Nobel Prizes in those days, so Joule’s main reward was the designation of the standard unit of energy as the joule.

6. Henrietta Swan Leavitt (150th birthday)
   Born in Massachusetts on July 4, 1868, Henrietta Swan Leavitt attended Oberlin College in Ohio and then Radcliffe College, where she studied astronomy. Her excellent academic record impressed Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard Observatory, where she volunteered to be a research assistant and soon earned a permanent job. She worked on mapping stars with the latest photographic and spectroscopic methods, eventually measuring the brightnesses of thousands of stars. Some of those stars varied in brightness over time (one of them, Delta Cephei, gave such stars the name Cepheid variables). Leavitt analyzed these Cepheids more thoroughly than her predecessors and noticed that the stars’ brightness varied on a regular schedule that depended on their intrinsic brightness. Leavitt worked out the “period-luminosity relationship” in 1908, giving astronomers a powerful tool for measuring the distance to stars and other astronomical objects.

Distance to a Cepheid nearby could be determined by parallax, enabling the determination of its intrinsic brightness based on its brightening-dimming schedule. Then, using nearby Cepheids’ intrinsic brightness, the bright-dim period for a more distant Cepheid could be used to infer its intrinsic brightness. That made it possible to calculate the star’s distance. Leavitt’s work made much of the 20th century’s dramatic revision of humankind’s conception of the cosmos possible. “Her discovery of the period-luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars is absolutely fundamental in transforming people’s ideas about first, our own galactic system and second, providing the means to demonstrate that galaxies do in fact exist,” historian Robert Smith said in a talk last January.

5. Spontaneous Generation, Not (350th anniversary)
   Casual observations of nature had led the ancients to believe that life sometimes spontaneously generated itself from decaying organic matter — think maggots appearing in rotten meat. Francesco Redi, an expert on the effects of snake venom, thought otherwise. Born in Italy, educated at the University of Pisa and then medical school in Florence, Redi conducted various experiments on the effects of snakebites, realizing that the danger stemmed from venom entering the bloodstream. In his masterwork Experiments on the Generation of Insects, published in 1668, he described clever experiments that showed maggots could appear only if flies had access to the meat to lay their eggs. He didn’t close the case on all claims of spontaneous generation, but his work was a major first step toward eliminating received dogma in biology and replacing it with experiment and reason.
6. Discovery of helium (150th anniversary)
   On August 18, 1868, French astronomer Jules Janssen witnessed a total eclipse of the sun in Guntur, India, and recorded the colors in the spectrum of solar prominences. He realized that he could record the colors even without an eclipse, and in the following days he observed a curious bright yellow line. He wrote a paper and sent it off to the French Academy of Sciences. Later that year, English astronomer Joseph Lockyer observed the same spectral line, wrote a paper and also sent it to the French Academy of Sciences. Legend (apparently true) has it that the papers arrived within minutes of each other, so Janssen and Lockyer shared in the discovery of the yellow line, whatever it was.

Lockyer soon argued that it was the signature of a new chemical element, unknown on Earth. He called it helium, for Helios, the Greek god of the sun. Some experts doubted that the line signified a new element or insisted that such an element must exist only on the sun and would never have any usefulness on Earth. But their balloon burst in 1895 when William Ramsay in London found helium gas within a uranium-containing mineral. (Others working in Sweden found the gas at about the same time.) Uranium emits alpha particles, the nuclei of helium atoms, so all those alpha particles need to do is find some stray electrons buzzing around to become helium atoms. But nobody understood that at the time because radioactivity hadn’t been discovered yet.

3. Ignaz Semmelweis (200th birthday)
   Born on July 1, 1818, in Hungary, Ignaz Semmelweis almost single-handedly (or maybe dual-handedly) showed how to bring public health out of the dark ages and into modernity by identifying the importance of washing your hands. After attending medical school in Vienna, he practiced midwifery for a while and then studied surgery and statistics. He then joined the staff at a teaching hospital, where he noticed a large (statistically suspicious) difference between two clinics in deaths of mothers or their babies from puerperal fever. He eventually realized that in one of the clinics doctors conducted autopsies and apparently carried cadaver contamination to the birthing room. Semmelweis concocted a solution for cleansing hands after autopsies; the puerperal fever death rate then dropped dramatically. But his insight was widely resisted by the medical establishment. It was only much later, after Louis Pasteur established the importance of germs in transmitting disease, that Semmelweis’ method could be successfully explained and then adopted.
4. Richard Feynman (100th birthday)
   One of the most nonconformist of theoretical physicists, Richard Feynman (born May 11, 1918) gained public notoriety late in life as a member of the Presidential Commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger explosion. He was also skilled at playing bongo drums. Among physicists, he was most highly regarded for his original approach to quantum mechanics and formulation of quantum field theory (work earning a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics). Later he was an early leading advocate of research into quantum computing. Hans Bethe, another physics Nobel laureate, considered Feynman to be a most unusual kind of genius. “He was a magician,” Bethe once said. “Feynman certainly was the most original physicist I have seen in my life.”
5. Noether’s theorem (centennial)
   On any list of history’s great mathematicians who were ignored or underappreciated simply because they were women, you’ll find the name of Emmy Noether. Despite the barricades erected by 19th century antediluvian attitudes, she managed to establish herself as one of Germany’s premier mathematicians. She made significant contributions to various math specialties, including advanced forms of algebra. And in 1918, she published a theorem that provided the foundation for 20th century physicists’ understanding of reality. She showed that symmetries in nature implied the conservation laws that physicists had discovered without really understanding.

Joule’s conservation of energy, it turns out, is a requirement of time symmetry — the fact that no point in time differs from any other. Similarly, conservation of momentum is required if space is symmetric, that is, moving to a different point in space changes nothing about anything else. And if all directions in space are similarly equivalent — rotational symmetry — then the law of conservation of angular momentum is assured and figure skating remains a legitimate Olympic sport. Decades after she died in 1935, physicists are still attempting to exploit Noether’s insight to gain a deeper understanding of the symmetries underlying the laws of the cosmos. On any decent list of history’s great mathematicians, regardless of sex or anything else, you’ll find the name of Emmy Noether.

A new kind of artificial cartilage, made with the same kind of fiber that fortifies bulletproof vests, is proving stronger than others.

The fabricated material mimics the stiffness, toughness and water content of natural cartilage, researchers report in the Jan. 4 Advanced Materials. This synthetic tissue could replace the cartilage in a person’s body that naturally wears down and heals poorly (SN: 8/11/12, p. 22), alleviating joint pain and potentially sparing many people from having to undergo joint replacement surgery.
Scientists have been trying to fashion artificial cartilage for decades, says Kara Spiller, a biomedical engineer at Drexel University in Philadelphia not involved in the work. But earlier materials were either weaker than the real thing or didn’t pack enough water to transport nutrients to surrounding cells.

The new material is a polymer mixture called a hydrogel that’s mostly water and contains nanoversions of the aramid fibers used to make bulletproof vests. Nicholas Kotov, a chemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues tested how well their material held its shape when squeezed or stretched, and how easily it was broken. Both versions of the hydrogel — one, about 70 percent water; the other, about 92 percent water — either matched or exceeded the stiffness and toughness of real cartilage.

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The new material has “a lot of different possibilities,” Spiller says. “The biggest market is going to be osteoarthritis patients, because most patients with osteoarthritis have no damage to the bone, just damage to the cartilage.” Many of the 30 million adults in the United States who suffer from osteoarthritis undergo whole knee or hip replacements. If doctors could simply replace worn down cartilage with this material, that could lower the risk of surgical complication. “That would be really huge,” Spiller says.
This kind of hydrogel “could also be used for all sorts of sports injuries, where you have damaged tendons or ligaments, [or] even for back pain,” she adds.

It remains to be seen how well this material can integrate into a person’s body, says Benjamin Wiley, a chemist at Duke University not involved in the work. Researchers still need to make sure it can anchor to bone and doesn’t irritate surrounding tissue.

SAN FRANCISCO — Even moderate light pollution can roughly double the time a house sparrow remains a risk for passing along the worrisome West Nile virus.

House sparrows, about as widespread across the United States as artificial lighting itself, make a useful test species for a first-of-its-kind study of how night illumination might contribute to disease spread, said Meredith Kernbach, an eco-immunologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Passer domesticus brought into the lab and kept dimly illuminated at night were slower in fighting off West Nile infections than lab sparrows allowed full darkness, Kernbach reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
Sparrows kept under a dim night light typically had enough virus in their bloodstreams for at least four days to turn biting mosquitoes into disease spreaders, she said. Sparrows housed in darkness had high virus concentrations for only about two days. Doubling the time a bird can pass along a big dose of virus could in theory increase the likelihood that a disease will spread.

The broader question of whether light pollution affects human health has been a concern for shift workers. Researchers have also looked at possible changes in reproduction and other behavior in wildlife (SN: 12/26/15, p. 29).

Kernbach’s project opens new territory by testing the effects of light on physiological factors that control how diseases that can infect humans might hopscotch among animals, says Jenny Ouyang, of the University of Nevada, Reno. As light pollution studies go, “I don’t know of anything like this,” says Ouyang, an integrative physiologist who also has studied light pollution and birds.

The tests intensify Ouyang’s curiosity about whether light might affect the spread of malaria among humans. There have been hints and speculation in the scientific literature, she says, that vector mosquitoes might be drawn to light sources in some circumstances, which could mean that excess illumination might compound urban disease risks.
Kernbach based much of her lab test on real-world conditions. The viral dose she gave the birds was strong enough to kill about 40 percent of them, and it was well within what a mosquito might pick up vampirizing birds or mammals. She used white incandescent lighting, basically the last century’s universal light bulb, which is still common despite inroads by LED lighting.

The white incandescence in the experiment has plenty of warmer tones, but does include some of blue wavelengths from common cool white LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. The sparrows on average experienced about 8 lux of this white incandescence during their seven-hour nights. (A heavily overcast day, by comparison, ranks at about 100 lux.)

Other studies in birds are showing that artificial night lighting can affect concentrations of the hormone corticosterone, which helps orchestrate reactions of the immune system. But Kernbach said she found no signs in her experiment that corticosterone controlled the results she saw in house sparrows.

What lights do to the birds is only part of the story, points out Davide Dominoni, an eco-physiologist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen. Researchers will also need to look for effects on the virus itself. And on the mosquitoes.

OXON HILL, Md. — Observations of a trio of dead stars have confirmed that a foundation of Einstein’s gravitational theory holds even for ultradense objects with strong gravitational fields.

The complex orbital dance of the three former stars conforms to a rule known as the strong equivalence principle, researchers reported January 10 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. That agreement limits theories that predict Einstein’s theory, general relativity, should fail at some level.
According to general relativity, an object’s composition has no impact on how gravity pulls on it: Earth’s gravity accelerates a sphere of iron at the same rate as a sphere of lead. That’s what’s known as the weak equivalence principle. A slew of experiments have confirmed that principle — beginning with Galileo’s purported test of dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (SN: 1/20/18, p. 9).

But the strong equivalence principle is more stringent and difficult to test than the weak version. According to the strong equivalence principle, not only do different materials fall at the same rate, but so does the energy bound up in gravitational fields. That means that an incredibly dense, massive object with a correspondingly strong gravitational field, should fall with the same acceleration as other objects.

“We’re asking, ‘How does gravity fall?’” says astronomer Anne Archibald of the University of Amsterdam, who presented the preliminary result at the meeting. “That sounds weird, but Einstein says energy and mass are the same.” That means that the energy bound up in a gravitational field can fall just as mass can. If the strong equivalence principle were violated, an object with an intense gravitational field would fall with a different acceleration than one with a weaker field.

To test this theory, scientists measured the timing of signals from a pulsar — a spinning, ultradense collapsed star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation that sweep past Earth at regular intervals. The pulsar in question, PSR J0337+1715, isn’t just any pulsar: It has two companions (SN: 2/22/14, p.8). The pulsar orbits with a type of burnt-out star called a white dwarf. That pair is accompanied by another white dwarf, farther away.
If the strong equivalence principle holds, the paired-up pulsar and white dwarf should both fall at the same rate in the gravitational field of the second white dwarf. But if the pulsar, with its intense gravitational field, fell faster toward the outermost white dwarf than its nearby companion, the pulsar’s orbit would be pulled toward the outermost white dwarf, tracing a path in the shape of a rotating ellipse.

Scientists can use the timing of a pulsar’s signals to deduce its orbit. As a pulsar moves away from Earth, for example, its pulses fall a little bit behind its regular beat. So if J0337+1715’s orbit were rotating, signals received on Earth would undergo regular changes in their timing as a result. Archibald and colleagues saw no such variation. That means the pulsar and the white dwarf must have had matching accelerations, to within 0.16 thousandths of a percent.

Many physicists expect the strong equivalence principle to be violated on some level. General relativity doesn’t mesh well with quantum mechanics, the theory that reigns on very small scales. Adjustments to general relativity that attempt to combine these theories tend to result in a violation of the strong equivalence principle, says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved with the research.

The strong equivalence principle might still fail at levels too tiny for this test to catch. So the door remains open for adjustments to general relativity. But the new measurement constrains many such theories better than any previous test. The result is “really tremendous,” says Will. It’s “a great improvement in this class of theories … which is why this triple system is so beautiful.”

OXON HILL, Md. — Future spacecraft could navigate by the light of dead stars.

Using only the timing of radiation bursts from pulsating stellar corpses, an experiment on the International Space Station was able to pinpoint its location in space in a first-ever demonstration. The technique operates like a stellar version of GPS, researchers with the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology experiment, SEXTANT, reported at a news conference January 11 during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Known as pulsars, the dead stars emit beams of radiation that sweep past Earth at regular intervals, like the rotating beams from a lighthouse. Those radiation blips could allow a spaceship to find its location in space (SN: 12/18/10, p. 11). It’s similar to how GPS uses the timing of satellite signals to determine the position of your cell phone – and it would mean spacecraft would no longer have to rely on radio telescope communications to find their coordinates. That system becomes less accurate the further a spaceship gets from Earth.

SEXTANT used an array of 52 X-ray telescopes to measure the signals from five pulsars. By analyzing those signals, the researchers were able to locate SEXTANT’s position to within 10 kilometers as it orbited Earth on the space station, astronomer Keith Gendreau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported.

On Earth, knowing your location within 10 kilometers isn’t that impressive — GPS can do much better. But “if you’re going out to Pluto, there is no GPS navigation system,” Gendreau said. Far from Earth, pulsar navigation could improve upon the position estimates made using radio telescopes.

To build resilient colonies, bacteria make a surprising tweak to a common substance found in cells.

A biochemical addition to the cellulose produced by E. coli and other species of bacteria lets them create colonies that are resistant to disruption, researchers report in the Jan. 19 Science. Called biofilms, these microbial colonies can form on medical devices or inside the body, leading to hard-to-treat infections that can resist antibiotics. Figuring out how to weaken these films by altering bacteria’s cellulose could lead to new treatments.
Cellulose is the most abundant natural polymer on the planet. It makes celery stringy and plants’ cell walls rigid. The basic structure of the substance is simple: a bunch of copies of the sugar glucose — the exact number can vary — strung together like beads on a string.

While the polymer is best associated with plants, some bacteria make cellulose, too. The microbes secrete it and use it to build scaffolding around cells that supports the growth of biofilms. In a biofilm, cellulose is like “the mortar to hold together all the bricks,” says study coauthor Lynette Cegelski, a chemical biologist at Stanford University.
When Cegelski and her colleagues used a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to analyze the biofilm around samples of E. coli, the researchers got a surprise. The cellulose made by bacteria was different from the cellulose made by plants.
Instead of being only a string of glucose units, bacterial cellulose also had an appendage containing nitrogen and phosphorus. E. coli’s appendage add-on affects the way the bacteria form colonies, experiments show. Normally, bacterial cellulose spins into long tendrils that, along with a different kind of sticky, protein-based fiber, form basketlike structures that cradle individual bacteria and tie them together into an elastic web. But when the researchers genetically engineered the bacteria to produce unmodified cellulose, the cellulose formed shorter fibers. That made the biofilm matrix weaker. The resulting film also appeared less resistant to microorganisms that produce cellulose-destroying enzymes.

Other studies have looked at bacterial cellulose before. But nobody had realized that it was modified. That’s because a commonly used method for examining biofilms involves dissolving the materials in an acid at one step of the process, which breaks down this modification.

The new study also pins down the role of a gene that researchers knew was somehow involved in cellulose production in bacteria, but weren’t sure how. This gene gives instructions for an enzyme that attaches the appendage to the glucose chain after it’s produced, altering the cellulose just before it leaves the cell. Targeting the gene or enzyme responsible for this modification could eventually be a way to weaken biofilms, Cegelski says.

The process by which bacteria make cellulose and secrete it to build biofilms is already quite complex, regulated by more than a dozen different genes working together. Adding an enzyme that can “sneak into this machinery” and tack on an appendage makes the story even more complicated, says Jean-Marc Ghigo, a microbial geneticist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, who wasn’t involved in the study. “I think it’s cool.”

Other species of bacteria, such as Salmonella, also produce the modified cellulose, Cegelski and her team found. She plans to do a wider survey of bacteria to figure out just how widespread it is.

West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins found himself embroiled in a controversy on Monday, and it's one of his own making.

The Mountaineers' terrific offseason, which saw the program land three of the top players in the transfer portal, was interrupted by Huggins' own words, potentially putting his status with the team in question.

In the arena, Huggins has been one of the most successful college basketball coaches without a national championship. He's one of six coaches with at least 900 Division I wins and has reached the Final Four at both West Virginia and Cincinnati.

The Hall of Famer is entering his 17th season as the Mountaineers' head coach, but he'll do so under a cloud.
Here's what you need to know about the controversy surrounding Huggins.

Bob Huggins controversy, explained
Huggins directed a homophobic slur at Xavier fans twice during a radio interview with Cincinnati's 700WLW on Monday.

"It was, was all those f—, those Catholic f—, I think," Huggins said as he spoke with host Bill Cunningham about an alleged incident at a game between Xavier and Cincinnati.

Huggins' comments prompted a very brief but awkward silence on the air, though Cunningham didn't seem too bothered by the slur as he kept laughing throughout the rest of the interview.

Cunningham originally had asked Huggins whether West Virginia was accepting players from Xavier in the transfer portal. Xavier was a bitter rival of Huggins during his 17 years at crosstown Cincinnati.

Huggins released a statement later Monday admitting he used a "completely insensitive and abhorrent phrase that there is simply no excuse for."
The Hall of Fame coach said he deeply apologizes and will "fully accept" any consequence for his comments.

West Virginia released a statement of its own, calling Huggins' comments "offensive" and adding that the situation is under review and will be addressed.
Xavier president Colleen Hanycz released a statement on Tuesday addressing the comments, saying the school's mission is to "prepare students for a world that is increasingly diverse, complex, and interdependent." Hanycz did not mention Huggins by name.
What did Bob Huggins say?
Huggins directed a homophobic slur at Xavier fans during a radio interview, saying "It was, was all those f—, those Catholic f—, I think," in reference to an alleged incident at a game between Xavier and Cincinnati.
The slur has cost prominent figures their jobs in the past. That includes former Reds play-by-play commentator Thom Brennaman, who was caught on a hot mic calling a certain city "one of the f— capitals of the world" during a game against the Royals in 2020.

His on-air apology became infamous for being interrupted by Nick Castellanos' untimely home run, but it wasn't enough to save his job.

Huggins has close ties to Brennaman and his father, Marty, who served as the Reds' play-by-play man for decades. Huggins had the younger Brennaman speak to his players in 2020, three months after the incident and Brennaman's subsequent exit.

While any usage of the word will spark immediate condemnation, Huggins used it while knowingly on the air, unlike Brennaman.

Will Bob Huggins be fired?
West Virginia will not fire Bob Huggins, as originally reported by ESPN's Pete Thamel. Instead, the Mountaineers coach will be suspended three games, see $1 million of his salary docked and undergo sensitivity training.
Response by West Virginia
West Virginia later confirmed Huggins would not be fired, though the university was blunt in its reprimand of Huggins' comments:

"On Monday, May 8, head men's basketball coach Bob Huggins was interviewed on a Cincinnati radio show where he used derogatory and offensive language. It was inexcusable," the statement reads. "It was a moment that unfairly and inappropriately hurt many people and has tarnished West Virginia University.

"It is also a moment that provides the opportunity for learning. A moment that can shine a light on the injustice and hate that often befall the members of our marginalized communities. While the University has never and will never condone the language used on Monday, we will use this moment to educate how the casual use of inflammatory language and implicit bias affect our culture, our community and our health and well-being."

The university all provided details on the stipulations of Huggins' return. Those include:

Huggins will be suspended for the first three regular season games of the 2023-2024 season;
His contract will be amended from a multi-year agreement to a year-by-year agreement, beginning on May 10, 2023 and ending on April 30, 2024;
Huggins' annual salary will be reduced by $1 million; the money will be donated to support WVU's LGBTQ+ Center, the Carruth Center and other state and national organizations that support marginalized communities;
Any similar incidents in the future will result in immediate termination.
Moreover, WVU's athletics department will partner with the university LGBTQ+ Center to "develop annual training sessions" to address aspects such as homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism and more. The training curriculum will be required of Huggins and all athletics coaching staff.

Huggins will also be required to meet with LGBTQ+ leaders from across West Virginia with the expectation of engaging in additional opportunities to support the LGBTQ+ community. He will also be expected to meet with leaders from WVU's Carruth Center to "better understand the mental health crisis facing our college students, particularly those in marginalized communities."

Huggins has also agreed to make a sizable donation to Xavier University's Center for Faith and Justice and Center for Diversity and Inclusion.
"We will never truly know the damage that has been done by the words said in those 90 seconds. Words matter and they can leave scars that can never be seen," the statement reads. "But words can also heal. And by taking this moment to learn more about another's perspective, speak respectfully and lead with understanding, perhaps the words 'do better' will lead to meaningful change for all."

Zac Al-Khateeb contributed to this report.

Big brains outpaced well-rounded brains in human evolution.

Around the time of the origins of our species 300,000 years ago, the brains of Homo sapiens had about the same relatively large size as they do today, new research suggests. But rounder noggins rising well above the forehead — considered a hallmark of human anatomy — didn’t appear until between about 100,000 and 35,000 years ago, say physical anthropologist Simon Neubauer and his colleagues.

Using CT scans of ancient and modern human skulls, the researchers created digital brain reconstructions, based on the shape of the inner surface of each skull’s braincase. Human brains gradually evolved from a relatively flatter and elongated shape — more like that of Neandertals’ — to a globe shape thanks to a series of genetic tweaks to brain development early in life, the researchers propose January 24 in Science Advances.
A gradual transition to round brains may have stimulated considerable neural reorganization by around 50,000 years ago. That cognitive reworking could have enabled a blossoming of artwork and other forms of symbolic behavior among Stone Age humans, the team suspects. Other researchers have argued, however, that abstract and symbolic thinking flourished even before H. sapiens emerged (SN: 12/27/14, p. 6).
Ancient DNA studies indicate that genes involved in brain development changed in H. sapiens
following a split from Neandertals more than 600,000 years ago ( SN Online: 3/14/16 ). “Those genetic changes might be responsible for differences in neural wiring and brain growth that led to brain [rounding] in modern humans, but not in Neandertals,” says Neubauer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Still, a lack of fossilized brains means scientists have to rely on braincase data. But these data don’t directly measure brain shape, making it difficult to untangle precisely how quickly or slowly human brains became as round as they are today, says paleoanthropologist Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich. In general, though, the faces of H. sapiens got smaller over time, a skull change that Zollikofer contends critically influenced the evolution of rounded braincases described in the new report.

Neubauer’s team studied 20 ancient H. sapiens skulls. The three oldest specimens included two Moroccan finds dating to around 315,000 years ago that may be the earliest known H. sapiens (SN: 7/8/17, p. 6). A second group of four skulls date to between 120,000 and 115,000 years ago. Estimated ages for the remaining 13 skulls range from around 36,000 to 8,000 years old.

Comparison skulls came from 89 present-day humans, eight Neandertals dating to between 75,000 and 40,000 years ago and 10 members of other ancient Homo species dating to between 1.78 million and 200,000 years ago. Progressive rounding of braincases appeared only in the sample of ancient H. sapiens.

Neubauer considers it unlikely that the gradual evolution of smaller faces with the same general skull shape altered braincase shapes. The oldest known H. sapiens skulls, which his team considers to be the two Moroccan finds, have faces shaped like those of modern humans, Neubauer says.

The 3-D displays seen in such sci-fi movies as Star Wars may not be so far, far away.

A new laser system renders full-color 3-D images in thin air, researchers report in the Jan. 25 Nature. This technology could someday make futuristic, free-floating visuals for everything from air traffic control to surgical planning.

With this new technology, “you really can, in principle, achieve what everyone hopes to achieve, which is the image of Princess Leia in that scene in Star Wars,” says Curtis Broadbent, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who was not involved in the work.
Whereas holograms are images on flat surfaces that only appear three-dimensional because of how the light bounces off the material, the newly created images actually take up 3-D space (SN: 12/4/10, p. 8). Two-dimensional images of virtual performers can also be made to appear 3-D through stage tricks that involve carefully placed projectors and reflective surfaces. But like holograms, these seemingly 3-D images can only be viewed from certain angles. The new technique creates 3-D images that can be seen from almost any direction.

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This system works by trapping a cellulose particle that’s mere micrometers across in a beam of nearly invisible laser light. That laser repeatedly moves the particle along a specific path through the air, for example, in the shape of a corkscrew or the outline of a butterfly. At each point on the particle’s path, other lasers illuminate it with red, green or blue light, which the particle scatters in all directions. This creates a single image pixel that can be viewed from all sides.

Because the particle whizzes through the air so quickly and loops through the same path over and over again, all these pixels blur together — like the tip of a sparkler waved so fast that it seemingly smears into a solid line. This creates what appears to be a still image floating in the air.

Daniel Smalley, an electrical engineer at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his colleagues used this method to produce graphics about the size of a postage stamp. Because the technology draws a picture with a single particle, the researchers could create only small images, including a high-resolution picture of Earth about one centimeter in diameter.
“Scaling that up to even something about the size of a computer monitor would be pretty challenging,” Broadbent says. Researchers would have to refine their prototype to make pictures using many particles.

Smalley says he is already imagining a system that manipulates 100 or even 1,000 particles at once. With those improvements, “the sky becomes the limit,” he says.
Free-floating images could help doctors practice surgery before the patient goes under the knife, says physicist Barry Blundell of the University of Derby in England, whose commentary appears in the same issue of Nature. This technology could also be used for physical therapy or improving athletic performance. People could record themselves performing various activities, like swinging a golf club, and then view the footage on 3-D displays to carefully study their bodily motion, explains Blundell. And if the images can be continually updated with real-time data, such 3-D visuals could provide air traffic controllers with dynamic maps of planes in the air, or help researchers track satellites to ensure they don’t collide.

The possibilities for advertising, education and entertainment systems are endless, Broadbent says. The world may someday be full of pop-up images like those imagined in the film Jurassic World, where museum patrons walk through a hall where a projected dinosaur image stands on display, or like the free-standing visuals used by the character Tony Stark in designing his metal suits in the Iron Man films. And unlike virtual reality systems, these new laser-drawn pictures can be seen with the naked eye: No headgear required. (SN: 3/18/17, p. 24).