badbrainstorm

Sciencedaily.com

A paper recently published in Nature Energy based on pioneering research done at Illinois Institute of Technology reveals a promising breakthrough in green energy: an electrolyzer device capable of converting carbon dioxide into propane in a manner that is both scalable and economically viable.

As the United States races toward its target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, innovative methods to reduce the significant carbon dioxide emissions from electric power and industrial sectors are critical. Mohammad Asadi, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Illinois Tech, spearheaded this groundbreaking research.

"Making renewable chemical manufacturing is really important," says Asadi. "It's the best way to close the carbon cycle without losing the chemicals we currently use daily."

What sets Asadi's electrolyzer apart is its unique catalytic system. It uses inexpensive, readily available materials to produce tri-carbon molecules -- fundamental building blocks for fuels like propane, which is used for purposes ranging from home heating to aviation.

To ensure a deep understanding of the catalyst's operations, the team employed a combination of experimental and computational methods. This rigorous approach illuminated the crucial elements influencing the catalyst's reaction activity, selectivity, and stability.

A distinctive feature of this technology, lending to its commercial viability, is the implementation of a flow electrolyzer. This design permits continuous propane production, sidestepping the pitfalls of the more conventional batch processing methods.

"Designing and engineering this laboratory-scale flow electrolyzer prototype has demonstrated Illinois Tech's commitment to creating innovative technologies. Optimizing and scaling up this prototype will be an important step toward producing a sustainable, economically viable, and energy-efficient carbon capture and utilization process," says Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy Program Director Jack Lewnard.

This innovation is not Asadi's first venture into sustainable energy. He previously adapted a version of this catalyst to produce ethanol by harnessing carbon dioxide from industrial waste gas. Recognizing the potential of the green propane technology, Asadi has collaborated with global propane distributor SHV Energy to further scale and disseminate the system.

"This is an exciting development which opens up a new e-fuel pathway to on-purpose propane production for the benefit of global users of this essential fuel," says Keith Simons, head of research and development for sustainable fuels at SHV Energy.

Illinois Tech Duchossois Leadership Professor and Professor of Physics Carlo Segre, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Andrew Rappe, and University of Illinois Chicago Professor Reza Shahbazian-Yassar contributed to this work. Mohammadreza Esmaeilirad (Ph.D. CHE '22) was a lead author on the paper.

I was gonna submit a pull request, but I see they say no new feature request rn with big changes coming.

Just wanting to throw out there my wish for a new feature.

I like the current ability to switch from video to audio, so would like that to stay the same

But I'd love to be able to set it to a default codec option for each.

It's a pain to have to always have to switch it to those free as in freedom codecs everytime

gizmodo.com

If you’re not Google (or, to a much lesser extent, Apple), map apps are damned hard to make. Last year, several major heavy hitters in tech, including the likes of Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and Amazon, decided to lay down their arms and meet under a flag of parlay held aloft by the Linux Foundation to make mapping just a little easier, cheaper, and less dominated by two companies. Alone, none could establish a big enough data pool to rival the likes of Google Maps, but with their individual hoards of business location data, satellite mapping tech, and more support from smaller tech firms, they could perhaps gather enough data together to help create a whole new series of up-to-date map apps.

On Wednesday, this pooled initiative, called the Overture Maps Foundation, shared its first alpha release for its mapping data. It contains millions of examples for buildings, roads, and geographic boundaries. It’s only the first large release for the planned massive dataset, but the hope is there will be much more to come as companies sign on.

Marc Prioleau, the executive director of the Overture Maps Foundation, was named as head of the project back in May. He’s been around mapping projects for many years, having worked in the start of the GPS market back in 1995, and later moved on to the likes of Meta and Uber for their location-based services. He said if there’s one thing that strikes at the difficulty of building a high-quality app with exacting road and place information, it’s the ephemeral nature of public infrastructure.

“The hardest thing in mapping is knowing what’s changed in the world,” Prioleau told Gizmodo in a video chat. Essentially, map apps are some of the hardest to design simply because of the massive amount of data required to build the systems. Not only do they need to be accurate, but they need to be constantly updated when businesses close and new ones open.

The first Overture release contains about 59 million points of interest that the group claims has not yet been released as open data before. A POI could be anything—a public landmark, a specific building, or a local business. Otherwise, the data contains about 750 million building footprints alongside road data that’s mostly collated from the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap project.

So how much of the world does this alpha release truly cover? Prioleau said the POI data makes up around 60 to 70% of a worldwide dataset. In his mind, a good number to shoot for is somewhere between 80 and 100 million places. It’s something of a Goldilocks problem. With around 200 million POIs, Prioleau said you’d likely be hoarding a lot of “junk,” but too little means you’re obviously missing out on locations, especially from less represented countries.

As far as the building data, he said that “feels pretty complete” as far as laying out worldwide structures, considering that the U.S. itself contains something around 100 million buildings. A good chunk of that data came from Meta through businesses listing their addresses on Facebook or Instagram. Microsoft also handed over some of its data through its work on Bing Maps, but the two sets combined included duplicates, which cut down on total numbers. The Overture director said the foundation has plans to add more datasets in the future from other sources centered on different continents.

The road data is a different beast entirely. The vast majority of it is based on the OpenStreetMap project, an open source, wiki-style resource compiled by internet users going on nearly 18 years. Prioleau said Overture has modified the project’s info to make it easier to attach new datapoints. The project has also worked to standardize and fact check the data contained on the project’s site. There’s also several benefits to using this Wikipedia-style map compared to how Google might spend billions maintaining its map data every year (or otherwise buying up the competition like it did with Waze). Users on the ground can archive and modify the map to note damage during a natural disaster.

“One of the things [OpenStreetMap] does incredibly well is build richness into the map, because what you map is no longer determined by what your commercial interest is, it’s what the community wants to map.”

Prioleau described himself as “the only full time employee” of the Linux Foundation-based group. Otherwise, the Foundation has depended on around 130 engineers from Meta, Microsoft, and more of the steering companies. As far as maintaining the data, the Overture head said that there’s no contractual agreement for companies to use the open source resources, but they’re still heavily encouraging all those who build upon their foundation to somehow give back to the data source with any new information they collect.

“The incentive is: if you want to fork [AKA build off] Overture, start building your own dataset and not give stuff back, then you’re on your own to maintain that dataset going forward.” Prioleau said. “So the incentive to giving back is that your data remains part of this consortium.”

What’s next is to create a “global entity reference system” for attaching data points to a map, which will then facilitate even more layers of information for new apps. Today’s map users aren’t just looking for ways to get from place to place, but from door to door. Delivery drivers need to know where they can pick up and drop off items. People with disabilities want to know where they can find ramp or elevator access.

“Maps are really digitization of things that are observable,” the Overture lead said. “We’re not mapping secret stuff. We’re mapping roads and addresses and places—things that are observable. And as the ways of capturing observable stuff gets better, the ability to build maps gets better.”

openstreetmap.org

Links: gizmodo.com/your-phones-navigation-app-is-probably-smarter-than-you

https://gizmodo.com/iphone-find-my-apple-maps-mistake-houston-house

gizmodo.com/linux-google-maps-meta-aws-microsoft-tomtom

prnewswire.com/news-releases/overture-maps-foundation-names-marc-prioleau-as-executive-director

gizmodo.com/why-google-buying-waze-will-keep-you-out-of-gridlock

www.nbclosangeles.com

Laurie Kellman, Rebecca Santana, David Koenig 10 - 12 minutes

Seeking a valid U.S. passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, wishful traveler, for a very different journey before you step anywhere near an airport.

A much-feared backup of U.S passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy as worldwide travel rebounds toward record pre-pandemic levels — with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say aspiring travelers in the U.S. and around the world, is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.

With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports where they sit — in other cities — in time to make the flights they booked in the first place.

So grim is the outlook that U.S. officials aren't even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They're blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic-related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That’s left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.

Stories from applicants and interviews by The Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which the agencies are prioritizing urgent cases such as applicants traveling for reasons of “life or death” and those whose travel is only a few days off. For everyone else, the options are few and expensive.

So, 2023 traveler, if you still need a valid U.S. passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone. ‘PLENTY OF TIME’ TO ‘WE’LL STILL BE OK' TO BIG PROBLEMS U.S. & World

News from around the country and around the globe

It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They'd have their passports a month before they needed them. "Plenty of time," Collier recalled thinking.

Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks. “We'll still be okay,” she thought.

At T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: “I can’t sleep." This after months of calling, holding, pressing refresh on a website, trying her member of Congress — and stressing as the departure date loomed. Failure to obtain the family’s passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a study-abroad semester.

“My nerves are shot, because I may not be able to get to him,” she said. She calls the toll-free number every day, holds for as much as 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she might be able to get a required appointment at passport offices in other states.

“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied in plenty of time,” she said. “How about they just process my passports?” THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS A CULPRIT: COVID

By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.

The U.S. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.

“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.

Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system "to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it," Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.

Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers' phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.

It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every U.S. traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.

But the number of Americans holding valid U.S. passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.

After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of U.S. passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.

“As a society gets richer," says Zagorsky, "the people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world.'” FOR AMERICANS AND OTHERS ABROAD, IT'S NO PICNIC EITHER

At U.S. consulates overseas, the quest for U.S. visas and passports isn't much brighter.

On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days.

In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. It's one appointment per person, even for newborns, who must have both parents involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.

Batsheva Gutterman started looking for three appointments immediately after she had a baby in December, with an eye toward attending a family celebration in July, in Raleigh, N.C.

Her quest for three passports stretched from January to June, days before travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman payed a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which stay available for only a few seconds. She ultimately got three appointments on three consecutive days — bureaucracy embodied.

“We had to drive the entire family with three small children, an hour-and-a-half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking off work and school,” she said. “This makes me incredibly uneasy having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with an appointment.”

Recently, there appeared to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewed U.S. passport stood at 360 days on June 8. On July 2, the wait was down to 90 days, according to the web site. FRUSTRATING TALES EMERGE FROM THE TRENCHES

Back in the U.S., Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son's passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.

She'd applied for her son's passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney ’s office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans.

It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from their to Rome. All on a bet that her son's passport was indeed shipped as promised.

“We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.”

They succeeded. But not everyone has been so lucky.

Miranda Richter applied in person to renew passports for herself and her husband, as well as apply a new one on Feb. 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6. She ended up canceling, losing more than $1,000.

Her timeline went like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter's photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent in a new one via priority mail. Then she paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the national passport line while also calling their congressman, senators and third-party couriers.

Finally, she showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.

“The security guard asked when is my appointment, and I burst out in tears,” she recalls. She couldn't get one. “It didn't work." FINALLY: A HAPPY ENDING

“I just got my passports!” Ginger Collier texts.

She ended up showing up at the passport office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 a.m. and being sorted into groups and lined up against walls. Finally they were called to a window, where the agent was “super nice” and pulled all four of the family's applications — paperwork that had been sitting in the office since March 17. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to pick up their passports the next day.

They did — with four days to spare.

“What a ridiculous process,” Collier says. Nevertheless, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: “It was the best hug ever!”

sciencedaily.com

When photosynthetic cells absorb light from the sun, packets of energy called photons leap between a series of light-harvesting proteins until they reach the photosynthetic reaction center. There, cells convert the energy into electrons, which eventually power the production of sugar molecules.

This transfer of energy through the light-harvesting complex occurs with extremely high efficiency: Nearly every photon of light absorbed generates an electron, a phenomenon known as near-unity quantum efficiency.

A new study from MIT chemists offers a potential explanation for how proteins of the light-harvesting complex, also called the antenna, achieve that high efficiency. For the first time, the researchers were able to measure the energy transfer between light-harvesting proteins, allowing them to discover that the disorganized arrangement of these proteins boosts the efficiency of the energy transduction.

"In order for that antenna to work, you need long-distance energy transduction. Our key finding is that the disordered organization of the light-harvesting proteins enhances the efficiency of that long-distance energy transduction," says Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

MIT postdocs Dihao Wang and Dvir Harris and former MIT graduate student Olivia Fiebig PhD '22 are the lead authors of the paper, which will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jianshu Cao, an MIT professor of chemistry, is also an author of the paper.

Energy capture

For this study, the MIT team focused on purple bacteria, which are often found in oxygen-poor aquatic environments and are commonly used as a model for studies of photosynthetic light-harvesting.

Within these cells, captured photons travel through light-harvesting complexes consisting of proteins and light-absorbing pigments such as chlorophyll. Using ultrafast spectroscopy, a technique that uses extremely short laser pulses to study events that happen on timescales of femtoseconds to nanoseconds, scientists have been able to study how energy moves within a single one of these proteins. However, studying how energy travels between these proteins has proven much more challenging because it requires positioning multiple proteins in a controlled way.

To create an experimental setup where they could measure how energy travels between two proteins, the MIT team designed synthetic nanoscale membranes with a composition similar to those of naturally occurring cell membranes. By controlling the size of these membranes, known as nanodiscs, they were able to control the distance between two proteins embedded within the discs.

For this study, the researchers embedded two versions of the primary light-harvesting protein found in purple bacteria, known as LH2 and LH3, into their nanodiscs. LH2 is the protein that is present during normal light conditions, and LH3 is a variant that is usually expressed only during low light conditions.

Using the cryo-electron microscope at the MIT.nano facility, the researchers could image their membrane-embedded proteins and show that they were positioned at distances similar to those seen in the native membrane. They were also able to measure the distances between the light-harvesting proteins, which were on the scale of 2.5 to 3 nanometers.

Disordered is better

Because LH2 and LH3 absorb slightly different wavelengths of light, it is possible to use ultrafast spectroscopy to observe the energy transfer between them. For proteins spaced closely together, the researchers found that it takes about 6 picoseconds for a photon of energy to travel between them. For proteins farther apart, the transfer takes up to 15 picoseconds.

Faster travel translates to more efficient energy transfer, because the longer the journey takes, the more energy is lost during the transfer.

"When a photon gets absorbed, you only have so long before that energy gets lost through unwanted processes such as nonradiative decay, so the faster it can get converted, the more efficient it will be," Schlau-Cohen says.

The researchers also found that proteins arranged in a lattice structure showed less efficient energy transfer than proteins that were arranged in randomly organized structures, as they usually are in living cells.

"Ordered organization is actually less efficient than the disordered organization of biology, which we think is really interesting because biology tends to be disordered. This finding tells us that that may not just be an inevitable downside of biology, but organisms may have evolved to take advantage of it," Schlau-Cohen says.

Now that they have established the ability to measure inter-protein energy transfer, the researchers plan to explore energy transfer between other proteins, such as the transfer between proteins of the antenna to proteins of the reaction center. They also plan to study energy transfer between antenna proteins found in organisms other than purple bacteria, such as green plants.

The research was funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attends President Joe Bidens State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, February 7, 2023.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated her colleagues who voted to strike down race-conscious college admissions policies, accusing the majority of “turning back the clock” on affirmative action.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote in a thundering dissent to the major court ruling Thursday.

“But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote.

“History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark,” Jackson wrote.

Jackson, a nominee of President Joe Biden, is the high court’s newest justice and the first Black woman to sit on the bench.

Her dissent accused the six-member conservative majority of not only ignoring the nation’s long and continuing history of racial discrimination, but also stunting the progress that academic institutions have made to address those social ills.

“No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better,” Jackson wrote.

“The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain,” the justice wrote.

“If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more,” she warned.

The justice also argued that race-conscious college admissions policies benefit society in a multitude of ways, including strengthening the U.S. workforce and business leadership.

“A less diverse pipeline to these top jobs accumulates wealth and power unequally across racial lines, exacerbating racial disparities in a society that already dispenses prestige and privilege based on race,” Jackson wrote.

Vice President Kamala Harris urged everyone to read Brown’s dissent.

“I encourage you to read it because she is a beautiful writer who is compelled by logic and a knowledge of history and a clarity of thinking about where we have been as a country and where we have the potential to go,” Harris said during remarks at the Global Black Economic Forum in New Orleans on Thursday.

The court, she added, is at a point where it hasn’t fully understood the importance of equal opportunity for the American people.

“It is a complete misnomer to suggest this is about [being] colorblind when in fact, it is about being blind to history,” said Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice president.

Thursday’s ruling dealt with two separate cases related to affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

In the Harvard case, the vote on the decision was 6-2, as Jackson took no part in considering the case due to her membership on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Jackson dissented in the UNC case, where the vote was 6-3.

Her polemical dissent followed another blistering rebuke from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored.”

Both dissents were joined by the Justice Elena Kagan, the court’s third liberal.

The majority held that the admissions programs of Harvard and UNC violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because they “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.” The clause enshrines that states must apply laws equally to their citizens.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that “We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

He noted, however, that universities can still consider race in a prospective student’s application in the context of a “discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

“In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. CNBC Politics

The liberals rejected the majority’s interpretation of the Constitution.

“It would be deeply unfortunate if the Equal Protection Clause actually demanded this perverse, ahistorical, and counterproductive outcome,” Jackson wrote. “To impose this result in that Clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the Clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all.”

Jackson also took aim at conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s second Black justice, who in a concurring opinion accused Jackson of believing that “almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.”

Thomas “ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson responded in a footnote of her dissent.

Source

[[Cited link https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-rejects-affirmative-action-at-colleges-says-schools-cant-consider-race-in-admission.html](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf)](https://www.cnbc.com/joe-biden/)

Let’s not beat around the bush. The Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the one canceling President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as “major questions” which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.

If you were counting on loan forgiveness — and Biden’s loan forgiveness program would have forgiven $10,000 worth of loans for most student borrowers, and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients — you will not receive it because of a decision the Court handed down on Friday, in a 6-3 vote entirely along party lines.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court’s majority of Republican-appointees. Justice Elena Kagan dissented on behalf of the Court’s Democratic appointees.

There are legitimate policy debates to be had over the Biden plan’s efficacy, fairness, and necessity. But one thing that should have been straightforward was its legality.

A 2003 federal law known as the Heroes Act gives the secretary of the Department of Education sweeping authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs ... as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

This is expansive language. While it only applies during a “national emergency,” when such an emergency (such as the Covid-19 pandemic) arises, the secretary may either eliminate (“waive”) or change (“modify”) student borrowers’ loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary.” So Congress clearly authorized the Education secretary to make modifications or waivers that are broad or narrow, or that apply to many or few borrowers. And it explicitly said that the secretary will have the final word on the scope of student loan relief within the context of a national emergency.

Roberts’s opinion in Nebraska effectively overrules the decision of both elected branches of government. It overrides Congress’s unambiguous decision to give this power to the secretary of Education. And it overrules the executive branch’s judgment about how to exercise the authority that Congress gave it. As Kagan writes in dissent, “the Secretary did only what Congress had told him he could.” What the Nebraska case should have said

The Heroes Act was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, to ensure that student borrowers who are impacted by a “war or other military operation or national emergency” are “not placed in a worse position financially” because of that emergency. Initially it was enacted on a temporary basis, but Congress made the statute permanent in 2007, thus giving the secretary lasting authority to cancel or modify student loan obligations when new emergencies arose.

In addition to the broad language permitting the secretary to “waive or modify any provision” of the federal laws governing student loans, the law also includes several other provisions showing that Congress intended the secretary to be able to exercise this power in a national emergency without being bound by many of the procedural and substantive limits that normally apply to executive branch officials engaged in policymaking.

Often, for example, when a federal agency wishes to create a new policy, it must undergo a lengthy process known as “notice and comment” before that policy may take effect. But the Heroes Act explicitly permits the Education secretary to forgo notice and comment when exercising their loan modification and forgiveness powers under the Heroes Act.

Similarly, the law states explicitly that the secretary may dole out loan relief en masse, to every borrower impacted by an emergency. According to the statute, “the Secretary is not required to exercise the waiver or modification authority under this section on a case-by-case basis.”

And, on top of all of that, the statute explicitly instructs federal courts not to interpret other federal laws to limit the secretary’s authority to alter student loan obligations. The Heroes Act permits the secretary to exercise their authority “notwithstanding any other provision of law, unless enacted with specific reference to” the Heroes Act.

So Nebraska is an easy case. When Congress passed the Heroes Act, it made a very clear and explicitly articulated decision to give the secretary broad and flexible authority in national emergencies, to allow the secretary to bypass ordinary constraints on policymakers, to permit the secretary to provide loan relief to many borrowers at once, and to forbid the federal courts from reading other statutes to narrow this authority.

That’s the exact authority that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona used when he announced the student loans forgiveness program. Pursuant to his statutory power to waive or modify loan obligations en masse, Cardona determined that, because of the financial hardship caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Education Department would reduce loans to borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in 2020 or 2021 by $10,000, and that Pell Grant recipients would receive $20,000 in loan relief.

Obviously, there are potential downsides to Congress’s decision to give him this authority. Any government official given broad authority by Congress might abuse that power. Or they might exercise it unwisely. But, as Kagan writes, Congress’s decision to preference flexible policymaking over constraining public officials “may have been a good idea, or it may have been a bad idea.” But, “either way, it was what Congress said.”

And it is not supposed to be the job of the courts to second-guess Congress’s decisions about how federal law should operate. How Roberts tries to get around the Heroes Act’s clear statutory text

Roberts’s attempts to make the Heroes Act mean something other than what it says are at times confusing and difficult to parse. But it basically boils down to this: In order to provide for the particular mix of student loan relief prescribed by the Biden administration’s policy, the secretary had to both “waive” some student loan obligations and “modify” others. That is, the policy only works if the secretary has the power to outright eliminate some obligations, while merely making changes to others.

The chief’s primary attack on the Heroes Act’s statutory language is that he reads the word “modify” too narrowly to permit these changes. As he writes, the word “modify” “carries ‘a connotation of increment or limitation,’ and must be read to mean ‘to change moderately or in minor fashion.’” And then he faults the Biden administration for doing too much, attempting to “transform” student loan obligations instead of merely making “modest adjustments.”

As Roberts writes, quoting from a MCI Telecommunications v. American Telephone and Telegraph (1994) “the Secretary’s plan has ‘modified’ the cited provisions [of federal laws governing student borrowing] only in the same sense that ‘the French Revolution “modified” the status of the French nobility.’”

One problem with this approach, as Kagan writes in dissent, is that courts are supposed to read the words of a statute in context, rather than in isolation, to determine what they mean when they are used in a particular law. Indeed, the MCI Telecommunications decision itself, which warned courts to “not rely exclusively upon dictionary definitions, but also upon contextual indications” when interpreting laws, provides support for Kagan’s approach.

“In the HEROES Act,” Kagan notes, “the dominant piece of context is that ‘modify’ does not stand alone. It is one part of a couplet: ‘waive or modify.’” The word “waive” moreover means “eliminate,” so Congress explicitly gave the secretary the power to simply wipe away student loan obligations altogether.

But, if the word modify were read as narrowly as Roberts suggests it must be, that would mean the Heroes Act must be read to give “the Secretary power to wholly eliminate a requirement, as well as to relax it just a little bit, but nothing in between.” The secretary, in other words, might have the power to abolish many student loans altogether, or perhaps to change a minor paperwork requirement for student borrowers, but not to take any intermediate steps between these two extremes.

That makes no sense. As Kagan writes, “Congress would not have written so insane a law.”

Perhaps recognizing that his attempts to parse the text of the Heroes Act may not be entirely persuasive, Roberts’s opinion also offers an alternative reason to strike down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program — something known as the “major questions doctrine.”

Briefly, the major questions doctrine states that the Court expects “Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” And, as Roberts writes, there’s little question that this student loans policy, which could forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans, involves matters of great significance.

But the most important thing to understand about the major questions doctrine is that it is completely made up. It appears nowhere in the Constitution, and nowhere in any statute, and was invented largely by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. It is true that the Supreme Court has invoked this made-up doctrine several times in the recent past — mostly in opinions joined entirely by Republican-appointed justices who wished to strike down policies pushed by Democratic presidents — but, in relying on this fabricated legal doctrine one more time, Roberts effectively cites past power grabs by the justices to justify a new power grab.

And even if you accept the major questions doctrine as legitimate, it’s not clear why Biden’s student loans program still should not be upheld. The doctrine merely states that Congress must “speak clearly” if it wishes to delegate significant authority to a federal agency. And, for the reasons explained in the previous section, Congress spoke quite clearly when it wrote the Heroes Act.

So, let me end this piece as bluntly as it began. The Supreme Court’s decision in Nebraska is not rooted in law, and it barely even attempts to resemble a legal decision. The Court overrules both elected branches. It rewrites a federal law. And it roots its decision in a fake legal doctrine with no basis in any actual legal text. You've read 6 articles in the last 30 days.

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In recent weeks, several prominent anti-trans laws have been blocked by federal courts, underscoring how shaky the legal footing underlying them really is.

Parts of measures curbing gender-affirming care for trans youth in Kentucky and Tennessee were barred by federal judges on Wednesday, while provisions limiting gender-affirming care in Arkansas, Florida, and Indianahttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/florida-transgender-health-care-ban.html were struck down earlier in June.

“I think what [the Kentucky decision and that of other states] across the country are saying is that banning health care is unconstitutional,” said Angela Cooper, a spokesperson for ACLU of Kentucky, a group that helped challenge the state’s law. “Every medical organization agrees with us.”

In nearly all the recent cases, federal judges concurred, deeming the core tenets of the laws either outright unconstitutional or likely to be interpreted as such. In Kentucky and Tennessee, the judges also respectively went on to describe gender-affirming care as “medically appropriate and necessary” and noted that targeting trans youth amounted to “disparate treatment on the basis of sex.”

Many conservatives and their allies beg to differ, however, and it is likely these cases could ultimately end up at the Supreme Court.

These court cases come as Republicans across the country have homed in on anti-trans bills as a culture war issue that can be used to rally their base. Even as courts are stymieing existing bills, other legislatures, like those of North Carolina and Ohio, are still approving them.

Decisions like those in Kentucky and Tennessee, however, suggest those policies — if they become law — may also be successfully challenged in court, only further highlighting how, for many conservatives, the messaging around anti-trans bills is as important as the proposals themselves. The Kentucky and Tennessee decisions send a message

The recent Kentucky and Tennessee decisions aren’t total victories for the trans community, but they do set important precedents. Both temporarily affirm that access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy is still legal for trans youth in these states, though other tenets in their respective bills — including bans on gender-affirming surgeries for minors — are still able to take effect. In Kentucky, plaintiffs did not challenge the gender-affirming surgery provision, and in Tennessee, the judge opted to uphold it.

The court decisions in both states add to others announced in the past few months, which have defended gender-affirming care in some way.

Earlier this month, a federal judge permanently struck down Arkansas’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth, deeming it unconstitutional, and enabling physicians to continue providing hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgeries. A federal judge has also temporarily blocked significant provisions of an Indiana law, noting that opponents showed how it could cause “irreparable harm,” and enabling physicians to continue providing hormone therapy and puberty blockers, but keeping the ban on surgeries. And in Florida, a federal judge has also temporarily blocked a provision in a law that bars trans youth from receiving puberty blockers, emphasizing that “gender identity is real.”

Collectively, these court decisions are bolstering advocates’ fight to combat anti-trans bills and push back on the onslaught of policy and rhetoric from conservatives in the last few years. Additionally, they help set a standard for how other states’ laws are evaluated and considered by the courts.

As Vox’s Nicole Narea and Fabiola Cineas explain, there’s been an explosion of state laws targeting trans youth, as Republican legislatures have framed trans people and health care as a threat to children. These laws have included restrictions on gender-affirming care, the ability for trans people to compete in sports, and the ability for trans people to use bathrooms that match their gender identity.

Such bills have been approved even as prominent medical organizations including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have described gender-affirming care as “medically necessary care.” According to MedPage Today, 20 states have approved some form of restriction on gender-affirming care for minors.

Beyond the legislation blocked in the last few weeks, other bills specifically attacking such care have encountered legal roadblocks.

“To date, eight gender-affirming care bans have been challenged in courts, with more challenges in the works,” Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, counsel at Lambda Legal, an advocacy group for LGBTQ rights, told Vox. “Of these, six have been preliminarily or permanently enjoined by the courts, one is not being enforced by agreement while the motion for a preliminary injunction is pending, and the last one has not taken effect yet.”

Such legal victories mark important inroads for trans advocates, though more will be needed to combat sweeping restrictions. In several other states, like Utah and South Dakota, bills curbing gender-affirming care have already taken effect, or are poised to soon. And in others such as South Carolina and Wisconsin, Republican legislatures are continuing to consider them.

Even in states where there’s been legal action blocking legislation, certain provisions in those bills — such as a ban on gender-affirming surgeries — have still been able to move forward. And some of the legal action that’s been taken is temporary and dependent on other legal challenges winding their way through the courts, or potential appeals.

Still, advocates note the string of wins they’ve seen recently send a powerful message about their ability to protect such care for minors, and set the tone for legal contests to come.

“That every court to consider laws like [these] have so far come out the same way shows how unconstitutional and misguided these laws are,” says Gonzalez-Pagan.

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I love a good air fried party snack, like these sweet and salty devils, but I mostly use my air fryer to turbo roast vegetables. The little tabletop convection oven gets incredible results in a short amount of time without heating up my kitchen; it’s rare that I have to air fry carrots or broccoli for more than 15 minutes. Now I’ve added corn to my easy vegetable repertoire: frozen corn, to be exact.

Sweet corn is in season right now, and I plan to eat a lot of it, but I always have a bag of kernels in my freezer, for tossing into ramen, pasta, and rice dishes. A few days ago, I found myself with a meager cup of kernels left in the bag, and decided to go ahead and air fry them, to see what that was like. (It was good.)

:Links to shitty air friers on amazon here

I tossed the corn in a little melted ghee, seasoned it with a few shakes of garlic salt, and dumped it in the basket of my air fryer (without the tray). I cooked it at 400℉ for 5 minutes, just until the kernels started to take on a little color.

The corn that came out of that basket was delicious—buttery, toasty, and a little chewy on the ends, yet somehow still juicy. I ate the whole bowl in about three minutes. The garlic salt was lovely—I’ve been a on real Lawry’s garlic salt kick recently—but any spice blend would work. (I’m working my way through the Trader Joe’s line of seasoning blends. The elote blend is next.) Is air fried corn groundbreaking? No, but it is fast, delicious, and cheap, and sometimes that’s more than enough. Easy Toasty Air Fried Corn Ingredients:

1 cup frozen corn kernels
1 teaspoon melted ghee (or bacon fat, or olive oil)
5-6 shakes of your favorite seasoning blend

Dump the kernels into a colander and rinse them with warm water to knock off any ice crystals. Dry them on paper towels, then transfer them to a bowl and toss with ghee. Season with your favorite seasoning blend.

Remove the tray from your air fryer basket—the kernels will just fall through and get caught—and heat the air fryer to 400℉. Add the kernels to the basket and cook for 5-6 minutes, until they begin to take on color at the edges. Serve immediately.

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It seems like everyone is obsessed with Outshine Fruit Bars, the inexplicably smooth popsicles studded with bits of whole fruit. I am particularly smitten with the lemon and lime varieties, which taste like perfect frosty lemonade on a stick.

I do, however, become annoyed as all heck when I encounter a processed food I cannot make better at home. Previous attempts to dupe these popsicles have been disappointing. The trouble with popsicles is that you end up with an ice block from which you have to suck out all of the juice. It’s fine when you’re five, but loses its appeal as an adult. How the heck are the Outshine guys doing it?

Gum. That’s the answer. More specifically, stabilizers like guar gum, agar, or gelatin. Before you castigate me for recommending “additives,” please remember each one is a natural food byproduct. Guar gum, for example, is just beans. I ordered some bean powder off the internet and started doing a deep dive, all in pursuit of a better pop, and I’m thrilled to share my findings with you. Here are three tips for making a fruit pop that has a deeply satisfying flavor and mouthfeel. Start your popsicles with cold ingredients

My most successful fruit pops were made with frozen fruit, but to make lemonade, you need to melt sugar into lemon juice. I tried pouring the resulting warm syrup directly into the mold, thinking it would freeze just fine, but it didn’t. It cooled inconsistently, fracturing the popsicle. The ones I made with blended frozen fruit turned out fantastic and froze really quickly.

This makes sense. In large, commercial operations, they use super fast chilling systems to get the temperature down quickly, much more quickly than your home freezer is capable of. There’s also a side benefit to agitation when using guar gum, and though I don’t have hard science to back this up, I suspect using the blender helped. If you want to make a pop that requires a heated base, such as lemon or limeade, freeze it on its own, then use your blender to break it up into a slush. Guar gum for the win

Guar gum—which, again, comes from beans—is a common thickening and stabilizing agent used in a wide variety of foods. It’s wildly good at its job, and more effective than other thickening and stabilizing agents (such as cornstarch and the like). It’s also naturally gluten-free, which is great because there is no reason for gluten to be in a popsicle.

Because it’s so effective, you don’t need a lot of it—just ¼ tablespoon of guar gum for every four cups of fruit. Sprinkle it in, then agitate it in a blender, which helps the guar gum get into solution and eliminates clumps. Combine fruit puree and pieces for a better pop

I read a lot about using “fruit pulp” when conducting my research for these fruit pops, and that definitely made sense. The texture of whole fruit pieces in my pops was part of what appealed to me. To achieve this at home, pour most of the fruit you’re using into the blender and blend with sugar until you have a puree. Add your guar gum, then add your whole fruit and pulse it in the blender just enough to break it up a bit, but not puree it. Now you have fruit pulp. How to make your fruit pops look profesh

Silicone popsicle molds do the heavy work here. They make it easy to pop out your pops one by one, and keep the popsicle stick solidly in place. I do not like popsicle molds that come with their own plastic stick bases, because I’m definitely going to lose one, and it ties up the base until I eat the popsicle. I wanted to be able to make a bunch of fruit pops and keep them in the freezer until I was ready to eat them. Everything you need for perfect pops:

Guar gum (duh): Judee’s Guar Gum Powder
Silicone molds, for pretty pops: Silicone Popsicles Molds
Cello bags, for storing: Popsicle Bags
Sticks (gotta have ‘em): Natural Wood Popsicle Sticks
A blender, for making pulp: Hamilton Beach Power Elite Wave Action Blender

Once the pops are done, and they really only need a six-hour freeze, pop them out and transfer them to cello bags made specifically for popsicles. They can live in your freezer until you’re ready, like the boxed kind you buy from the store. Perfect Strawberry Fruit Pops (makes six) Ingredients:

16 ounces frozen strawberries
One cup of white sugar
¼ tablespoon of guar gum

Add 12 ounces of the berries to your blender, along with your sugar, and blend until you have a smooth puree. Sprinkle the guar gum on the puree and blend for 20 seconds. Now add the rest of your berries, and pulse for one second five or six times to break them up, but not puree them.

Immediately pour the mixture into your silicone mold and freeze. You want the mixture to be as cold as possible when it goes into the freezer, so don’t dawdle; have your mold ready to go as soon as you’re done blending.

After six hours, un-mold and eat or transfer cello bags and store them in the freezer.

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If you love your lawn, fine, but maybe hear me out: Lawns are the worst. Even if you don’t mind the watering, mowing, and chemicals, most lawns—including yours—are terrible. A non-comprehensive list of why lawns are awful

Grass, as a plant, is worthless. It’s a monoculture, meaning that there’s no diversity, and more susceptible to disease because they lack defenses from fellow plants. Biodiversity is why we plant nasturtiums next to vegetables—to protect the vegetables—and a lack of such diversity is why people often treat their lawn with chemicals.

Lawns also provide nothing to pollinators or animals, and often hurt surrounding wildlife with those same chemicals that are absorbed into the soil and plants nearby. Lawns rob soil of nutrients and are constantly in need of fertilizer. Chemicals and fertilizer often end up in the runoff, which pollutes our waterways and harms aquatic life. Lawns require a lot of water, time, effort, and money. Lawns simply suck. Be smart about killing your lawn

Don’t use chemicals to kill your lawn. If you want to benefit the soil, waterways, and nearby wildlife, using chemicals obviously defeats the purpose.

A lesser evil, but one you may also regret, is landscape fabric. Laying this black propylene is problematic for the soil and going to be a pain for you eventually. Once it’s stapled down, it’s almost impossible to get back up, and it also sheds, adding plastic to the soil, so any future plants will have to contend with both plastic and compacted, starved soil. Every gardener I know has had to extricate this nightmare from their yard eventually, and the irony is that it still doesn’t actually stop weeds. They grow through, practically giving you the finger. How to kill your lawn for free

You can rent a sod cutter, but they’re unwieldy and expensive. You can also turn over all your lawn with a shovel, but that’s a lot of work. Both of these methods are pretty fine, environmentally. But you can just sheet mulch your lawn, which is both easy and free.

Sheet mulching is the act of covering the ground with cardboard or something else that easily degrades. Cardboard is a nice, solid material that will block out the sun and oxygen from your lawn, and once starved of both, the grass will die—and better yet, it will compost in place. The cardboard will too, usually in a season or two, sticking around just long enough to kill the lawn. And as everything composts in place, it feeds the soil, creating microbes, mycorrhizae (the good fungus), and creating food for worms. It’ll also create pockets in the soil for other useful insects, and with the worms and insects will come birds and other small animals.

And cardboard is basically free. Use your Amazon boxes that you otherwise toss away, ask your neighbors for theirs, or ask your local grocery store. Remove the tape and staples, and use only uncoated cardboard (if it’s shiny, skip it). Lay it down, layering the ends, and make sure every spot is covered. Multiple layers is fine.

Reasonable people can agree a yard full of cardboard isn’t going to win the hearts and minds of your neighbors, so cover the cardboard with (also free) wood chips. Those chips will provide a uniform layer on your sheet mulch, help keep the cardboard in place, and hide the ugliness underneath. The chips will also compost over a few years, helping create a rich soil.

You can plant into your chips after a season. As you dig, you’ll see what’s left of the cardboard covered in white, which is mold and mycorrhizae—a sign of a healthy soil base. Those chips will break down in a year or two, and you can continue layering them on with new chips if you enjoy the look. They’re great to walk on and keep the ground nice and cool, in my opinion.

If you want to plant a ground cover or alternative lawn, you can. After a year, rake out the bigger chips still left, and you’ll be surprised to see how much has already broken down, leaving the smaller chips and compost behind. Layer on some more compost, and plant your ground cover right into it. There are also plenty of companies now like PT Lawn that specialize in alternative lawns of all kinds, from dog park mixes to pasture mixes. These diverse mixes look great, feed the soil and pollinators, and need less water and mowing.