SciSchmooze
Bob Siederer
27 July 2026
Hello again fans of Science!
I’ve just returned from a long road trip. Maybe I’m outside the norm about this, but I enjoy long drives. I always have. I rarely listen to music, or audio books. I enjoy the quiet reflection such time can give.
The scenery doesn’t change much from year to year, but it does change over the course of hundreds miles…from lush, green forests to farmland, then grasslands, then dry desert, from flat lowlands to mountains and everything in between.
One other thing that can change is roadside hotels, both existing ones being remodeled and new ones being added. Both bring the science of design to bear on what should be fairly straightforward…a quiet, comfortable place to rest overnight. Little details can make a big difference, and some things I saw this year make me wonder if the designers (or the people that approved the designs) ever spent a night in a hotel! As perhaps you can tell, I had a lot of time to reflect on this during the trip.
I stayed in a Hampton Inn (a Hilton chain) that was undergoing a refresh in the rooms and common areas. I can’t say I liked the new room design, but it wasn’t awful either. There seemed to be less in this new design than in previous iterations…less storage, less convenience. For example, no towels reachable from the shower, and no place to hang one nearby if you noticed that before you got wet.
Then there was the Tru by Hilton I stayed in. This was my first Tru stay, and I really have to wonder what they were thinking. There were no lights on the night tables, which weren’t really tables in the true sense, but shelves by the bedside. There were two LED can lights in the ceiling over the head of the bed, and one standing lamp in the corner. I was traveling alone, but imagine if you were with someone else and had to get up in the middle of the night. You would want some light, but the only option from bedside is a switch that turns on the overhead cans, which are BRIGHT, along with the standing lamp. Your bedmate would not be amused! That light switch was only on one side of the bed. If your partner got up, they had to do so in the dark.
Then there was the desk…which didn’t exist! Instead, there was a small rolling table sitting under a narrow shelf along the wall where you would expect to find the dresser/desk furniture. To use it, you had to sit on the bed. There was a desk-style chair, but it was in the corner of the room, and wouldn’t fit between where the table was and the bed. There wasn’t much in the way of storage area for your clothes either. The Hampton Inn didn’t have a desk, but at least it had a small table, more like a cafe table you might find at a coffee shop than a desk, and a chair to go with it. There was also an lounge chair with a smallish computer table that you could move over your lap to work from, or eat from.
There’s a concept called User Centered Design, wherein attempts are made to create designs that center around the way a user would interact with the product. This often involves focus groups looking at the design, or even visiting a mock up, and giving their opinions on what they see. This isn’t limited to hotel rooms, but can (and should) be used in any type of device or product that will be used by the public.
An example from my previous life…I chaired a series of meetings between some large customers and a computer company wherein the customers were introduced to a new cartridge tape drive that was revolutionary. I expected the customers to be thrilled when they saw the product. But they weren’t. The individual units were 1 meter in height, roughtly tabletop height. The customers pointed out that computer operators would put stuff on a surface that height. The engineers who designed these devices only put one thing on that surface…the power button. How long do you think it would have taken before someone accidentally powered off a drive while it was being used? I should point out that I had not seen the actual drive myself before this set of meetings, so can’t say if I would have thought of this problem, but I’d like to think I would have. Anyway, as a result of these meetings, the power button was moved prior to general availability of the drive. Several other design elements were changed too.
Anyway, I thought I’d share these observations with you all since I had a lot of time to think about them. If what I observed helps you avoid a room with bad design, all the better. And I hope you got a chuckle out of all this.
Now, on to the news.
Government and Science
NPR reports that one of the many cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was the removal of the climate.gov website. This contained extensive records on climate, which inconveniently showed proof of climate change. Since the current administration has called climate change a “hoax”, such data would undermine the message they wanted to send. The people who worked on this site were laid off, being deemed unnecessary since the website was going away.
Well, some of those people recreated the climate.gov website, now called climate.us. Most of the data on the original site is still available, but is buried on a variety of government servers. All it took to rebuild this site was around $280,000 in crowd-sourced funds and a small team of researchers. Among other things, this proves the closure of the climate.gov site wasn’t about cost or efficiency, but about removing easy access to information that was contrary to the message the administration wanted to send.
Thanks to Herb for bringing this to my attention, and to Denise Middleton who posted about this on the Slack platform.
In a similar vein, the Administration is upset about a chapter about climate science in an educational guide for judges. The guide was developed by the National Academies of Sciences and covers many aspects of science. Such a guide is available to judges to provide them guidance on scientific topics they might not be familiar with when cases come before them that require some scientific background. Again, the attack isn’t based on science contradicting climate change, but on idealogical issues.
All these attacks on science are having a toll, on many levels. Neil deGrasse Tyson has some thoughts on the unintended consequences of the Administration’s massive cuts to science funding. Recovering from these cuts won’t be as simple as restoring funding. Researchers have gone to other countries. PhD candidates are no longer coming to US institutions to do their research. The government seems to think private industry will take up the slack, but they need to make a profit to survive. Any funding provided by the government will most likely require results that meet the agenda of the current administration. This damage has already been done. Sobering.
Several states, including California, have looked at making Daylight Savings Time permanent. California voters approved a referendum on this several years ago. However, federal approval is required for any state to change their Daylight Saving Time rules.
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would make daylight savings time permanent. It must till get through the Senate. Is this really a scientifically backed improvement? Would year-round standard time be better? The answer isn’t all that simple.
Climate
The big news for California over the past few weeks/months has been the development of a strong El Nino. What will this mean for the coming months? More rain? Less? The general media has coined the term “Super El Nino”, but this hasn’t been adopted by the scientific community. It makes for catchy weather promos (“tune in at 11:00 to see what to fear next!”) but isn’t an official category. Here are the answers to these questions, and more.
In Europe, wildfires have caused over 250,000 people to be evacuated in France and Spain. NASA’s Deep Space Communications Complex, which is near Madrid, was affected by one of these fires. It is too early to tell how much damage was caused. This center is one of three that are used to communicate with probes, including Voyager 1. Workload has been transfered to the other two, so no ongoing missions are directly affected.
Technology
Where better than Silicon Valley for a museum dedicated to technolgy than the place where much of it has been invented. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View attempts to chronicle this technology, and they just received a huge donation towards that end.
Artificial Intelligence
This week, OpenAI said a test model of theirs had “escaped” its test environment, broken into a real, outside company’s servers, all in an effort to “ace” an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In other words, it cheated on a test, looking for answers outside its sandbox. This wasn’t a single step effort either. It was a complex series of actions taken by the model to find flaws in the security of its own environment. How did this happen? Read the article.
Space and Astronomy
This article is a few years old, but I learned of it while on my trip back east. I stayed with a friend who happens to know the CEO of Near Space Corporation and she told me of this article about the company and their involvement in a small corner of the very complex project of getting to Mars. I always wonder about the reasons some people form the niche companies they start and how their success contributes to a much larger project. This is such a story.
We often link to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who discusses current topics from astronomy. Here, he talks about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory which just came online, and what it will mean to the search for asteroids, comets, and many other types of objects in the Universe.
Citizen science projects are pretty neat. They offer the general public a chance to help with data analysis. Such a project has resulted in the finding of more than 3,000 brown dwarfs near to us. That’s a lot!
There are two rocky planet discoveries near to earth in the news this week. The first one, GJ3378b, orbits a red dwarf just 25 light years from us. For comparison, the Milky Way is around 100,000 light years across. It isn’t clear if GJ3378b has an atmosphere, but it is rocky and will be studied further.
The other one, LHS1140b does have an atmosphere, orbits its star in the habitable zone (also called the Goldilocks Zone) and is also rocky. It is cooler than Earth, but larger in size and mass. It seems to have a helium-rich atmosphere.
Finding earth-sized planets at the right distance from their stars is not easy, given their small size and the distances between us. Most of the exoplanets found so far are gas giants, like Jupiter, which are easier to detect.
Have a great week in Science!
Bob
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