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The “Heliophysics Big Year” was an extended “year” when major solar events engaged the public. NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded several projects to educate the public on the science of the heliosphere and safe observing practices. In response to this initiative, we worked with other teams to create and disseminate accurate yet engaging information. We expanded our eclipse website (https://space.rice.edu/eclipse/) with activities, citizen science projects, resources, training videos, suggested equipment, and links to other compendia. We directed the Citizen CATE 2024 project, and trained state coordinators and their teams to use the specialized equipment and procedures. We trained teachers at local, regional, national, and international workshops, providing eclipse viewing cards, lenses for making “solar cup projectors,” a pattern for a safe viewing screen, and additional materials. With other teams, we gave presentations to the media at SciLine in San Antonio and hosted public events to demonstrate safe eclipse viewing techniques. The most lasting and impactful product was our planetarium show “Totality,” which was distributed free of license fees. More than 180,000 views of the show and its animations have been documented. We improved our space weather forecasting site (https://mms.rice.edu) and used our email lists (14,000+) to send out real-time warnings about the major solar storm of 10–11 May 2024. In total, we provided nearly two million people with heliophysics information. In summary, the federal/private/business partnerships meant that the events of this “year” were a fun, safe, learning experience for tens of millions of Americans. 

Stress fields imparted with an ultrafast laser can correct low spatial frequency surface figure error of mirrors through ultrafast laser stress figuring (ULSF): the formation of nanograting structures within the bulk substrate generates localized stress, creating bending moments that equilibrize via wafer deformation. For ULSF to be used as an optical figuring process, the ultrafast laser generated stress must be effectively permanent or risk unwanted figure drift. Two isochronal annealing experiments were performed to measure ultrafast laser-generated stress stability in fused silica and Corning ultra-low expansion (ULE) wafers. The first experiment tracked changes to induced astigmatism up to 1000 °C on 25.4 mm-diameter wafers. Only small changes were measured after each thermal cycle up to 500 °C for both materials, but significant changes were observed at higher temperatures. The second experiment tracked stress changes in fused silica and ULE up to 500 °C but with 4 to 16× higher signal-to-noise ratio. Change in trefoil on 100 mm-diameter wafers was measured, and the induced stress in fused silica and ULE was found to be stable after thermal cycling up to 300 °C and 200 °C, respectively, with larger changes at higher temperatures. 

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made rapid progress in reasoning across visual and textual data. While VLMs perform well on vision tasks that they are trained on, our results highlight key challenges in abstract pattern recognition. We present GlyphPattern, a 954 item dataset that pairs 318 human-written descriptions of visual patterns from 40 writing systems with three visual presentation styles.GlyphPattern evaluates abstract pattern recognition in VLMs, requiring models to understand and judge natural language descriptions of visual patterns. GlyphPattern patterns are drawn from a large-scale cognitive science investigation of human writing systems; as a result, they are rich in spatial reference and compositionality. Our experiments show that GlyphPattern is challenging for state-of-the-art VLMs (GPT-4o achieves only 55% accuracy), with marginal gains from few-shot prompting. Our detailed analysis reveals errors at multiple levels, including visual processing, natural language understanding, and pattern generalization. 

ABSTRACT Marine fish are likely one of the top producers of biogenic carbonate in the oceans. However, nothing is known about the production rate and composition of intestinal carbonate (ichthyocarbonate) excreted by mesopelagic fishes, which are small, fragile and account for up to 94% of global fish biomass. To address this knowledge gap, and associated uncertainty of global ichthyocarbonate production, we identified a model species residing at 350–430 m, depths relevant for mesopelagic fishes. The blackbelly rosefish (Helicolenus dactylopterus) lacks swim bladders and survives capture and transfer to the lab. Freshly collected blackbelly rosefish, maintained at 6°C, contained high amounts of intestinal ichthyocarbonate (0.4 g kg−1) and excreted ∼5 mg kg−1 h−1 ichthyocarbonate, in agreement with expectations based on allometric and thermal relationships for other species. Despite longer intestinal residence time, intestinal and excreted ichthyocarbonates are similar in crystallite morphology, composition and sinking rate, but have a higher dissolution rate than that produced by shallow water species at higher temperatures, ruling out strong effects of pressure and low temperatures on ichthyocarbonate formation and excretion. Considering allometric and thermal relationships, the metabolic rate of blackbelly rosefish is lower than that of other marine fish in general, and mesopelagic fishes in particular. Our observations support assumptions of ichthyocarbonate excretion by mesopelagic fishes, and suggest that thermal and allometric relationships for ichthyocarbonate excretion determined from shallow water species extend to fish populations at depth. 

Data include soil and litter measurements for moisture, pH, and carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Samples were collected from 8 different ecoregions, as determined by NEON, at various NEON/LTER and/or other experimental sites. Soil cores and litter samples were taken in the spring and fall of 2022. 

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are increasingly used in applications across the biomedical domain, yet their long-term biodistribution and biocompatibility remain poorly understood. Conventional brightfield microscopy imaging techniques often fail to detect AuNPs due to optical diffraction limits and lack of chromogenic contrast. Understanding the biodistribution and ultimate fate of these nonbiodegradable NPs is crucial for further development of AuNP-based therapeutics and diagnostics. Here, we present a label-free multiphoton luminescence (MPL) imaging workflow that enables sensitive detection of AuNPs in liver histology sections, even 1 year after intravenous (IV) administration. MPL imaging exploits the intrinsic nonlinear optical properties of AuNPs to generate broadband emission under ultrafast pulsed laser excitation, enabling subcellular localization without exogenous labels while having the ability to rapidly image entire organ sections. The intrinsic, distinct broadband MPL emission produced by gold allows us to study these NPs in their biological context without extrinsic labels while also faithfully representing the surrounding tissue architecture via autofluorescence and second harmonic generation. We demonstrate that MPL imaging detects up to 98% more AuNP-positive regions than brightfield microscopy in challenging low-dose (1 nM) conditions and requires no modification of standard histology workflows. Correlative imaging with SEM–EDS confirms high spatial specificity (AUC = 0.955) of MPL for AuNP localization. Dose-dependent retention patterns were observed across liver tissue, and MPL analysis showed strong correlation with ICP–MS quantification. Importantly, histological and immunohistochemical analyses (Masson’s trichrome, CD3, and TUNEL) revealed no significant fibrosis, immune activation, or apoptosis in liver tissue at either low (1 nM) or high (10 nM) doses at 1 year post IV administration. These findings establish MPL imaging as a robust, label-free tool for long-term tracking of AuNPs in biological tissue and highlight its potential for improving biodistribution and safety assessments.