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The future of the STEM workforce rests partly on the strength of the STEM teacher workforce to teach and nurture new generations of STEM graduates. However, the STEM teacher workforce is facing critical decline with the annual production dropping from about 31,000 a decade ago to around 20,000 in the last few years. This is concerning given the need for more STEM teachers to meet rising demands. Although production is decreasing, there are improvements in the diversity and qualifications of STEM teachers, including more female teachers and those with higher degrees in STEM fields. Investments in teacher salaries and financial support for STEM education can help address the shortage and improve the future STEM teacher workforce and STEM workforce. 

Abstract AstroSage-Llama-3.1-8B is a domain-specialized natural-language AI assistant tailored for research in astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, and astronomical instrumentation. Trained on the complete collection of astronomy-related arXiv papers from 2007 to 2024 along with millions of synthetically-generated question-answer pairs and other astronomical literature, AstroSage-Llama-3.1-8B demonstrates remarkable proficiency on a wide range of questions. AstroSage-Llama-3.1-8B scores 80.9% on the AstroMLab-1 benchmark, greatly outperforming all models—proprietary and open-weight—in the 8-billion parameter class, and performing on par with GPT-4o. This achievement demonstrates the potential of domain specialization in AI, suggesting that focused training can yield capabilities exceeding those of much larger, general-purpose models. AstroSage-Llama-3.1-8B is freely available, enabling widespread access to advanced AI capabilities for astronomical education and research. 

Polariton chemistry has emerged as a new approach for directing molecular systems via strong light–matter interactions in confined photonic media. In this work, we implement a classical electrodynamics–molecular dynamics method to investigate collision-induced emission and radiative association in planar microcavities under variable light–matter coupling strength. We focus on the argon–xenon (Ar–Xe) gas mixture as a representative system, simulating collisions coupled to the confined multimode electromagnetic field. We find that while the effects of a microcavity on collision-induced emission spectra are subtle, even at extremely large coupling strengths, radiative association can be significantly enhanced in a microcavity. Our results also indicate that microcavities may be designed to induce changes in the statistical distribution of Ar–Xe complex lifetimes. These findings provide new insights into the control of intermolecular interactions and radiative kinetics with microcavities.