This grant funds a project by WNET, working with physicist Brian Greene, the World Science Foundation, 59 Productions and CounterPunch Studios, to adapt the live stage piece “Light Falls: Space, Time, and an Obsession of Einstein” for broadcast on public television. The piece, which debuted at Lincoln Center during the 2016 World Science Festival and is narrated by Greene, traces Einstein’s journey to the discovery of the general theory of relativity. The piece walks the audience through the stages in Einstein’s journey—from his boyhood fascination with a compass to his desperate efforts to understand gravity to his fear that mathematician David Hilbert would beat him to the general theory. In addition to providing historical information about Einstein himself, the production will explain, explore, and make compelling key scientific ideas related to the general theory such as Lorentz contraction, time dilation, the equivalence principle, Riemannian geometry, and curved spacetime. The producers, working with the award-winning CounterPunch Studios, will also explore deploying a pioneering holographic rig that can generate a digital, life-like, three-dimensional rendering of Einstein so that Greene can interact and converse with a realistic looking historical figure. The completed production will be broadcast on the one hundredth anniversary of the 1919 solar eclipse measurements that confirmed Einstein’s theory and made him the most famous scientist in the world.

This grant provides two years of support for continued production and broadcast of Open Mind. Hosted by Alexander Heffner and broadcast on 214 PBS stations, Open Mind is a 30-minute, one-on-one interview show that dives deeply into a rich variety of topics pertinent to the public discourse. Grant funds will allow Heffner and the Open Mind team to interview five Foundation-supported science and technology authors per year, allowing them to discuss their books and the ideas behind them in a thoughtful and engaging public forum. An additional 3-5 interviews per year will focus on topics of Sloan Foundation interest such as the Digital Public Library of America, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or the economics of the aging workforce. Additional grant funds support efforts to improve the reach of the program, including expanded outreach on social media and enhanced promotion of the Open Mind podcast.

This grant funds a project led by Assistant Professor Marina Vance of the University of Colorado, Boulder, in collaboration with Associate Professor Delphine Farmer of Colorado State University to initiate the development of a data infrastructure for the field of indoor chemistry through an interdisciplinary collaborative field experiment named “House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry” (HOMEChem). The HOMEChem experiment will take place at a test house at the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2018, where researchers from 9 universities will aim to identify the most important factors controlling chemistry in indoor environments. Teams from each of these nine universities will make a wide range of measurements of the test house, including building and ventilation metrics; environmental parameters; spectral radiance and photolysis rates; aerosol concentrations and size distributions; aerosol composition; and the presence or absence of elemental and oxidized carbon, gas and particle phase organics, nitrogen oxides, ozone, nitrous acid, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. Many of these factors will be the subject of multiple measurements by more than one instrument, allowing comparison of instruments and collection methodologies. In addition, Vance and Farmer will conduct controlled experiments regarding cooking and cleaning, so see how these common household activities affect the chemistry that takes place inside the house. The HOMEChem experiment promises not only to result in new knowledge about indoor chemistry, but to surface important issues regarding shared data and metadata needs among indoor chemists and to build community as the various research teams work together to execute the experiment and interpret their joint findings. Research results will be shared through at least eight publications and twenty presentations at high-profile sessions and plenaries at national and international meetings.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Deep Life Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Led by US microbiologist Mitch Sogin and German biogeochemist Kai Hinrichs, the Deep Life Community is a global collaborative network of some 250 researchers working together to enhance our understanding of the nature, distribution, abundance, and limits of the deep biosphere. Funds from this grant will allow the Deep Life Community to conclude its research as the Deep Carbon Observatory approaches its planned conclusion in 2019, as well as begin integrative work to synthesize the community’s findings with the work of the larger DCO community. Grant funds will support the completion of three major sampling studies: one in mainland Oman, one in the Atlantis Massif on the north Atlantic seafloor, and one in the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. Other funded research includes the completion of a “Census of Deep Life” that draws on deep life surveys of more than 90 locations worldwide. In addition, the Deep Life community continue laboratory studies of “extreme biophysics” that probe how biological molecules behave at high temperatures and pressures. Finally, the Deep Life Community will contribute several chapters to the technical volume that will summarize the entire body of DCO work and will contribute to the Deep Earth Carbon modeling initiative that provides integrative frameworks for the many faces of the DCO. The modeling has the exciting, maximal aim to predict the distribution of all deep life on Earth in space and time.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Extreme Physics and Chemistry Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). The Extreme Physics and Chemistry community is a global network of researchers working together to better our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of carbon in the high temperature, high pressure environments characteristic of the deep Earth. Led by geophysicist Wendy Mao of Stanford and geologist Craig Manning of UCLA, the community is concerned with the 90% of Earth’s carbon that resides in the interior as solids, magmas and melts, and low density fluids. It addresses the transformations that occur both as carbon rises from the core to the mantle to the crust and also as surface carbon is subducted beneath the crust and subjected to extraordinary temperatures and pressures. Grant funds will support research and administrative costs of the Extreme Chemistry community as it moves towards the planned conclusion of the DCO in 2019, with the majority of funds supporting a network of postdoctoral research associates at 20 participating institutions. Other funds support workshops, “hackathons,” and computational simulation and modeling work associated with integrating insights from the community with discoveries by the larger DCO community.

This grant provides research and operating support for the Biology of the Built Environment (BioBE) Center at the University of Oregon. Founded in 2010 with Sloan support, the BioBE Center conductsc research on the indoor microbiome and provides education about the microbiology of built environments. This grant provides continuing support for the Center’s ongoing outreach, research, and training activities and promotes Center efforts to implement a sustainable financing model that integrates their work with industry practice. BioBE’s central research question is: how does the design and operation of the built environment impact the built environment microbiome? The BioBE team has planned a series of experiments organized around three primary architectural decision realms that each have implications for health, energy-efficiency, and microbiome composition and function: (1) design for air (moving air for contaminant removal and thermal tempering), (2) light (illumination for visual tasks and definition of form), and (3) material selection (finish, substrates, and structure). Other funded work under this grant includes plans to expand and strengthen the nascent Health and Energy Industry Consortium, a group of 75 companies, professional firms, academics, and associations, and plans to educate undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in architecture/biology about how design impacts the microbiome of built environments. The Center will also increase interdisciplinary course offerings that create new methodological approaches to education at the architecture-biology interface.  

This grant provides partial support for the planning and implementation of the fifth research phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V). The five-year project aims to use two telescopes (one in New Mexico and one in Chile) fitted with state of the art spectroscopic instruments to answer fundamental questions in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology about the forces shaping the origin, structure, and future of galaxies; the nature of supermassive black holes; and how regions between stars and galaxies, known as the interstellar medium, impact how these celestial objects form and grow. SDSS-V will be the most extensive spectroscopic observatory program in operation through the middle of the next decade. Over the course of five years, it will collect infrared spectra of over six million stars in the Milky Way (an order of magnitude more than have ever been observed), optical spectra of over 400,000 black holes, and over 25 million optical spectra of interstellar gas. As with previous phases, all data collected by SDSS-V will be released to both the scientific community and the general public under open principles, allowing non-affiliated scientists and stargazers alike to partake in SDSS discoveries. Planned technological improvements to the SDSS telescopes will make it one of the only observation programs capable of enhancing, complementing, and making the best use of data from other large astronomical surveys. Both SDSS-V telescopes will be equipped with rapidly reconfigurable fiber positioning technologies that will reduce the time it takes to collect object spectra from hours down to minutes. This will allow the SDSS to rapidly shift its focus and observe interstellar phenomena identified by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the Kepler and TESS space missions, the Gaia space mission, and the eROSITA satellite. This grant provides approximately 25 percent of the total SDSS-V project budget and includes funds for project infrastructure and planning, research, instrumentation and technology development, and outreach and education. The remainder of funds will be raised from within the scientific community.

Funds from this grant support research by Harvard economist Richard Freeman that will link and then analyze 16 different data sets in order to examine the relationship between the increased employment/postponement of retirement by older workers and shifts in the demand for these workers associated with the changing composition of industries and the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic automation. Freeman will examine differences in employment and earnings of these workers by gender, education, health status, and income, and by industry, occupation, and firm and will study the impacts of these technologies on earnings, as well as employment. Overall, this project seeks to identify new patterns of work and retirement, determine their effect on worker well-being, and project whether these patterns are likely to continue among younger cohorts as they age. In addition to his own analysis, Freeman will commission 10 additional papers from leading economists using this new linked dataset, which will then be made available for public access through application to the Census Bureau research centers. All papers will be published as NBER Working Papers and submitted for publication in leading peer-reviewed journals.

This grant provides twenty months of continued support for a partnership between National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press (AP) to marry NORC’s research expertise with AP’s media reach to create a vehicle for promoting public understanding of the barriers and facilitators, as well as the causes and patterns, to people working beyond conventional retirement age in the United States. Funds from this grant will provide twenty months of salary support to a NORC-AP journalism fellow, who is selected through a competitive application process. The fellowwill cover the older work force beat, producing thoughtful, scientifically informed, high-quality articles on a variety of issues at the intersection of aging and work, including retirement, work and health, productivity, older workers and the gig economy, and the economic impact of an aging work force on businesses, pensions, and government programs like Social Security. In addition, NORC will field a high-quality, nationally representative survey of older adults about issues facing older workers with the results distributed nationwide through the AP. Survey reporting will be supplemented with reporting on new economic research on the older work force and survey data will be made freely available to researchers in a public-use dataset.