Jake Noel-Storr

As today's scientific challenges become increasingly complex and interdisciplinary, future researchers in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) need both disciplinary skills and adaptive resilience to persevere and cope productively with failure. We argue that Open Educational Resources (OER) provide the enabling conditions for this resilience. OER are freely accessible and openly licensed materials that can be reused, adapted, and redistributed without cost barriers. In comparison to closed educational resources, OER provide greater flexibility in learning by enabling students to access a broader range of materials beyond a single prescribed textbook, work at their own pace, and revisit or compare content as needed. Such flexibility may reduce learning-related anxiety and foster persistence when facing academic difficulty. Drawing on resilience theory (e.g., Dweck's growth mindset, Henry et al.'s FAIL framework) and experiences from the Community of Practice “Innovation in STEM Education” (University of Groningen, Netherlands), this paper explores how OER's unique characteristics such as their adaptability, accessibility, and diversity of materials serve as enabling conditions that foster students' tolerance of failure and uncertainty. This approach allows us to contribute to both the theoretical understanding of resilience in STEM and its practical implementation through use of OER.

Light pollution is an increasing environmental concern, impacting both ecological systems and human health. This report presents an analysis of light pollution data from the Was het donker sky quality meter (SQM) network from 2020 until 2023, with a focus on indirect light pollution, commonly known as skyglow. By integrating measurements from SQM stations in the network and cloud cover data from European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of night sky brightness (NSB) across a region encompassing the northern Netherlands and the western part of the German Wadden Coast. Yearly changes in brightness for 27 locations were ranked and plotted, revealing that in the darkest areas, light pollution is increasing at a rate of 2.78–6.68 per cent per year. A trend emerged showing that brighter areas experienced lower variability in brightness, while darker zones exhibited higher variability. This is due to the dominance of artificial light sources, such as street lighting, in brighter areas, which reduces the influence of natural light sources like the moon, stars, and cloud backscatter. Seasonal patterns and the effects of the Milky Way were also investigated. Density plots were employed to visualize these changes in NSB, helping to identify specific sources of light pollution, such as greenhouse lighting and streetlight turn-off times. These findings emphasize the need for systematic monitoring of light pollution and offer valuable insights that can guide public awareness initiatives and inform light pollution mitigation strategies.

We present Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray, Very Large Array (VLA) radio, and optical observations of three candidate compact steep spectrum (CSS) radio galaxies. CSS sources are of a galactic scale and are presumably driving a shock through the interstellar medium (ISM) of their host galaxy. B3 1445+410 is a low-excitation emission line CSS radio galaxy with possibly a hybrid Fanaroff–Riley FRI/II (or fat double) radio morphology. The Chandra observations reveal a point-like source that is well fit with a power law consistent with the emission from a Doppler boosted core. 3C 268.3 is a CSS broad-line radio galaxy (BLRG) whose Chandra data are consistent spatially with a point source centered on the nucleus and spectrally with a double power-law model. PKS B1017–325 is a low-excitation emission line radio galaxy with a bent double radio morphology. While from our new spectroscopic redshift, PKS B1017−325 falls outside the formal definition of a CSS, the XMM-Newton observations are consistent with ISM emission with either a contribution from hot shocked gas or non-thermal jet emission. We compile selected radio and X-ray properties of the nine bona fide CSS radio galaxies with X-ray detections so far. We find that two out of the nine show X-ray spectroscopic evidence for hot shocked gas. We note that the counts in the sources are low and that the properties of the two sources with evidence for hot shocked gas are typical of the other CSS radio galaxies. We suggest that hot shocked gas may be typical of CSS radio galaxies due to their propagation through their host galaxies.

We present the results of high-resolution VLBI (very long baseline interferometry) observations at 1.6 and 4.9 GHz of the radio-loud Seyfert galaxy, Mrk 6. These observations are able to detect a compact radio core in this galaxy for the first time. The core has an inverted spectral index ($\alpha ^{1.6}_{4.9}$ = +1.0 ± 0.2) and a brightness temperature of 1 × 10⁸ K. Three distinct radio components, which resemble jet elements and/or hotspots, are also detected. The position angles of these elongated jet elements point not only to a curved jet in Mrk 6, but also towards a connection between the AGN and the kpc-scale radio lobes/bubbles in this galaxy. Firmer constraints on the star formation rate provided by new Herschel observations (SFR < 0.8 M_⊙ yr⁻¹) make the starburst-wind-powered bubble scenario implausible. From plasma speeds, obtained via prior Chandra X-ray observations, and ram pressure balance arguments for the interstellar medium and radio bubbles, the north–south bubbles are expected to take 7.5 × 10⁶ yr to form, and the east–west bubbles 1.4 × 10⁶ yr. We suggest that the jet axis has changed at least once in Mrk 6 within the last ≈10⁷ yr. A comparison of the nuclear radio-loudness of Mrk 6 and a small sample of Seyfert galaxies with a subset of low-luminosity FR I radio galaxies reveals a continuum in radio properties.