California and 16 Democratic states are suing to challenge a Trump administration policy requiring higher education institutions, including University of California and California State University campuses, to collect data — including student grade point averages — to prove they don’t illegally consider race in admissions.

Attorney General Rob Bonta is among the state attorneys general who filed the suit Wednesday against a Department of Education rule that asks colleges to submit “the race and sex of colleges’ applicants, admitted students and enrolled students.” Bonta called the requirement a “fishing expedition” that is “demanding unprecedented amounts of data from our colleges and universities under the guise of enforcing civil rights law.”

“This is the same administration, I’ll remind you, that gutted the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, leaving thousands of civil rights complaints and investigations in limbo,” Bonta said in a statement. “This latest sham demand threatens to turn a reliable tool into a partisan bludgeon. California is committed to following the law — and we’re going to court to make sure the Trump Administration does the same.”

The policy, announced in August, requires schools to submit disaggregated data on gender, race, grade point averages and test scores of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students by March 18.

The Trump administration is requesting seven years of data and says it wants schools to prove they are not illegally considering race as a factor in admissions — a practice the struck down nationally after a 2023 Supreme Court case involving Harvard. In that case, justices said colleges may still consider how race has shaped students’ lives if applicants share that information in their admissions essays.

California and Democratic opponents of the suit, which was filed in a Boston federal court, say in their complaint that the government is attempting to turn the nonpartisan National Center for Education Statistics into a “mechanism for law enforcement and the furthering of partisan policy aims.”

The Trump administration has accused numerous elite institutions, including the UC system, breaking the law by using race in admissions and discriminating against white and Asian American students. This year, it sued UCLA in federal court, alleging that the David Geffen School of Medicine illegally practices affirmative action. UC and UCLA have said they follow California state law, which has banned considering race as a factor in admissions since 1997.

President Trump ordered the new policy last summer after he raised concerns that colleges and universities were using personal statements and other proxies to consider race, which he views as illegal discrimination.

Ellen Keast, an Education Department spokesperson, defended the data collection.

“American taxpayers invest over $100 billion into higher education each year and deserve transparency on how their dollars are being spent,” Keast said in a statement. “The Department’s efforts will expand an existing transparency tool to show how universities are taking race into consideration in admissions. What exactly are State AGs trying to shield universities from?”

The new policy is similar to parts of recent settlement agreements the government negotiated with Brown University and Columbia University, restoring their federal research money. The universities agreed to give the government data on the race, grade-point average and standardized test scores of applicants, admitted students and enrolled students. The schools also agreed to be audited by the government and to release admissions statistics to the public.

The government made a similar ask of UC in August when it proposed a $1.2-billion settlement fine to resolve allegations of federal civil rights law violations at UCLA after cutting off more than half a billion dollars in federal medical, science, and energy research funding.

UC President James B. Milliken said the university will not pay the fine but is open to talks with the Trump administration. No agreement has been reached, although faculty and union-led lawsuits resulted in research funding being restored and strict limits on the Trump administration attempts to reshape UC policies and culture through threats of funding cuts.

The Trump administration’s August memo on race in admissions directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to require colleges to report more data “to provide adequate transparency into admissions” to the National Center for Education Statistics. After a public comment period — in which California and other Democrat-led states submitted notices opposing the rule — the Department of Education finalized the reporting requirement on Dec. 18.

If colleges fail to submit timely, complete and accurate data, McMahon can take action under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which outlines requirements for colleges receiving federal financial aid for students, according to the memo.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who co-led the suit along with Bonta, said in a statement that “there is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data in the federal government’s rushed and arbitrary timeframe, and it is unfair for schools to be threatened with fines, potential losses of funding, and baseless investigations should they not fulfill the administration’s request.”

The government uses the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, to gather information from thousands of colleges and universities that receive federal aid. The coalition also argues that the new data collection demands jeopardize student privacy.

“Many institutions have data protection obligations to their students, which are placed at risk by the administration’s new IPEDS demands for in-depth information about individual students,” the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit.

Casey writes for the Associated Press.

In addition to being a staple of science fiction, the concept of megastructures has long been the subject of serious scientific studies. As famed physicist Freeman Dyson originally proposed in 1960, “Malthusian pressures will ultimately drive an intelligent species” to occupy an “artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star.” In short, he theorized that advanced civilizations would disassemble their planet (or planets) to create a structure (which has since come to be called a “Dyson Sphere” that would harness all the energy from their star and provide immense living space.

Over time, scientists have proposed many variations on this structure, collectively known as “Dyson Structures.” However, considerable research has countered these proposals, arguing that such megastructures would be unstable. In a new study, famed engineer Colin R. McInnes demonstrates how two specific megastructures – Dyson Bubbles and Stellar Engines – could be built in such a way that they would be passively stable over time. These findings could aid the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) by constraining the technosignatures these structures could produce.

Colin R. McInnes is a Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Glasgow and the chair of the James Watt School of Engineering. His findings are presented in a paper that appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. While the concept is several decades old, megastructures have received renewed attention thanks to the discovery of Boyajian’s Star and other cases where stars exhibited periodic dimming, were low in luminosity, or were “missing.”

In addition to being a leading figure in the field of solar sails, reflectors, and satellites, McInnes has also previously authored a paper on the subject of megastructure stability. As he summarized in this latest study, megastructures have been proposed for a range of ventures, including asteroid orbit modification, climate engineering (i.e., solar shields), terraforming (a la Ken Roy’s Shell World concept), and planetary orbit modification (moving them into the star’s habitable zone).

At larger scales, scientists have considered how massive swarms of reflectors could enshroud a star, known as a Dyson Swarm, Bubble, or Matrioshka Brain, or be used to alter a star’s orbit, known as a Stellar Engine or Shkadov Thruster. In the case of the former, the reflective surface ensures that radiation pressure will levitate the swarm (which could support habitats) above the star. In the latter, a flat reflective disk remains bound to a star through gravitational coupling, causing the star to move.

Much like Dyson proposed in his original paper, these studies assume that advanced civilizations will experience exponential growth and rising energy demands as they age. “Freeman Dyson imagined a swarm of energy-collecting elements enveloping a central star as an endpoint for a civilisation with continuously growing energy demands,” McInnes told Universe Today via email. “It’s clearly difficult to infer motivations. However, the universality of the laws of physics means that we can at least speculate on how such structures could be engineered.”

While a popular idea among scientists, considerable research by physicists and structural engineers has cast doubt on the existence of megastructures. In short, they have argued that such structures would be, by their very nature, gravitationally unstable. But as McInnes explained, it is possible that megastructures could be built in a way that would ensure long-term passive stability:

Many concepts, such as a rigid Dyson sphere or Ringworld, are not in orbit, and so a small displacement can cause the structure to drift and collide with the central star. They would therefore need active control measures to stabilise them. However, my interest is in understanding ways in which ultra-large structures could be engineered so that they are passively stable. We can imagine that engineers, terrestrial or otherwise, would prefer passive stability to more complex active control measures.

The simplest design (he notes) for a Stellar Engine would likely be a flat reflective disk. Using an ultra-large disk as a starting point, he calculated the structure’s stability from first principles using a simplified model of a perfectly reflecting rigid disc. He then employed the functional forms of gravitational and radiation-pressure forces to investigate the stability of a stellar engine and of orbiting reflectors (making up a Dyson’ Bubble) in different configurations. Said McInnes:

Stability analysis involves adding a small displacement to the equations of motion describing such structures and then determining if the displacement grows with time. Then, by considering ways to engineer the structure’s properties, for example, its geometry or mass distribution, we can determine if it can be stabilized such that small displacements do not grow and are bounded. There isn’t a set process as such; it’s a case of looking at the equations of motion and considering how the forces acting could be modified, for example, through changes in the geometry or mass distribution of the structure.

In the end, his analysis showed that while an ideal stellar engine comprising a uniform, reflective, rigid disc is unstable, a reflective disc whose mass is concentrated at its edge can (in principle) be passively stable. By balancing the gravitational and radiation pressure forces, such a design would also maximize the stellar engine’s propulsion. Meanwhile, a self-stabilizing Dyson Bubble or Swarm would avoid (or minimize) collisions among the cloud’s elements and maintain equilibrium, provided the right configuration and design considerations were taken into account.

These structures would also produce telltale technosignatures that SETI researchers could look for in the future. While a Stellar Engine would scatter light reflected from its star, a Dyson Bubble would appear as a dense cloud enclosing a star, thus modifying its spectral characteristics. For a static cloud, there would be no flickering apparent to observers, unlike a swarm of orbiting reflectors, which would pass in front of the stellar disc. And as Dyson first predicted, e a solid Dyson sphere would be discernible from the infrared excess produced by radiated heat.

However, as McInnes added, this study is not the final word on megastructures and their potential stability. “The analysis in the paper is simplified and makes a number of assumptions,” he said. “However, it’s a starting point to begin to understand how ultra-large structures could be engineered to be passively stable. For example, a dense Dyon bubble can apparently be self-stabilising due to light pressure falling faster than gravity as we move out through the cloud of elements. Perhaps by understanding how such structures can be engineered to be passively stable, we can better predict the technosignatures associated with them.”

Further Reading: MNRAS