Southwest Research Institute

In October twenty twenty-five, we began a preliminary analysis to guide a binational water project proposal.

Since then, we have met with field experts from the International Boundary and Water Commission, IBWC; the Center for International Law, CILA; the Mexican Ministry of Economy; the Permanent Forum of Binational Waters; the Baker Public Policy Institute at Rice University; the Southwest Research Institute; the Texas Water Resources Institute; the Water Resources Research Center; the International Water Management Institute; and various universities.

These meetings have helped us understand the region's unique context and relationship with water.

By the end of January twenty twenty-six, we will release a white paper on the complexity of the US-Mexico border water situation.

It's really helpful to have, I think, a variety of different experiences.

But yeah, so I was like a pure planetary science researcher working at Southwest Research Institute, observing asteroids like James Webb Space Telescope, doing Cassini data analysis, Europa Clipper, Artemis program, blah, blah, blah, NASA scientist.

Um, and then as I had mentioned, like touch PT became a thing and like information, like that stuff was like very intriguing to me.

Um, and there was like a job opening for an academic search engine called the, um, astrophysics data system, which is a search engine that's used by every single astronomer.

In 2025, there was another breakthrough.

Scientists from the University of Oxford, Southwest Research Institute, and the Planetary Science Institute looked back through the Cassini observations of the North Pole from its winter in 2005 and summer in 2015.

They found that not only was heat escaping at the South Pole, but also at the North Pole.

It was seven degrees warmer than they expected.

But, you know, that's just a part of the story of, of how it became a tool.

And today, I have a second part of the story with Dr. Marc Janssens from, uh, Southwest Research Institute.

And Marc tells me the story about how this brilliant device built by Vito turned into something that you can find in every single fire laboratory on the planet, how the standardization, uh, calibration round-robin efforts followed the development of technique, how it became widespread in Europe and then worldwide, and what efforts, uh, touched it and, and what kind of practical applications, uh, have it been used across the years, like applications that driven the development and improvements in the technology.

We talk about what did the cone calorimeter allow, uh, models built on the basis of the cone calorimetry data.

In spite of our efforts to find them, the question remains: where are the alien civilizations? In a recent talk given at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting, Dr.

Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute suggests that perhaps the majority of the worlds with biology and intelligent civilizations exist on interior water ocean worlds where their existence is hidden by thick layers of rock and ice which separate them from the hostile vacuum of space.

We know that in our solar system alone, the moon of Jupiter, Europa, Saturn's moon, Enceladus, and perhaps several other small worlds are likely to have oceans of nutrient-rich liquid water covered by a thick layer of rock and ice.

We also know that whales and dolphins have larger brains than humans, communicate with each other, and exhibit other forms of intelligence.

It's a sensitivity result.

Cagan Denton and Robin Canup at the Southwest Research Institute with Erik Asphaug in Arizona in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The canonical story is a Mars-sized body called Theia hitting the proto-Earth, throwing a disc of debris into orbit, and the moon slowly accreting out of it.

What this group added was something nobody had properly included, rock strength that changes with temperature.