So this happened in Oslo yesterday. Four articulated buses got stuck in a roundabout.

These are *not* the same logs we inoculated last May: these oyster mushrooms simply volunteered in some of the remaining logs. This harvest (the 2nd one this month) was 4.5 pounds, which will make for a very nice Thanksgiving feast!

The organisers of the world's biggest planetary science conference are outlawing any DEI-related submissions because their lawyers are afraid they'll lose federal support. They're losing the support of the planetary science community fucking fast. www.science.org/content/arti...

UPDATE: Summers’ page is now offline.

Got my trusty Acme Thunderer at the ready.

CBP reported to be coming to Raleigh tomorrow. Here's the Siembra NC hotline. Please share widely.

“The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.”

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

📸 Image of the month: November 2025!⁣ This month we are delighted to feature “𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐲𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐬” by Maher et al. 🔗 doi.org/10.1103/l5hk...

Don’t miss out on the colloquium next Monday from 4-5pm in 2010 Biltmore Hall!! Dr. Vashan Wright, from University of California San Diego and Scripps Institute will discuss “Searching for Evidence of Water in the Martian Crust”. | More info: physics.sciences.ncsu.edu/event/physic...

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

Happy Halloween!

In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.

On the subject of cello-ing ... if you've got kids who'd enjoying hearing Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, @chphilharmonia.bsky.social will be performing it tomorrow at 3pm in Hill Hall @ UNC. Your kids will also have a chance to conduct us playing Strauss's Radetzky March.

Dartmouth is OUT! Thank goodness... a friend at U of A and I have been playing "Who will be the last of the 9 standing?" and it's not gonna be us!

Solidarity!! Last week, Indiana University fired the director of student media & halted print on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Yesterday, Purdue’s student paper printed the banned edition & drove two hours to deliver it. Incredible www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...

Carrboro, NC has a sizeable fraction of its population talking about #NoKings today, high energy that I hope translates to action.

Here in Carrboro, NC, and across the world, academic freedom requires #NoKings @aaup.org

TL;DR: Fuck off Trump.

For those who are new to or already use LAMMPS… with reference to a new GUI arxiv.org/abs/2503.14020

MW correctly reading the room

"Trump directives have undermined a 75-year history of independence and threaten the National Science Foundation's vaunted track record for excellence" www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪 🌊 ⚒️

This is a rather unfortunate change that seems to have come as a surprise to just about everyone. FYI for students and PIs who were looking to apply for the NSF GRFP

🧪The NSF has made changes to the GRFP solicitation and eligibility TODAY that may change your eligibility! PLEASE read through the solicitation if you were planning to apply and speak to your mentors about the merits of applying: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment. The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

The white supremacist conceit that everyone in antiquity was living under some kind of global jim crow segregation is just complete bullshit news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

When stressed, amorphous materials undergo plastic transformations aided by low-frequency vibrational modes. Now researchers have found the same association in an entirely separate class of materials: active matter.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

Why is this horrible for Universities? Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card. This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

In 2024, a team of science writers at AAAS ran a long-term experiment to see if ChatGPT could cut it writing news items about scientific research. Here's what they learned. Worth a look. 🧪 #scicomm www.science.org/content/blog...

Excited to share our new preprint on the discharge of granular materials from a silo. Led by @ramsudhirsharma.bsky.social , we went after a simple question: What is the flow rate through the opening? The answer turns out to be "simple" and quite general. See more here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14415 [1/4]

Of all the stupid things that this regime has done, this is right up near the top. Postdoctoral researchers come to the US on H-1B visas. This will further destroy the US science enterprise. Stupid stupid stupid.

NEW: Tonight, this is all that remains of Nepal's seat of government in Kathmandu. Singha Durbar was the largest palace in Asia; home to the Prime Minister & government offices. A 48-hour revolution, led by Gen Z protestors, has toppled the government & left large parts of the capital in flames.

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

The constitution is supposed to apply equally to all Americans. The Department of Justice is flirting with removing constitutional protections from anyone with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The top stories in trans news to start your week: www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

The US Administration has thus imposed a de-facto ban on most professional and academic interaction with a range of countries around the world. Barring those without a year of planning (or more, at their whim) equates to a ban.

@paperhandpuppet.org's 25th anniversary follows NC (and them, specifically) getting hammered by water from Helene and Chantal over the past year. Yet ... water remains "The Gift" (this year's show) we all depend on, represented in puppetry at the Forest Theater.

Busy yesterday so I missed that Anthropic had settled. Figures. LLMs have violated thousands of copyrights; they *knew* it would kill them if it went to trial. Anyway, the Authors Guild has some useful info here: authorsguild.org/news/what-au...

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Hegseth is now the Secretary of War, which is fitting I guess as RFK jr is basically the Secretary of Pestilence. We just need Famine and Death to round it out.

Here’s a 🧵 on key points in Judge Burroughs’ order in the AAUP/Harvard AAUP’s lawsuit against Trump’s DOJ for ideological funding cuts at Harvard: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The Everglades Concentration Camp costs 3x one of these trains.

We have a double-header out this week: two papers examining how the stress-force-fabric relation manifests in both annular shear (PRL doi.org/10.1103/gp8t...) and more varied loading conditions (PRE doi.org/10.1103/rv25...). The anisotropies in the contact forces set the response to loading, (1/3)

From Durham, NC to Washington, LA, Chicago, Boston, & dozens of cities in between, higher ed workers stood up today for the freedom & independence of higher education, because the future of our democracy depends on it. #LaborDay #DefendHigherEd #WorkersOverBillionaires @ncaaup.bsky.social

It's one of the most famous rock songs ever — Bohemian Rhapsody — and now, for the first time, it's been translated with Queen's blessing into Zulu.

I'm glad Forbes is covering this important issue. Talented students staying in the US after they complete their degrees have enriched all our lives, but future students won't be about to join a degree program if they won't be able to stay long enough to finish it! www.forbes.com/sites/stuart...

DSOFT invites students and recent graduates to participate in our Students’ Virtual Conference, on November 6th (10 a.m.-4 p.m. ET). The conference aims to discuss the latest advancements in soft matter physics by students. If you wish to present your work, please find details in the post below!

Welp, I guess I'm back on my tool time rants. So let me tell you about probably the most consequential tool maker of the last two centuries. A person who completely changed how we cut and process lumber. A Shaker woman named Tabitha Babbitt.

This is a time for secular hymns that can be sung together at gatherings IMO.