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.

🧪 BREAKING: In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court allows NIH to re-terminate grants pending a full ruling. It's complicated though. Not a clear full win for Trump. And if you have terminations or active grants at ANY OTHER AGENCY -- NSF, EPA, etc. -- this concerns you too. 🧵 Let's break it down

So I can't tell you all about what I learned at the Soft Matter Physics GRC last week, due to the cone of silence, but .... wow! My notebook is overloaded with ideas to follow up on, plus we got to visit a bog with more pitcher plants than seems reasonable. And the bog invited us to do rheology.

New preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05919 We aim to explain what hyperuniformity is, for non-specialists (hopefully even high schoolers?), since this is a key idea underlying our #NSF #DMREF grant (and the last photo). And what a great excuse to visit the NC State Insect Collection, to take photo A!

Hey! This is kinda cool. A near-real-time event and analysis related to a pretty ancient observation of curved slickensides (they're out there, even if not that widely reported)

From a colleague: NSF proposal received FOUR "excellent" ratings (the highest possible...that almost never happens). Rated "highly competitive" in panel summary. 👎 ...but still rejected. Likely reason: It studied a topic disfavored by this admin.

Check out the @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social conference we're (Vashan Wright, Sujit Datta, Nathalie Vriend) organizing: www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/s... for THIS JANUARY 6-9! Geoscientists, physicists and engineers: are you intellectually adventurous and been wondering "is this all there is?" 🧪

“Every year, North Carolina universities, particularly those in the Triangle, draw students and faculty from around the world. Under the Trump administration, they’re grappling with travel bans, restriction and visa application delays that could affect their ability to teach and conduct research.”

I had been wondering this. How about if Congress re-appropriates those funds back to the institution who sent them? (we can wish ....) www.chronicle.com/article/wher...

Excellent thread, and underscores why I've been telling folks that I that I can't ethically recruit postdocs on federal $: their paycheck could get cancelled without warning. For graduate students, my department has a significant teaching mission and therefore TA positions can mitigate that risk.

Two things: 1. Large language models like ChatGPT are statistically likely word generators; they don't have "expertise" in anything. 2. I have seen a team of PhD level experts fail to assemble a dresser from IKEA.

My group's tradition after oral exams is to celebrate the milestone using the Free Expression Tunnel and our large supply of spray paint! Today we're recognizing Sidharth Gat's MS defense, on acoustic modes in ordered and disordered 3D printed networks. A key exciting result: a bandgap :-)

Trainees: If you haven't already, learn the value of implementing the Bat Signal with your peers. When you're stuck and need a body double, a review, a brainstorm, an escape... this can be game-changing. Don't worry about being a bother, instead: pay it forward. We all need it a some point. 1/3

This is great news! triangleblogblog.com/2025/08/04/f... Now #gotriangle needs to work on the Chapel Hill-Raleigh connection as well: the CRX is so much more poorly served than the DRX as to be a joke. Improve the service, and the riders will follow.

Not to mention the loss to their own personal education and the ideas they contribute to our research programs. Devastating.

The cooler weather let us enjoy #UproarFestNC today, walking all over Carrboro and Chapel Hill enjoying this public art show, with artists from all over North Carolina.

Welcome to Jurassic Pork 🦕🥟🦖 #Delicious #Dinosaur #Dumplings

Patchwork of non-stretch fabric pieces. Embroidered organza on bamboo frame

NEW: 18,500 children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. The Washington Post has just published every single known name. A seminal moment.