66 hours and 100% completion later... yeah it's damn good. For sure sometimes too hard in frustrating silly not-fun ways, but overall yeah I had a blast

The plot of Silksong can be a bit confusing for newcomers, but I think I've cracked what it's about: 🧵Thread

Does our Research Unit endorse the view expressed by our employee here that "so much quantum tech is way over-hyped"? 🤔🤔🤔🤔

New from me at @scishow.bsky.social! In news stories, why do quantum computers look like a 'steampunk chandelier'? Well, turns out: that's not the computer! (But that's all just setup for my rant at the end about how so much quantum tech is way over-hyped 👀👀👀) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhou...

Looks like the Literature prize this year went to "The late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years." Which, okay, that's pretty fun, too improbable.com/ig/winners/#...

This year at the Ig Nobels it's affirming to see empirical confirmation of a personal research project: that alcohol demonstrably improves my ability to speak a foreign language. The sample size is a bit small but I'd volunteer for anyone's replication attempt: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

One of my all time favourite things on the internet just got an incredible makeover www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3g6...

Silksong good

Congrats to Professor Michele Dougherty on being my Differential Equations lecturer in second year undergrad in 2012. Oh, and maybe some other more recent achievement of hers IDK www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

New preprint! Really excited about this. It's some of my best work ever, IMO: an analytic and numerical study of the Wigner's Friend problem(s) with a specific model of the measurement process and a decohering environment. arxiv.org/abs/2507.21221

Ha, this is fun. Four years ago I wrote a SciShow that mentioned the famous unsolved "Moving Sofa" problem. But last year someone claimed to have finally solved it. So now, SciShow made a new video about it! New video: youtu.be/GeJEJXqf2XI?... My older video: youtu.be/3b6zvcqbNa0?...

Great article www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

New @scishow.bsky.social This was a really fun one. We wrote about the real science behind an ancient tome said to hold alchemical secrets... And just what does Shannon entropy have to do with it? youtu.be/K0wVcFXNXLw?...

Really enjoyed this series of mini essays on social democracy

Quite enjoyed this piece!

Mission Impossible good.

To us, every year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, but it's nice that it's official now... And this week, Marcus spoke to esteemed science journo Emily Conover about the future of quantum theory, with some hot takes 👀 www.sciencenews.org/article/quan...

New SciShow! Really pleased with this one. Had a lot of fun researching and writing it. It turns out that basically every language has almost the exact same bit rate. What's up with that? Find out here: youtu.be/suEm3uFJA2s?...

This project is coming along nicely it seems www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Damn.

Philosophy of science by the thermal bath swimming pool. Not a bad weekend in Bad Blumau 😎

TV is back, baby youtu.be/mlrQBK8h2AE?...

A proud older brother making an embarrassed younger brother take credit for his hard work ❤️

New SciShow! It's a topic close to my own work in quantum thermo. You've probably heard that absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature... But controversially, some claim that temperatures lower than zero are possible in some cases. Here's how it works: youtu.be/KHVEwTMA19M?...

Sigh, it's that time again

I went to a cinema screening of this and it was fun! The eerie timeliness of e.g. the conspiracist general was both comic and chilling, the performances are all great, and Iannucci mostly succeeds in seamlessly blending new lines into the original script www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/o...

The group I did my PhD with in London is advertising a postdoc position. I can 100% vouch for them being a lovely lot of people to work with, and UCL was a great work environment when I was there www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMJ551/r...

Exciting times for cosmologists right now. Like quantum people they have a big centenary this year. Here's Wendy Freedman (one of the protagonists in my recent video on the Hubble Tension) with a nice article in Nature on the history and current state of the field www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Papers like these always have amazing sentences like "Bell inequalities can indeed reveal the presence of magic." Quantum theory always feels arcane and mystic to me, but reading this really makes me feel like a wizened sorcerer hunched over an arcane tome in a lost library 🧙‍♂️

🚨 New Chalkdust alert 🚨 You can read about sudoku, potatoes and crossnumber's biggest secrets right now in issue 21! chalkdustmagazine.co...

Cool new video about the Thorium clock breakthroughs of recent years, in part done by people in my department: the Atominstitut youtu.be/tXLoBs0ipsI?...

It does seem to be working as intended, yeah. Definitely recommend this feed for fellow academics

Mickey 17 slaps

My brother came to Vienna this weekend for, well...

Damn called out by SciShow of all places (it's a good episode!) youtu.be/0pc9Uf3vFDU?...

Well, looks like in the end there won't be multiple rounds of elections within a year in this country. The new coalition has been agreed... and it's almost exactly the one that was proposed in October 🤷 orf.at/stories/3386...

New @scishow.bsky.social video! The Hubble Tension, often called THE Crisis in Cosmology, has been rumbling on for years. Here we check in with the latest updates with brand new data from JWST. That should have helped resolve the issue, right? ...Right? www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxca...

A team led by Johns Hopkins University scientists has dispelled fears that Iran conducted a nuclear test following a Magnitude 4.5 earthquake last October, showing these concerns were unfounded. Read more: doi.org/10.26443/sei... spacequakes.bsky.social

So this is fun: I actually made a small contribution to this cool seismology paper that came out this month! Seems I'm not the only one who thinks it's cool, too: gizmodo.com/scientists-d...

Let's GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

How much of a bang did OSIRIS-REx make when it re-entered the atmosphere? Take a look at our new paper to found out! doi.org/10.1785/0220... w/ @neerajac.bsky.social @tomrivlin.com and others!

I'm currently in my third research role in as many countries. During each of my roles, the host country has fallen into an 'unprecedented' political crisis due to divisions in the country's right-wing, leading to multiple elections within the span of a few years 🙃 www.derstandard.at/story/300000...

I contributed to this lovely article about the new PRX Quantum paper I was involved in! Check it out to learn more about how the second law of thermodynamics behaves differently in quantum theory

Finally figured out how to fiddle with the DNS settings in my tomrivlin.com domain, so... new Bluesky handle! I'm now just @tomrivlin.com

😎

New SciShow! Before modern rocketry, Jules Verne imagined using a giant cannon to get to space, and in the 1960s, a guy who was practically a real-life Bond villain almost made that dream a reality. Find out about all that and more here! www.youtube.com/watch?v=guPx...

Florian, the lead author of the new paper, has some very cool animations to show you all (posted on his birthday, no less!)

When the preprint came out I wrote this blog post on my personal website about the findings. Check it out here

This is now out in the journal Physical Review X Quantum! Super excited to be able to share this piece of work with everyone. I'm incredibly proud of it journals.aps.org/prxquantum/a...

I once wrote a SciShow about an odd theory, just about plausible, that polar bear fur has 'fiber optic' properties. Now, a new paper is out with a 3D model of the fur's properties. It comes out fairly definitively against the idea: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Ia...