IMO, senior faculty at top R1 institutions rushing to use AI to flood journals with papers before future students or early career researchers can have an opportunity is not just greedy, it's salting the earth of the discipline.

Slides from my contributed talk today at thomasyoungcentre.org/event/tyc-8t..., Path integral polarons for real semiconductors. speakerdeck.com/jarvist/path... I had a ball! Great talks. Lovely to see the community. A strong pastry game from KCL.

I can tell when I'm procrastinating from actually making manuscript edits, when I find myself Googling the ultimate manuscript markup pen... (Currently using a 0.4 mm Papermate Flair fineliner, but its a little thick unless I print properly double-spaced... and not super comfortable.)

Meet Frank the problem-solving robot, uncover the mysteries of lightning, and experience a weekend of wildlife celebrating Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday at this year's #SummerScience Exhibition. Book your free tickets now: https://bit.ly/4nGgDQT

The University of Edinburgh's Meiko T800 Computing Surface system was a forerunner of the services provided by EPCC today. As this articles describes, the first entry in the Meiko logbook was made 40 years ago this month. edin.ac/4upW7Gw

In the next edition of #CondensedMatterPioneers, we will be highlighting the work of Mark A. Ratner on molecular-scale electronics, as well as his groundbreaking proposal from 1974 that single molecules could function as components in electronic circuits. 🧵

Seriously, what the hell? Combined with the 5p fuel duty tax cut, these policies are committing ourselves to a poorer, worse, future. At least half the rush-hour traffic in London is kids get shuttled to school, journeys that could and should be done on public transport or via active travel.

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Happy 108th Birthday Dick (Richard) Feynman! This 100 year documentary is well worth watching if you haven't seen it already. www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8pB...

A coherent and information dense description of the current energy situation in the UK: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... (I'm actually quite shocked to see something like this published in a national newspaper. In a good way!)

Our aid cuts have been just as severe. It won't kill as many people because we spent less to start with, and focused a bit less on health/food programmes. But we've got nothing to be proud of here.

2 and 4 year 'AI in Science' Schmidt Fellowships. Great scheme. Based in the lovely I-HUB building at Imperial's White City campus. Closing date 23 July 2026. www.imperial.ac.uk/ix-ai-in-sci...

I've been having a fantastic time at "The sign problems of Fermions' workshop at ECT* in Trento (Italy) (indico.ectstar.eu/event/262/co...) My talk slides: speakerdeck.com/jarvist/2026...

The contributed talk abstract submission deadline for the 8th @thomasyoungcentre.bsky.social Energy Materials Workshop has been extended to next Wednesday the 22nd of April 2026. Get your abstracts for talks in now. #compchem

I'm starting to think that Fermions are cursed. (7 electron fully spin-polarised UEG.)

A timely and eloquent essay, well worth reading by anyone in science.

I've spent the entirety of my adult life being repeatedly shocked at the complete failure of governments to act. The science of climate change was fully known by 2000; renewable technology was cheap enough to deploy at incredible scale by 2010, just as the cost of money fell to ~zero.

I have been having SO MUCH fun following up some QMC work on actually predicting the PIMC exchange probabilities (arxiv.org/abs/1409.3262). Only problem is that with so much time staring at 'magic number' diagrams like those below, I'm starting to feel like Max in π www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4f...

Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy. Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks. Those that didn't now pay the price.

I had a slightly-swanky group-website based on Jekyll static-site generator, but I found it a bit frustrating and wasn't updating it: frost-group.github.io SO I ripped that out and replaced with raw HTML + simplecss.org ; and THEN I replaced that with Markdown+pandoc, github.com/Frost-group/...

PSA: For anyone with kids who like robots (i.e. anyone with kids!), you can acquire the Mindstorms NXT kits for ~£40-60 if you key an eye on eBay / Vinted. These are 'obsolete' but work just fine. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mi...

Congratulations to Charlie Bennett and Gilles Brassard for winning the 2026 Turing Award (akin to the Nobel Prize for Computer Science)! They invented quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. awards.acm.org/turing 🧪 ⚛️ 1/

This is a big deal. A lot of lives saved through this.

The environmental / climate necessity of renewables has been clear since at least 2000; the technology was on 'learning curves' to make it affordable since at least 2010; hopefully the current security threat / wake-up call is enough to make all countries finally follow through!

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

The UK's Eurovision entry this year, actually a banger! www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XR2...

Converting between chemistry and physics is sometimes quite easy! sed -i s/b3lyp/PBE1PBE/ *.gjf

Have you ever noticed that range-separated hybrids are LESS accurate for modern strongly-absorbing low-bandgap organic semiconductors such as Y6? We believe we know why and how to fix: the implicit model of the dielectric function is incorrect; simply reduce ω to fix. arxiv.org/abs/2603.05379

Definite Feb 2020 vibes! I was idly wondering the other day whether imported cases from the current American surge would outgrow whatever background we have in the UK; not that it matters once the chain reaction starts...

I wrote a science St Valentine poem 9 years ago for a competition. I did not win, but I still like the poem. Solid-state physics; Cooper pairs; the superconducting gap. To be fair, a little niche!

Quite apart from the excellent course, two weeks in Miramare in June living and talking science with a cohort of like-minded computational / theory students is the best possible start I could imagine to a PhD/PostDoc...

It was always clear this was an injustice - but now we know by how much. Absolutely shameful, and as bad as the Nobel neglect of Lise Meitner, if not worse.

Spoke to Shleagh Fogarty yesterday sbout why the Chancellor is wrong: our “student loan” system is not remotely fair. It’s regressive and embedding inter and intra generational wealth inequality. It’s not a loan system, it’s a bad grad tax in all but name. youtu.be/uOC6Arrf2us?...

OK OK, Prism is terrible and likely to destroy peer-review and preprint servers, BUT it is also pretty funny and means I can enjoy the fan-fiction academia-adjacent work I'd never have time to write myself. (Go read Strugatsky! It's hilarious.)

arXiv is not going to survive the wave of slop heading its way

And now something positive: solar and wind energy production in the EU surpasses fossil energy for the first time. ☀️ 💨 #TippingPoint Source: dr.dk

2024: can Europe defend itself ALONGSIDE America? 2025: can Europe defend itself WITHOUT America? 2026: can Europe defend itself AGAINST America?

OpenBind is a new open science effort to dramatically increase the number of protein:ligand structures in the PDB, pairing this with high-quality affinity data to enable a new generation of predictive structure and affinity models for drug discovery. Check it out: openbind.ai

In Our Time returns this week. Thanks for waiting patiently and/or impatiently www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Gemini 3 Flash is a super impressive research assistant. My Cursor.com AGENTS.md starts with an 'echo' to confirm that this file was read and processed. For whimsy this is: "GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN." Gemini 3 Flash is the first model which has started responding with contextual jokes...

🤯

The number of global deaths of children under-5 is projected to increase this year (from 4.6m to 4.8m) for the first time this century. (FT) The price of aid cuts.

I finally ~finished~ my blog post on running a maths circle for primary school age kids. (Yes, I just copy + pasted it into Linkedin, I looked at getting my Hugo blog running but its so obsolete getting it to compile looked a massive hassle! Raw HTML next time.) www.linkedin.com/pulse/two-ye...

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’ AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’ @aishadown.bsky.social for @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

And the moral for practicing scientists is: Engage with the arts! Read novels! Go to plays! Indulge your interests outside the lab!

UK aims to secure agreement to rejoin Erasmus student exchange scheme

It’s letter-of-recommendation season again, when universities ask me to rate a 21 year old student’s ability to “see the big picture of life” while I eat leftover pasta in a Tupperware…

PK's (Keerati Keeratikarn) second PhD project was on fitting electron transfer integrals between organic electronic molecules with the Atomic Cluster Expansion (ACE). Codes: github.com/Frost-group/... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.06551