It’s great that this research on the science behind a perfect cacio & pepe won the Ig Nobel prize! And it works, I’ve tested it! 🤤🍝 www.iflscience.com/physicists-r...

...Professor X [an old legend at the faculty] who is so deep in he can't do integrals any more."

Our maths prof at university started his course with the anecdote that as mathematicians dig ever deeper into their field they start forgetting ever more of the basics. He said "For example, as you'll no doubt notice, I can't add up integers any more. But that's nothing compared to 1/

Research integrity sleuth Lonni Besançon tells #HLF2025 that he’s definitely hoping more people will join the hunt for flawed research, but “it’s complicated because people are afraid of the consequences.” It takes time and “you don’t really make friends doing it.” 🧪

“Computer science was born aware of its limitations,” says Avi Wigderson at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum #HLF2025. He’s taking us on a tour of the work of CS pioneer Alan Turing, one paper per phase of Turing’s too-short life. 🧪

Nobel chemistry laureate David MacMillan tells the Heidelberg Laureate Forum audience that chaos at the US NIH left his Princeton University lab without federal funding for 7 months, lost them $1m dollars, and “every time you open the New York Times, it’s not necessarily getting better.” #HLF2025 🧪

Leslie Lamport has basically dedicated his entire #HLF2025 talk to telling young researchers to comment their damn code already, and it’s kind of amazing.

David Silver of Google DeepMind thinks AIs that ‘learn by experience’ are the future of AI – but maybe not in particle colliders or nuclear arsenals. #HLF2025 ⚛️🧪 physicsworld.com/a/the-pros-a...

Good morning, #HLF2025! I'm at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum this week, hoping to learn more about areas of math and computer science that relate to physics. If you got lost during yesterday's panel session on machine learning in mathematics, here's my take: physicsworld.com/a/are-we-hea... ⚛️🧪

Jonathan Liew writes really, really well when he does this kind of thing, and I absolutely loathe that he's having to do it again.

In the fourth of our series of truly weird quantum effects we look at the bizarre situation in which the causal order of events are in a quantum superposition. 🧪⚛️ ow.ly/zLrQ50WTWmj

Next week I am going to a conference social event where the dress code is “Wear your national dress.” I was born in Kansas and I live in Wiltshire, which is basically the Kansas of the UK, but with more sheep and fewer universities. What is my national dress? Wrong answers only.

Please do not forget that some scientists were cozying up to Epstein long long long after his horrific behavior was known. Five of them are featured in the Birthday Book. Gerry Edelman. Murray Gellman. Steve Kosslyn. Martin Nowak. Lee Smolin. See docs: oversight.house.gov/release/over...

I love everything about this story, beginning with the fact that Germans call a slug a nacktschnecke (literally “naked snail”) and ending with the Polizisten’s reaction. Gut gemacht! www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Fash music festival in Great Yarmouth called off www.greatyarmouthmercury.co.uk/news/2543569...

I made a decent effort to learn Slovak in the ~6 months before I visited Slovakia. It was, in many ways, an utter failure - moja slovenčina was and remains veľmi zlá - but the hotel receptionist in Štrbské Pleso thought it was absolutely adorable when I haltingly ordered a taxi. Make an effort!

In the AI universe, Suleiman the Magnificent got through the gates of Vienna and immediately placed his own capital there, forcing the Habsburgs to relocate theirs to the ruins of Rome. It's the only possible explanation!

It’s harder than you might think!

And stop talking about migrants, without migrants, Brits and Germans, it's not as if we're hard to find. And think we have different outlook on life than "We gotta pick up potatoes for the Brits!"

Scientists have made molecules containing nobelium for the first time, which is great because it means that "The Chemistry of No" is an actual scientific thing, not just a great title for a self-help book. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/making-mol...

How is this "good for British Science",Prof Dougherty & @royalsociety.org committee? How is amplifying/supporting Combat 18/NF figures going to encourage top scientists and innovators, particularly those from minority backgrounds or foreign-born, to stay in the UK? www.linkedin.com/posts/nimagh...

You can cut a hole in a cube that's big enough to slide an identical cube through that hole! Think about that for a minute - it's kind of weird. Amazingly, every convex polyhedron that people checked had this property! Until this week. (1/2)

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

❗The biggest neo-nazi music festival in over a decade is coming to Great Yarmouth and we need your help to stop it. hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/28/g...

Physicists have made *yet another* version of the double-slit experiment and I am totally here for it. This one uses individual cold atoms as the slits, and – spoiler alert – the results show that Bohr, not Einstein, was right about wave-particle duality. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/famous-dou...

Let's cut the "Farage's plan is impractical" line eh? People said the same of Trump and now ICE goons are rounding people up into alligator-infested camps and sending people to Uganda. Need to defend principle of asylum and defend human rights and be against sending people to be tortured and killed

Increasingly I need to prepare scientists to deal with negative interactions with the public. Some tips: • Listening is often more effective than correcting “I hadn’t heard that, tell me more” • Anti-sci to pro-sci is a spectra: Anti➡️questioning➡️neutral➡️interested➡️supportive. Nudge 1 place only

British "debate" on migration is in the gutter, but we should still be shocked that Labour's response yesterday was to criticise Farage for being insufficiently detailed in his plan for mass detention camps.

Stone-cold classic.

Bill Phillips interviewed by Physics World. Wonderful as usual. physicsworld.com/a/william-ph...

Notably, SpaceX/Starlink is *not* breaking any regulations by putting up satellites that emit at internationally protected radio wavelengths. That's because these radio emissions aren't intentional – and the regs don't cover unintentional transmissions. 🤦🧪⚛️🔭

“Elon Musk has shown time and time again he’s no friend of the UK…I am seriously concerned that allowing Musk to supply energy to British homes would pose a risk to our national security.” Well said from @eddavey.libdems.org.uk here: www.theguardian.com/business/202...

If I were suffering from a plague of dark matter, I'd want to turn into a black hole, too. I mean, wouldn't everyone? 🧪⚛️🔭 physicsworld.com/a/exoplanets...

Protons have a new magic number! No, it's not 42. It's 14, and this article explains why. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/physicists...

Thrilled to see @CNN.com featuring "The Great Miscalculation" in their deep dive into one of NYC's most incredible engineering stories! The Citicorp Tower had a 1-in-16 chance of collapse, yet one engineer's courage saved thousands of lives. Read the full article here:

Love to get invitations from fake journals soliciting the insights that I – a science journalist with a background in quantum physics – have to offer in the fields of *checks notes* agricultural economics and oceanography. In other news, grain costs money, and the ocean is wet.

How hot can you make a solid before it melts? If you thought the answer was "up to its empirically-determined melting point for a given pressure," you should read this article. It's *so much* more complicated than that! 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/how-hot-ca...

Does Altman - the leader of the world's largest "AI" company, a company that is literally worthless without data centres to run their software, software that needs to respond to human requests within no more than a few seconds - not understand the basic concepts of latency and the speed of light?

Especially with the sound on.

Which hypothetical quasiparticle would you most like to see proven to be real? Many would vote for the axion (named after a detergent because it cleans up a mess in quantum chromodynamics), but for purely etymological reasons, I'm now voting for the neglecton. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/predicted-...

We are definitely going to be trying this at our next Microsoft Teams meeting, along with medically accurate terms for other significant body parts and BOTH pronunciations of "Uranus". Should be fun! 🫠

Attention, planetary astronomers! Inquiring minds want to know: Does Microsoft Teams censor your meeting transcripts when you talk about Uranus? 🧪🔭

My colleague who writes about medical physics just discovered that the AI transcription tool in MS Teams censors words it doesn’t like. It rendered the word “rectum” from an interview as “******”. Seems less than ideal for a tool that doctors are being encouraged to use, but hey, what do I know? 🧪

Tooth-in-eye surgery is incredible. You get one of your canine teeth inserted into your cheek, and in a few months the tooth and newly formed cheek tissue are removed. A tiny plastic telescope is then drilled into the tooth, and the tooth is implanted in your cornea, restoring some sight.

Calling all quantum steampunks! This proposed quantum thermochemical engine has a 1D Bose gas as its working fluid, and theoretical calculations show that it should combine near-maximum efficiency with high power output. Read more about it here: 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/quantum-th...

Video is almost certainly real. From colleagues in Russia:

Following the dismissal of Erika McEntarfer as US Commissioner of Labor Statistics, we've released a statement of concern. At a time of global economic uncertainty, we stress the importance of the independence of statistical institutions and the protection of the integrity of official statistics.

The truly /unique/ thing about the Curies wasn't Marie's obvious brilliance but Pierre's /insistence/ on sharing credit. There were tons of Nobel-worthy women whose collaborators were not so insistent.

Academics' moral compass is only money and ego. That's why they see Musk as their own. This one would've installed Wernher von Braun as FRS. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Quantum on the Clock is officially open! Know a young person in their final two years of school in the UK or Ireland that has a passion for quantum science or tech? Encourage them to enter! They need to create a 3-minute video explaining any quantum concept creatively. 🔗 www.iop.org/physics-comm...