Been thinking about this structure for a while. Building blocks cut and ready!

5/5 (at last) 120-Deltahedron A. That's 60 blue and 60 yellow equilateral triangles that break the reflection symmetries of this Mobius deltahedron. Just the many 5-fold, 3-fold and 2-fold axis remaining. 🧪 🐡 #Symmetry #MathArt

Set complete.

A work in progress. If I don't finish it tonight, it'll be another week!

4/5 120-Deltahedron B. Icosahedral symmetry and 120 faces. The three corners of each triangle sit on a 5-fold, a 3-fold and a 2-fold rotation axis. Next year, I'll be involved in teaching a symmetry course at Glasgow. I'm quite excited by the prospect. Can you tell? 🧪 🐡 #Symmetry #MathArt

3/5 This third one in the series is 48-Deltahedron B. Octahedral symmetry again, and an isomer of the previous post (2/5). As far as I'm concerned, that's the last relatively simple one! 🧪 #SciArt #Symmetry #MathArt

2/5 is 48-Deltahedron A. The second Mobius deltahedron with 48 faces. Octahedral symmetry, meaning each triangle has a corner on a 2-fold, a 3-fold and a 4-fold rotation axis. Again going for two-tone. 🧪 #Symmetry #MathArt #SciArt

1/5 This is 24-Deltahedron A, a 24-sided non-convex polyhedron, made of equatorial triangles. It is face-transitive and has tetrahedral symmetry. The corners of the triangles lie on 2-fold and 3-fold rotation axis. It is the first so-called Mobius deltahedron. 🧪 #Symmetry #MathArt #SciArt

A paper model representing the fullerene C70, colloquially known as Rugbyballene. 🧪 #ChemSky #ITeachChem #SciArt

Still making paper models of fullerenes. These represent the 7 IPR isomers of C80. 🧪 #ChemSky #SciArt

Charles Janet's version of the periodic table is often lost in the history of science. I for one, prefer it. #ChemSky 🧪

Evening light on the Gare Loch. #Scotland #Highlands #Landscape

Not posted for a while. Not made much for a while. Too busy with the day job...dotting the i's and crossing the t's on the academic results from Year-3 Chemistry. Just a couple more board meetings until that part of the process is complete. Image: a two-tone weaving of C80...just because.

Daylight version of Creachan Mor, viewed across Loch Long #Scotland

Creachan Mor (657m) from Airlig (198m) late this evening.

Voronoi

To be fair I should have shown what it's like to weave folded paper.

REMINDER: Global heat waves are FOSSIL FUEL‑driven climate chaos. Recent research shows that warming linked to the world’s biggest oil and gas companies has made EVERY major 21st‑century heatwave more intense and more frequent.

11:30 pm in Argyll (#Scotland) looking north, and we're still a month away from the longest day. Many newts, toads and frogs ( and roe dear) this evening.

The weave, added creases, blue lines for bonds, and it's a model of C60 fullerene. Potential #SciCom 🧪 #SciArt

Eldest son had the brilliant idea that we should hatch ducks! We're at 6 weeks with these Silver Appleyard. #NewFeatheredFriends

The two disconnected void spaces, separated by the card, are identical and interpenetrating. Each has the shape of the framework of carbon atoms in the structure of diamond. 🧪 #ChemSky #PaperCraft #SciArt

Dramatic skies today on our ascent of Beinn a' Mhanaich, quite foreboding across to Loch Goil. #Scotland #StormHour

Making an astronomer portrait with a juicy rainbow roll 🌈 #linocut #printmaking #sciart #spectroscopy #histsci 🧪

Duck update: What are we feeding them? Hatched 4 weeks ago!

Still on a fullerene adventure. Unflattened a network of regular hexagons and given the impression of electron density with contours. It represents a molecule of (C80-Ih)[56]fullerene. #ITeachChem 🧪 #ChemSky #SciArt

I live in a very busy and neurodiverse household. I get a lot of push-back from my kids. I find I'm constantly having to defend all sorts of random positions or points of view. On the plus side it keeps me on my toes, but on the down side, it's exhausting.

Loving this! Woven from 6 strands, each made from 10 hexagons, this ball shows the most symmetric C80 fullerene isomer. But I see it as a kagome lattice on a sphere, so I am wondering . . . is it tripartite? I need to make a 3 colour version. 🧪

Highlights from this week in #Scotland: cuckoos, swallows, warblers and a wheatear have all arrived for the summer season. But what pleases me most, the ganets have returned to their summer fishing in Gare Loch and Loch Long.

One short! It seems that this stack of 13 open ended truncated tetrahedra will divide the space bicontinuously. Two identical interpenetrating spaces that are separated from each other. 🧪 #geometry (with the same symmetry as diamond #Chemsky ) #SciArt

Representations of C60 and C80(Ih) fullerenes. Each are woven from 6 strands (touch of glue this time). 🧪 #ChemSky #SciArt

Very pleased with this! Been trying to find different ways to build representations of C60 -fullerene. This is a five-stranded kagome weave (no glue). As a structural representation carbon atoms are located on the pentagonal vertices. 🧪 #ChemSky #SciArt

Without having actually ever done any fullerene chemistry, I feel I'm learning a lot! Paper models of C60 (top), C70 (right) and C80 - the Ih one (left). 🧪 #ChemSky #SciArt #Papercraft

Just over 22 years ago I delivered the big one. Now here he is delivering ducklings at Easter.

Hatched about an hour ago. The question is duck or drake?

Much excitement in my household today. And well timed by the new addition, it being Easter Sunday.

Found this tiny piece of uranium glass on the beach. The amazing green fluorescence under the blacklight is unrelated to its radioactivity. It is caused by an electronic transition in the linear uranyl [O=U=O]2+ group; the most common structural feature of uranium in it highest oxidation state. 🧪

These aren't Easter eggs. Testing different construction sequences and decorations on C-70 fullerene models. Black for the bonds, green for the pentagons. 🧪 #SciArt #Chemsky #Papercraft

Local store getting ready for new UK legislation on unit pricing. Reminds me of being a crystallographer, when the computer returns a calculated density of x megagrams per cubic meter. I'd get stuck trying to imagine a cubic meter sized crystal! What would you fix with a kilo of cyanoacrylate?

Exploring different, but simple ways of using paper to model chemical structures. This is C70 fullerene. It has a significantly larger interior cavity than C60, and an axial D5h point symmetry. 🧪 #Chemsky #SciArt #Papercraft

It's a very rough model of C70, if carbon atoms are placed on every corner. #SciArt #Papercraft

I'm quite confident I have the right components; just need the glue now!

Enjoyed making these. The five Möbius deltahedra. Non-convex, acoptic, face-transitive polyhedra made from equilateral triangles. Each edge of each triangle lies on a mirror plane. They have the same #symmetry as the Platonic solids, and are related to triangular tessellations on a sphere. 🧪 #SciArt

Designing deltahedra as models for #chemed #STEMed. Trying to find "good" nets. While there are 2 distinct nets for the tetrahedron, apparently there are 43380 for the icosahedron! It seems easier to assemble nets that wrap, than more condensed variants. 🧪 #SciArt #iteachchem

Slightly squiffy 3D build from paper loops. This bipartite network is a model of the unusual niobium monoxide (NbO) structure (NB purple, O yellow!). The structure can be considered as a 1/4 depleted NaCl structure, where the cubic symmetry is preserved. 🧪 #SciArt #ChemSky

🧪 Schottky defects occur in ionic crystals. They are pairs of point defects, where a vacancy at a cation site is matched by a vacancy at an anion site, preserving the charge balance. Here's my two dimensional paper representation of a Schottky defect in sodium chloride. #SciArt #SciComm

Real crystals are never perfect. This is a two dimensional paper representation of a Frenkel defect. It's a pair of point defects, where an atom is displaced, leaving a vacancy and an interstitial. 🧪 #SciArt

I was getting bored of making regular convex deltahedron as paper models for chemists. Delighted with this non-convex distraction. A highly symmetry (icosahedral) 120- faced Möbius deltahedron. I'm sure mathematics is art. 🧪 #SciArt

Testing my net for the bicapped square antiprism. Forth time lucky! 1 missed folding an edge. 2 missed folding another edge. 3 forgot to pay attention to the sequence (made a non convex deltahedron). 4 seems okay. Maybe there's an easier net? #SciArt

I've converted 1 sheet of A4 cardstock into a representation of C60. Never worked with it, but it had quite an impact on me. 1991 I saw Harry Kroto recount its discovery, and I can't overstate what a revelation this was. A new allotrope of carbon...all my textbooks were wrong! 🧪 #SciArt #papercraft