Case Western Reserve Department of Biology is hiring! We're recruiting for a tenure-track position focusing on eukaryotic microbiology, especially microbial/environment interactions. Please share widely: apply.interfolio.com/174456

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

Every fall when baseball season ends and football, inexplicably, begins, I think again about features I like and dislike about spectator sports, and every year I futilely dream we will someday REPLACE AMERICAN FOOTBALL WITH KABADDI

In honor of Halloween, I just read a horror novel and wanted to write up a quick micro-review thread here. Presenting: @mcmanlypants.bsky.social's Children of Solitude. Thread: 1/ www.skylightbooks.com/book/9798992...

My 2¢: your in-person talk isn't about maximizing data-delivery, it's about being a person. What are the things a paper CAN'T do that a speaker CAN? Voice, affect, personal reactions. Share "Y was a fucking slog". Control my attention: "Z is tricky, stay with me lol". Say "Look! Cool, right?"

YOUR GUIDE TO MELLONS Rags-to-riches (Thomas, d. 1908) Hardworking (Andrew, d. 1937; Richard B, d. 1933) Spent inheritance decently-ish (Paul, d. 1999; Richard K, d 1970) Never met hardworking grandpas; should have been estate-taxed into dust; evil (Richard Mellon Scaife, d 2014; Timothy, b. 1942)

My student self said "I will never, ever use this knowledge" about so many physics topics which later came home to roost. Today I'm solving the Lane-Emden equation, which I vividly remember failing to do successfully (in Fortran) when Ed Bertschinger assigned it as 8.901 homework.

INTERVIEWER: do you have any skull tattoos? ME: for context, let's talk about Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb novels, in which <four hour plot recap> in the end recontextualizing the Ninth House skeleton cult as something purposeful. INTERVIEWER <dazed>: sir just answer the question ME: I have no tattoos

Personally, I enjoyed writing my course syllabi as raw HTML which I could SCP down the hall to a Linux box named after a Tolkien sword and running an infrequently-patched Apache server. In that context, my neckbeard contrarian educator opinion is: "Canvas is pretty good by comparison" 🎢

My friendly department-next-door, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, is hiring a f/t staff engineer! Work in undergrad teaching labs AND help w/ cool research instruments. "Bachelor’s degree in engineering and 0--2y professional experience" says the ad. Job code 13852 at employment.case.edu

I emailed our colloquium organizers with the title of my talk, "Supernova Neutrinos: From 1987 To [Insert Date Here]". Just realized the talk was announced as "Supernova Neutrinos: From 1987 To Today". Next time I give a colloquium I'm going to try submitting a title containing an XSS attack.

CWRU's lifelong learning program sent out their calendar of upcoming lectures, with topics ranging from earth science to religious studies, and including the following unsettling entry: HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE HEAVENS (IN-PERSON)

In the 1950s, National Geographic wanted Kodachrome nature photography that really popped in print. One trick was to put foreground subjects (hikers, etc.) in bright colors; it was called the "red shirt school". Dick Lasher's Pinto makes this the greatest red shirt school photo of all time.

If you are an alum of: Vanderbilt UVA UT Austin U of Southern California Dartmouth Brown MIT U Penn U Arizona Your alma mater is RIGHT NOW weighing the costs and benefits of giving up its independence and abandoning academic freedom. SPEAK UP NOW: 2/2

well I was wrong this time but honestly I forgot that John Clarke didn't already have a Nobel ⚛️🧪

Tagging 🧪⚛️

Going out on a limb with my Physics Nobel prediction/wishlist: to Paul Ginsparg (ArXiV), Gunther Eichhorn (Astrophysics Data System) and Louise Addis (SPIRES) for revolutionizing the dissemination of physics research literature online

This is my local boulangerie, and they're so goddamn good. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I tried to keep a running Tigers-Guardians score in one corner of the blackboard during my physics lecture today. I thought, eh, I can glance at my phone once an inning while they're busy solving a problem (eigenvalues and expectation values). The 8th inning got way ahead of me! #guardsball 🎢

Here's a qualitative, draft infographic expressing the following hypothesis: Your urban public transit dollars pay working-class wages within your city; car-ownership dollars pay richer people farther away. Is that right? If so, is there research that says this quantitatively? 🚫🚗

The optics industry can’t run without skilled technicians, and there aren’t enough of them. MCC’s revived training program + the new SPIE Technicians Series aims to bridge the gap & keep innovation moving forward. 💡📕 Read more about the technician shortage in the Sept/Oct issue of #PhotonicsFocus!

Last chance to submit official comments to DHS this brutal and self-destructive rule change proposal.

here are some helpful steps for academics who are considering creating genAI images to use for lab branding: 1. don't

Jose Ramirez is so much fun to watch *baserunning*. I don't know why highlight producers have not discovered it. The cameras track some dumb relay throw and ignore the guy windmilling around 3rd, heads up, one hand holding his helmet on, 100% aware of every fielder. Best show in town. #guardsball

Today isn't just "another day DOE SBIR/STTR grants were not announced", it's the day grant activities were meant to have STARTED if the announcements had taken place on the (already delayed) date. Can tech/energy/DC people to look into this? @costasamaras.com? @repshontelbrown.bsky.social?

I have heard the "superfluid helium films can climb out of containers" fact umpty-ump times, always in a "woOoO it's weird and quaAantum" context I never followed up to try to understand, but today in a zoom seminar Alex Kavner from Zurich showed a potential energy diagram and it finally clicked. ⚛️

as always I forgot to tag ⚛️🧪🎢🔭

I want to chime in here to explain why something like "Chemistry BA" probably appears on this list and why it's a bad and stupid thing to cut. Only guessing at the Syracuse-specific details but I know the big picture. Thread: 🧵

Note that SBIR/STTR grants typically involve collaboration between a small business and a university, with very short (6 to 9 month) funding periods. For a university researcher, there is a HUGE difference in how you plan your research time over a summer vs during the academic year ... 1/2

Remember the Department of Energy's SBIR/STTR small business grants, a beloved bipartisan program that's de-facto the seed fund for America's green energy R&D startups? Were Phase I awards announced 5/29, as planned? No, in June they delayed to 8/29. Were awards announced 8/29? Also no.🔌💡🧪

I know that energy-frontier new-physics searches are the LHC’s reason to exist, but I love all the Standard Model processes they can see along the way. WW pair production in (maybe not the right word for pp) ultraperipheral pp interactions?!? Crazy. ⚛️🧪

Ask Me About My Research! at #CWRU We caught up with Prof. Robert Brown & rising senior Darcy Chew (physics + BME) on CAPGLO—a device using magnets and fluorescent tags to capture T cells, aiming to make CAR T cell therapy more accessible and affordable. #physics #askmeaboutmyresearch

You know the thing where a screenwriter hints at a backstory for their newly-introduced spy by having them mention "the Bucharest fiasco" and "the Gdansk job" and the whole spy team nods? Just had this experience listening to a radiation safety officer namedrop "the Harborview incident"

Trying to figure out why I have a directory called ~/projects/lhc_hcal_muons. Some fragments of C code last updated in 2009? A clone of the old Geant4 ExampleN02 directory, apparently compiled and run? No notes, no code comments, no readme? NO IDEA what I had been thinking about. ⚛️

Surprising nature sighting today: little ~15mm mushroom (puffball?) emerging from shale along a stream bank. Is it eating the mossy surface detritus, or tree roots in the cracks? It can't eat kerogens in the shale, can it? (Cuyahoga Formation shale, Southerly Park, Shaker Heights OH) 🧪

Technology bleg: when I point my iphone camera at a QR code, it recognizes it and gives me the option to click a link or something, but otherwise forgets it. Is there an iOS app that will run the camera and just *keep a log file* of all the QR codes it sees?

(let me share my favorite dumb idea) since you need thermal rather than electric energy, you could (a) "charge up" a kettle with an electrochemical reaction that makes a supply of reactants, which later react (contained, in a heat exchanger) to boil water. I called it a "thermite teakettle"

I would like to put in a request for electric kettle on the same principle. Charge up a 0.2 kWh battery, discharge it with like three kiloamps, and you can bring a liter of water to a boil in thirty seconds.

Hi folks, I've processed some new information and made some additional slideshows and videos about Lower Shaker Lake flood risk. <click "view full thread" for links> The dam-failure Emergency Action Plan includes a huge AECOM flood-modeling data dump. What do we learn from it? 1/5

ME, TWO MONTHS AGO: I wonder what day of the week my fall teaching starts. CAMPUS REGISTRATION SERVER: <big "my schedule" button> ME: lets see <clicks> SERVER: your class starts August 26th <fine print>in 2024, a semester you recently logged and looked at</fine print> ME: thanks, sorted

we’re joining a panel discussion shortly to talk about our latest recommendation for Lower Shaker Lake and where we go from here. livestream starts at 6pm: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt3B...

Favorite places for freshwater play, by government agency: Metroparks: South Chagrin NEORSD: West Creek Shaker Heights: Shaker Lake Nature Ctr NPS: Cuyahoga Valley NP ODNR: Punderson Cleveland Water: our street, which has been a kid-friendly creek for three days due to a water main break

Also: there's a great way to get much-more-appropriate ship-themed wall decor: for most of the US research vessel fleet, you can find PDF *deck plans* and other schematics online. Download these and send 'em to a poster printer, they look awesome, trust me. (Links in thread.)

Missed this news two weeks ago: the Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector *excavation* is finished! The world's largest hard rock cavern! ⚛️🧪 <gets on hobby horse> still not as big as the huge pressurized caverns used for fluid storage in salt domes! www.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/news/16770/

Fellow Clevelanders will have seen @neorsd.org's update on the end of their Shaker Dam engineering work. I have some technical-detail thoughts about this, as an engineering-adjacent STEM person and a fan of the lake and brook. Keep reading for a summary (incl. links to slides and video): 1/8

I think about this every once in a while #waroncars

Today I learned that the word "gorilla" is borrowed from the unidentified language of an unidentified tribe whose members accompanied Hanno, a Carthaginian navigator, as translators on a voyage around East Africa in 500 BCE. 🧵 1/4

ASTRONOMERS: what will Rubin Telescope learn about interstellar asteroids? Let's find a widely-respected seminar speaker who knows POT-SMOKING BITCOIN MILLIONAIRE: is Mars made of blockchain? Nobody on my megayacht seems to know. AVI LOEB: my new preprint is about the Martian blockchain

Mine: DNP 1998 in Santa Fe (the inaugural run of the APS Conference Experience for Undergrads program). In a tribute to Dave Schramm they played video of an Elements Song parody that replaced all the lyrics with "hydrogen and helium deuterium and lithium". (At the time I had never heard the Lehrer!)

When I mentioned this idea to @snark.bsky.social he suggested the visual antecedent for fast-object-tracking camerawork might not be "missiles" but "sports", which is a good excuse to mention that Clyde Tombaugh was the great-uncle of Clayton Kershaw