Researchers have used a beam of fast hydrogen atoms to probe single-layer graphene, producing the sharpest graphene diffraction patterns to date. The patterns embody information about short-range interactions between the atoms and the surface.

Every time I see someone with a bike on a BART escalator, it makes me smile - especially this rider prepared for rain. Not all policy making is so visible & tangible. Two years after we started allowing bikes on escalators, it’s worked perfectly. I haven’t heard complaints or of any big accidents.

“More than 51,000 AAUP members nationwide are watching Portland State admin’s troubling pattern of disregarding shared governance & union contracts — and we are prepared to take action. We expect these 10 faculty members to be reinstated immediately." — Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

AAUP TV — WEDS, NOV 19 @ 7 PM ET! Veena Dubal, AAUP General Counsel, and Todd Wolfson, AAUP President, will discuss the historic victory in AAUP v. Trump and what it means for the UC system & higher ed! @proftwolf.bsky.social @veenadubal.bsky.social Tune in on IG or YouTube (link in thread)!

I'm happy to see the redesign of the Jackson Street Bridge coming together at last! It's been several years in the making. There's a post that prevents cars from entering the new two-way bike path, and several parking spaces are here to lure photographers from parking in the bike lane. 1/2

How did I miss this? It's insane!

Honored to receive the 2026 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award! To see how the DEI ban in Ohio influences our university, please see the OSU announcement of the award (left) vs the actual APS citation for the award (right).

The AI that’s jacking up your utility bill, draining your water and threatening your job is also helping China hack the US. @wsj.com

Last light for Tuesday. Sunset in Chicago this evening at St Mary of the Angels church.

Terence Tao is more kind, patient, and generous than any of us deserves

Yessss!!!

As a young Assistant Professor, I attended a lecture by Watson at UT Austin. I was excited, I mean..DNA… I learned no science from his talk, but did learn he was a flaming sexist and racist. Worst of all, it went unremarked upon by my colleagues and the field. My lesson: this is what we face.

Excited to attend the @astrosociety.org gala tonight & receive the Nancy Grace Roman Award! I read about her life & career on my way here. Did you know she was responsible for making NASA data archives public so that everyone could benefit, not just PIs? Such an amazing impact on our field. 🔭

I read The Double Helix as an undergraduate. I was a science major at a women’s college taking molecular biology. Our professor taught us that Watson & Crick screwed Rosalind Franklin over. So I read the book to learn more. I’ll never forget how reading this passage made me feel.

Absolutely amazing: they've got so much solar in Australia that they need more people to use more of it, so the gov't has instructed energy retailers to offer *at least three hours of free power* during the middle of the day. Meanwhile fossil-addled US struggles with an energy-price crisis ...

AI is not just another research tool; it is redefining what research is, how it is done and what counts as an original contribution go.nature.com/47Uh6sf

The US funds the bulk of biomedical research globally by far. It's not like other countries can simply take up the slack. The more likely: people leave research, new people don't become researchers. There is no happy ending. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Some charts for those who don't know the extent of the US public (and private) investment in research (particularly in biomedical research) compared to other countries and institutions. The destruction of the US' scientific institutions has global implications.

Another casualty of the LLM revolution. In "arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review."

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

C. N. Yang was simply amazing. Incredibly deep and creative. He seemed to remember everything, including all the papers he wrote. So, my story is kinda funny www.ias.edu/news/in-memo...

I think about the title of this report on a weekly basis stanleycenter.org/publications...

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum. www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

Researchers have unveiled a quantum algorithm that could lead to quantum advantage. Using a time-reversal procedure, the algorithm calculated how quantum information spreads through a many-particle system. A classical supercomputer would take 13,000 times longer.

1/n - Trump says something about nuclear weapons tests...It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong. 1. The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. Wrong. Russia has more nuclear weapons than the United States.

Physicist Laura Bassi was born 314 years ago today. Her thesis defense in 1732 was a major social event which led to her getting hired by the University of Bologna as a paid lecturer. Here is her story! tinyurl.com/4jyxuttr #WomenInSTEM #Physics 🧪

Tao on the USA destroying what made it great - it’s universities

friend shared this, immediately updated my settings

Jian Zu, Zhiguo Xu, Jingyue Hao: A Deep Learning Framework for Identifying Weakly Chaotic, Strongly Chaotic, Resonant and Non-resonant Orbits in the Generalized Kicked Rotator https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21318 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21318 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.21318

The pipeline for Ph.D.s out of U.S. universities is shrinking www.axios.com/2025/10/26/p...

Harvard AAUP's Ryan Enos explains the importance of colleges working together to combat Trump’s attempts to shake down universities. #defendhighered @ryanenos.bsky.social

Great idea! (second only to not posting on twitter)

Simply amazing how this is happening and US media is focusing only on absolute nonsense. Now that Ellison and Weiss will control most of media, hard denial of climate crisis will be locked in.

“The Trump admin has tried many different ways now to stifle & censor the alchemy of universities. We see what works to fight this kind of repression, people standing up. Students, faculty, alumni, community, standing up together to create a big tent. Our assignment at this moment: be courageous.”

In a break from recent themes & in honor of World Phage Week (Oct 22-28), some reflections on the world of bacteria and phage, part of a short series explaining the rationale for why we have invested so much time in exploring when microbes get sick too. joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/happy-worl...

I forgot to share that this paper is now 🎉 published 🎉 in Phys Rev Letters! Open access here: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... And still available on the arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/2412.06887. Or just check out the thread below! 🧪⚛️

#OAweek Support diamond #openaccess scholar-controlled journals, such as those listed at freejournals.org.

A post focusing on the link between funding and fairness and why 7 of the 9 institutions who said no (& even Vanderbilt) objected to abandoning merit-based review for compliance. Now, only UT Austin remains silent. Much is at stake for them & other universities. open.substack.com/pub/joshuasw...

I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Square News about the government's attempt to extort universities. nyunews.com/opinion/gues...

@sasolla.bsky.social 🤗

Just another normal HHS week: CDC researchers cannot present work at an annual Infectious Disease conference in (checks notes) Atlanta. As a CDC researcher put it: “It appears to me that HHS’s goal is to prevent the dissemination of scientific information. It’s insane.” apnews.com/article/infe...

Note that all 5 hours worth of the @royalsociety.org 's recent symposium, "Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Turing Test," with Alan Kay, Gary Marcus, and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, can be found on YouTube: www.youtube.com/live/GmnBTCK... (I'm gradually making my way through it...) #AI #science

Proud papa moment: my son J published a letter in the @nytimes.com today (in print tomorrow) on the need to think our definitions of autism.

Dartmouth says *No* to the Compact 1 - MIT 2 - Brown 3 - Penn 4 - U. of Southern California 5 - UVA 6 - Dartmouth UT-Austin, Vanderbilt & U of Arizona left... bsky.app/profile/roop...

At a time when higher education is under relentless political attack, the universities that refused to sign onto Trump’s Faustian bargain showed real courage and integrity. @AFThighered.bsky.social @AAUP.org www.aft.org/press-releas...

"people use it very differently".. this applies to so many concepts in neuroscience! We (@irinapochinok.bsky.social and Simon Musall) put together a #BernsteinConference Workshop on exactly this and @juangallego.bsky.social will be one of our speakers! @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social shorturl.at/4kV00

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...