Worst flight experience flying American Airlines @americanair.bsky.social. Delayed 6 hrs. Told us our seats would be assigned “at the gate” which NO ONE WAS AT until 10min b4 boarding. Now my wife & I, traveling w our dog, can’t sit together. No apology, no explanation. Never flying them again.

I don't get it. I'm a university professor and am around young people all the time. In my lectures, I regularly call on students and ask them questions. I have never experienced this supposed "Gen Z stare" thing.

Gotta celebrate the few good things going on right now. Like our good friend & filmmaker Dehanza Rogers earning tenure at Emory. Celebrated at a Dodger game & got ourselves on the Jumbotron! #AcademicSky

If you had a mentee or know a student with a rescinded PhD offer or who is reconsidering attending a US school, this is an interesting opportunity from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. 🧪 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

🚨 Action alert: Two days left!! Help protect NSF/NIH from political interference. 👎 A new rule (Sched. F) would allow for replacing career program officers with political appointees. ➡️ Action: Object here by THIS FRIDAY. Comments can be brief and/or anonymous. Helps future litigation.

Bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, BSCCO, or “bisko,” either way it sounds and looks delicious! Measured recently in our scanning tunneling microscope at #UCLA.

Absolutely STUNNED that Lorna Simpson says my work partly inspired a work of art 😮 “It was a reproduction of a collage from a series called “Sky Pinups,” partially inspired by Zora’s gift of a book called “The Disordered Cosmos,” by the physicist and Black feminist writer Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.”

Solid state physics is pretttttty. This is an image of the momentum-distribution of electrons inside of a crystal measured using the photoelectric effect. From a recent trip to @als-lbnl.bsky.social.

Bill is the absolute best. I was part of an outreach event w/ him when I was a postdoc at #NIST years ago and I was just in awe of his level of enthusiasm & warmth for the kids visiting us that day. Amazing scientist & person.

1. This week my group & I will be at #APSGlobalSummit2025 #APSMarch showing some of our exciting work discovering ways to tune correlated phases in quantum materials using external knobs like LARGE uniaxial strain or flowing current through them while visualizing these effects at the atomic scale.

Laplace's equation to solve for incompressible fluid flow around a sphere for my Math Methods class. This exact problem was on my PhD qualifying exam. I had never done a fluid mechanics problem in my life! What saved my ass was the analogy to a conducting sphere in a constant E-field. 🧪 #AcademicSky

This is a mega-thread of all Microsoft problems related to topological qubits. NOTE: I skip the numerous news reports and press releases, this thread is for serious _scientific_ and procedural materials First retraction: Quantized Majorana Conductance, from Nature www.nature.com/articles/nat...

My lab has high-voltage vacuum pumps & other electrical equipment that runs 24/7 all year long. UCLA has its own fully-staffed **POWER PLANT** to supply the considerable power required for all of its medical and science research labs. F&A in part goes to running & staffing it.

Interested in an exciting PhD project working in a stimulating environment in the Centre for Designer Quantum Materials, combining cutting-edge experiments, bespoke instrumentation, complex data analysis and numerical modelling? Any questions get in touch, apply at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/pgr/home.htm.

Grant decisions by something that cannot give the correct number of Rs in “strawberry” or even generate images of hands with the correct number of fingers 🙄

My former student (and big Harry Styles fan) included a fun, harmless prank for beta-testers of PyAtoms: After prolonged use, a pop-up asked if you'd like to listen to his music on Spotify. Now that PyAtoms is out of beta, this feature is discontinued. Farewell, Harry! github.com/asariprado/P...

🎢 ⚛️ New form of matter just dropped Video Description: demonstrations and explanations of the newly created Polycatenated Architected Materials, which respond to some stresses as a fluid would and to others like a solid. Source: www.caltech.edu/about/news/r...

No one could have foreseen.... (Narrator: Everyone could have foreseen....) www.science.org/content/arti...

A small piece of unexpected joy in this bleak new year: One of my favorite singers, Marlon Williams, is releasing a new album and his first sung entirely in the Māori language *AND* he is coming to Los Angeles ❤️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMMh...

My high school AP English teacher, Jill Granger, has lost her home in the Altadena fires. Mrs. Granger was a LAUSD public school teacher for decades and had a huge impact on me & many other students who, like me, were the 1st generation to attend college. gofund.me/c6fa3e7d

NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! (Kind of) 📚💙 In honor of my late grandfather CLR James's 124th birthday, meet the new edition of his 1953 book *Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We live In* I wrote the foreword with 🧪 in mind! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Bands should release their tour set lists as a playlist on Spotify. If you’re seeing an unfamiliar band live, it’d be a nice way to quickly get acquainted with what you’re gonna hear live. All you want to do when seeing a new band is hear songs you know.

Merry Christmas! 🎄 From Nanosurf lab and the atomic deer 🦌

Working on a paper describing our open-source software PyAtoms (github.com/asariprado/P...) & how it's used both in the lab & in the classroom! Fun fact: I *hated* coding as a young PhD student...until I realized how fun it was & got really good. #STM #graphene #AcademicSky #STEM #Python

My writing soundtrack this week: Johnny Dodds, jazz clarinetist from early 1900s. Super fun music for writing. open.spotify.com/playlist/37i... #AcademicSky

Enjoyed re-creating this visual in the @desmos.com Geometry tool: www.desmos.com/geometry/lx7... #mathsky

In 2006 I plotted the number of Nature journals vs time and it sure looked like a Moore’s law: “the number of nature journals doubles every five years”. It’s slowed down to every 7.5 years, but we are still on track to get every scientist their own personal journal 🧪 #scipub

An amazing story! Words of encouragement can really carry us. I instantly think of @anterobot.bsky.social who—when things were tough—said just the right thing I needed when I was close to quitting my PhD. Wouldn’t be a Prof w/o him. And if Dr. Crusher remembered me, I’d prolly die. 🖖 #AcademicSky

Today in Physical Review Letters (journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...), spin texture in supramolecular metal complexes on a 2D superconductor, together with V Vaňo, S Reale, O Silveira, D Longo, M Amini, M Kelai, J Lee, A Martikainen, S Kezilebieke, A Foster, F Donati, P Liljeroth and L Yan.

Our latest out in Phys. Rev. Lett., Viliam Vaňo et al. “Emergence of Exotic Spin Texture in Supramolecular Metal Complexes on a 2D Superconductor”. link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...

This is doing the community a real service!

(0) I've created the following interactive widgets for my undergrad course, Intro to Solid State Physics. I've found these extremely useful for teaching & inspiring students to learn to code. Feel free to share, copy & edit to create your own widgets! #academicsky #STEM #quantum #Python #graphene

3D printed STM?! This is so cool! #science #stm #nanoscience #maker #microscope

We just found 10 surface scientists @🦋 #SciSky 🎉 Help us find more! #UHV #STM #XPS #UPS #ARPES #AFM #ChemPhys #PhySky #ChemSky #SurfSci #SurfaceScience go.bsky.app/LKyQJm7

Hello Bluesky! I'm a scientist, professor & artist based in Los Angeles, CA. I post about science, education, art & music. My research group at #UCLA — the Quantum Matter Design Studio— uses special #quantum microscopes to image the strange & beautiful "mob behavior" of electrons in materials.