Curious of how photonics fits into interstellar travel? In OPN's June feature article "New Optics for Interstellar Flight" freelance writer Edwin Cartlidge discusses the challenges of light sail technology and how some researchers still think it could work. https://bit.ly/4wWQwtf 💡 ⚛️ 🧪

A big day for all of us at @uclaengineering.bsky.social!

CNBC@cnbc.com · 3mo ago

Meta, Broadcom and others to launch $125 million semiconductor research hub at UCLA

My hottest parenting take is that Raffi is not only the great to ever do it, but he’ll probably never be bested. Michael Phelps-ass children’s songwriter.

A fun journey back to the early days of photonic crystals for us, with a twist: defects, but only lossy ones, in a non-Hermitian photonic crystal, cause the formation of singularities that are topologically non-trivial. Lossy defects yield large improvements in gain. journals.aps.org/prapplied/ab...

We've always designed space solar cells to capture as much spectrum as possible. Our new paper in Device shows that's the wrong approach. When you're thermally limited by radiative cooling, absorbing less light can produce more power. 🧵 Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1n5rC9UPy1...

Poking around the Truman library photograph collections, I have discovered that first NSF director Alan Waterman knew how to party www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-r...

Because the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, if you build your habitat on some plot of near-side regolith you can put the little Earth anywhere in the sky you want & it’ll stay there, lazily meandering around just a little as the Moon wobbles in its orbit. A view of Earthset from #Artemis II.

Artemis launch watch party!

ArXiv lately has been putting everything I submit on hold, and has rejected manuscripts that are clearly part of their purview/ the physics.optics category (ie: there's stuff on there from a month ago on the exact topic!) Really not sure what's going on.. having to appeal is tiresome

I am excited to share our latest paper, Uniform bacterial genetic diversity along the gut, now out in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41.... (1/n)

Time to do some theory again.. new preprint that we think will be pretty useful for understanding and designing nonreciprocal photonic systems for thermal emission arxiv.org/abs/2603.23538

Magneto-optic perturbation theory for near-complete violation of Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission at low magnetic fields

Magneto-optic photonic systems can violate Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission by breaking Lorentz reciprocity. We develop a dispersive perturbation theory yielding an analytical expression for magnet...

arxiv.org

Project Hail Mary was great! Stuck to the spirit and overall plot of the book, though obviously less of the science exposition. First time I've gone to a movie on opening weekend in a very long time..

Enjoyed Preskill’s keynote at APS

If you're at the @apsphysics.bsky.social Global Physics Summit, I'll be speaking at the FIAP prize session this afternoon at 4pm along with some other cool applied physics talks!

I'm.. randomly.. remembering the Newfoundland referendums of 1948: "President Harry S. Truman's administration had little incentive to pursue annexation. With respect to foreign policy, such a territorial ambition would have only served to antagonize two key allies." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Ne...

1948 Newfoundland referendums - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature

Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

nature.com

I was on a DARPA project with a program officer who came from industry and didn't go to grad school One day the program officer told us that before working at DARPA, he thought universities were inefficient, but now was shocked at how much we and other university performers got done for so little $

Aaswath Raman@aaswath.bsky.social · 8mo ago

For all the criticism of universities, my guess is that - absent a Bell labs or long term philanthropic donor - they will rediscover the financial logic behind the university “bundle”. Related point: universities need to advertise that they are very cheap R&D!!

Well this is getting confusing, there’s a new (Wiley) journal also named Nanophotonics: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/2192... not to be confused with the established De Gruyter one: www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

If students are getting 4.0s in their high schools math classes but unable to do 1st-8th grade math, the SAT has to be back on the table (as it already is at many other places). www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet

The number of first-year students at the University of California, San Diego, whose math skills fall below a middle school level has increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years, according to a n...

insidehighered.com

Here's a poem by one of the old Chinese scholar bureaucrats that I think captures a certain Vibe very well

New preprint! Turns out that there is a thermal penalty to harvesting longer wavelength solar photons when your operating temperature is constrained by your radiating surface area (ie: in space). arxiv.org/abs/2506.16588

The Thermal Cost of Harvesting the Solar Infrared Tail in Space-Based Photovoltaics

Space applications require the highest performing photovoltaic devices. Typically these are multi-junction devices that are capable of converting a larger bandwidth of the solar spectrum. However, the...

arxiv.org

We have a new preprint on arXiv, "Passive radiative cooling using temperature-dependent emissivity can sometimes outperform static emitters", led by Yeonghoon Jin We show how one can design a thermal emitter with temperature-dependent emissivity to optimize radiative-cooling performance 💡🧪

Passive radiative cooling using temperature-dependent emissivity can sometimes outperform static emitters

In passive sky-facing radiative cooling, wavelength-selective thermal emitters in the atmospheric transparency window of 8-13 $μ$m can reach lower temperatures compared to broadband emitters, but broa...

arxiv.org

John Tyler became US president in 1841. His youngest grandson just died this past weekend. www.richmonder.org/harrison-ruf...

Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 10th U.S. president and longtime Richmonder, dies at 96

The Richmond resident, preservationist and chemical engineer, for whom William & Mary’s history department is named, also had the distinction of being the grandson of a man who became U.S. president i...

richmonder.org

New online! Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls

Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls

Nature Sustainability, Published online: 05 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41893-025-01558-0Active radiant cooling is an emerging technology that consumes less energy than traditional air conditioning. This work demonstrates an outdoor radiant cooling structure incorporating infrared-reflective surfaces that delivers enhanced thermal comfort.

bit.ly

How can we keep people safe outdoors in extreme heat? In a paper out today in @naturesustain.bsky.social we demonstrate that active radiant cooling and IR-reflective walls can deliver thermal comfort and be accepted by members of heat-vulnerable communities. rdcu.be/ekMzN

Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls

Nature Sustainability - Active radiant cooling is an emerging technology that consumes less energy than traditional air conditioning. This work demonstrates an outdoor radiant cooling structure...

rdcu.be

Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks. “I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.” [kottke.org]

Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks

Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of de

kottke.org

is ds9 called terok nor again

It is notable that Steve Blank felt that he had to write this, but a sign of the times... steveblank.com/2025/04/15/h...

Steve Blank How the U.S. Became A Science Superpower

Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happ…

steveblank.com

Join us in Marseille this July! 💡

Klaus Jäger@solartube.bsky.social · last yr.

☀️CALL FOR PAPERS ☀️ 💡 Solar, Lighting and Thermal Photonics (SOLITH) Topical Meeting at the @optica.org Advanced Photonics Congress 🏙️ Marseille, France 📅 July 13-17, 2025 🎯 Abstract submission deadline: Tuesday, 11 March 2025. Submit your abstract here: www.optica.org/events/congr...