New preprint: SPINDRIFT Rather than infer the maximally entangled ground state wavefunction from nothing, why not watch the correlations condense from the quantum mechanical 'purity' of infinite temperature as we project along continuous imaginary time? arxiv.org/abs/2607.29590

Spindrift: Learning quantum degeneracy from thermal purity in restricted path integral Monte Carlo

Restricted path integral Monte Carlo (RPIMC) sidesteps the fluctuating Fermion sign problem by confining paths within nodal regions of a trial density matrix, thereby recovering polynomial scaling. Ho...

arxiv.org

Across the three US research institutions where Marcus taught and conducted research, Caltech estimates that he mentored more than 100 postgraduate students and postdocs, on top of hundreds more undergraduates. @rebeccatrager.bsky.social #ChemSky www.chemistryworld.com/news/chemist...

Chemistry Nobel laureate Rudy Marcus passes away just before turning 103

Theoretical chemist who came up with one of his most important ideas in a just month also mentored more than 100 young researchers

chemistryworld.com

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

bbc.co.uk

Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 3w ago

“What will the Lovell Telescope discover/enable 20 yrs from now? I can’t tell you, and that’s the point. It will either be something extraordinary that none of us can yet predict, or we will defund it and leave Cheshire with a rusting monument to unfulfilled potential and discoveries never made.” 🔭🧪

If I was an agency wanting to be disbanded, I would choose the moment just after a new man of the ppl PM from the NW arrived - with a defining mission to rebalance the country and make agencies accountable - to pull £ from the world renowned telescope visited by generation upon generation of NW kids

As *tech*, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's apps "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology: www.normaltech.ai 1/

You see this frontpage and do genuinely wonder what on earth the conversation must have been between the senior editors when they were laying it out...

Ingvars' first-two-years of PhD battling the devious Fermion signs! Following the Zaanen and Kruger observation that a simple hydrodynamic backflow can give complex fractal nodal surfaces, we married this to a PIMD code and set about optimising parameters; first via a CNF arxiv.org/abs/2604.01963

Hydrodynamic Backflow for Easing the Fermion Sign in Finite-Temperature Electron Path Integral Simulations

Some notable technology systems, such as high-temperature superconductors and materials for controlled nuclear fusion, require an accurate description of finite-temperature quantum matter. Stochastic ...

arxiv.org

Now we have a Thames water hosepipe ban, I went looking for the data. It's here: data.london.gov.uk/dataset/lond... It seems the level is kept near 100% until July (presumably abstracting from the Thames?) and then we drink down the reservoirs, sometimes until as late as November (!)

Nice review of how biomolecular condensates assist in proteostasis and how they might be harnessed in this capacity for therapeutics, including of targets considered "undruggable". www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Biomolecular condensates for proteostasis and potential therapeutic applications

LLPS-driven condensates are emerging as central regulators of proteostasis. This perspective examines their assembly and physiological functions, highlighting how these condensates can be harnessed to...

cell.com

Preprint on the ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2607.15060 Mostly the same as the talk, a bit more consideration on the results.

Learning the Fermion sign structure in path-integral Monte Carlo

Starting from a \emph{probabilistic numerics} approach to the Fermion sign problem in path integral Monte Carlo, we recast the arithmetic calculation of a Fermionic observable as a statistical inferen...

arxiv.org

Jarvist Moore Frost@jarvist.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I've been having a fantastic time at "The sign problems of Fermions' workshop at ECT* in Trento (Italy) (indico.ectstar.eu/event/262/co...) My talk slides: speakerdeck.com/jarvist/2026...

Sad times! Twenty years ago I was sailing home from the Azores, solo, and so glad to pickup 198 kHz and the dulcet tones of the shipping forecast as I approached the edge of Sole, no longer having to fiddle the short wave to try and understand the Meteo-France SSB broadcast.

@gkt-wales.bsky.social · last mo.

Preparing to say goodbye to the mighty BBC Radio 4 Long Wave broadcast. The first service began 101 years ago. The transmitters at Droitwich, Westerglen and Burghead will be switched off at 0100 BST on Saturday. The 200 metre long AM signal at 198 Khz goes right through you and sounds fabulous!

I especially love this diagram.

Solidarity with Anthropic. What kind of monster would automate the mass theft of intellectual property just to train an AI model?

Olga Nesterova@onestpress.onestnetwork.com · last mo.

Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of a massive, illicit "distillation attack" to steal Claude’s AI capabilities. In a letter to US officials, they accused Alibaba of running 28.8 million fake conversations with Claude to train a competing AI for free. Alibaba declined to comment.

If I were in government I'd be scoping an announcement to have solar, batteries and air conditioning (heating and cooling) in every school and hospital by 2030

A Machine Learning workflow to design antimicrobial peptides. Open source, open science. The work of three fantastic MSci students projects at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, by Kam, Igor and Lucrezia, all building on top of each other. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Generating antimicrobial peptides via genomic transfer learning

We present a generative machine learning pipeline for the design of linear antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). To extend diversity beyond synthetically validated peptide datasets ($\sim$7,000 entries), we ...

biorxiv.org

I don't know if I feel better or worse about my own dirty solar panels... Mine are less filthy, bertainly a first floor roof in London is more accessible!

Hourly Cosmos@hourlycosmos.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Opportunity (15) - From Jacint Roger (landru79.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/2iKTGL2

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

For Retired Engineers… I know I'm not the only one to have noticed the fact that many- indeed most - such correspondents are Electrical Engineers (usually retired). I was delighted therefore to see that there's now a nice little paper on arXiv by David Garfinkle with the title Relativity for…

For Retired Engineers…

I know I'm not the only one to have noticed the fact that many- indeed most - such correspondents are Electrical Engineers (usually retired). I was delighted therefore to see that there's now a nice little paper on arXiv by David Garfinkle with the title Relativity for Retired Engineers

telescoper.blog

I get endless cold-emails selling me something. Was wondering how many of them are human. The answer turns out to be: none. Updated my LinkedIn profile yesterday. 10 monastic messages today, of which this was the best.

New paper! arxiv.org/abs/2606.12221 From building an effective model to simulate non-adiabatic dynamics in Y6 in the solid state, we noticed that spin-orbit-coupling was massively enhanced in (singlet charge transfer) <=> (triplet Frenkel) excitons. We attribute this to a generalised El-Sayed rule.

Quantum dynamic simulation of triplet formation in an effective model of Y6 (BTP-4F)

We construct a five-state model for photoexcitation in Y6 (BTP-4F) dimers, and then solve the non-adiabtic dynamics using the Hierarchical Equations of Motion (HEOM) method. We find that triplets are ...

arxiv.org

Motivated by the latest round of undergraduate project report reading and marking, I wrote a little essay / group guide to using LLMs in science. As I thought this might be useful beyond my little research group, I made it public: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to AI in the Frost group

The Hitchhiker's Guide to 'AI' in the Frost group Jarvist Moore Frost - 2026-05-26, updated 2026-06-08 Large Language Models (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Deepseek, etc.) are powerfu...

docs.google.com

Growing out of our ML4ATOMS cross-London TYC journal club, we now have a 'think-piece' on Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials. So far, these really are the 'killer app' for machine learning in condensed matter / chemistry, so well worth thinking where they go next! arxiv.org/abs/2606.07327

Six Open Questions in Machine-Learned Interatomic Potential Foundation Models

Machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have had a profound impact on molecular modelling in recent years, promising to resolve the long-standing tension between the scale and accuracy of simul...

arxiv.org

IMO, senior faculty at top R1 institutions rushing to use AI to flood journals with papers before future students or early career researchers can have an opportunity is not just greedy, it's salting the earth of the discipline.

Krista Langlois@cestmoilanglois.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"'Why do we do astrophysics?' Hogg offered an answer. It wasn’t to solve the cosmos but to grapple with it: a journey, not a destination." THIS, from @joshuasokol.bsky.social, gets at the heart of why I despise genAI: it assumes that writing is a product rather than an experience

Slides from my contributed talk today at thomasyoungcentre.org/event/tyc-8t..., Path integral polarons for real semiconductors. speakerdeck.com/jarvist/path... I had a ball! Great talks. Lovely to see the community. A strong pastry game from KCL.

Path integral polarons for real semiconductors

TYC 8th Energy Materials workshop: From Electron and Phonon Interactions to Net Zero 1 June 2026 @ 1:30 pm – 3 June 2026 @ 4:30 pm Venue: The Great Ha&hellip;

speakerdeck.com

I can tell when I'm procrastinating from actually making manuscript edits, when I find myself Googling the ultimate manuscript markup pen... (Currently using a 0.4 mm Papermate Flair fineliner, but its a little thick unless I print properly double-spaced... and not super comfortable.)

Meet Frank the problem-solving robot, uncover the mysteries of lightning, and experience a weekend of wildlife celebrating Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday at this year's #SummerScience Exhibition. Book your free tickets now: https://bit.ly/4nGgDQT

The University of Edinburgh's Meiko T800 Computing Surface system was a forerunner of the services provided by EPCC today. As this articles describes, the first entry in the Meiko logbook was made 40 years ago this month. edin.ac/4upW7Gw

In the next edition of #CondensedMatterPioneers, we will be highlighting the work of Mark A. Ratner on molecular-scale electronics, as well as his groundbreaking proposal from 1974 that single molecules could function as components in electronic circuits. 🧵

Seriously, what the hell? Combined with the 5p fuel duty tax cut, these policies are committing ourselves to a poorer, worse, future. At least half the rush-hour traffic in London is kids get shuttled to school, journeys that could and should be done on public transport or via active travel.

Andrew Sissons@acjsissons.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Got to be honest, loosening sanctions on Russia before we’ve even tried any basic demand-side measures is not filling me with pride or joy

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Helen Branswell 🇨🇦@helenbranswell.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I find this unsettling: A new study in #Lancet shows that the number of faux citations in scientific articles is on the rise, and #AI is likely to blame. @aniloza.bsky.social reports. www.statnews.com/2026/05/07/l...