So this happened in Oslo yesterday. Four articulated buses got stuck in a roundabout.
Karen Daniels
@karenedaniels.bsky.social
she's a purple-loving soft-matter physicist at NC State who dabbles in geophysics and engineering and textiles and food
These are *not* the same logs we inoculated last May: these oyster mushrooms simply volunteered in some of the remaining logs. This harvest (the 2nd one this month) was 4.5 pounds, which will make for a very nice Thanksgiving feast!
The organisers of the world's biggest planetary science conference are outlawing any DEI-related submissions because their lawyers are afraid they'll lose federal support. They're losing the support of the planetary science community fucking fast. www.science.org/content/arti...
‘This is censorship.’ Conference requires abstracts to comply with Trump anti-DEI order
NASA-funded planetary science institute previously scrubbed hundreds of records from its archive
science.org
Got my trusty Acme Thunderer at the ready.
The Assembly@theassemblync.bsky.social · 9mo agoBREAKING: U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents will be deployed in the Raleigh area on Tuesday, Democratic legislative sources briefed by Gov. Josh Stein’s office told The Assembly and INDY on Monday. www.theassemblync.com/news/politic...
CBP reported to be coming to Raleigh tomorrow. Here's the Siembra NC hotline. Please share widely.
Siembra NC@siembranc.bsky.social · 9mo agoOutside of Charlotte and elsewhere in the state, Siembra NC at (336) 543-0353. In the Asheville area, CIMA at (888) 839-2839.
“The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.”
U.S. Congress considers sweeping ban on Chinese collaborations
Researchers speak out against proposal that would bar funding for U.S. scientists working with Chinese partners or training Chinese students
science.org
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
📸 Image of the month: November 2025! This month we are delighted to feature “𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐲𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐬” by Maher et al. 🔗 doi.org/10.1103/l5hk...
Don’t miss out on the colloquium next Monday from 4-5pm in 2010 Biltmore Hall!! Dr. Vashan Wright, from University of California San Diego and Scripps Institute will discuss “Searching for Evidence of Water in the Martian Crust”. | More info: physics.sciences.ncsu.edu/event/physic...
In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.
Jonathan M. Katz@katz.theracket.news · 10mo agoNot a shitpost: #NoKings is feel-good performative activism for comfortable mostly upper and upper middle class white folks and that’s good, actually. Millions of people in the streets protesting a fascist regime is good. It is good for the normie baseline to be massive displays of public dissent.
On the subject of cello-ing ... if you've got kids who'd enjoying hearing Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, @chphilharmonia.bsky.social will be performing it tomorrow at 3pm in Hill Hall @ UNC. Your kids will also have a chance to conduct us playing Strauss's Radetzky March.
Dartmouth is OUT! Thank goodness... a friend at U of A and I have been playing "Who will be the last of the 9 standing?" and it's not gonna be us!
Solidarity!! Last week, Indiana University fired the director of student media & halted print on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Yesterday, Purdue’s student paper printed the banned edition & drove two hours to deliver it. Incredible www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...
Purdue student journalists deliver special 'solidarity' newspaper to IU Bloomington campus
The special edition blasted across town features columns from IDS and Exponent editors, alongside QR codes to support both student papers.
heraldtimesonline.com
Carrboro, NC has a sizeable fraction of its population talking about #NoKings today, high energy that I hope translates to action.
For those who are new to or already use LAMMPS… with reference to a new GUI arxiv.org/abs/2503.14020
A Set of Tutorials for the LAMMPS Simulation Package
The availability of open-source molecular simulation software packages allows scientists and engineers to focus on running and analyzing simulations without having to write, parallelize, and validate ...
arxiv.org
"Trump directives have undermined a 75-year history of independence and threaten the National Science Foundation's vaunted track record for excellence" www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪 🌊 ⚒️
Under Trump, NSF faces worst crisis in its 75-year history
Political directives have undermined agency's independence and record of supporting the best basic research
science.org
This is a rather unfortunate change that seems to have come as a surprise to just about everyone. FYI for students and PIs who were looking to apply for the NSF GRFP
Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 11mo agoAs others have pointed out, the fellowship is now available only to 1st year grad students. (Left is last year, right is this year)
🧪The NSF has made changes to the GRFP solicitation and eligibility TODAY that may change your eligibility! PLEASE read through the solicitation if you were planning to apply and speak to your mentors about the merits of applying: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)
nsf.gov
Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment. The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/
An Open Letter to U.S. STEM Leadership on the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program
An Open Letter to U.S. STEM Leadership on the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program
jasonjwilliamsny.github.io
The white supremacist conceit that everyone in antiquity was living under some kind of global jim crow segregation is just complete bullshit news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
Pure bloodlines? Ancestral homelands? DNA science says no. — Harvard Gazette
Geneticist explains recent analyses made possible by tech advances show human history to be one of mixing, movement, displacement.
news.harvard.edu
When stressed, amorphous materials undergo plastic transformations aided by low-frequency vibrational modes. Now researchers have found the same association in an entirely separate class of materials: active matter.
Active Matter Breaks like an Amorphous Plastic
Shearing a dusty plasma with a laser shows how vibrational modes lead to weak points in an amorphous active system.
physics.aps.org
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:
How a Harvard maverick forever changed our concept of the stars
At just 25, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin applied quantum physics to a treasure trove of astronomical observations to show that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium.
sciencenews.org
Sarah Tuttle@niais.bsky.social · 11mo agoWait a minute. Why aren't we celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's dissertation.
In 2024, a team of science writers at AAAS ran a long-term experiment to see if ChatGPT could cut it writing news items about scientific research. Here's what they learned. Worth a look. 🧪 #scicomm www.science.org/content/blog...
Can ChatGPT help science writers?
science.org
Excited to share our new preprint on the discharge of granular materials from a silo. Led by @ramsudhirsharma.bsky.social , we went after a simple question: What is the flow rate through the opening? The answer turns out to be "simple" and quite general. See more here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14415 [1/4]
