Omid Shayestehpour

Shipping emissions levy shelved as countries bow to US pressure Long-planned charge on greenhouse gas emissions postponed as Trump officials accused of intimidation tactics

Wow, this is disappointing. This meeting was supposed to be a final confirmation of a deal agreed six months ago, and it would have been the first serious step in making the slow-to-change shipping industry cleaner & greener & ready for the future. The delay only hurts everyone in the long run. 🌊

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

The Quantum Mechanics of Greenhouse Gases | Quanta Magazine Earth’s radiation can send some molecules spinning or vibrating, which is what makes them greenhouse gases. This infographic explains how relatively few heat-trapping molecules can have a planetary ef...

There's a really nice explanation (with clear graphics) in this @quantamagazine.bsky.social article of why most molecules in the atmosphere (oxygen & nitrogen) don't act as greenhouse gases, but a lot of the far less numerous ones (like carbon dioxide and methane) do. A great teaching aid :)

Quanta Series Marvels at 'The Achievement of Climate Science'

.@quantamagazine.bsky.social has devoted a whole issue to the fundamental science of climate. Can't wait to read this – we hear so much about climate change, but so little about the basic science.

Press: www.newswire.com/news/quanta-...

Issue: www.quantamagazine.org/how-we-came-...

The simple machine that visualised atomic orbitals In 1931, Harvey Elliott White developed a device that traced out the shapes of electron clouds by approximating solutions to the Schrödinger equation

In the early days of quantum chemistry, before we had computers to calculate the shapes of electron orbitals, one man invented a mechanical machine that simulated their shapes. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com
www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...

Closing in on half a million avoidable deaths. A historic legacy of indifference to human suffering.

The EU wants creepy AI to scan EVERY message you send. Even the encrypted ones. 😱

But guess who’s EXEMPT?

✅ Government
✅ Military
❌ YOU

Now, we need YOU to join the fight.

📞 Call your rep.
🔗 Find out more here: tuta.com/blog/chat-co...

Let’s save privacy in Europe. ✊

Weizen transcends time limits.

Well, that was a bad decision!

CERN Physicists Find Key Piece of the Matter-Antimatter Puzzle In a first, CERN physicists succeeded in observing matter-antimatter imbalance in baryons, fundamental particles that make up most of the observable universe.

New result from CERN (@lhcb.bsky.social) finds CP violation in the decay of baryons for the first time. Not unexpected - and not violation of baryon number itself! - but hopefully one more step in understanding why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
gizmodo.com/cern-physici...

There’s a nonzero chance you will die from a cancer that could have been curable because people who couldn’t pass 7th grade biology and are scared of things like “mRNA” and “riboflavin” and “walkable cities” decided to make their ignorance everybody else’s problem

How did human language emerge? A key step was combining sounds into words, shifting from analog to digital to overcome error thresholds. Fascinating paper with deep ties to Shannon’s coding theory. @sfiscience.bsky.social
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....

The Atlantic's chilling secret: A century of data reveals ocean current collapse A century-old mystery of a stubborn cold patch in the North Atlantic is finally being unraveled. A new study links this anomaly to a long-term weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulat...

A study confirms what we have long argued: the spectacular Atlantic 'cold blob' is the result of a slowing of the Atlantic overturning circulation #AMOC, which transports warm waters into that region. That's the only part of Earth that resisted #globalwarming. 🌊
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

At this stage, EU Foreign Ministers are about as relevant as a fart in a biscuit tin.

🚀 After two+ years of intense research, we’re thrilled to introduce Skala — a scalable deep learning density functional that hits chemical accuracy on atomization energies and matches hybrid-level accuracy on main group chemistry — all at the cost of semi-local DFT ⚛️🔥🧪🧬

Uncertainty in the face of serious danger is of course no reason to ignore it.
Passing that #AMOC tipping point by mid-century looks increasingly likely in light of recent studies.
And there’s also a more imminent, albeit a bit less detrimental risk:
bsky.app/profile/rahm...

Nobel Prize Laureate Kip Thorne speaking yesterday at the Albert Einstein Institute in Postdam, Germany:
"Donald Trump is destroying America's capacity for [leading science]. We are counting on Europe to take over here and elsewhere." ⚛️ 🧪

Lyapunov instability of a system of WCA disks. Initially, the two systems (blue and red) differ only by 10^-12 in the x-velocities of two particles. The exponential divergence of the trajectories, probed by the configuration space distance, is shown on the right.

YouTube video by vlogbrothers DOGE Is Not Cutting Government Spending

Is DOGE cutting the size of the federal government? No. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpNg...

Guess what? By learning from energies and forces, machine learning interatomic potentials can now infer electrical responses like polarization and BECs! This means we can perform MLIP MD simulations under electric fields!
arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05169

NeurIPS participation in Europe We seek to understand if there is interest in being able to attend NeurIPS in Europe, i.e. without travelling to San Diego, US. In the following, assume that it is possible to present accepted papers ...

Would you present your next NeurIPS paper in Europe instead of traveling to San Diego (US) if this was an option? Søren Hauberg (DTU) and I would love to hear the answer through this poll: (1/6)

The QCML dataset, Quantum chemistry reference data from 33.5M DFT and 14.7B semi-empirical calculations - Scientific Data Scientific Data - The QCML dataset, Quantum chemistry reference data from 33.5M DFT and 14.7B semi-empirical calculations

This is a remarkable paper! A gigantic dataset of highly precise, highly accurate first-principles data. This builds on years of work on @fhi-aims.bsky.social - enabling dispersion-corrected hybrid DFT that covers a huge swath of chemical space. Congrats to the authors!

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Sadly, this is not the first time she has quoted Musk and Thiel. I first heard this a while ago, and it was the point at which, after almost a year of eye-rolling at some of her content, I finally stopped following her.

U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World Here are some of the 5,800 contracts the Trump administration formally canceled this week in a wave of terse emails.

“People will die, but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/h...

Super fast review in J Phys Chem Lett @pubs.acs.org and check it out: doi.org/10.1021/acs....

Andrea killed this, also showing that the LODE long range descriptors are essential to capture a very basic scaling law of the polarizability of metallic nanoparticles with size.

Where are the style options?

🚀 First Bluesky Post! 🎉 VMD 2.0 Alpha is here! Released today at BPS 2025, this is the biggest update in 30 years—new UI, real-time ray tracing, fast surfaces, UHD & touchscreen support. Monthly updates coming in 2025! Try it now! #VMD #BPS2025 #MolecularVisualization
www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd...

I was just told that I have to remove “climate” from the title of an ongoing grant if I want to keep it. And publications from that grant cannot include “climate” and other forbidden words. I can’t believe I’m writing this from the United States of America. #AcademicSky

Mike Lee tweets "name a fascist dictator whose agenda entailed limit the size cost and power of government." Elon quote tweeted it with a laugh emoji and an arrow hitting a bullseye emoji.

Perhaps if he had not spent so much time playing video games so that he could be the #1 video game player he would know that the answer to this question is "All of them."

The champions of Free Speech are now forcing scientists to retract submitted publications until they can be checked for the appearance of “forbidden terms.”