Douglas Natelson

It’s a bit too coarse for 11 year olds, but put “Shoresy” in your queue for later.

🧪⚛️ There are a couple of fun, conversational preprints this week on the arXiv - one about the mysterious connection between structural chirality and electron spin; and a condensed matter theory take on ways to think about quantum gravity. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/10/inte...

I have to know - what journal is this?

I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time….

I agree that it feels similar, but the adoption of AI tools already by a huge fraction of students may make this different. MOOCs always had limited buy-in, but the temptation tools use AI is very widespread.

I'm not asking a LLM to be a search engine; I'm asking why an image generator cannot make good images of something that surely appears many thousands of times in its training set.

ELI5 why this (benzene case) is different than: generative model is trained on thousands of cat pix, so it's reasonable for me to expect it not to create an image of a walrus when I ask it to make an image of a cat.

It surprises me how poorly generative AI is at chemical structures. Google image search for "benzene" finds thousands of correct structures. Why does its generative image AI tool fail to create something that matches that training set?

The question was rhetorical, btw. I'm sure at it's root this is about advertising revenue from the school/college-age demographic.

Google ad for using google lens to do your homework for you

🧪⚛️ This morning when I tried to search for a scientific result on my browser, it popped up this image. While it asks if I want "help" on my homework, it says paste in the problem and it (presumably google gemini) will just solve it for me. Google, why are you explicitly encouraging this??

If the speaker of the house can indefinitely refuse to swear in duly elected members, then we don’t have representative government anymore.

No, no, this time for sure we have entered an entirely new regime of equity valuation, so old notions of reasonable PE are no longer valid. Surely this time, unlike every past time someone says this.

Dilution refrigerator cold leak 🧪⚛️

We’re both professors, and you know that describes about 75% of our colleagues….

How worrisome is his internal polling if he’s spending this much money 5 months before the primary!

YouTube video by Reuters Federal funding cuts could 'cripple science,' says Nobel Prize winner | REUTERS

Good to see John standing up for science

youtube.com/watch?v=7Vcm...

Illuminating the Nano Frontier: From Atomic Antennas to Photocatalysis - American Chemical Society Douglas Natelson of Rice University will reveal how these atomic-scale emitters couple to engineered nanostructures, and why their strange physics could redefine how we harness light. Dongling Ma of I...

🧪⚛️ In case you’re interested, the ACS webinar from National Nanotechnology Day is available free here: www.acs.org/acs-webinars...

MIT to administration: No. Glad to see explicit refusal, rather than weasel words implying negotiations. orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Sure, but it would be different for certain. We don’t have an habilitation for example.

🧪⚛️ The proposal by the administration to restrict F1 student visas to four years and get rid of occupational practical training could devastate international doctoral studies in the US. PhDs almost always take 5-6 years. The claim that extensions for good students won't be an issue is...dubious.

🧪⚛️ The Rice Advanced Materials Institute 2026 postdoctoral fellowship competition is ramping up, and I'd be happy to talk about opportunities in my group. To get started, I'd need a CV. See here for details of this highly competitive opportunity: rami.rice.edu/rami-postdoc...

The Miller presidency's goal is to make fair elections in 2026 and 2028 impossible - Lawyers, Guns & Money Here’s a gift link to Thomas Edsall’s latest piece, which as usual is a collection of comments from various academic observers of current political events, interspersed with his commentary. Rather tha...

www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/the-...

Hey @jaketapper.bsky.social , do you have any concerns about the mental wellbeing of the president, and whether his advisers are feeding him wildly inaccurate information? Please look at this now, not in retrospect in a future book deal!

I think "macroscopic" in this context means that the system doing the tunneling involves very large numbers of particles (what is effectively tunneling in this problem is the phase difference btw the superconducting states on opposite sides of the junction). Try doi.org/10.1016/0003...

2025 Physics Nobel: Macroscopic quantum tunneling As announced this morning, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke , Michel Devoret , and John Martinis , for a ser...

🧪⚛️ The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics - a brief writeup about what is meant here by macroscopic quantum tunneling. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/10/2025...

ACS National Nanotechnology Day webinar, Thursday Oct 9 Time for a rare bit of explicit self-promotion on this blog.  This coming Thursday, October 9, as part of the American Chemical Society 's a...

🧪⚛️ Now with blog link goodness: ACS Webinar about plasmonics and "Illuminating the Nano Frontier" this coming Thursday. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/10/acs-...

Structural color = nanoscience all around you, all the time.

Lots of capital, too many people who all think they're the smartest one in the room, and complete credulity when faced with hype are three contributors.

Illuminating the Nano Frontier: From Atomic Antennas to Photocatalysis - American Chemical Society Douglas Natelson of Rice University will reveal how these atomic-scale emitters couple to engineered nanostructures, and why their strange physics could redefine how we harness light. Dongling Ma of I...

🧪⚛️ This coming Thursday October 9 I will be giving a talk as part of the @acs.org American Chemical Society's Nanotechnology Day events. All are welcome! www.acs.org/acs-webinars...