C.-A. Palma

Informationsreise zu herausragenden Forschungseinrichtungen in China im Herbst 2026

Interessiert an einer Informationsreise nach China? Die DFG und das Chinesisch-Deutsche Zentrum für Wissenschaftsförderung in Peking fördern einen Aufenthalt für Postdocs aus den Bereichen Physik und Chemie im Herbst 2026, u.a. mit Universitäts-Besuchen und Konferenzteilnahmen. Mehr: sohub.io/6y5x

Assuming sophisticated PhD theses, it is surprising to learn that 86% are (still) able to cope with incompetence. My wishful thinking is that those who remain are serving as beacons, keeping our/the world’s boats afloat while we all weather this storm.

„Verantwortung ist jedoch nicht dasselbe wie Schuld. Diejenigen, die sich nicht schuldig fühlen nicht schuld sind, können sich gleichwohl nicht den Konsequenzen einer Politik entziehen, der sich ein allzu großer Teil desselben Volkes bereitwillig angeschlossen hatte“ WB
#HessenData #Gotham #VeRA

Export Control and Academia Professors, scientists and scientific staff at universities and non-university research institutions as well as representatives of these organizations working in the field of “export control and resea...

Each org is responsible for implementing trade law according to DE export law. DE just “supports you in implementing foreign trade law” www.bafa.de/EN/Foreign_T... Working with BAFA/Foreign Off. toward ~asylum fellowships might be poss. & challenging, benefiting from political/social media leverage

Great sentiment, but challenging to implement: US export policies prevent researchers from working in the US and DE, as DE implements US export policies. Eg DE Foreign Office may not issue visas to researchers with ties to countries that are flagged by US export control, eg Iran, China, India, etc

Universality in quantum critical flow of charge and heat in ultraclean graphene - Nature Physics Critical behaviour is expected in graphene when the carrier density is tuned to the Dirac point. Now, universality associated with the critical point is observed in electronic and thermal transport.

AI slop is terribly jarring—yet in this case it simply seems to rephrase the abstract in www.nature.com/articles/s41... or am I missing something?Theres much effort in routinely correcting paper misconceptions so maybe is OK to let anything pass which tries to engage an audience/not factually wrong?

Could it be that the expectation that societies and govs will make difficult decisions on our behalf should change? Would it make sense at this point, to take difficult decisions upon ourselves, such as stop publishing in the Royal Society and watching FIFA?

Or, forgive the double-pun, maybe it’s nontrivial (product space) after all 😆

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

+Professionalizing dissident scientist networks within scientific self-governance is essential for legitimizing similar career paths, as such last-resort has often been assumed to reflect unprofessional conduct rather than raise concerns re. institutionalized authoritarianism. Fingers crossed, U.S.

*apparent height in a scanning tennisball microscope #STM #SurfaceScience #CondensedMatter xkcd!

How do the ultra-wealthy restock during the programmed recession? How do they acquire liquidity in the context of bailouts? The problem is that not everyone sees it, and we need to be well informedwhen the bailouts begin.

💯—Except that Research is not an Industry, is a resource. Without regulation, Journals do what anyone would do with a free resource: Profit. It’s time to stop holding journals/editors accountable whose jobs are to be profitable, and begin making policy makers accountable—whose jobs are to regulate.

“Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices”

“Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation.”

Germany updates US travel advice after citizens detained Germany updated its travel advisory for the United States to emphasise that a visa or entry waiver does not guarantee entry for its citizens after several Germans were detained at the border recently, a foreign ministry spokesperson said.

Great work, everyone www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Etats-Unis : un chercheur français refoulé pour avoir exprimé « une opinion personnelle sur la politique menée par l’administration Trump » Le ministre de la recherche a dit sa « préoccupation », mercredi, après cette décision des autorités américaines. Le chercheur du CNRS aurait subi un contrôle aléatoire à son arrivée, avant que son or...

French researcher, going to a conference in Houston, was forbidden entry to US; his work and personal electronics were both confiscated.

Why? Because a “random search” of his cell phone revealed a negative personal opinion on Trump and the Trump administration. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

The corresp. 1969 piece is a brilliant account of experimental physics & highlights tenacity as a key quality for scientists iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... (Though I ignore whether being laughed at by teachers is a rite of passage for all scientists or just those in sci. underdev. environments)

Bis zu 700 Spitzenwissenschaftler könnten auf eine dringende außerplanmäßige Finanzierung für ihre Forschungsprojekte in Deutschland angewiesen sein fyi @BMBF_bund @oezdemir.de

Source: Nature Index 2022. Data analysis: Catherine Cheung; infographic: Catherine Armitage, Bec Crew & Tanner Maxwell

Curious how this graph will look like in 4 years www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@johncarlosbaez arguments are specially relevant this week. One cannot help but wonder if the whole US Tech and @bluesky will eventually share a scorched-earth mindset to progress. Any tips on how to use @Mastodon efficiently, starting with how to follow across servers?

My heartfelt condolences to family and friends

Truly heartbroken by the passing of my dear colleague, Rudi. For a time, it felt like we were the only two intl. physics faculty in Beijing, and I am at a complete loss…

Thank you MK, for being an inspiring mentor and supporting my applications. I would've loved to have more opportunities to discuss—alas, time goes by unjustly fast. My condolences, dear Marci and family.

What about experiments? We haven't been able to fund experiments in this direction, so progress is slow, but we hope to catch a break! If you liked this story stayed tuned for more spin-chain logic arxiv.org/abs/2407.20996 & (super)conductivity www.nature.com/articles/s41... stories next year! 7/7

Geometric phase and holonomy in the space of 2-by-2 symmetric operators We present a non-trivial metric tensor field on the space of 2-by-2 real-valued, symmetric matrices whose Levi-Civita connection renders frames of eigenvectors parallel. This results in fundamental re...

Bc single ligands in axial-coordination lattices can be manipulated by STM to pattern circuitry, our next step is to simulate fully-atomistic phonon circuitry together with the thermal memory and a logic gate. Logic operations will be holonomic arxiv.org/abs/2411.15038, a story for another time...