Antoine İşlegen-Wojdyla

Two scientists looking at synchrotron instrumentation

Random shot from the @als.lbl.gov where we’re installing a novel photon energy sensor on beamline 6.3.1 while the sun is setting over @berkeleylab.lbl.gov

Inside the Grace cathedral in San Francisco during the Aura show

beatitudes

A photo of a woman in the lab, wearing glasses with dark hair.

Jelena Vučković helped drive the photonic chip revolution by integrating light and electronics on a single platform! 💡

Learn more about her work in #PhotonicsFocus: https://bit.ly/4aBzQhu

The main topics where AI should accelerate research and where the US dept of energy wants to direct resources — worth a read!

www.energy.gov/documents/ge...

Dont forget today 2/10 at 11am PT Maher Alghalayini will present two demonstrations of AI-driven robotic platforms using Bayesian methods to learn how parameters affect material quality. Get the zoom link and more: https://bit.ly/4qvwLFn

Your prayer is important to us patreon.com/berkeleymews

Spring in #sausalito

Steady Nerves, by Chaos Fiction 8 track album

Thanks to the always wonderful @kalxberkeley.bsky.social I discovered Teargas hockey from the excellent SF indie band Chaos Fiction
chaosfiction.bandcamp.com/album/steady...

Interesting talk by Eno Reyes on software development agents at the AI Agent workshop at @berkeleylab.lbl.gov with an emphasis on the importance of environment (ontology of data etc.) and the critical importance of evaluation loops in coding tools

indico.physics.lbl.gov/event/3209/o...

This piece has brilliant infographics but terrible news to convey

Display from a laser casing manufacturer

Structured lasers, showing a grid, a bullseye and lines of various colors

3D printed representation of the first zernike polynomials, used in optical aberration theory

Fiber lasers modules on display

Every year the optical candy shop opens during @spie.org #photonicswest in San Francisco
🍭 😍 🌉🌉
Always a great occasion to meet old friends and let new generations of scientists shine and salivate before the display of optical technology — which often runs our daily lives in the background

Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95 ALEXANDRIA, VA — Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She passed away

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

Show a television show that raised you

America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives. Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago. It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”. It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing. The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States.

Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all. As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.

I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Hundreds of mega yacht anchoring in St barts harbor on Dec 31, 2025 seen from St Martin

There are just so many magayachts the coastline of the #StBarts seems double

Picture of St Barts from St Martin’s Orient Bay on Dec 31, 2025

Map of vessels in st barts on Dec 31, 2025

Spending the holidays on the island of St Martin where I grew up— I see trillions of dollars through the window, ready to partake on New Year’s Eve
#taxtherich

I’m so glad northern california has so many great choices for gins. #botanicalifornia

This is a metaphor for the tech industry overall circa 2025

Berkeley Science Review A student-run publication on all things science.

If you're in Berkeley, you can find free physical copies around campus. You can read this and all issues of @berkeleyscirev.bsky.social online at berkeleysciencereview.com

Petering out the dream
@alexis-madrigal.bsky.social

www.nrel.gov/news/detail/...

My reward for listening to Gainsbourg

Satellite megaconstellations will threaten space-based astronomy - Nature Rapidly growing satellite constellations pose a substantial threat to astronomical observations, with projections indicating that future space telescopes will have more than 96% of their exposures aff...

You can access the article for free here:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(Sorry for the previous link which is broken!)

UC Berkeley leaps ahead in decoding whale talk with AI The research shows overlap between whale calls and human language.

Good vibes only

www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

anti-pitch-bot

WOMEN IN PHYSICS DAY! In honor of the pioneering women in physics who broke down barriers to do what they love, we celebrate Women in Physics Day on November 7th, the birthdate of both Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. Marie Skrodowska-Curie (1867-1934) Radioactivity pioneer, two-time Nobel laureate A giant of science, Marie Sktodowska-Curie conducted pioneering research on radioactivity, a term she coined. She discovered two elements, founded two medical research centres, won two Nobels, and invented mobile X-ray units (dubbed petites Curies), saving countless lives in World War Lise Meitner (1878-1968) Nuclear physicist When Lise Meitner was a teen, Austria restricted female higher education. She pursued physics anyway, and 25 years later became the first woman in Germany to hold a professorship in physics. She helped discover nuclear fission, but was contentiously not awarded the 1944 Nobel alongside collaborator Otto Hahn. NOVEMBER 7TH

Dear Physicists and Physics fans,

I would like to encourage you to celebrate #WomenInPhysics Day this Friday, November 7th.

Why November 7th? Because it is the birthday of two of the most impactful women physicists of the 1900's: Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 👩‍🔬

YouTube video by PBS NewsHour Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: 'The science world is ending'

Well reported story on the PBS News Hour about science cuts and the ongoing and potential brain drain.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLvO...

Thanks to Terrance Tao and other scientists at various career stages for having the courage to speak out.

Watch and share!

1/7

Screenshot of the Zoom software update for the 6.6.6 version, a few days before October 31st, 2025

For Halloween, Zoom is even more cursed

Photo of a message above a pedestrian highway overpass: vote on prop 50 — mess with Texas

As seen in San Rafael—

Ad on a wall in San Francisco with the writing: Our Al can automate all your work. No more Mondays, bosses, or paychecks! Hope you've got savings

Stumbled on that ad in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow.

It seems to be dark humor, but it’s nasty
Replacement.ai

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.