David A Muller

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Dose-efficient cryo-electron microscopy for thick samples using tilt- corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy - Nature Methods Tilt-corrected bright-field scanning transmission electron microscopy offers enhanced cryogenic electron microscopy contrast and substantial improvement in dose efficiency for thick samples such as ba...

The published version is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The offical citation is
"For developing a new generation of electron detectors and reconstruction algorithms leading to the highest resolution electron microscope."

www.nae.edu/345149/NAENe...

or as a friend joked "the academy award goes to David for the best picture"

🧪 ⚛️ #NAE

Pretty sure they’d be negative

Yes, these would be the local conditions where the nucleation and growth occurs, so mainly in the clouds. Can also be modeled in a lab doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Saturation is 100% relative humidity. Supersaturation is the amount of water vapor in the air above 100% RH. This excess is not stable and will precipitate out - so here it basically measures how fast the snowdrops will form

Saturation is 100% relative humidity. Supersaturation is the amount of water vapor in the air above 100% RH. This excess is not stable and will precipitate out - so here it measures how much/how fast the snowdrops will form

Phase diagram for shapes of snowflakes as a function of temperature and water vapor content, showing when to expect fluffy snowflakes and dense crumbly bits of ice

Given the weather today, it’s time to repost my favorite phase diagram: Nakaya’s snow crystal morphology. We are towards the bottom right today. 🧪 ⚛️ #cryoEM

Faint purple and green aurora

And this is when Bluesky became the old twitter

Measurement of a Quantum of Solace

Yes, I think Hillier was hired by RCA to commercialize his electron microscope. I remember meeting him as a grad student when he came up to Cornell to visit John Silcox in the early 90’s

and @joachim123.bsky.social was very briefly a postdoc (one of 3 labs he worked in during his fellowship in the US)

That would be Ben Siegel. He joined Cornell in 1948, after having worked on the Manhattan project looking at diffusion membranes with TEM. James Hillier (then at RCA) donated an RCA TEM to Cornell, and found funding for student fellowships. Ken Downing did his PhD with Ben, as did Earl Kirkland

I’ll be teaching the Hall effect in solid state this Tuesday. Let’s see if I can sneak it in

Time to break it up when they dosey do

Three horse are out standing in their field at the Cornell horse farm, with strong fall colors on the trees behind them

While Cornell has field theorists, we also have practitioners

The scale of the room doesn’t come across that clearly in the picture. The cones on the wall are six feet deep to absorb long wavelength waves, and the entry in on the 2nd floor of the building with a full floor of empty space below the mesh you walk in on - not for those with a fear of heights!

Imaging hydrogen atoms with ptychography

Our microscope lab was in the same buliding as the anechoic chamber - in one of the old varechoic rooms. The acoustics folks showed us how to get things quiet.

Jim West's group taught us everything we know about building ultra-quiet rooms

Two wood ducks paddling together in Cayuga lake as the trees on the opposite shore are just starting to turn

Ducktober

Astro folks might want a turn?

#cryoEM 🧪⚛️ Lena’s paper on imaging thick biological sections with STEM is finally published! We started this work almost 10 years ago. After Lena passed in 2023, I spent much of my sabbatical working with Yue and Steve to wrap this up. Also learned a lot about TEM vs STEM dose efficiency

Some good news 🧪⚛️

Electron ptychography 3D reconstruction of SiC after 100 iterations, taking 1 hour. This is an animated depth section showing the depth slicing through a thin SiC film and its interface with an amorphous layer. A small hole drilled with a parked electron beam is visible in the top half of the image

We had 35 participants at our summer school a few weeks ago testing this on their laptops. Turns out a Macbook M4 pro is almost as fast as a 10GB slice of an A100. From the school, here is a 1-hour reconstruction. (Data took a few seconds to record at the school in a crowded scope room)

Our new zippy ptychography code, PtyRAD is now out in print. 3D Multislice reconstructions that used to take a day, now can be done in about an hour!

🧪⚛️ #ptycho
paper and install links:
academic.oup.com/mam/article/...

Good use case for comic sans

I don't know how many were posters. Overall probably a 10-15% drop. For cancelled invited talks it felt larger, or perhaps it was that my area had a lot of invited talks from China, reflecting the huge investments and activity there on this topic

I’m told we had about 200 cancelled talks due to visa problems or US funding cuts. We were told not to travel, but have travel funds that will vanish if we don’t, so the whole gang was here