Abcroll

Just popped into the Royal Institution for a coffee, to discover they have a lovely display on benzene to mark the bicentenary of Faraday's discovery of it. Here are his notes, his paper, and one of his first samples. Glorious.

Polymers Tame Turbulent Flow New experiments show that adding polymers to a fluid can reduce energy dissipation by suppressing small eddies.

Adding polymers to a liquid speeds up its flow through a pipe by reducing the frictional drag at the pipe’s inner surface. Now researchers have found that the polymers also suppress eddy formation and thus reduce the loss of flow energy to heat.

Ha ha, jokes on them! As a scientist, I don't own the rights to anything I publish!

Well don't I feel stupid

Edmonton mountain bike community grieves tragic loss of Dr. Darren Markland - Canadian Cycling Magazine Respected cycling and healthcare advocate died riding in Nordegg

RIP. He was a good man.

cyclingmagazine.ca/mtb/edmonton...

@drdagly.bsky.social

#Alberta #Edmonton

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

A 2024 study published in JAMA involving 2.4 million children in Sweden, used sibling-control analysis. When comparing siblings—one exposed to #acetaminophen in utero & one not—the researchers found NO increased risk of #autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability.

Do they go to spatula city?

Sand Patterns on the receding tide.
County Clare, Ireland.

Origins of the Ising model In 1925, Ernest Ising published a paper analyzing a model proposed in 1920 by Wilhelm Lenz for ferromagnetism. The model is composed of constituent units that take only two states and interact only wh...

A nice historical look at the origins of the Ising model.
www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.00632

No one has been able to invent a technological innovation that is better for learning than simply reading books and getting together in small groups to talk about them.

The Faculty of Arts at UWaterloo is pushing through a 'reorganization' plan that will - administratively, at least - collapse a number of its departments into 'schools'. Problems abound with both the process and the plan. A long thread... 1/n

Photo of a chaotic garden. Foreground shows a rusty chicken wire fence, behind which are several colourful flowers. On the flowers, a vine spreads and behind everything is a wood fence. To the right of the image, tall sunflowers reach up. A monarch butterfly screeches past the flowers.

Action shot!

Okay. I've got admin bits to sort today. So to distract me while i wait on things to run at various points:

For every few likes this get, a fact about university websites and how gen z and below interact with information, as proven by testing/data.

(Most of which unis aren't handling well yet)

Flower-like origami patterns could inspire folding spacecraft Engineers have developed a class of origami structures that unfold in one smooth motion to create flower-like shapes, which could have applications in space

These gorgeous origami shapes - an entirely new family called bloom patterns - could be used to design new, more effective space telescopes or solar panels.

www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

A rather cold wave breaks on a pebble shore, stirring up the red sand.

View of multicoloured pebbles in foreground, with a wave breaking in the background. Sky is cloudy.

A look down a pebbley beach, with waves crashing into the shore. A peninsula covered in confers juts out in the distance. Sky is filled with clouds.

Hard to beat the north shore.

A view through a boreal forest, across a bay to a small mountain known as the sleeping giant.

A nice day on the bluffs.

I love this. I would add not wasting millions on software, consultants, and climate surveys when those dollars can be spent directly supporting faculty and students.

Influence of Environmental Surroundings on the Mechanical Properties of Ultrathin Polymer Membranes We review the impact of temperature, pressure, and liquid/gas environments on the mechanical properties of ultrathin polymer films. Understanding how they influence the mechanical properties will be ....

This spring I challenged myself to write my first perspective article about ultrathin polymer film mechanics. I had a lot of fun writing it. I think there are some interesting questions that are still out there. doi.org/10.1002/pol....

A screenshot of my spacetime diagram web app, showing diagrams describing the same events and motion in two different inertial frames ("Home Frame" on the left and "Other Frame" on the right). Each diagram shows a "graph paper" grid with the vertical axis labeled "t" or "t prime" and the horizontal axis labeled "x" or "x prime". Faintly in the background of each is a tilted diamond-like grid showing the coordinate grid of the other frame. Each diagram shows three lines going up the page (toward higher t), but they go straight up in the Home Frame and up along parallel diagonal lines in the Other Frame. There are also 45° lines going upward from a shining event marked at the origin. A yellow horizontal line is drawn across each diagram at the same height somewhere in the middle. Below each diagram is a flat panel showing the locations of each object at the time corresponding to the height of the yellow line: two firecrackers, a person with green hair in the middle, and a couple of blue dots between them. In the scenario below the Other Frame diagram, the firecracker on the left has just exploded.

1/? Ever wanted to understand Einstein's theory of special relativity? I'm feeling remarkably proud of a web page/app I've written that introduces the idea using "spacetime diagrams" (and lets you play with them yourself).
steuard.github.io/spacetime/in...
🎢🧪 #ITeachPhysics

Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign Several researchers who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences’ plans to revive extinct animals say they have been targeted by online articles trying to discredit them

Thanks @newscientist.com for shining a light on the smear campaign against @toriherridge.bsky.social, @devoevomed.bsky.social, @flintdibble.bsky.social & myself just for fulfilling our critic & conscience role to provide expert commentary about de-extinction www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

I vote De Goose, but daughters are both for Gooseteau.

It happened again yesterday: I informed someone they were Canadian who didn’t know they were Canadian. This has now happened about 10 times for me. Americans, take note: if your parent was a Canadian citizen born in Canada, you are a Canadian citizen. And there’s a law working its way through…

The cover picture depicts a firefly (BSJ-04-146) luring a moth (FAK) to the carnivorous plant (proteasome) and was designed by DrawImpacts.

We turn complex science into striking visuals, like this cover we illustrated for Dr. @behnamnabet.bsky.social et al. on FAK inhibitors and PROTACs. 🦋
👩‍🔬 Know someone doing great research? Tag them, we’d love to help share their story. #JournalCovers #DrawImpacts #SciArt

A tv in a French hotel shows riders in the the Tour de France.

Once again, I am close but not close enough...

Many people enjoy themselves around posters. A band plays a Green Day cover in the distance.

ESMC2025 even has Green Day, why would you not come to Lyon?

Ticks on the rise: Strategies for preventing disease | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Time

I will be moderating a a discussion with several experts this afternoon on ticks. We will be talking about the rise of these pests and the dangers they pose. It's free and online. Love to see you there! hsph.harvard.edu/events/ticks...

Building a monostable tetrahedron In this short note we describe what we believe to be the first working model of a monostable tetrahedron.

This is fun. Do there exist tetrahedral objects that will only rest stably on one of its four faces, tumbling spontaneously under gravity until it rests on this one? These authors say they have found such an object.
www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.19244

🧪🔭 It's conference season, so if you're giving a talk this summer: please check out the "Colour Blindness Simulator" – an accessibility tool where you can upload slides & ensure they will be visually legible to people with different types of colour blindness. It's a quick act but it really helps! ⬇️

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

Bonnne chance!