Abcroll

A fire flickers in a simple fireplace set in white granet at the end of a coffee table surrounded by chairs.

Appropriate for this evening in Blacksburg.

Architectural swarms for responsive façades and creative expression Architectural swarms fuse swarm robotics and architectural façades to create spaces that adapt to people and the environment.

Thrilled to see our work, titled "Architectural swarms for responsive façades and creative expression", published in Science Robotics @science.org !

Huge congrats to Merihan Alhafnawi, who led this project.

Read more: science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.ady7233

Map of NATO countries by number of those who died in Afghanistan answering America's call to aid following the 9/11 attacks. 90 French soldiers died out of 23,200 who fought in defense of the United States.

Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Iryna Kaluyzhna, Ukrainian beauty series Red Bird, 2019

This artwork is a part of the Art of Ukraine fundraiser. All proceeds will go towards supporting Ukrainian efforts 🇺🇦

Buy now

Impact and Energy Absorption with Sticky Crumpled Matter This study shows experiments and simulations of the low-speed impact of a solid sphere into a sticky crumpled sheet. The manuscript details how the added energy absorption mechanism, due to the inter...

Great to see Wathsala Jayawardana's last thesis work published. She was looking at how thin crumpled sheets absorb energy during low speed impact. Fun to think about why we like crumpled paper when we have to move!

doi.org/10.1002/adem...

A knee in blue jeans and a beer in a green bottle are seen in the foreground. A small fire burns in a fireplace. Beyond is a pile of wood on the edge of a fenced garden. On the fence hangs brown decaying vines. In the background you see some wood fences.

Autumn

APS Meeting abstracts for Denver deadline was extend to October 31! Consider submitting to the "Engineered Biopolymers and Living Materials" focus session organized by Melody Morris and me. We invite abstracts covering research using polymer physics for engineered biopolymers and living materials.

Beware giving this site your unpublished data Users noticed the website had fake testimonials and a domain name registered seemingly overnight.

The dark truth behind FormatMyPaper.com

All Royal Society journal content is freely available this week for open access week @royalsocietypublishing.org

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...