#PhysicsJournalClub
"Direct observation of colloidal quasicrystallization"
by Y. Gao, B. Sprinkle, DWM Marr, and N. Wu

Nat. Phys. (2025)
doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-02859-z

Quasicrystals are weird. When you solidify something it tends to get into a high-order state: a crystal. If you cool it down too fast so it doesn't manage to make a monocrystal it will form a polycrystalline state or, worse case scenario, something completely amorphous like a glass.
But quasicrystals are weird. They are ordered structures that lack a periodicity and making them is not easy.
In this paper the authors show how paramagnetic colloidal microspheres (i.e. big enough to be clearly visible under a microscope) subject to an electromagnetic field spontaneously arrange themselves into a quasicrystal.

This is 100% not my field, but the ability to create quasicrystals on demand looks so cool!

#Physics #Chemistry #Quasicrystal

"The story they told, on the whole, was that they backed Trump because they believed he was the best vehicle for winning the culture war."
Can we please have back the evil guys who would do anything for money instead of this bunch of idiots who will happily destroy the world to "own the libs"?
🤦‍♂️
https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/407623/trump-tariff-culture-war-hanania-khan-ferguson

Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen takes more energy than it theoretically should, which is partly why it's not used on a large scale to generate hydrogen fuel.

Now scientists know why – and it's all down to a feat of nanoscale gymnastics.

https://physicsworld.com/a/splitting-water-takes-more-energy-than-theory-predicts-and-now-scientists-know-why/

#physics #chemistry #science

The fact that the YouTube "continue watching" section is full of videos I never started watching is baffling. I assume words have no meaning anymore.

Not having anything that can run #MonsterHunterWilds I guess I will start a new savefile of #MonsterHunterWorld. Time to learn the lance!

Now there's a protest sign you don't see often.

Well, it looks like I managed to lock myself out of my own #Wikipedia account 🤷‍♂️

From an engineering standpoint, TVs are a solved problem. We know how to make very good and reliable ones and we have known for a long time.
But the problem of selling good and reliable TVs (mine is well over 10 years old and still works perfectly) is that you only sell them once, so you don't make a lot of money on them. The way out of this conundrum is #enshittification. You make worse TVs, and you make the owner pay forever instead of paying a one-off. You force the TV to be forever online, use it steal the owner's data and feed them a neverending stream of bad adverts.

We truly live in the stupidiest timeline.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/cheap-tvs-incessant-advertising-reaches-troubling-new-lows/

🧵 La guerra in Ucraina e l’articolo di Kuperman: quando la disinformazione si maschera da analisi https://www.valigiablu.it/disinformazione-propaganda-guerra-russia-ucraina/ via @valigiablu

In the first millennium CE, mathematicians performed the then-complex calculations needed to compute the date of Easter. Of course, with our modern digital calendars, this task is now performed automatically by computers; and the older calendrical algorithms are now mostly of historical interest only.

In the Age of Sail, mathematicians were tasked to perform the intricate spherical trigonometry calculations needed to create accurate navigational tables. Again, with modern technology such as GPS, such tasks have been fully automated, although spherical trigonometry classes are still offered at naval academies, and ships still carry printed navigational tables in case of emergency instrument failures.

During the Second World War, mathematicians, human computers, and early mechanical computers were enlisted to solve a variety of problems for military applications such as ballistics, cryptanalysis, and operations research. With the advent of scientific computing, the computational aspect of these tasks has been almost completely delegated to modern electronic computers, although human mathematicians and programmers are still required to direct these machines. (1/3)

I have been using #Inkscape for over 15 years, and I have told uncountable people to use it. But in recent years it somehow get worse with every new version 🤬

Please respect Ms Orbán's new gender identity and refrain from addressing her with her deadname.

Reminder: Court rulings are not "democratic" in the same sense as your doctor's diagnosis of that weird mole on your skin is not democratic. It is simply not something subject to vote.

like broo i get not liking the AI hype and blackbox algorithms and all that but trust me Fuzzy Logics aint new and they've been on your dishwasher for over a decade now

Didn't have any proper equipment, so I improvised a pinhole camera making a small hole in a piece of paper with a toothpick and projecting the image of the (partial) eclipse on a second piece of paper.
Rudimentary, but it works.

#Eclipse #Optics

Holy shit.

Just wow, wow, holy shit:

Completely rewriting a multi-million line COBOL codebase that has life-or-death consequences for real people in the space of a few months, using gen AI?

I’ve been writing software for 40-some years, and I have to say: this may be, without exaggeration, the stupidest software-related idea I’ve ever heard from leadership.

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/

@cstross
I can’t believe these VC funded idiots are creating an enormous corporate Torment Nexus!

We will fight this in the only way we know how…

Introducing OpenTormentNexus, the open source alternative for all your Torment Nexus needs.

Receiving an email so weird that it prompted me to install an antivirus on Linux just to scan that particular email. Check.

#PhysicsJournalClub
F. Diacu "The Solution of the n-body Problem"
Math. Intell. 18, 66 (1996)
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03024313

In Physics we are often guilty of cutting corners when it comes to Mathematics (to be honest, we are in very good company). One example is in Chaos theory, where statements like "the 3-body problem is unsolvable" are common but misleading.
The author of this paper actually complains about his fellow Mathematicians colleagues (not about Physicists), and then explain in a very understandable way how the sentence "the 3-body problem is unsolvable" must be understood (spoiler: it just means we have fewer conserved quantities than degrees of freedom), how a full solution to the n-body problem in terms of an infinite but convergent series had been found already in 1991 by a Chinese student, and how this solution (albeit correct) is completely useless for any practical purpose, as it converges horribly slow.

An easy and very interesting reading if you know just a little bit about classical mechanics.

#Chaos #3bodyProblem

Well yeah, indirectly....