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Dan Garisto

@dangaristo.bsky.social

5.2K followers 300 following 1K posts

science journalist | good physics, bad physics, and sometimes ugly physics Signal: dgaristo.72 Email: [email protected]

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 14h

Suspect we'll see more of this, given the funding situation.

Meg Schwamb @megschwamb.bsky.social · 15h

Sad to see the University of Washington Astronomy Department has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. astro.washington.edu/graduate-adm...

Graduate Admissions | Department of Astronomy | University of Washington

The Department of Astronomy has suspended graduate admissions for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. General Information for applying to UW Astronomy Graduate Program. Applications must be submitted using ...

astro.washington.edu

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 23h

hmm, not what I'm seeing on the website

BBC headline: "Physics Nobel prize awarded to three quantum physicists"

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 23h

Yes, but even then it's amid discussion of other applications for superconducting circuits. If the Committee wanted to highlight QC it with this prize they could have done so. That they went out of their way to avoid it is notable.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

QC is not ready for primetime. This is an interesting discovery on its own merits, with applications beyond QC, though QC is heavily implicated.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

It's a very careful prize. Celebrates 100th anniversary of QM without really supporting QC, though it is there in the wings.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

You are on this council meme but we do not grant you the rank of master, but with quantum computing

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

Interesting bit of sociology: They are really studiously avoiding any mention of quantum computing. First and only mention came in the last few words of the presentation by Johansson.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

In many ways, Nobel day is like SantaCon. www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9FU...

A screenshot of the live chat on Youtube.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

Missed some days last week, but I'll try to be consistent this week.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 29d

I've complained a couple times about the lack of physics community here but not done much about it! New commitment: I'll post one interesting arXiv paper a day until things are better.

(To the folks who follow me for non-physics science policy, don't worry; plenty more of that reporting to come.)

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

Day 16

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

Two neat planetary searches for dark matter that annihilates/decays:

1. Annihilation into photons would melt earth's core and heat it up. arxiv.org/abs/2505.24070
2. Annihilation into electrons excites hydrogen molecules, which then illuminate the atmosphere of gas giants.
arxiv.org/abs/2408.15318

Figure 1. A planet with aurorae (at the poles, magenta), and
a dark matter induced ultraviolet airglow (isotropic, green).

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

(This is not to endorse either as a place where DM is likely to be found, but the papers as a creative and reasonable exploration of parameter space, with accessible observables. Would be quite the thing if UV radiation data from Voyager 1's pass of the outer planets contributed to DM detection.)

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

Limits from airglow in gas giants are quite a bit better than heating the core (first order intuition: larger detector gives better results?).

FIG. 6. Our limit from the existence of a solid inner core
is shown in red. We also show other limits from Earth
heating (teal and blue) [41, 43, 61], star formation and stellar disruption (purple and burgundy, respectively) [50], and
airglow in gas giant atmospheres (dashed black and dashed
gray) [47, 48]

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 1d

Two neat planetary searches for dark matter that annihilates/decays:

1. Annihilation into photons would melt earth's core and heat it up. arxiv.org/abs/2505.24070
2. Annihilation into electrons excites hydrogen molecules, which then illuminate the atmosphere of gas giants.
arxiv.org/abs/2408.15318

Figure 1. A planet with aurorae (at the poles, magenta), and
a dark matter induced ultraviolet airglow (isotropic, green).

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 2d

Atomic energy. Maybe not messianic, specifically, but prophetic/apocalyptic--and far more justified to be so.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 3d

The Times provides an explanation for why Trump claimed a deal with Harvard was at hand: a phone call where no deal was made. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/u...

Mr. Schwarzman began the effort in early September. A pivotal conversation took place on Tuesday, when Mr. Schwarzman called Mr. Trump at the White House while on a trip to London, where he had traveled, in part, for a dinner with Prince William, the heir to the British throne.

While on the call, Mr. Schwarzman was placed on speakerphone in the Oval Office, and was drawn into a heated argument over the terms of the deal with Ms. Dhillon, who was in the room along with Ms. MacMahon, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, among others, according to three people briefed on the discussion.

Mr. Trump appeared delighted by the back-and-forth and laughed it off, the people said.

Despite the argument, the ploy to reach Mr. Trump worked, as almost immediately after speaking with Mr. Schwarzman, Mr. Trump announced publicly that a deal was close but said the final terms had to be ironed out.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 4d

Searing editorial from the EIC of The Lancet: "Those I can’t forgive are Bhattacharya and Makary, both physicians with experience of what constitutes evidence for causal explanations of disease. ... They both know that evidence linking vaccines to autism simply does not exist. What are they doing?"

Offline: Those one should not forgive

What was even more shocking than a US President telling pregnant women, “Don’t take Tylenol [paracetamol, acetaminophen], don’t take it…fight like hell not to take it”, was watching the Director of th...

www.thelancet.com

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

List here. Does seem to be mostly Dem states. Here's an extremely dashed-off visualization. www.latitudemedia.com/news/scoop-t...

Plot of various states with DOE terminations

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

Despite the project location nominally being a 'Democrat' state, many terminations have impacts in Republican communities.

But when I began looking up projects by their award number, I found that many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds. Take, for example, Moment Energy, a Delaware-based company that was awarded $20 million by the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains to build the first certified manufacturing facility in the United States producing battery energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. The plant was set to be built in Taylor, Texas, creating 50 construction jobs and 200 new permanent positions. After receiving the Energy Department’s stamp of approval, the company raised a $15 million Series A funding round in January to help finance the plant.

Also listed are a $10 million grant for Carbon Capture Inc, a California-based company, to conduct an engineering study for a direct air capture plant in Northwest Louisiana, and a $37 million grant to New York-based Urban Mining Industries to build one of its low-carbon concrete manufacturing plants in Florida. Linde, the global industrial gas company based in Connecticut, had $10 million to build hydrogen fueling stations for heavy duty trucks in La Porte, Texas, clawed back. BKV, a Colorado-based natural gas company set to study the transportation of captured CO2 by barge throughout the Gulf Coast region, also had its $2.5 million grant canceled.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

AAUP (in the Harvard case) has filed opposition for the DOJ request for a stay.

They note that: "the Department of Justice’s FY 2026 Contingency Plan recognizes that '[i]f a court denies such a request and orders a case to continue, the Government will comply with the court’s order'."

#147 in American Association of University Professors - Harvard Faculty Chapter v. United States Department Of Justice (D. Mass., 1:25-cv-10910) – CourtListener.com

AMICUS BRIEF filed by 12,041 Harvard Alumni in support of Plaintiff's Motion for Summary Judgment. (Milgroom, Lauren) (Entered: 06/09/2025)

www.courtlistener.com

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

Looks like exhibit 1 in that union lawsuit.

Trump post on Truth Social about cuts during the shutdown. I'll spare you the exact text.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

Although Vought is saying the DOE terminations are targeting Dem states, it's unclear if this is true. We don't yet know which grants were hit and the DOE statement says nothing about states being targeted.

n.b. Mass grant terminations at NSF, NIH, etc. did not exclude Republican-controlled states.

Trump targets states that voted for Harris in shutdown fight

The Office of Management and Budget is withholding billions in energy and infrastructure money in more than a dozen states that voted against Trump.

www.politico.com

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

viz.

Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from
@ENERGY
.

The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

"Following a thorough, individualized financial review" DOE is terminating 223 awards worth $7.5 billion.

Energy Department Announces Termination of 223 Projects, Saving Over $7.5 Billion

The U.S. Department of Energy today announced the termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects, resulting in a savings of approximately $7.56 billion dollars for American taxpayers.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d

Q: The CDC director is a political appointee. Does your experience show that the influence of politics in the director’s role is a foregone conclusion?

Monarez: It is an inherently political position, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be politically compromised.

Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 5d

EXCLUSIVE: In her first interview all year, Susan Monarez, CDC director for only 29 days, tells me why Trump/RFK fired her and where this is all headed.

The CDC director is an “inherently political position, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be politically compromised”, she tells @nature.com.

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired

“I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 6d

Day 15

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 6d

There've been a lot of overstated claims about immediate progress from applying AI to material science (most notoriously, the fabricated MIT paper).

Stuff like this—a large scale dataset for material synthesis—is the kind of unglamorous work that might really bear fruit someday.

Material Synthesis 2025 (MatSyn25) Dataset for 2D Materials

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have shown broad application prospects in fields such as energy, environment, and aerospace owing to their unique electrical, mechanical, thermal and other properties. W...