Happy 120th birthday, special relativity!

Albert Einstein introduced special relativity in the paper "On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies," published in Annalen der Physik #OTD in 1905. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭

Manuscript: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
English: www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einst...

Finding good information is hard.

A study done on 2.5M pregnant women who took Tylenol during pregnancy showed no adverse fetal effects.

However, pregnant women with untreated fevers had increased fetal risk of:

Neural tube,
Heart,
And abdominal wall,

Defects.

Plus cleft palate and more!

With the viral season upon us, the debate over vaccination will flare up again.

It remains strange to watch: the advantages are many, well established, and increasingly better supported by evidence, including benefits against non-communicable diseases.
1/10

On a side note: Whilst writing my data analysis lecture this week, I discovered that the spurious correlations on tylervigen.com now come with AI explanations!

They're brilliant: Here's the explanation why GMO corn growth in North Dakota correlates with Google Searches about headaches.

RFK Jr. rolled out that old chestnut again about how healthy Americans were in the 60’s, so here’s a fact check.

In 1965:

-42% of American adults smoked; it’s 11% now.

-The infant morality rate was 24.7/1000; it’s 5.6/1000 now.

-Overall life expectancy was 70 years; it's about 77 years now.

I love Christine's writing

"Those of us who have been lucky enough to live in countries that have had several decades without a war can cling on to our fantasy that we are in some way in charge of our destiny, that peace is our right and the norm."

"Peace is not the norm." I think we forget that.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

RIP Tom Lehrer.

The LIGO Virgo KAGRA study of #GW231123 was posted to the arXiv today, and is free to read

arxiv.org/abs/2507.08219

Data are available from the GW Open Science Center

gwosc.org/eventapi/htm...

#OpenScience #OpenData ☄️

If you did a PhD (in the UK) funded by #EPSRC and are looking for a postdoc position, we (meaning @exeter.ac.uk, not me specifically) have 3 open Postdoctoral Research Fellowships.
All info in the link below.
#AcademicJobs #Physics

"a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," Sagan

2 postdoctoral researcher positions are available in the Structured Light Group in Exeter (UK). Project focussed on quantum & classical light control through dynamic complex scattering media (see concept picture). Details are below. Drop me an email if you'd like to know more! 🧪💡

John Von Neumann "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, with five I can make him wiggle his trunk"

#PhysicsFactlet
Wavefront Shaping is a family of techniques used to control light (or, more generally, a wave) propagating through a scattering medium.

A 🧵
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🧪⚛️🎢💡

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology created a waveguide that can amplify near-infrared light 10 times more than current devices, which could improve #telecommunications and boost medical #imaging.

Read the OPN story: bit.ly/44pXBX5 💡🧪⚛️

Put up by Katy Brand today - this is the story over and over again

Enough internet. Time to cheer myself up by writing about how dark energy will eventually destroy the universe.

Did you know that science labs work like small business entrepreneurs? Faculty hired on strength of ideas, get some startup $ to last 3-4 yrs. After that is grants- grants pay all our + our trainees’ salaries + scientific work. Funding in this country is frozen. That means scientific work stops

We will continue with data collection for a recently funded grant that came from a private foundation. There will be no pursuit of new ideas for now

Our operational shutdown means we are not doing what we normally do bc we don’t have the stability to function. We won’t be testing new chemo drugs. We won’t be developing new biomaterials. We won’t be following new leads. We won’t be doing what scientists do: discovery. No NIH = no discovery

“essentially closing research operations in my group” = no new experiments save 1 recently funded grant. Spending freezes limit our ability to order supplies and reagents. We need to focus remaining funding on maintaining personnel + analyzing existing samples w whatever’s left in the cabinet

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

A lot of people who got the measles as children died or suffered lifelong disabilities as a result. The measles vaccine was a godsend to worldwide public health, and it’s an absolute scandal that this lethally ignorant dolt has any power over public health.