The Blackett Lab family are getting Black undergraduate physics students together at The University of Manchester on Thurs 12th September. It will be a day to connect, inspire and amplify the voices of Black physicists across the UK. ☄️ Register here: tinyurl.com/ybvxes3e The Blackett Lab Family

I guess he's going to have to revisit his priors.

NEW: I wrote about a problem that's plaguing the artificial intelligence field: AI research is clearly being peer-reviewed by AI chatbots, no one really knows what to do about it ... ... and unfortunately, AI scientists have only themselves to blame. chronicle.com/article/ai-sci…

Want to know what makes the world's most precise timekeeping device (literally) tick? Physics World student contributor Ali Lezeik (علي يوسف) has you covered in this brilliant piece about a new optical lattice clock developed JILA and CU Boulder 🦬. physicsworld.com/a/the-most-pre…

The often odourous and frequently dangerous world of gases makes a fascinating subject for a pop-science book, especially with Mark Miodownik at the helm. My review here: physicsworld.com/a/a-breezy-tou…

We practiced with caskets that were stored outside our barracks building. To simulate the weight of honored remains, we’d toss several full sandbags into the belly of the casket and then, for hours, we’d go through our exact movements. Over and over and over. (thread)

Anyone have any idea why *squints at map* Hungarians really like to joke about Scots?

This photo shows Elisa, a woman born in Moscow in 1925, arm in arm with the love of her life Joyce. Taken on Dublin's O'Connell Bridge around 1963, I found it in a garden shed in Galicia in 2021. Let me tell you how 🧵 1/

If we've learned nothing from Hatfield Rail Crash, safety has to come first. Getting a respected #rail engineer like Gareth Dennis sacked for raising safety concerns shows Lord Peter Hendy isn't suitable for government. Especially for someone responsible for our #railway.

Feels like a nice quiet day to drop some new merch... railnatter.creator-spring.com/listing/sacked

Basically, the world is full of: - total b*****ds - people who like voting for total b*****ds - horrible problems that are in no way helped by the total b****ds and usually started by them Thank you The Economist

Concorde successor Reaction Engines scrambles to avert collapse trib.al/L4n2cp9

So one Labour MP is a slumlord, another has freely handed the Tommy Robinson crowd a new racist myth cut from whole cloth and the new rail minister is happy to interfere in procurement to settle personal grievances. That's just this week. This is the competence we were promised.

This is the key reason Hendy has to go. As the man at the very top of the rail industry, he broke the vital covenant of trust that modern rail passengers had come to believe in: that SAFETY comes first. Instead, he has shown that, for him at least, REPUTATION comes first.

Over the centuries, "Ode to Joy" became a global hymn of resilience and stubborn gladness. For Beethoven, it was the product of many heartbreaks, half a lifetime in the making – here is the remarkable story behind it themarginalian.org/2022/05/17/bee…

How do you get the coherent polarised directed beams that bulky lasers usually provide from an LED or even just an incandescent bulb? #Metamaterials weave their magic yet again at Andrea Alu Lab physicsworld.com/a/metasurface-… CUNY ASRC

A fun thread on one of the many areas for improvement in the North's infrastructure. A fun bonus fact I suspect Tom will come on to is that this train connecting huge cities can only ever be two carriages long. No longer. Because of capacity constraints at Leeds.

Since everyone is talking about #Grenfell, let us reflect on the fact that this week Keir Starmer expressed "full confidence" in a rail minister who had an engineer sacked for raising public safety concerns.