Just found out that the Daniel Dennett recently passed away. Truly a magnificent mind and great writer. I strongly recommend reading his thought-provoking books on the mind, free will and evolution. 'Consciousness Explained' is one that blew me away.

Interesting and unexplained high occurrence of compounds with primitive unit cells made out of a multiple of 4 atoms in materials databases.
phys.org/news/2024-04-m…

Our new work on TiO2 nanoystems shows how both size-induced quantum confinement and the dipole field from hydroxylation allows for top-down tuning of electronic energy levels for applications. See: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/art… Nanoscale journal family #compchem

Nice paper by Ryan Fortenberry highlighting the increasing importance of computational chemistry for interpreting astrochemical data from observations.

Newly built 3D map of interstellar cosmic dust in our galaxy! universetoday.com/165959/astrono…

Quantum mechanical bomb tester mimicked by classical fluid droplet experiment. Another hint that Bohmian mechanics may be true...?
phys.org/news/2023-12-h…

Nanosilicate cosmic dust is potentially highly abundant - if so, is the James Webb Space Telescope #JWST sensitive enough to detect it? We say yes (just) in our Faraday Discussion paper: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/art…
#astrochemistry #compchem #cosmicdust

Really pleased to be able to share our latest results on nanosilicates with the cosmic dust community. Great conference in Gothenburg. #CosmicDustSweden2023 #Astrochemistry

Being a fossil fan I find this a great place for the Jack evening event.

Great to be at the isspic21 meeting in Berlin talking about our recent work on silicate clusters in the interstellar medium. #astrochemistry #cosmicdust
Many thanks to the organisers!

On my way back from a workshop on interstellar catalysis in sunny Denmark. Thanks to @AIntercat for organising such a stimulating event #Astrochemistry

A machine learning potential for simulating infrared spectra of nanosilicate clusters doi.org/10.1063/5.0150… - just out in The Journal of Chemical Physics. Great collaboration with Zeyuan Tang and Bjørk Hammer at @AIntercat. #Astrochemistry #ML #compchem

Gave an online talk yesterday at my first Faraday Discussion: 'Astrochemistry at high resolution' in Baltimore, USA
#FDAstrochem #Astrochemistry - many thanks to the organisers.
Accompanying Faraday Discussions paper on finding nanosilicates in the ISM with JWST coming soon...

Buckletronics: how compression-induced buckling affects the mechanical and electronic properties of sp2-based two-dimensional materials - our new paper in #PhilTransA (doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2…). #2Dmaterials #compchem IQTCUB Royal Society Publishing

Enjoying the hospitality of my first Chem2DMat conference in Bologna together with Kílian Jutglar - hope to get some interest from our talk/poster.

“PhD students need to be taught how to communicate their work to a broader audience, how to write a research proposal or a paper very early on. Even in a top institute like IIT, there is hardly any training on these attributes.”

phdsofindia.medium.com/rocketing-scie…

I hope I could pass on a bit of useful advice in my talk earlier today. Thanks to the organisers for the invitation.

An important take home message from a quick test of the scientific capabilities of ChatGPT. Check out the full thread.

Extending the concept of neutral mixed valence compounds to 2D leads to emergent spin-frustrated triangular networks, thus providing a promising platform for quantum materials.
See our new J. Am. Chem. Soc. paper pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja…
#compchem #QuantumMaterials IQTCUB SOMM alliance

Can non-crystalline nanoparticles have crystalline properties?

We say yes in our latest work on nanoscale titania 'crystallikes' where we speculate on the potential photocatalytic implications of such species.