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mcherkashin.bsky.social
Once did an experiment, and can't stop. Postdoc: sonicating things to help light get through them, photoacoustics, biomedical optics, Dad of 2 Takes in: coffee and music, outputs: questions
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It appears we have globally unfolding replay of 1930s, but on steroids.

For newcomers, I and @vincentmourik.bsky.social wrote the 2012 Science article that literally started the Microsoft technical effort to build topological qubits. The paper is okay, and it includes a lot of negative evidence in the supplement (i made sure of it), 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is a mega-thread of all Microsoft problems related to topological qubits. NOTE: I skip the numerous news reports and press releases, this thread is for serious _scientific_ and procedural materials First retraction: Quantized Majorana Conductance, from Nature www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Marketing department takeover of science communication is a sad sad trend

It me looking at next deadline (too soon, deadline, too soon)

Oh that's the party I can join

Non-American colleagues. It may seem like the US administration is just doing random US things (particularly as the news here mostly focuses on silly topics) but just so it is clear: a substantial number of my US colleagues have had their science grants stopped without notice.

this one from @phdcomics.bsky.social but also this overhead office light is deeply disturbing

looking back, AOL had it right. 30 hours of internet per month was the right amount.

The Beer-Lambert Law is fundamental to fNIRS but requires modifications to account for scattering in tissue. My latest Medium story explores the MBLL and its role in neuroimaging. 🔗 medium.com/@boramerts/t... #fNIRS #Neuroimaging #Neuroscience #BCI

Hey #iteachphysics, what are your thoughts?

🧵"So this is how liberty dies..." Trump’s first 3 weeks have been a relentless flood of actions. It's incredibly hard to keep up. I’ve gone through 69 actions & mapped out the pattern - showing how they fall within 5 broad domains consistent with authoritarian states 1/9

Bonus: your conginitive functions will decline for using it, and we're making sure you have NO OTHER CHANCE

I was thinking that calling them "indirect" is not helping at all, and it seems important language used to be changed. I thought maybe "associated" costs would be more helpful

What a graph!

I have work to do but I'm distracted by watching US scientific progress & leadership being irreversibly undermined because a few unelected malcontents are penalizing researchers for following legal requirements set out by congressional orders to augment basic research with benefits to society.

#PhysicsJournalClub "Three-dimensional holographic imaging of incoherent objects through scattering media" by Y. Baek, @hiltondeaguiar.bsky.social and @sylvaingigan.bsky.social arXiv:2502.01475v1 a 🧵 1/ ⚛️💡🧪

@nature.com video team produces very nice visuals, youtube served me this and just look at those patterns! 😍 youtu.be/XKgHu66ggMQ?... as a fellow interference effects enjoyer, i smell something cool is cooking in a dance of light and sound

Does life works with cis isomers only? @philipcball.bsky.social

Preparing my 2025 Day of Light outreach lectures, I bought a glass sphere and made a rainbow. But I saw some odd things, and so here’s a thread with some photos and raytracing pictures. There may well be mistakes so tell me and I'll fix them. First the basic setup showing the primary bow.

Given that a lot of the news around this has used the term "overhead," I found this image helpful to explain what "indirect costs" actually pay for. Overhead IMHO has a rather negative connotation and many people don't know what that money actually pays for […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

Professor James Reason passed away a few days ago. The Reason model - often known as the Swiss cheese model - of accidents revolutionised aviation safety and risk management practices, as it did for many other fields. Vale.

‪In this week’s Fourier Optics course we shall be looking at one of the key concepts of Fourier optics – how a lens performs a Fourier transform. The importance of f to f is explained. 🧪 #physics ⚛️ #optics 💡 #iTeachPhysics 🎢

Ornithology 101: Owl life stages 🦉

Going to retweet this one once more for university administrators. Someone at your crisis meeting will say "let's see where this goes" and if you accept that, that is the moment you lost everything.

#PhysicsJournalClub "Emergence of collective oscillations in massive human crowds" by Francois Gu et al. Nature 638, 112 (2025) a (short) 🧵 1/ 🧪🎢⚛️

The kindest of gentle reminders. We have one week to go on one #PhDPosition and one #PostdocPosition in single-molecule dielectrophoresis. Do you like single molecules , advanced optics and nanotechnology? More details in the thread👇 Dear Bluesky poplulation, please help with reposting

"when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing"

That image with death going door to door except these are US agencies now