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@studyingdisorderlyconduct
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‘beyond the scope of this paper’ is a dear friend to me. I Am Not Fucking Talking About That
colorshow glassworks
Situation that happened in class this semester that was so funny I immediately sketched it out in my notes
Mouthpieces by Juanita Care
So one of the funny things about materials science is that Brilluoin zone diagrams for crystal lattices look like they come straight out of a medieval grimoire.
I cast spell of <111> silicon
Check out the x-ray diffraction pattern image of the reciprocal lattice of icosahedrite. Found only at the blast sites of intense meteorite impacts and nuclear bombs.
What the fuck. The only known naturally occurring example is extraterrestrial in origin, it was brought to earth by a meteorite 4.5 billion years ago.
Showed the icosahedrite diffraction pattern to a coworker and she said, verbatim, "what kind of quasicrystal bullshit is this"
Here's the peer-reviewed PNAS article that pentagram picture comes from.
Ok ok I'm taking off my materials science hat and putting on my science communication hat for a sec. I have a Master's in this field but quasicrystals aren't my forte, so apologies to my PhD followers if I'm off-base.
There's a reason we're reacting like this! To a materials scientist it doesn't just look spooky, it looks wrong. Uncanny valley-wrong, like convincing footage of Bigfoot riding the Loch Ness Monster. For the longest time, nobody believed that 5 sides could happen at all. This was assumed to be completely impossible.
Let me tell u about crystals.
A crystal is an ordered arrangement of atoms. Glass is not a crystal, steel is polycrystalline (individual grains are crystals, but they bump up against each other at misaligned boundaries), salt is a crystal, graphite is a crystal.
Crystals have "rotational symmetry," meaning that there is some way to rotate the pattern and lay it back on top of itself to match. Because of Math and Physics, the only possible rotational symmetries you can get in crystals are two-, three-, four-, and six-fold. Think, like, square or triangular or hexagonal grids, but in three dimensions.
The green image five reblogs back is not a picture of individual atoms, but rather something called a diffraction pattern. You can analyze diffraction patterns to learn how the atoms on a crystal's surface are arranged. That pattern tells us that the atoms of crystalline silicon, sliced along a particular angle called the <111> plane, look like this:
Anyway, two- three- four- or six-fold symmetry, that's it. We long believed that a crystal categorically could not have any other type of symmetry. Crystals were also assumed to be "periodic," meaning that they have "translational symmetry" – if you shift the entire lattice in particular directions, you could lay it over itself perfectly. Like if you took a sheet of graph paper (four-fold symmetry) and shifted the whole thing one square to the left, you end up with the same sheet of graph paper.
The ominous red image shows a diffraction pattern with five-fold rotational symmetry, which should be impossible. Except, if you could somehow construct a crystal without translational symmetry, you could make it happen. We didn't discover them until the 1980's, and we call them "quasicrystals."
This is an image of what happens to aluminum-palladium-manganese when you do some insane stuff to it with high pressures and temperatures. The quasicrystal is "aperiodic," with no long-range periodicity, meaning that there is no guaranteed way to shift it and rotate it such that it always lines up with itself again. You can spot some local translational symmetries and repeated structures, but they don't hold up over the whole lattice.
In the 1980's, aperiodic tilings were mostly just a fun trick of mathematics. Very few people believed they could show up in real atomic crystals. The unexpected discovery of quasicrystals in 1982 was so wild that Dan Shechtman, the guy who first described them in a sample of aluminum-manganese, won the Nobel Prize.
That's him on the left explaining quasicrystals to a bunch of incredulous and delighted physicists at NIST. This is what physicists look like when they learn something new and exciting, btw, it's pretty great. I love his mustache.
Anyway since 1982, quasicrystals were known to exist only in two places: laboratories, and "trinitite" – the fused desert sand in New Mexico from the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb. It wasn't until 2010 that we found naturally-formed quasicrystals in that meteorite – icosahedrite, an aluminum-copper-iron mineral.
Here's the other cool bit: Contrary to what you might expect, icosahedrite likely didn't actually form on impact with the ground! Analysis of the isotopes in the sample indicates that the quasicrystal likely formed in deep space and was brought to Earth in this form[1]. Wild!
Fun fact, aperiodic tilings with a limited number of unique tiles are tricky to make, but they show up in sophisticated art from the Islamic golden age. This is a mosaic in the Darb-e Imam shrine in Iran, built in the 15th century:
Neat!
I love that the red image isn't just aesthetically unsettling, it is also scientifically unsettling
I looked deeper into this all and found a very excellent image of the 2011 expedition to Khatyrka that confirmed that the meteorite was natural in origin
Sadly, I wasn't able to find any info on the indoubtably leading role that this little guy played in the discovery
classic scifi novels by men r always like. page 1 here's a cool scifi idea i had. page 2 i hate women so much it's unreal
guys if one more person leaves a tag like this on my post im gonna lose my mind. There Are Science Fiction Authors Who Are Not Misogynistic Men
ok i've gotten one too many 'this is why i don't read sci-fi' comments so here's a rec list for the people convinced all science fiction is bad and misogynistic (with something for everyone, hopefully!):
(also, btw, the book links are to the Storygraph, which includes content warnings for each one!)
smth funny and lighthearted about a security robot who'd rather watch TV then do its job? all systems red by martha wells (first novella in the The Murderbot Diaries series, 6 books, ongoing)
a complex, intricate political space opera following a warship AI who's lost (almost) everything? ancillary justice by ann leckie (first in the Imperial Radch trilogy) (fun fact! bc of space linguistics reasons, all characters in this series are referred to with she/her pronouns, making gender a non-factor - it's really cool!)
a dark story about travelling between parallel universes and a woman who is dead in almost every single one? the space between worlds by micaiah johnson (standalone) (SO good, i don't get to recommend it often enough!!!)
a story about grief and letting go, and a unique take on alien invasion? the seep by chana porter (standalone novella)
hey, how abt some dystopian YA, for old times sake? specifically, one with sapphics and sick mechas? try gearbreakers by zoe hana mikuta (first in duology)
or, if you'd prefer something a bit less angsty, YA about a ragtag group of teens and a space heist? the disasters by m. k. england (standalone)
alternate history steampunk that blurs the line btwn science fiction and fantasy? the black god's drums by p. djeli clark (standalone, novella)
a dark gone girl-esque thriller about clones? the echo wife by sarah gailey (standalone)
poetic sapphic romance and time travel? this is how you lose the time war by max gladstone and amal el-mohtar (standalone)
a hopeful utopian future and a human-robot friendship? a psalm for the wild-built by becky chambers (novella, first out of two) (this author's got a whole bunch of hopepunk sci-fi novels in general, if that's smth you're looking for!)
africanfuturism, coming-of-age, and cool jellyfish aliens? binti by nnedi okorafor (novella, first in trilogy)
spicy lesbian cyborgs? and shall machines surrender my benjanun sriduangkaew (novella, first in the Machine Mandate series, 6 books)
cosmic horror with an autistic scientist, cyborg angels and AI gods? the outside by ada hoffmann (first in trilogy, 2 books are out)
also, if you're a fan of Janelle Monáe, may i draw your attention to the fact that they've recently come out with a Dirty Computer short story collection, each story co-written with a diff writer?
this list is long enough, but have some more authors (who are not cis men) also worth checking out: rivers solomon, yoon ha lee, charlie jane anders, aliette de bodard, xiran jay zhao, mary robinette kowal, corinne duyvis
and finally, not all older/classic scifi is written by crusty old white guys who hate women!!! some iconic authors i'd particularly recommend looking into are ursula k. le guin, octavia e. butler, samuel r. delany and vonda n. mcintyre 🥰
There is a great deal of truth there. Sometimes special moments happen purely by accident. But most of them happen because you make a plan and create the conditions to let them happen.
Had to ban the phrase “tricky dick” from my classroom during watergate lesson because saying the word dick in front of 30 fifteen year olds is like lighting a bomb and throwing it through the doorway but now they’re just calling him Richard the Treacherous like they’re all medieval peasants. gonna lose it
Good news, they found Mendel's genes:
Mendel1 studied in detail seven pairs of contrasting traits in pea (Pisum sativum), establishing the foundational principles of genetic inhe
Now he can rest in peace.
What I love about this is that this paper is from April 2025, this year! Mendel discovered these principles and published them in 1866, he didn't understand what the units of inheritance were (he didn't even call them genes, he just called them factors) just how they were transmitted and expressed, his work went unexamined until it was rediscovered (decades later in 1900) and forever changed biology, it is taught in every single biology course since then
But we didn't know WHAT those specific genes in pea plants were exactly, we just knew how they were transmitted and expressed, we were the exact same as Mendel after all this time
But now we know, we know the exact genes, their locus, their pathways and DNA sequences. We finished his work. I hope he's happy.
that's me
knitted textures from 'the encyclopedia of knitting,' lesley stanfield and melody griffith, pub. 2000.
I was looking for references and stumbled across a series of paintings from 1930s by Soviet painter Alexander Samokhvalov called "The young women of metro construction"
A wish bounced off the moon and broke up on reentry, blanketing the southwestern USA in shards of high velocity desire.
Sources say affected cows have begun to genuflect, and a cactus has learned to while away the time in memory.
Maybe it’s just me, but. When I’m reading something and am just flat-out enjoying it, like filled to the brim with glee at the author’s wording or characterization or imagination or ingenuity or pacing, I stop reading. I am so full of excitement and love that I have to stop wherever I am and pace around or do something because Words Are So Damn Cool I need to expend some energy or I’ll explode.
Villa Hadrian, Roma, nov 23
fixated on this statue i saw in athens