Has anyone done a Schrödinger's Strait gag yet?

Just of to pick up my number because tomorrow I will run my first competitive marathon since 2008. It's fair to say I will be a lot slower than I was then! Getting old isn't great.

A half-eaten sugared doughnut sitting on in a plate with green jelly oozing out of it.

Tried a waldmeister doughnut today. Apparently they are a spring delicacy 🤷‍♂️. Not sure I would recommend, tbh.

Close shot of the face of a red panda as it licks a thin branch.

Went to the zoo yesterday and the red pandas were out.

A screen shot from the Nature Briefing that says "The resulting paper, published in Nature, updates a 2024 preprint that described the tool, including by toning down its reported capabilities."

As an editor, this is a very satisfying thing to read.

I used to have a pet turtle and often wondered about taking it out but the apparent geometrical problem of attaching a lead at an unstable turning point seemed prohibitive. Turns out I was wrong.

(But I still don't understand why the turtles don't just slip out.)

Obviously so many things wrong with this on a philosophical level.

But practically, I wonder if the cost of hiring people to check the eligibility of visitors will be outweighed by the income from the entrance fees?

Sometimes I feel like all of Dan Brown's novels are coming true at once.

I love it when authors use suspenseful constructions like "This raises the question of whether the experimental data can be explained by our slightly-out-there theory?"

I mean, the answer isn't going to be 'no' is it??! 😂

Translating Asterix! Super interesting.

The future is bright - Nature Physics Fifty years ago, the theoretical concept behind free-electron lasers was proposed. Since then, these light sources, operating from millimetre to X-ray wavelengths, have been indispensable for many are...

The March issue of @natphys.nature.com is delayed for stupid reasons, but I'd like to highlight our editorial that is already live, and focuses on the transformative impact of free-electron lasers.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I swear that the browser versions of M365 have been engineered to be as unusable as possible.

And lastly, if you're in Denver this week and want to meet for a chat, feel free to message or email and we can set something up. (6/6)

I understand the position of those who stay away and it's a shame that the meeting will be diminished by their absence. This is the fault of the administration, not them. But I feel that it's important to keep showing up and keep promoting the idea of rational progress. (5/6)

Many of our team are wary of travelling to the US because they hold an inconvenient passport or have an appearance that could single them out for extra scrutiny. I'm in the privileged position of not suffering from those arbitrary constraints so it makes sense for me to be the one to come. (4/6)

In that situation, I would like our journal to be a supporting influence on scientists in the US. The APS meeting is the biggest congregation of US physicists and so, viewed through that lens, it makes sense for us to be there. (3/6)

Fundamentally, it seems to me that the anti-science position of the current US administration makes continuing to do science an act of rebellion in itself. I spoke with a PER researcher today who told me that their grant was denied because DOGE got involved. Doing science is political now. (2/6)

Now that I'm safely across the US border, I figured I can share some thoughts about travelling to America for work in the current political climate.

I should say at the outset that this is an issue where there isn't an objective truth. Sensible and rational people can disagree about this. (1/6)

Got to Denver for the APS and honestly I think everyone on the flight was editing their slides 😂

How the classic computer game Doom became a tool for science The 1990s game has been run on bacteria and a satellite and played by neurons in a dish.

Superb journalism.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The cover of the Feb issue of Nature Physics. It shows a colourised electron microscopy image of a device in bright purple with grooves cut down the middle suspended on yellow/orange springs.

It's nearly time for the March issue of @natphys.nature.com to arrive, but I'm taking a moment to appreciate how cool our February cover is. 🙃

Preparing for a week of altitude training 😉 in Denver, and the weather forecast looks absolutely nuts. 24º on Saturday, 4º with snow on Sunday, and temperatures into the 30s by the middle of the week. 😵‍💫⚛️

The 2026 Physics Education Research Conference (#PERC) will take place on July 22-23 in Pasadena, CA. Learn more and submit a parallel proposal by the March 16th deadline. ow.ly/kTvm50YoAPe #PhysicsEducation #PhysicsResearch #PERConference2026

I just learned that Tony Leggett passed away over the weekend. That's sad. 🙁

I'm running a marathon in April so I've bought myself a pair of fancy shoes that have a plate and lots of foam and so on. I've trained in them a couple of times now and honestly, these things are basically cheating and should be banned!

I am at a winter school this week and have been reminded that chalkboard talks are usually of more benefit to the speaker's reputation for being able to give a chalkboard talk than they are of benefit for the education of the audience.

Feeling quite patriotic. This is what equality under the law is meant to look like.

Every month I have to go to our production database, copy a bunch of information about which papers in our next issue are associated with which News and Views etc into a Word document, and then send that document to the production team.

And every month the inefficiency drives me completely mad. 😡

That feeling when your code mostly works but there's that one pathological edge case where it does something weird and you don't know why... 😡

I think it's fair to say that was one for the purists.