We might expect fluctuations and noise to destroy structure. But in our recent paper, we show the opposite can happen in dissipative self-assembly: small fluctuations can be amplified, transiently producing more assembled material than the steady state can sustain. 
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

News: opening in my group for a Postdoc coming soon. Research: quantum information scrambling.

Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades The lag in funding extends far beyond D.E.I. initiatives, affecting almost every area of science: chemistry, computing, engineering, materials and more.

The National Science Foundation is awarding new grants at the slowest pace in at least 35 years. The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs that the Trump administration says it wants to cut.

US researchers must stand up to protect freedoms, not just funding Curtailment of freedoms and disregard for the rule of law in the United States is destroying the ability of science to serve the nation’s, and the world’s, interests. Researchers can take action.

The US administration is eroding the freedoms on which the nation’s success has been based

https://go.nature.com/4jRfcfs

Want to know more success stories of federally-funded research and everyday life?

Here is a great collection, started by my colleagues here. Amazing things in here. GPS, at-home pregnancy tests, lasers, medical imaging, improved tornado detection...check it out!

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

Looking up at the Capitol rotunda against a blue sky. An American flag in front of the rotunda is blowing in the wind.

The president's budget proposal cuts billions in funding from the DOE Office of Science, NIST, NASA, and the NSF — but there’s still time to change it. Tell your lawmakers why they should stand up for science using our letter-writing toolkit, targeted to your state: go.aps.org/3RP9EWF

NSF halts grant awards while staff do second review Action comes after DOGE team arrives at science agency

The National Science Foundation has put a cork in its grantmaking pipeline after billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set up shop at the agency this week. scim.ag/4iowX4t

"Dear Cornell community,

Cornell is aware of media reports suggesting that more than $1 billion in federal grants have been frozen. While we have not received information that would confirm this figure, earlier today Cornell received more than 75 stop-work orders from the Department of Defense ...

Dissipation rates from experimental uncertainty Motivated by recent experimental advances in active materials, this work reparametrizes the speed limit set by the Fisher information to infer dissipation rates from directly observable quantities wit...

New paper: Reparameterizing the speed limit set by the Fisher information, we show how to infer dissipation rates from directly observable quantities without an analytically solvable model or full time-dependent probability distribution.
doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

US science agency reclassifies hundreds of workers as probationary, US lawmaker says National Science Foundation administrators reclassified hundreds of employees from permanent to probationary status in violation of labor contracts, according to a U.S. lawmaker and agency employee.

We need some accountability here. Who are the administrators within the NSF who did this and under what instructions?

I believe federal FOIA regulations would applied to general communications leading up to this action if not to individual personnel decisions.

Phase space contraction rate for classical mixed states Physical systems with non-reciprocal or dissipative forces evolve according to a generalization of Liouville's equation that accounts for the expansion and contraction of phase space volume. Here, we ...

New preprint: Dynamical systems that dissipate entropy to the environment tend to contract their phase space. We derived a measure of this entropy flow from a _classical_ density matrix that opens up new ways to model and predict thermodynamic costs.
arxiv.org/abs/2502.09361

The Erasing of American Science How far can the Trump administration bend U.S. research before it breaks?

🧪 "Trump administration has frozen research funds, halted health communications and publications, vanished decades of health and behavior data from its websites, terminated federally funded studies ... "

& fired critical medical professionals and scientists.

www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...