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Physicists trap electrons in a 3D crystal for the first time
  • "Trapping electrons in a crystal" is such a nonsensical way of conveying the idea of a flat band. Most isolated crystals trap all the electrons they have inside of them, or else the world will be full of free roaming electrons!

  • [Bug] Keyboard keeps closing and opening
  • I've seen similar things with a physical keyboard connected. There are plenty other Android apps that can handle connected keyboards corrected by not showing the on screen keyboard(OSK) (the now defunct RIF being one). Right now the only way to not have flashing OSK is to turn it off system wide under android settings, which is not ideal (because it won't turn itself on automatically when the physical keyboard disconnects)

  • Bad Science and Room Temperature Semiconductors - Sixty Symbols
  • Well the band wagon has turned 180, now it's fashionable to point out the flaws. My issue with this kind of videos is really, where are you in the early days of the hype, when the public needed cautions the most? A convenient naysayer when all the actual hard works have been done elsewhere

  • [DISCUSS] Pros/cons of videos for technical documentation?
  • Documentation is different from demonstration. Text (with graph or animation interspersed to unpack unintuitive terms) wins for documentation. Video could be good for demo if presented in a no-nonsense manner.

  • Long-tap on comment text should display text selector
  • Copy text doesn't cut it because sometimes I just need to select a sentence or a link, not the full text.

    This is also a problem for the post itself, not just comments.

    On android, long press for text selection is standard operation.

  • Deleted
    LK-99: Diamagnetc Semiconductor, Not Superconductor?
  • Mind you, the DFT calculation from the Griffin paper is not a proof of LK 99 being a superconductor in any way. What it showed is the (potential) formation of flat bands near the Fermi surface. Band dispersion is associated with the kinetic energy of the electrons, so materials with flat band (and therefore electrons with suppressed kinetic energy) at the Fermi surface are more susceptible to interaction effect (and strong interaction causes all sorts of nonintuitive quantum effects). I'm not a DFT expert in any sense, but from what I've heard, it is quite easy to "tune" your model to produce narrow (the limit of which being flat) bands from substitutions (e.g. the Cu substitution in this case) and such, which don't necessarily lead to superconductivity.

    So I'll take the DFT papers (there are quite a few now) as saying, "hey you want some flat band? Here's some. We've done our part. Now some other theorist, do your magic and conjure up some superconductivity". It's a cog in the full picture, if there is a full picture

  • peer review
  • Resubmitting to multiple journals is not a typical (nor the "right" one however it is interpreted) strategy though (at least not in physical sciences). You'll usually ping the handling editor, who will then contact the referee on your behalf. The referee will then either "promise a report soon", or, in the event they didn't reply, the editor will find another referee. Nowadays with arxiv and such, there is usually no rush to actual publication as far as priority is concerned.

    I'd also say, don't take the combative mindset as suggested in the comic. Think of it more as having some fresh pairs of eyes to check your work as well as communication (if a referee misunderstood something in your paper, chances are many readers will as well).

  • Mechanical Musical Keyboard?
  • Getting it to make a sound is (probably) easy but realistically emulating piano action would be really hard. Reputable electronic pianos all mimic real piano mechanics to a degree, e.g., the visible portion of an individual key is only a fraction of its entire length in order to give you the "weight" and "speed" of the real key action, which would be hard to reproduce with e.g. a shorter key + spring. A search of "hammer actions" should give you some idea

  • Why the Big Bang might not have been the beginning of our Universe
  • One idea that captures my imagination is the concept of cyclic inflation – a framework that combines cosmic inflation with the notion of cyclic collapse and expansion, or bounces.

    This captivating idea, conceived by former postdoctoral researcher Dr Tirthabir Biswas and myself, suggests that the Universe undergoes infinite cycles of collapse and expansion.

    Here's a link to the good professor's paper for those interested. As others have already pointed out, cyclic universe as an idea is not new -- the paper itself cited refs 11-19 as prior art, the oldest of which dated back to 1931.

    The claim the good professor is trying to make is somewhat subtle for any lay person skimming through the article: the novelty of their idea is not cyclicity itself, but rather to combine cyclicity and inflation. To be honest, as a lay person I would have thought a cycle would consist of an inflationary period and a deflationary period, so forgive me for not seeing the point! The following technical statement from the paper perhaps makes more sense:

    Thus although cyclic and inflationary models are not mutually exclusive, it is natural to try to attempt to replace inflation altogether with “cyclicity”. In this paper, however, we take a slightly different approach, by exploring whether by embedding inflation in a cyclic universe setting, some of it’s problems viz. (i-iv) can be alleviated. Our main idea is to merge inflation with cyclic cosmology where the universe undergoes an infinite number of cycles before bouncing into a final power-law inflationary phase.

    I think the better way to say this is that not only do you get inflation (and deflation) for free within each cycle, but the sequence of cycles is itself inflating -- a larger scale inflation modulated by a smaller scale periodic function if you will.

    The question now is, of course, is there a "first cycle", and what happened before it. Why stop there and not have some meta-cycles? That would bring the whole business to a full circle.

  • Room Temperature Superconductors - This Changes EVERYTHING!
  • The point is there are established conventions among the practitioners on how these are pronounced, and not getting them right says something about the youtuber who may otherwise appear as an expert.

    You might be right on how the name 'Schrieffer' should be pronounced in its original tongue, but I've heard multiple former students and colleagues of Bob Schrieffer pronounce it otherwise to conclude that theirs is probably how Schrieffer himself intended his name to be pronounced.

    Yeah, can't wait to hear economists' take, or The Economist's..

  • Do our phones listen to our conversations? The answer is complicated.
  • Give me a way to physically shut off the microphone (like a camera shield on business laptops), then we will talk.

    Strange topics had popped up in my Google feed after l spoke to someone about something I've never googled before

  • Can we move the comment count closer to the vote count?

    I think both counts (vote and comment) are important for a quick check on community interest in a post and I often rely on both to filter content. The new version now places the two counts on the opposite ends, making it difficult to glean both info in one glance. Would it be possible to have an option to put the two counts close together?

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)GA
    galilette @mander.xyz
    Posts 1
    Comments 54