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Aaswath Raman

@aaswath.bsky.social
576 followers 307 following 172 posts

Associate Prof @UCLA in Materials Science and Engineering. www.aaswathraman.com

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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
A worthwhile effort dailybruin.com/2026/10/08/u...
dailybruin.com
UCLA Academic Senate calls on administration to keep childcare centers open - Daily Bruin
The UCLA Academic Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution Tuesday calling on administrators to reverse a decision to close the university’s childcare centers in June 2027.  UCLA will shut down the E...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"Regardless, I hope that we can all pause, take a breath, and calmly hear the things that people in my industry already know: 1. We must never stop building the Universal Bone Dissolver. 2. The Bone Dissolver is out of control, and seems intent on dissolving our bones."
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Mikhail Kats @mickeykats.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
💡🧪 🧵 For an upcoming funded program, I am looking to hire a *research scientist* (postdoc also a possibility) to carry out design and simulation of semiconductor lasers based on nanophotonic structures The candidate must be a US citizen or permanent resident due to requirements from the sponsor
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Things are getting sporty here in CA
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Virtual Dust Bunny @virtualdustbunny.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Today is the 25th anniversary of this episode
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Los Angeles Times @latimes.com · 17/08/2026
Blow to Westside child care: UCLA to close infant and toddler centers charging $3,000 a month
latimes.com
Blow to Westside child care: UCLA to close infant and toddler centers charging $3,000 a month
UCLA will close its remaining child-care centers in June, leaving hundreds of families scrambling to find new care amid an acute countywide shortage.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Our older son went here and had a very positive experience from 2021-2024. The budget deficit argument makes little sense to me. They do have a revenue source (high tuition/ fees! as well as subsidies from rest of campus). Any associated deficits are likely a tiny fraction of the UCLA total
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Museum of Twitter @museum-of-twitter.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
@TheAncientWorld

A typical complaint fielded by Babylonian administrators: “I am not getting water for my sesame field. The sesame will die. Don’t tell me later, ‘You did not write to me.’ The sesame is visibly dying. Ibbi-Ilabrat saw it. That sesame will die, and I have warned you.”

(image of stone or clay tablet with the caption: Map of canals and irrigation systems to the west of Euphrates. Babylonia, 1684-1647 BC)
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Optics & Photonics News @optica-opn.org · 01/06/2026
Curious of how photonics fits into interstellar travel? In OPN's June feature article "New Optics for Interstellar Flight" freelance writer Edwin Cartlidge discusses the challenges of light sail technology and how some researchers still think it could work. bit.ly/4wWQwtf 💡 ⚛️ 🧪
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
A big day for all of us at @uclaengineering.bsky.social!
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Mina Kimes @minakimes.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
My hottest parenting take is that Raffi is not only the great to ever do it, but he’ll probably never be bested. Michael Phelps-ass children’s songwriter.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
A fun journey back to the early days of photonic crystals for us, with a twist: defects, but only lossy ones, in a non-Hermitian photonic crystal, cause the formation of singularities that are topologically non-trivial. Lossy defects yield large improvements in gain. journals.aps.org/prapplied/ab...
journals.aps.org
Loss-driven gain enhancements driven by topological singularities in non-Hermitian photonic crystal defects
We show that purely lossy defects in one- and two-dimensional non-Hermitian photonic crystals can induce transmission matrix singularities not accessible with lossless defects. These singularities in ...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
We've always designed space solar cells to capture as much spectrum as possible. Our new paper in Device shows that's the wrong approach. When you're thermally limited by radiative cooling, absorbing less light can produce more power. 🧵 Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1n5rC9UPy1...
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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Poking around the Truman library photograph collections, I have discovered that first NSF director Alan Waterman knew how to party www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-r...
An older gentleman stands outside a white brick house, wearing blue slacks, a blue-checked shift, and glasses, and is playing the bagpipes
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 07/04/2026
Because the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, if you build your habitat on some plot of near-side regolith you can put the little Earth anywhere in the sky you want & it’ll stay there, lazily meandering around just a little as the Moon wobbles in its orbit. A view of Earthset from #Artemis II.
[alt text from NASA] Earth sets at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, over the Moon’s curved limb in this photo captured by the Artemis II crew during their journey around the far side of the Moon. Orientale basin is perched on the edge of the visible lunar surface. Hertzsprung Basin appears as two subtle concentric rings, which are interrupted by Vavilov, a younger crater superimposed over the older structure. The lines of indentations are secondary crater chains formed by ejecta from the massive impact that created Orientale. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Artemis launch watch party!
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
ArXiv lately has been putting everything I submit on hold, and has rejected manuscripts that are clearly part of their purview/ the physics.optics category (ie: there's stuff on there from a month ago on the exact topic!) Really not sure what's going on.. having to appeal is tiresome
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Nandita Garud @nanditagarud.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I am excited to share our latest paper, Uniform bacterial genetic diversity along the gut, now out in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41.... (1/n)
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Time to do some theory again.. new preprint that we think will be pretty useful for understanding and designing nonreciprocal photonic systems for thermal emission arxiv.org/abs/2603.23538
arxiv.org
Magneto-optic perturbation theory for near-complete violation of Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission at low magnetic fields
Magneto-optic photonic systems can violate Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission by breaking Lorentz reciprocity. We develop a dispersive perturbation theory yielding an analytical expression for magnet...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Project Hail Mary was great! Stuck to the spirit and overall plot of the book, though obviously less of the science exposition. First time I've gone to a movie on opening weekend in a very long time..
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Enjoyed Preskill’s keynote at APS
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
If you're at the @apsphysics.bsky.social Global Physics Summit, I'll be speaking at the FIAP prize session this afternoon at 4pm along with some other cool applied physics talks!
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
I'm.. randomly.. remembering the Newfoundland referendums of 1948: "President Harry S. Truman's administration had little incentive to pursue annexation. With respect to foreign policy, such a territorial ambition would have only served to antagonize two key allies." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Ne...
en.wikipedia.org
1948 Newfoundland referendums - Wikipedia
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Nandita Garud @nanditagarud.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature
Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...
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Mikhail Kats @mickeykats.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
I was on a DARPA project with a program officer who came from industry and didn't go to grad school One day the program officer told us that before working at DARPA, he thought universities were inefficient, but now was shocked at how much we and other university performers got done for so little $
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Well this is getting confusing, there’s a new (Wiley) journal also named Nanophotonics: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/2192... not to be confused with the established De Gruyter one: www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
If students are getting 4.0s in their high schools math classes but unable to do 1st-8th grade math, the SAT has to be back on the table (as it already is at many other places). www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...
insidehighered.com
UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet
The number of first-year students at the University of California, San Diego, whose math skills fall below a middle school level has increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years, according to a n...
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Here's a poem by one of the old Chinese scholar bureaucrats that I think captures a certain Vibe very well
Dreams - Su Shi (trans. Arthur Waley)

Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
New preprint! Turns out that there is a thermal penalty to harvesting longer wavelength solar photons when your operating temperature is constrained by your radiating surface area (ie: in space). arxiv.org/abs/2506.16588
arxiv.org
The Thermal Cost of Harvesting the Solar Infrared Tail in Space-Based Photovoltaics
Space applications require the highest performing photovoltaic devices. Typically these are multi-junction devices that are capable of converting a larger bandwidth of the solar spectrum. However, the...
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Mikhail Kats @mickeykats.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
We have a new preprint on arXiv, "Passive radiative cooling using temperature-dependent emissivity can sometimes outperform static emitters", led by Yeonghoon Jin We show how one can design a thermal emitter with temperature-dependent emissivity to optimize radiative-cooling performance 💡🧪
arxiv.org
Passive radiative cooling using temperature-dependent emissivity can sometimes outperform static emitters
In passive sky-facing radiative cooling, wavelength-selective thermal emitters in the atmospheric transparency window of 8-13 $μ$m can reach lower temperatures compared to broadband emitters, but broa...
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David Priess @davidpriess.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
John Tyler became US president in 1841. His youngest grandson just died this past weekend. www.richmonder.org/harrison-ruf...
richmonder.org
Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 10th U.S. president and longtime Richmonder, dies at 96
The Richmond resident, preservationist and chemical engineer, for whom William & Mary’s history department is named, also had the distinction of being the grandson of a man who became U.S. president i...
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Nature Sustainability @natsustain.nature.com · 07/05/2025
New online! Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls
bit.ly
Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls
Nature Sustainability, Published online: 05 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41893-025-01558-0Active radiant cooling is an emerging technology that consumes less energy than traditional air conditioning. This work demonstrates an outdoor radiant cooling structure incorporating infrared-reflective surfaces that delivers enhanced thermal comfort.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
How can we keep people safe outdoors in extreme heat? In a paper out today in @naturesustain.bsky.social we demonstrate that active radiant cooling and IR-reflective walls can deliver thermal comfort and be accepted by members of heat-vulnerable communities. rdcu.be/ekMzN
rdcu.be
Efficient outdoor thermal comfort via radiant cooling and infrared-reflective walls
Nature Sustainability - Active radiant cooling is an emerging technology that consumes less energy than traditional air conditioning. This work demonstrates an outdoor radiant cooling structure...
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kottke.org @kottke.org · 01/05/2025
Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks. “I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.” [kottke.org]
kottke.org
Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks
Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of de
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Riker Googling @rikergoogling.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
is ds9 called terok nor again
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
It is notable that Steve Blank felt that he had to write this, but a sign of the times... steveblank.com/2025/04/15/h...
steveblank.com
Steve Blank How the U.S. Became A Science Superpower
Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happ…
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
Join us in Marseille this July! 💡
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Jesse D. Jenkins @jessedjenkins.com · 09/01/2025
Power demand in the US was up 3% last year! Mostly due to greater AC use due to heat waves (hello hottest year on record), plus some "help" from data centers (and EVs). We'd better get used to it though: it's time for growth mode! We need to build new clean supply (at least) 2x as fast as load grows
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Edwin Kite @edwinkite.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles
science.org
Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles
Warming Mars with artificial aerosols appears to be feasible.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
All I want for Christmas is a new preprint.. arxiv.org/abs/2412.17659
arxiv.org
Thermo-optic tuning of directional infrared emissivity
Tuning the spatial extent of directional thermal emission across an arbitrary, and fixed spectral bandwidth is a fundamentally enabling capability for a range of emerging applications such as thermoph...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Solstice, what solstice? It's warmer on Dec. 18 (79F/ 26C) than Jun. 18 (73F/ 23C) here in the western part of LA. A testament to the power of the large thermal mass otherwise known as the Pacific Ocean!
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
“Williams’s painting conveys a proud visual message: I, Francis Williams, free Black gentleman and scholar, born in Jamaica and educated in Britain, witnessed the return of Halley’s comet and I calculated its exact trajectory, according to the rules of the third edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia.”
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
Could California’s effectively deciding to drive up energy prices, partly to help build out clean energy faster, cost lives in the face of more extreme heatwaves? A sobering thought..
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Mikhail Kats @mickeykats.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
New preprint out on arXiv, "Large tuning of the optical properties of nanoscale NdNiO3 via electron doping" arxiv.org/abs/2411.15679 🧪💡 Led by Yeonghoon Jin from our lab at UW-Madison, Teng Qu from Nanfang Yu's lab at Columbia, and Siddharth Kumar from Shriram Ramanathan's lab at Rutgers
arxiv.org
Large tuning of the optical properties of nanoscale NdNiO3 via electron doping
We synthesized crystalline films of neodymium nickel oxide (NdNiO3), a perovskite quantum material, switched the films from a metal phase (intrinsic) into an insulator phase (electron-doped) by field-...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
This is wild - hundreds more yet left to discover per the authors www.nytimes.com/2024/11/23/s...
nytimes.com
Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru’s Desert
With drones and A.I., researchers managed to double the number of mysterious geoglyphs in a matter of months.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
In a new preprint led by Dr. Parthi Santhanam we demonstrate a monolithically integrated optoelectronic platform for voltage boost conversion. Voltage conversion is a foundational power electronic capability: we show how to do it more compactly and effectively arxiv.org/abs/2410.13220 💡
arxiv.org
Chip-scale monolithic optoelectronic voltage boost conversion
Voltage conversion is a fundamental electronic process critical to engineered systems across a wide spectrum of applications and spanning many orders of magnitude in scale. Conventional approaches lik...
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
We are recruiting for multiple faculty positions in our department - please share widely! Deadline is Dec. 1 recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF09729
recruit.apo.ucla.edu
Tenure-Track Assistant Professor Faculty Positions in Materials Science & Engineering 2024-2025
University of California, Los Angeles is hiring. Apply now!
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Some thoughts and comments from me on radiative cooling and textiles.. cen.acs.org/materials/To...
cen.acs.org
Totally rad: Radiative materials redefine cool clothes for a hotter world
Fabrics designed to keep people comfortable without using energy could save lives and the planet
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