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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 · 07/10/2026
Well anyway, I’m glad I was never much of a theorist :)
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Yeah, and I think he probably agrees with that in the abstract (and in his own work actually - he is a big user of AI). I think it’s the weird social dynamics currently that he may be referring to (for the people involved)
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Would be great to see what it was not able to solve (and how/ why..). Did it generate proofs that failed lean verification? Terry Tao is right in that much is obfuscated right now. but this is all a temporary state of affairs one presumes
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The crazy thing was that it was killing a very large fraction of people (25%?) generation after generation ~5000 years ago in western eurasia (they found it in several generations of graves). And implication is that this facilitated Bronze Age steppe movement into Western Europe in that era.
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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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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The most interesting detail in Buckmaster’s writeup was the insight he provided into the role of human (mathematicians) in the OpenAI team. This is otherwise entirely opaque, but seems like there was definitely some active steering going on (based on some sense of the direction A/B were taking)
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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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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Yeah..
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Posting without comment: www.google.com/maps/place/T...
google.com
Google Maps
Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.
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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
At Berkeley, for example, ECE is under student affairs.. ece.berkeley.edu/about-ecep/h...
ece.berkeley.edu
History - Early Childhood Education Program
The history of the Early Childhood Education Program dates back over 100 years. In 1927, Berkeley founded the Institute of Child Welfare (now the Institute of Human
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Fwiw, ECE was moved under the Ed&IS school 3 or 4 years ago (I don't remember when or the exact circumstances). But I'm not sure that ever worked out adminstratively for whatever reasons.. As with any campus thing, there needs to be an internal champion for ECE and there's really no one.
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Nearly every UC campus has their own on-campus childcare! e.g. ece.berkeley.edu or child.ucsd.edu or childrenscenter.sa.ucsb.edu - the problem I'd argue is a lack of will/ interest (from the Ed school in particular since ECE was moved under them), not money
childrenscenter.sa.ucsb.edu
Home | Early Childhood Care & Education Services
UC Santa Barbara is a leading center for teaching and research located on the California coast - truly a learning and living environment like no other!
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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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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Similar observation about very obvious and low-quality AI generated short videos that get forwarded mindlessly in WhatsApp groups (with people of a certain age at least). Apparently these kinds of low quality videos are wildly popular in China too.. no one seems to care?
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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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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Spectacular shot! Clouds/ haze work beautifully for this one
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
This is interesting given a fair bit of HRL is not quantum computing-related (and also they had a lot of layoffs recently). It would be a shame, particularly for the so-cal ecosystem, if they decided to downsize the non-quantum parts of HRL..
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
And yet the big move on campus is to dramatically reduce TAs and ”use AI more” whatever that means.. I think this is ultimately foolish, as the human element and community will remain the university’s key edge going forward. Throwing it away so quickly seems foolish to me
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Yeah, to be honest the classes I regularly teach have always relied on in-class assessments so nothing has really changed. I'm sure it's different for some courses that relied on more take-home work, but for most of our classes this never applied 🤷
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
And yet it is on par with the Apollo missions and manhattan project..
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Interesting, so not necessarily one per topic area? I'd expected more like a 100 based on the funding and size of the awards
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
when my grandfather passed away I found some peer reviews that came by mail resulting in a rejection :( somehow that feels even worse than a regular rejection we get these days..
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Paying a $1000 for tickets..
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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 · 26/05/2026
Specifically: "In this case, our moderators have determined that your submission would benefit from additional review and revision that is outside of the services we provide."
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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
In space, your only cooling mechanism is radiation. We show that extra IR photons add more heat than electricity, reducing efficiency when thermally constrained. As an example: a record 6-junction cell would actually perform better in LEO if you removed its bottom junction!
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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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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Actually if around 100 institutions and ~10 national labs each submit as lead to all 100 topics that’s more like 11000
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
5000? I’d guess Grok is our reviewer
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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
Well, I've appealed the rejection, so I'll see what happens. But perhaps I should reach out. I've had multiple submissions just sit on hold for weeks until we email them to ask what's going on. I don't think physics.optics is quite in the same situation as some other sections as arxiv but who knows
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Can I just post a pdf on my website and be done with it?
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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 · 22/03/2026
What usually happens for me is something similar: I read over its output, get annoyed by the way something was written or overstated, and in annoyance I start writing it the way I (it turns out always did) want to write it.
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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
There’s parliamentary which is similar to the US parliamentary and the standard Canadian format with cross examination etc. it doesn’t so the whole speed reading thing (which I found baffling when I came here for college!)
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
So, uh, should we be running our proposals through Grok or something?
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Aaswath Raman @aaswath.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Enjoyed Preskill’s keynote at APS
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