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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Physics Nobel 2026 prediction: Andrei, MacDonald, Jarillo-Herrera for twisted 2D materials. (I feel like it ought to be something in cosmology this year, but honestly no idea what so I will go with condensed matter again)

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Prediction: these markets will follow the path of chess, backgammon, poker. Now that real money is involved, advantage traders will swoop in, teenagers will make huge bags, and then the action will dry up pretty soon after. It's not the same as betting on sports--little entertainment value here.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

There's nothing like cold hard experimental data from experimentalists you trust.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Woohoo! Second year on a row I got one right! John Clarke is a giant. it was a privilege to occupy the same building as a grad student, he was always kind to us.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I'll go with John Clarke and two others (Devoret + Martinis? not enough of a historian on the topic) for SQUIDs and superconducting qubits for 2025 Physics Nobel.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Trend: paper reviews that appear to be LLM generated. Used to get reviews like "pg5, 2nd par. You say XYZ but don't back it up/it's confusing" I loved these. Now: "the paper lacks [something vague + not obviously relevant], explain how this will be implemented" (Rev's still polite and unpaid!)

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Sounds like an "epiphany" college kids have smoking weed and philosophizing late at night. But I guess now it's NIH policy?

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

I'm sorry, but the PhD is not just a "training" degree. For me, any definition must include a marker of academic achievement for creating and disseminating new knowledge.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

People on here are need to focus. Bhattacharya appointment is one of the least insane things going on out there. Folks quibbling about his h-index and nunber of R01s...Look who we elected president!

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Great review, cool photophysics--I learned something new!

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

New paper, led by postdoc Janis Smits: -Introduces a “Ramsey-Mz” protocol for NMR spectroscopy using diamond NV centers -In principle, works at arbitrary field. Well suited to moderate fields (0.3-3 T) -Resolved ethanol chemical shift structure with negligble distortion arxiv.org/abs/2503.02140

arxiv.org

Chemically resolved nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy by longitudinal magnetization detection with a diamond magnetometer

Non-inductive magnetometers based on solid-state spins offer a promising solution for small-volume nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) detection. A remaining challenge is to operate at a sufficiently hig...

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Please do not use an llm to review my papers. I much prefer you just paste whatever bullet points/notes you were going to put into the llm prompt into a txt file and submit. No flowery verbage needed!

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Reposted by Victor Marcel Acosta

Jane @gingercrone.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

He's not a student of history, is he? As well as being an utter cockwomble.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Watched the oval office meeting. First 40 min is standard Trump BS, Zelensky is used to it and nods along. Then Vance starts bloviating, speaking with entitlement about shit he absolutely has no idea about. Zelensky loses it. Weve all been in Zelenky's shoes, its impossible to bite ur tongue there.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Alright I'll say it. The Microsoft Majorana craziness is what you get when you let theoretical physicists run your device R&D agenda based on the "beauty" of the idea instead of what actually works.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

I'm confused. If IDC rate is now 15% on all existing NIH awards as of now, does the total award amount also change? Or do we now just have more allocated to direct costs? I'm guessing they intended the former, but arent total costs listed in the award documents and public disclosure (ie Reporter)?

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Magnetic Resonance News @nmr900.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Postdoctoral Research Associate (solid-state NMR) The Carbon and Composites Group, the Separations and Polymer chemistry section, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Oak Ridge, TN, US jobs.ornl.gov/job/Oak-Ridg... #NMRjobs #NMRchat #NMR 🧲

jobs.ornl.gov

Postdoctoral Research Associate- Solid-state NMR Spectroscopy

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Hate how the favorite US policy argument for science funding is Sinophobia.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Nice. I'm tempted to submit a proposal titled "Spin qubits and Inclusive Excellence come try and triage this I'm ready to fight". Just for fun

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Looks a lot like NSF leadership is playing "pick me" to the White House nutjobs.

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Would appreciate a RT from the scientists for this one! We have 665 scientists in the spring database and I want to get us to about 1000 before we set the teachers loose on the database for January matches.

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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

So in fact what journal peer review may primarily be doing is ranking papers (by determining where in the journal hierarchy they end up). And most problematically, that lasting quality signal is assigned at a single point in time based on the somewhat subjective opinions of a 3-4 people 4/n

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Adrian Liston @labliston.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Plenty of other publishers try different models! PLoS, Frontiers, EMBO, Wellcome, Review Commons, all have implemented new models. Let’s not forget to credit them, just because they don’t jump wildly from model to model every couple of years.

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Tim Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Triage is a long and complicated discussion. We tried to deal with it here elifesciences.org/articles/100... But we agree it is complicated and we are open to suggestions. The suggestions can't start "review everything" though. Anyone who suggests that has not seen what gets submitted.

elifesciences.org

Scientific Publishing: How and why eLife selects papers for peer review

When deciding which submissions should be peer reviewed, eLife editors consider whether they will be able to find high-quality reviewers, and whether the reviews will be valuable to the scientific com...

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Jordan Meier @doc-jlmeier.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

This Thanksgiving I was privileged to go on a Disney Cruise with my wife and five small-ish children (12, 10, 5, 4, 4). Here ‘s a thread nobody asked for explaining why a cruise with 5 kids is essentially a floating psychological experiment gone wrong.

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Habtom Samuel is an incredible athlete. One shoe, one barefoot for half a 10k cross-country championship in near-freezing temps and finishes in second place!

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Another new paper on diamond magnetic microscopy! This one, led by grad student Bryan Richards and recent grad Nate Ristoff, studies the M-H curves and Neel relaxation of hundreds of single 30-nm nanoparticles in parallel. Some surprising results, e.g. step-like M-H curves: arxiv.org/abs/2411.13087

arxiv.org

Time-resolved diamond magnetic microscopy of superparamagnetic iron-oxide nanoparticles

Superparamagnetic iron-oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) are promising probes for biomedical imaging, but the heterogeneity of their magnetic properties is difficult to characterize with existing methods. ...

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Victor Marcel Acosta @acostaphysics.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

New paper led by Dr. Andris Berzins & Maziar Saleh Ziabari: -the impact of MW phase noise on NV sensors is important! picotesla-level noise. -accurately predicted with sequence filter function + MW generator spec sheet. -with gradiometry, we realize >10x suppression journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...

journals.aps.org

Impact of microwave phase noise on diamond quantum sensing

Precision optical measurements of the electron-spin precession of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond form the basis of numerous applications. The most sensitivity-demanding applications, such as...

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