iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 10h

A few episodes later they do go there: that's how they imagined SPring-8 would look like in 2032 ...✍️

A sky view of the SPring-8 synchrotron in year 2032, as illustrated in the second series of the anime Ghost in The Shell (2nd GIG)

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 20h

Kudos for the stomach to actually open that book already; the review was quite a painful read 🤒 Useful reminder that #crystallography textbooks — not only crystallography-based papers — can be published without sanity checks by crystallographers... with tragicomic results. @springernature.com

020

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A few more days and it could have been a great Halloween post

020

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

When I first watched Ghost in the Shell, in 2007 or so, I really wasn't ready to get this detail... #SPring-8

A screenshot from the Series Ghost in the Shell 2nd GIG, Ep. 9. During an investigation scene, the agents mention the possibility of getting samples to the Japanese synchrotron radiation facility Spring-8.

161

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

♨️ Warming up Fourier Tiler with a new release, including Temperature param. in the crystal builder! Also: my fancy friends using macOS will not be left alone in this one 🫶 Have fun! ...and let's hope this new version makes the Reviewers happy 😏🤞 Get your copy here: github.com/stecanossa/F...

093

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

What do electroactive frameworks, a walk in the beautiful Ewha W.U. campus, and a delicious bulgogi feast have in common? Our guest @manuelsouto.bsky.social visiting us for a great lecture and equally great discussions! 🌟 Looking forward to more visits and exchanges between our groups, Manuel! 🙌

A collage picture of our guest, Prof. Manuel Souto (Universidad Santiago de Compostela), visiting us at Ewha Womans University, delivering a lecture in front of our group and other Professors, and joining us for a great lunch together.

041

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

One should check the specific company, for example Anthropic says: "you retain any right, title, and interest that you have in the Inputs you submit. Subject to your compliance with our Terms, we assign to you all of our right, title, and interest—if any—in Outputs." Almost identical words by OpenAI

010

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

Weizmann Institute of Science @weizmann.ac.il · 31/08/2026

We, the Weizmann Institute of Science community, deeply mourn the passing of Prof. Ada Yonath - Nobel Laureate and a Model of Scientific Perseverance. May her memory be a blessing. bit.ly/ada-yonath-eng

110645

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Mine is not a genuine question... I don't think there is a systematic solution to this problem fitting any student combined with any supervisor. Faculties should figure out some statistics to generate policies to increase the likelihood of good mentors mentoring, and poor mentors doing other things.

000

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Sounds like "choose a research area that will lead to a professorship", reply: "yes but who has ever had enough information beforehand and not just after luck and privilege played their part?"

100

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Intensity analysis of a dataset can produce some artistic gems... or maybe is the "Eye of the beholder" thing. (yes, the flat field correction of that detector was awful) #Crystallography #Sciart

$An image produced by analyzing an X-ray diffraction dataset and plotting, for a series of Q intervals, the highest 10% values encountered in a frame containing the pixel-wise intensity median of all frames.$

020

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I just realized that a successful AI tool is one of the best manifestations of the phrase "Fake it 'till you make it" currently available. #ImitationGame

030

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 24/08/2026

Telling everybody we just got the Nobel Prize

694736456

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I am not familiar with the latest GPT models, but I am using Claude in agentic mode within VS code and it really good, very self-critical in its own 'debuggings', and it does not miss correcting me (I often try to deceive AI models with confidently wrong technical statements hidden in my prompts)

111

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

A few days ago it's been confirmed that IUCr2032 will be hosted in South Korea, Incheon; walking across the wonderful Incheon airport I think crystallographers from all over the world will agree the choice is truly "spot on" 😌 #BraggYourPattern, #IUCr2032

0163

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I did crack quite a few looking for geodes... Only found a tiny one but not really noteworthy

000

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Another thing I discovered is that Banff is rich in stripey wonders... mostly (but not entirely) geological ✨ #BraggYourPattern

A smooth rock with a dull grey colour and beautiful orange stripes.

A massive rock (ca. 1x1x0.4 meters) with a dark grey colour and countless thin orange streaks within, visible from its exposed section.

A large orange rock with smooth surface and a myriad of grey lines.

A chipmunk eating nuts on a rock, showing off his beautiful fur with black and white stripes on its back.

2185

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Impressive case of the renowned pine stacking at Banff National Park

A young pine tree with oddly equally spaced horizontal branches.

0343

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

An unforgettable IUCr Congress is about to end; an endless river of old and new expertise that keeps expanding and renewing itself, thanks to these gatherings since 1948. And like many "experts," I now carry with me George Sheldrick's line "An expert is someone who has made all possible errors once"

060

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

Nikolay Tumanov @ntumanovxray.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

If you are at #IUCr2026, come to chat at my poster in next days, there are: - Karl Marx - a card game - authentic Canadian (fake) products - minerals - a lot of stories - ah, some structures too. #chemsky #chemchat #crystallography

2142

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

If you are attending #IUCr2026, feel welcome to drop by at tomorrow's Software Fayre, where I will give a lecture and practical session on using Fourier Tiler for enhancing your crystallographic teaching, learning, research... or just for casual fun! #crystallography #totalscattering

The ad of a talk titled "Fourier Tiler - A software for creative associative learning of structure-scattering relationships.", reporting the date 13th August, and room 220, time 16:00 to 16:45.

091

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

IUCr2026 @iucr2026.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

🔬 IUCr2026 is underway in Calgary! The Electron Crystallography Satellite School has kicked off at the BMO Centre, and tomorrow the IUCr2026 Workshops begin! 🎉 We’re excited to welcome the crystallographic community to Calgary! #IUCr2026 #Crystallography #Calgary

052

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Without mentioning that it looks kindof against any digital database, enciclopedia, e-book...

010

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Some attribute to Max Planck a nice quote: "When you change the way to look at things, the things you look at change". A new perspective on materials might reveal new hidden sides of countless of them — that does not mean that discovering a new material does not have ramifications, of course.

050

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

While reviewing I saw another reviewer lamenting that a material's behaviour has been known for decades, while the article is on a new perspective on it. Might be controversial, but I'm sure that discovering new things is more popular and less significant than discovering new ways to look at things.

240

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

Nikolay Tumanov @ntumanovxray.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Do diffraction, have fun, they say... @stecanossa.bsky.social , an analysis by single picture? :) #crystallography #chemsky

$Single-crystal X-ray diffraction with a lot of diffuse scattering.$

1122

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Just a normal data collection, in principle... I am verifying something on an "old" Bruker D8 with Ga metal jet source. I didn't know I was going to measure powder diffraction though. Every Bragg is a cone of powder rings... that's Taoistic diffraction: beam becomes Bragg, Bragg becomes beam.

000

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Today I asked myself the same question in reciprocal space... and I know that to an experienced eye this image damages my crystallographic reputation in at least 3 ways.

$A diffraction image showing a saturated Bragg reflection surrounded by speckle-containing rings, in an overall very grainy diffraction pattern.$

110

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

Nikolay Tumanov @ntumanovxray.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

I can be considered as experienced crystallographer (>1100 structures, X-ray, neurons, electrons, powder, VT, HP, in situ, in operando, etc, bla-bla), but almost every day, working with small and "simple" molecules, I am asking the question "What The Hell It Is?!" #chemsky #crystallography

3171

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

If you do the temperature should be not imposed by a plate or something, but more like a bath, sicne it should come from everytwhere. if it comes fro a heating plate, you'd have strong convective motions in solution which could create trouble with the growth.

210

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Did you try growth at above-room-T? You will need a high humidity chamber to slow down evaporation, but the high T should favour surface redissolution and make multiple nucleation disfavoured because of their being thermodynamically bad compared to a single crystal, if I am not wrong.

110

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

manzana @manzana-crystal.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Tartaric Acid Crystals I intended to make these right after making the sodium ammonium tartrate crystals, but they kept turning into polycrystals. It actually took quite a bit of effort to grow a single crystal.

111

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Very long 龙 (Lóng), possibly one of the lóngest. Some might say long ( 1 + ´ )

010

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I just found out that a tradition of the yearly Chinese dragon boat festival (which ended recently) is drinking realgar wine and my mineral geek side was "oh realgar is so cool" but 100 ms later the chemist side kicked in and "no way it's not just a name..." (apparently it's not) 🫥 🐉

130

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

Simon Krause @simonkrause.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Last week the one an only @furukawas.bsky.social visited @uniulm.bsky.social and gave a fantastic talk on cages, MOFs, and anything in-between. We got a bit confined in our discussions on dynamic frameworks and started a new tradition - Guest Portrait on dry plates with historical camera.

Historical dry plate photo held by Shuhei who is also imaged on the photo

0142

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

For crystal structures it does not make much sense though, checking if it's new, because only if the authors claim the structure is new the paper would have a problem. So the structure check is not the critical step here, not the only one at least

000

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Oh yes, if you refer to structures indeed a check is almost obvious. For crystal structures is integrated in the submission process so authors do it every time. For molecules I guess is not?

000

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I agree, but a consequence of the point I was making is that having such a tool would make their behaviour even less within "benefit of the doubt", or more accurately would make the benefit-of-doubt area much smaller... which is pretty useful considering the number of possible doubt abusers

100

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I think these tools should be for authors, before journals; if I'm asked "You sure this is totally new?" I reply "I looked, did not find it anywhere" and not " Yes". That sounds like sth where AI could save us a lot of time, although it cannot access all texts from all articles. Nor can all of us...

110

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Indeed, I should make some T-shirts about it

110

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Aha right. Or what I sometimes say: just insert one carbon per cubic angstroem, give them free occupancy and your R factors will be brilliant!

030

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

I referred to this beauty: bsky.app/profile/stec... ... oh do i miss those creative PhD times

020

Stefano Canossa @stecanossa.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

woops #crystallography (nothing compared to my "broken R1" record anyway)

A detail of Olex2 interface displaying the R1 and wR2 factors, with the first one reading "586.69%"

380

Reposted by Stefano Canossa

Nikolay Tumanov @ntumanovxray.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I will just recrystallize this iron food supplement, maybe I will get crystals. Few days later, looking on the crystals: - WTF? What The Framework, I mean? Why MIL-88A? I did not ask for it or any other MOF! Looks like #MOF are inevitable. #chemsky #crystallography

A fragment of MIL-88A crystal structure.

2233