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Stephen Argent

@steppphhhen.bsky.social
300 followers 276 following 63 posts

Crystallographer and sometimes supramolecular chemist at University of Nottingham. Looking for light chemistry banter and responsible ownership.

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Reposted by Stephen Argent
University of Nottingham UCU branch @uonucu.bsky.social · 12h
And when we fight together by standing in solidarity, we win. See you all on the picket line (which happens to start tomorrow at 8:30 at University Park, West Entrance). With love, UoN UCU (Photo by @tregenza.bsky.social)
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
University of Nottingham UCU branch @uonucu.bsky.social · 12h
Our strike action began today. The management at our university has seemingly shackled itself to course closures and compulsory redundancies, despite neither being financially necessary. So we fight for our members, our students, and our community until they change their minds.
A photo of a UoN UCU rally
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The Journal of Immaterial Science @immaterialscience.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
We’re proud to announce the launch of the smallest NMR ever invented: the 1 MHz spectrometer. PDF: www.immaterialscience.org/2026/pocketnmr
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Chemistry World @chemistryworld.com · 20/05/2026
The chemistry department at the University of Nottingham is set to lose 14 out of 46 of its academic staff, leading to warnings that teaching and research will suffer. www.chemistryworld.com/news/notting...
chemistryworld.com
Nottingham’s chemistry department faces loss of 30% of faculty amid university-wide staff cuts
The department's technicians and support staff are also at risk
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Tony Padilla #JFT97 Don’t buy the S*n @proftonypadilla.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Dear academic colleagues. Please sign and share this open letter expressing your support for Physics & Astronomy at Nottingham, as the university plans unnecessary and devastating cuts. One in three academics staff expected to lose their jobs nottinghamphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/...
nottinghamphysics.github.io
Save Nottingham Physics and Astronomy
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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Yesterday, 56 of our fab colleagues at the Physics & Astronomy dept in Nottingham, received “at risk of redundancy” letters. The Uni is planning to reduce the size of the Physics dept by almost a third.🧪⚛️🔭 Sign this petition to show them your support ✍️: nottinghamphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/
Petition statement

We, the undersigned, call on the University of Nottingham to reverse its plans to impose compulsory redundancies on its staff in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

The University threatens to cut twenty members of staff out of the seventy one currently in the School. On 12 May, fifty six of those members of staff received letters notifying them that they were at risk of redundancy. This affects academic and technical staff at all levels, from Research Fellows to Professors.
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
The Guardian @theguardian.com · 12/05/2026
Thousands of University of Nottingham staff told they are at risk of redundancy
theguardian.com
Thousands of University of Nottingham staff told they are at risk of redundancy
Institution says it could run out of money by 2031 and wants to cut more than 600 academic and support posts Thousands of staff at the University of Nottingham have been told to prepare for redundancy as part of swingeing financial cuts that academics say will harm the institution’s future. The university’s administration sent letters to 2,700 staff on Tuesday, notifying them their role was at risk of redundancy after its leadership said it could run out of money by 2031. Continue reading...
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
This is a very good factual description of the risks to the School of Chemistry at University of Nottingham if the management doesn't pull back from the devastating announced cuts to staff. The University College Union has put forward a counter proposal that does not require drastic cuts to staff.
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
Michael O’Neill @michaeloneill.org · 16/05/2026
I've tried to collate the public data on Nottingham's teaching to help everyone make some noise about the proposed redundancies. Please sign the petition if you feel able. www.michaeloneill.org/blog-1/2026/5/16/nottingham-redundancies-briefing-data
michaeloneill.org
Nottingham Redundancies: Briefing Data — Michael O'Neill
The University of Nottingham has served notice to staff in its Chemistry Department that they are at risk of redundancy. This blog is intended to do two things: Publicise the petition to oppose t...
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Thomas Penny @thomaswpenny.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
If anyone in government has a few minutes to run the country in between plotting leadership challenges, could they please cast their eye over the devastation of Higher Education in the UK. www.theguardian.com/education/20...
theguardian.com
Thousands of University of Nottingham staff told they are at risk of redundancy
Institution says it could run out of money by 2031 and wants to cut more than 600 academic and support posts
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Chris Cummins @christianccummins.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Come on #Lego, it's time to lift the heinous discrimination 😉 and, as a gesture of contrition, send Sir David a lego penguin for his big day.
It is Sir Ddavid Attenborough and a sign saying lego is for ages 4-99
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Grae Hall @graemation.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
A little behind the scenes video of the puppet build for Small Prophets. You even get to see my hands! 👋 #SmallProphets #BehindTheScenes
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Structural Analysis of Coordination Cage/Guest Complexes Prepared with the ‘Crystalline Sponge’ Methodology www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/14... Well done Chris Taylor and James Williams for finishing up these structures for a nice paper in Crystals.
Children's shape sorter cube toy with holes for various shapes including an irregular hole to fit spacefilling views of of vanillin and naphthaldehyde. Semi-AI generated slop, beacuse when AI tries to draw a molecule it ends up looking almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a molecule.
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
David Cooper @davidbcooper.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
It’s amazing how faithful The Muppet Christmas Carol is to the original novel.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Lift broken this week so the SuperNova has mostly been drinking hand hauled moonshine out of an Onion Dewar.
A single crystal diffractometer instrument in a research lab. The cryostream accessory has a liquid nitrogen feed line coming from a small and comically rotund 25 litre onion Dewar instead of the more usual 60 litre barrel type Dewar. Oh how we giggled.
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
University of Nottingham UCU branch @uonucu.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
Strike action continues this week! Please join us for the following events as we withhold our labour from a university that continues to unnecessarily threaten our livelihood:
TEACHOUTS

Lecturers are on strike.
Come learn.

Upcoming teachouts:

What is Chaos:
Martin Richter,
10am 14/10/25,
Mrs B’s catering cafe

Exposing Empire: War, Capital & Palestine:
Victor Kattan & Andreas Bieler,
6pm 14/10/25,
Coates Road Auditorium

The social construction of mental illness:
Ella Guerin,
12pm 20/10/25,
Online
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
Rosie Young @rosieyoung.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
Come work with me! The synchrotron is hiring a *permanent* MX beamline scientist with chemical crystallography experience. If you like crystals and fixing things, this is the job for you! 👩‍🔬🔧💎🤖 australian-nuclear.contactrh.com/jobs/12/4355...
australian-nuclear.contactrh.com
Beamline Scientist - MX
Beamline Scientist - MX
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No Score Draws ✍🏻⚽ @noscoredraws.com · 22/05/2025
About last night… 💙 (Been drawing since the final whistle and now we’re finished & we’ve made NEW mugs and fellow Spurs fans if you feel like sharing the heck out of these we would appreciate it so so much #COYS #COYS #COYS) 🛒 noscoredraws.com/products/spu...
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
Remember to vote early if you're a chow chow, as it's too blinking hot to be doing much after 9am #dogsatpollingstations Broxtowe Beeston North
Avchow chow dog with a somewhat undergroomed blue coat standing outside a polling station in Bramcote
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Many thanks to @benjaminchem.bsky.social for the kind invite to cross the river and visit Nottingham Trent University Chemistry to collect some diffraction data for a naughty incommensurate crystal on their rather marvelous @rigakuoxfordxrd.bsky.social Synergy-DW.
Photo of the river Trent taken from the cycle path of Clifton Bridge looking south. The water is still and pleasingly reflects the blue cloudy sky.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
Couldn't wait to get back from a holiday in Lisbon to start taking Fourier transforms of all the lovely azulejo tiles I saw! 1/999
Side by side images of an azulejo tiling and a Fourier transform of the tiling image. Wildly tentative wallpaper group guess made by a crude Python script is p4m or p6m.
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Compound Interest | Chemistry infographics @compoundchem.com · 13/04/2025
On #NationalScrabbleDay, this periodic table shows what every element's name would score during a game. Can you spot the highest scoring elements and the only element that scores the same as its atomic number? www.compoundchem.com/2019/07/07/p... #ChemSky 🧪
Periodic table showing the scores for different element names in a game of Scrabble. Zirconium, rutherfordium and praseodymium score highest, and aluminium is the only element to score the same as its atomic number (13, in UK Scrabble)
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Spring is coming. Hopefully.
3D Printed giant lego daffodil style flowers on an office windowsill. Most of the green "stems" are bare but a few brave plastic yellow heads have burst forth promising an end to a long dark winter that we'd all like to see the back of.
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Reposted by Stephen Argent
Sophie Benjamin @benjaminchem.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
RSC Main Group PhD Lectureship Prize - a fully funded lectureship at Dalton conference. Spread the word among the PhDs! #chemsky
Call for Nominations: RSC Main Group PhD Lectureship Prize.
The RSC Main Group PhD Lectureship Prize is awarded to an individual for the advancement of Main Group Chemistry during their PhD research. The lectureship recognizes a piece of peer-reviewed published work that provides a distinctive, creative and impactful contribution to main group chemistry. The winner will recieve an invited lectureship including registration costs at Dalton 2025
To make a nomination please provide the following by 17.00 1st March 2025:
A 1 page CV of the candidate with their graduation date or expected graduation date clearly identified.
A 500-word summary on why the nominated article represents a significant advancement in main group chemistry and the contribution of the candidate.
A citation of the work.
If the nominated work has recieved previous recognition, please identify which awards. In the case of multiple submissions of similar quality, work that has not yet been recognized will be given priority.
Both self-nominations and external nominations welcome.
Eligibility: the candidate must be due to graduate within the next year or have defended their thesis within 12 months of the nomination deadline. The nominated article can be published in any peer-reviewed journal and shoudl represent the candidate's PhD work. 
Nominations can be directly emailed as a single PDF file to the interest group secretary (catherine.weetman@strath.ac.uk). Please name the file with the format lastname_firstname_MGprize.pdf. e.g Smith_John_MGprize.pdf.
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-let...
en.wikipedia.org
One-letter word - Wikipedia
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Just enjoyed a very productive day at the National Electron Diffraction Facility at the University of Warwick where our host Jere Tidey helped us solve some amazing structures and spot an exoplanet. Today I also learned why orienting a crystal on a zone axis is bad thing even though it looks pretty.
Screen grab of the bright spot of the undiffracted beam at the centre of an electron diffraction image. A lone weak diffraction peak adjacent to the large central spot looks like a bit like a planet orbiting a star.Electron diffraction image of a crystal zone axis with a stripe of evenly spaced spots running across the image.
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Compound Interest | Chemistry infographics @compoundchem.com · 03/01/2025
It's that time of the month when web hosting fees for compoundchem.com leave my account. They've increased again this year, so it now costs me almost £60 per month to keep all the graphics freely available. If you'd like to support these costs, I'd hugely appreciate it! ko-fi.com/compoundchem
ko-fi.com
Support Compound Interest on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/compoundchem
Support Compound Interest On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations
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Ed Conway @edconway.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
🧵SALT🧵 It's been snowing in the UK and the road gritters are out in force, begging the question: Have you ever wondered where that grit actually COMES from? The answer is more magical, beautiful and fascinating than you probably realised. 1/14
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Now that's the wreath of a crystallographer. Lab B15 is nearly ready for Christmas (i.e. everything's stopped working and there's no hope of fixing any of it before January).
A 3D printed Christmas wreath made of giant Lego ferns and studs hangs on the door of a crystallography lab. Various broken diffractometers can be glimpsed through the festive branches of the wreath. The lego wreath has been assembled in a conformation with point group C3.
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Luisa Ciano @luisaciano.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
To all members of the Inorganic Chemistry community, please save the date for the #Dalton2025 meeting. The registration link will be live soon. @roysocchem.bsky.social #chemsky PS: for the bioinorganic folks out there, consider following the IBDG account for news and events 👇
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Dr. Christine Beavers @xtalgrrl.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
So, as a new member of the US National Committee for Crystallography, I've been tasked with looking into workforce development. So I'd like to ask you #chemsky peeps how you learned about crystallography? Reply and retweet, I wanna hear from as many of you as possible!
media.tenor.com
a large diamond is surrounded by blue water on a black background .
Alt: a large diamond is surrounded by blue water on a black background .
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CCDC Cambridge @ccdc.cam.ac.uk · 10/12/2024
📢Want your own personalized graphic with a summary of the structures you published in the CSD this year (Oct23-Oct24)? Just reply with "What's my #CSDWrapped?" and tell us your publishing name. This week only!👀 #ChemSky #CompChemSky #Crystallography #StructuralChemistry #ChemData #SmallMolecules
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Friday fun with some zinc MOF crystals that look like Minecraft swords. The fun being that they diffracted just as nicely as Monday's Pd octahedral crystals #cursedcrystallographer
Microscope image of a colourless crystal that has a long jagged shape reminiscent of a Minecraft pixelated sword.Microscope image of lots of colourless crystals that have long jagged shapes reminiscent of a Minecraft pixelated swords.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
A perfect octahedral-shaped crystal of a palladium metal-ligand coordination cage gives a perfectly baffling diffraction pattern.
media.tenor.com
a close up of a piece of paper that is burning
Alt: A microscope video of a rotating colourless perfectly octahedral-shaped crystal mounted on a MiteGen MircoLoop. The crystal is mounted on an Oxford Diffraction SuperNova X-ray diffractometer, but the image only shows a close up fo the crystal. Incidentally, if you're a keen GIF make and want to share your own creations on BlueSky like this, you'll need to submit them to Tenor and wait about 24 hours for them to approve and add to their library.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 17/10/2024
The PANalytical X'pert powder X-ray diffractometer has never looked lovlier now that it is decorated with a new poster reminding users what all the slits and masks do.
Scene in a laboratory of two computer screens on a desk in front of a powder X-ray diffractometer. The side of the diffractometer is festooned with magnetic fridge letters spelling out the name of the instrument, and Bragg's law with conversion to Q (which some users of the instrument are really keen on). The desktop background of the computer screens are some lovely Debye-Scherrer ring diffraction patterns. The side of the instrument is also decorated with some colourful posters informing users of how to setup their diffraction experiments. Fingers crossed that some of them read it.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 10/10/2024
Somewhere over the rainbow is hopefully some sort of cubane-esque mad nine-cornered polyhedral cage.
Microscope view of a needle like crystal of an organic compound. The microscope has crossed polarising filters, so the actually colourless crystal appears to be tinted a series of rainbow hues along it's length. It's the kind of sight that makes you grab a phone and point it down the microscope eye piece.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 17/09/2024
Amazing tool for extracting crystals from the neck of a Young's NMR tube: the bent Pasteur pipette! Thanks Kieran. No thanks to the chemist who thoughtlessly grew crystals in such an awkward place. Now let's hope they actually diffract.
Two Pasteur pipettes which have had their tips skillully bent to an angle of around 160° with a blow torch and a pair of tweezers.
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Stephen Argent @steppphhhen.bsky.social · 08/08/2024
Been playing with the diamonds today. Scale not to scale.
Very close up arty microscope image of a recently cleaned cutlet face of a diamond from a diamond anvil cell.
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