Helen MC

🍄 From nanomagnets to glowing mushrooms, physics is everywhere. Hear AIP NSW Chair A/Prof Karen Livesey explore everyday science, physics careers and Ghost Fungus Tours on the Citizen Science Show. 🎧 Listen: podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/i...

Wishing a very happy World Wombat Day to all that celebrate

I keep looking at this, expecting the eyes and ears of the Cheshire Cat to appear…

For parents and teachers: Encourage Year 10 girls across Australia to apply for an AMSI Specialist Maths Scholarship worth $6,000 over Years 11–12! Get financial support, mentoring and opportunities to explore maths careers. Applications extended to 11 November 2026. Find out more: amsi.org.au

Even without hosting any, NZC could transform women's Test cricket just by accepting the invites they keep turning down to play them each time they tour AUS & ENG. As frequent every other year visitors to those nations, it would mean at least one women's Test a season could quickly become the norm.

Why do we fear as a society the 1 in 27 million (the odds of a woman being killed by a shark 🦈) but ignore the 1 in 3 (the odds of a woman 🧒being physically or sexually abused by a man 👨)?

fun little treat at the end of this article: both knitting researchers credit their moms with teaching them how to knit :) www.scientificamerican.com/article/math...

Nice collection of articles here - but sadly little/no mention of Titan which IMHO is perhaps the most fascinating world from a chemical perspective.

rip to one of the coolest software engineers who ever lived

None of this year's science Nobel Prizes have gone to women. The number of these prizes to go to women remains at 27 out of more than 600. See how many you can name in our quiz: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

never the wrong time for this classic

First report for the 2026/27 #WNCL season is up - summary of round one with some really interesting twists and turns

This has been a weird year with some challenges we just couldn’t fix in time. We have ideas on what to do, but hearing from you makes all the difference. Please fill out our Players Survey and give us your thoughts on what’s important to you! www.mineralcup.org/2026/players...

Congrats to #Quartz, the literal bedrock of all minerals on Earth, after 10 years on the campaign trail it has got the #MinCup26 title. But a bigger congrats and thanks go to the @mineralcup.bsky.social team, for providing the sparkle we all needed to our social media feeds.

On the face of it, the two #MinCup26 finalists seem kinda samey at the atom-level. But #Cuprite has interpenetrating networks of atoms and is magnetic - it deserves you vote and the 2026 crown over stoic #Quartz

Famously versatile and flaky! Graphite's structure is in the high school chemistry curriculum. It conducts electricity and is very soft, leading to its uses in grey 'lead' pencils and as a solid lubricant. Carbon has 5 polymorphs: graphite, diamond, lonsdaleite, chaoite and tartarosite.

So it will be cubic v hexagonal for the #MinCup26 final, but what hexagonal mineral will it be? Is #graphite too flaky to stay the course? Is #quartz going to nick it in time? (see what I did there?) Tough call, but I think #Graphite gets my vote today (as I'm off out sketching!)

I’ve got a soft spot for Europa Clipper, but I have to admit that JuIcE is a catchier name.

Semi final #MinCup26 match up between #Cuprite and #Halite - I'm now fully behind the magnetic #Cuprite - and have dug out that neutron diffraction discovered it has nearly ZERO thermal expansion from 200-300 K link.springer.com/article/10.1... WEIRD!

New Horizons is now *three days away* from shutting off its two heliophysics instruments, simply because NASA has not provided the $2M in funding it had promised to the mission last year or this year. There is no science basis for shutting these off. Our earlier coverage:

Let's see #Cuprite in #MinCup26 finals! Jauch and Reehuis used γ-ray diffraction to revisit how electrons are arranged in Cu₂O, finding incomplete ionization of Cu and O but no Cu–Cu charge build-up to support covalent bonding. Reported in @actacrystb.iucr.org: journals.iucr.org/paper?S20525...

hummm... I really hope that #pyromorphite gets through to the semis - cuprite, quartz and halite (all through so far) are all on the boring structure side. (on the plus point perhaps I get get my 6-year old niece to help me make models of them all) #MinCup26

Have shifted timezones so a little out of sorts - but looks like a tight one in the last #MinCup26 Quarterfinal. #Pyromorphite vividness comes from its phosphorus atoms, I love how they tuck into the crystal structure. That gets my vote today over boring #Graphite.

The obvious conclusion (to me): if you have proprietary research & you upload it into the Plagiarism Nexus, it's not YOUR proprietary research anymore. Behave accordingly.

Hoping for a late surge for #Julienite in today's #MinCup26 quarter final. Hard to be up against a tasty opponent like #Halite - but it's structure is just so interesting! Look at those jewel-like blocks of death! (Not a chemist, but sulfur+nitrogen+carbon attached to a metal can't be healthy)

Best #AFLGF entertainment ever! I love the fact they used the spider cam ropes to elevate Kylie across the ‘G

As some of us in Aus settle in for the Grand Final, as a Hawthorn fan I'm more focused on the Quarter Final of #MinCup26. From a crystal structure view battle of octahedra coordination within #Skutterudite vs tetrahedral coordination within #Quartz. Tough call today, but #Quartz gets the call.

I’ve been catching up on listening to #TheArchers on my commute of late (you can take the girl out of England etc…) some dismay at recent storyline’s but mainly I just want the recipie for Usha’s apricot shortbread and to see an image of her conclave of radishes

Sphalerite is also historically important for crystallography since it was a big octahedral ZnS crystal that allowed Max von Laue show without a hint of doubt how X-rays are scattered at precise angles by crystals. A large, easy to allign crystal, helped show 3 and 4-fold rotational symmetry.

Do you have a painting or drawing by Lawrence Bragg? The Nobel Prize-winning scientist appears in the 1927 Solvay photo alongside Einstein and Marie Curie; he was also a keen painter. I’m planning an exhibition about his life and times in 2027, the centenary of this picture.

So we enter the Quarter Finals of #MinCup26 - and first up is semi-boring structure #Sphalerite vs boring structure #Cuprite. Maybe it's just because it's my last day before leave, but can't seem to care about either of them... I guess as a neutron scatterer I'll have to go for magnetic #Cuprite

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. many more here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/

We're up to match 8 of round 2 #MinCup26 - and it's #Gadolinite-(Y) taking on the very useful #Graphite. Easy pick for me is the lovely mosaic-like structure of #Gadolinite-(Y) (and variety of elements!). VOTE here www.mineralcup.org/2026/vote-re...

I’m voting #Halite in this #MinCup26 round! Under 1.7 GPa, NaCl forms a tridecahydrate with a hydrogen-bond network like ice VI, including orientationally disordered water molecules. Yamashita explores salt’s this high-pressure chemistry in @actacrystb.iucr.org: journals.iucr.org/paper?ne5013=

No contest for #crystallography for today's #MinCup26 battle - we have 'I don't know my crystal structure' #Chrysocolla vs 'First crystal structure EVER determined' of #Halite. So though it is a boring structure - #Halite gets my vote today

Ebba Lund (b. #OTD in 1923) was an extraordinary Danish chemical engineer, microbiologist & virologist who lived two distinct lives. Before becoming a towering figure in European #science, she was a fearless #WWII resistance fighter who personally saved hundreds of lives. 🧵 #WomenInSTEM