Jerome Moore

Taking an electron from a molecule (M->M+) can cause it to shatter like it was hit by a hammer. This is one useful way to identify things, by looking at the pieces of many shattered Ms. But it can be a hard puzzle. This team found a fast way to solve such puzzles.

With all of the changes to internet functionality, I'm glad that the feature of clicking on a product photo to make it very slightly larger has persisted for 30+ years. It would be jarring if it actually became useful.

An enjoyable read. The author, Rachel Handler, did a quick interview about the piece on Marketplace yesterday. I'm compelled to say though: eat good chocolate. Hershey products are just not good, they never were, and they're not even that cheap now.

Absolutely true. It was so bad, the 2nd hand smoke and the residue on clothes, in motel rooms, theaters... In grad school, my car broke down and I got a ride from a guy whose floorboards were covered in discarded cigarette packs. His ashtray was a sphere of stubbed-out butts.

“Smoky Metro Morning” - “That’s public transportation, it’s not gonna hurt you girl”. Oof: www.popville.com/2026/10/smok...

What’s the difference between blind obstinance and determination? Whether you are questioning, actively seeking evidence to the contrary, being introspective, with guidance like the questions in the second half of this post:

Always brightens my day to read the alt text on this posters cool photos

College libraries were filled, I mean wall-to-wall, with great smelling books. You could walk amongst them for an hour without hearing a sound like a comfy little ghost.

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Scams usually contain elements of the absurd at an early stage to filter out people with a functioning bullshit detector. www.eschatonblog.com/2026/10/insi...

#caturday π locked in on a housefly, from her window perch.

It's so nice to be able to choose precisely when to be sick for a day or two.

Only stock person at a craft store. Beat out two others who couldn't do the math worksheet. Manager gradually shifted the duties to janitorial, which wasn't mentioned during hiring. I would leave covered in thick dust, wet shoes. Saturday I told him he wouldn't see me Monday, or ever again.

10 years of foul odors, finally a suit filed and still 2 months for a court order to stop. Near 100th and Torrance in Chicago.

if you work in science and are looking for a designer to help with illustrations and/or websites, highly recommend Sabine Deviche devichedesigns.com with whom I've collaborated on a number of other papers and projects, eg she illustrated this figure from my recent TICS paper

Taking notes helps you to organise your thoughts, which has been shown to air comprehension and later recall *even if you don’t actually look at the notes afterwards*. Using an #AI device to do this for you provides none of those benefits. 🤷 #AIHype #Deskilling #CognitiveScience

Whole 🧵 is interesting. My corner of science seems to have settled on these tools being good for writing short code (less than a page that you can look at, digest and tweak) and inane for actual software engineering.

Most of this is obvious to anyone familiar with how silicon valley + their investor community has worked for decades, but it's a very clear, short summary if you aren't familiar.

Again, highly recommended if you're in the Chicago area. If they could teach me, they can teach you! And they have a lot of work on display that's interesting to look at.

Southwest Research Institute is engineering the future of space robotics technologies that include environmental sensing, adaptability and decision making. Check out SwRI’s Maturing Adaptable Space Technology (MAST) Initiative. https://youtu.be/Fj_BGfTwOzI

And for those who are not academics: heaving a pile of papers that haven’t gone through peer review and going “here, you sort this out for us and prove us wrong” isn’t scholarship. It’s a hurricane shitting on an earthquake and demanding the professionals come clean it up.

Whole thread is good, but this post is the core of it. Too many people are making wild claims anthropomorphizing LLMs and related technology. They should be taken even less seriously than people talking about astrology IMO.

I'm noticing more fellow scientists in person openly talking about the issues in this thread. Even people who were uncomfortable with the topic, in the belief that support for science isn't partisan.

Reminded of this article after getting the new mRNA flu shot. Had to ask for it specifically at the pharmacy, and pay a little more, but it feels worthwhile.

www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/10/sola...

Norwegian humor is on another level. Here's how the Norwegian Consumer Council explained @doctorow.pluralistic.net's concept of 'enshittification':

Obvious to people doing work with cobots. Good article though, summarizes the challenges and applications. tl;dr it's much much much harder to get a robot to cook a meal or sew a pair of pants than it is to make a self-driving car.

Wildlife collars are great for tracking movements 🦌. We’re now adding smoke sensors to those collars! New paper led by Adam Parlin w/ @mditmer.bsky.social & others describes the tech & huge potential to learn about 🔥 smoke impacts on wildlife 🧪 🌎🌐 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Nevermind the blank thumbnail - click through for a nice intro to chirality and its relevance to the origin of life, including a focus on the work of Donna Blackmond at Scripps.

I share this concern with experimental condensed matter/solid state physics. Each experiment is much cheaper than in particle physics, but in aggregate its the same problem: as funding is dimished, progress will slow or even stop.

Sophisticated mass spec in a van to study wildfire air composition.

"Those claims mask a voluntary system riddled with loopholes that has made scant progress toward stamping out one of the oil industry’s dirtiest practices. The industry helped shape the initiative, which leaves companies to police themselves."

The Nobel Committee's scientific reasoning for the prize cites five key discoveries, made by Halzen and the IceCube Collaboration, that were published in @science.org. I had the pleasure of being the editor who handled four of them. Here's a thread of what each of those studies found. ☄️🔭⚛️🧪

AI thought leaders talking up doom-soon scenarios are desperate to taken as seriously as the scientists who created nuclear weapons, or work with biosafety level 4 organisms.

Current* conditions near Milwaukee, WI:

Penny napping pic for #caturday

Sketch of an arclight

We know planets are common. But we still haven't found another planet quite like Earth. On Oct. 7, @aussiastronomer.bsky.social explores the past, present, and future of our hunt for Earth 2.0 at the next Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture. 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬 #bayarea www.seti.org/events/the-s...

At 9 AM the AQI was 58 , the dominant pollutant was PM2.5 and the air quality is moderate PM2.5 = 58 or 15.99 µg/m³ PM10 = 26 or 28.5 µg/m³ NO₂ = 25 or 27 ppb SO₂ = 1 or 0.69 ppb O₃ = 3 or 2.67 ppb CO = 3 or 0.3 ppb

165 years ago TODAY, Charles Darwin had a normal one. "I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.— I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything…" I think about this letter a lot.

Postdoctoral Associate Position in Biosocial Science in the Human Nature Lab! We have a cutting edge research agenda in human social chemosignaling. Scientists with an interest in olfaction and AI or with experience in GC/MS or animal chemosignaling are especially encouraged. Please repost.

electricschoolbusinitiative.org/why-school-d...