Nick Barber 🌋

I know the world sucks right now, but for the next week I’m going to be exclusively posting about my trip to Geneva for #IAVCEI2025. I’m presenting a poster on Thursday, and looking forward to a week of fun and cutting edge volcano science.

Many museums are currently under threat of being closed. The Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest natural history museum in the US, is no exception. Please take the time to read our statement on this matter.

Ahmed Zewali won the Nobel Prize. Elias James Corey (Lebanese) won the Nobel Prize. Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize. Michael Atiyah won the Fields prize. Omar Yaghi won the Wolf Prize. Numerous Arabs have won the Pritzker, Caughey, Shannon, Shaw, & Asturias awards. RFKJr is a clown.

What we learned is that former petrochemical lobbyists now inside the EPA are meeting with former clients and then moving to force career staff at the EPA to rollback public health protections. We found the actual documents detailing these moves. Smoking guns. (Redlines striking protections)

Story from KOAT-TV in ABQ about the northern NM flooding. Amazed this is not getting more national coverage. www.koat.com/article/new-...

We scientists make a righteous stink about NSF funding cuts, but this is just as important…if not more so. Science without the humanities is without soul or meaning.

What’s funny is they all know a scientist… their local TV meteorologist. But perhaps it doesn’t come to mind or they don’t really associate their weather person with science. Odd. Why?

American Mineralogist: Disentangling magmatic-hydrothermal evolution of highly fractionated granite through the integration of zircon and monazite U-Th-Pb and Hf/Nd-O isotopes Xing Zhang, Rui Li, Wen-Xiang Zhang, Bin Fu, Guangyan Zhou, Zhaochu Hu, Yuanbao Wu doi.org/10.2138/am-2...

John Hopfield’s Nobel Prize winning work—the basis of AI today!—was published when he was 49 & 51. The Trump guys and the Thiel anti-public and anti-intellectual partisans don’t understand basic science research. But also they don’t know the very first things about topics they claim to care about.

Have you ever seen a rock that is composed almost entirely of foraminifera? Now you have! From a Late Pleistocene (probably MIS 3/4) outcrop in western Kikaijima, Japan.

I've talked to disaster experts about this. They say that this is condemning states to decades of infrastructure problems

Right. Writing is science, and science is writing. Because science is about communicating results. All the data in the world doesn’t matter if people don’t know about it.

LeBron James Squeezes Eyes Shut To Avoid Catching Glimpse Of Philadelphia During Commute

Students, colleagues, friends, various businesses I am interacting with, pleading with me to answer my emails www.youtube.com/watch?v=47Oe...

For folks looking to help long shot candidates: I would love to live in a district represented by the anti-JD Vance. Any small donation you can spare to make that possible is appreciated by the people of Virginia’s 6th!

The Anthropocene is widely used without fixed definition. In this Nature Reviews Earth & Environment Perspective article the authors identify 1952, marked by a sharp increase in plutonium from nuclear tests, as a key point for defining the Anthropocene. go.nature.com/4i0IdFX 🌍🧪

The other thing about the data: the nonprofit workforce in science has actually been shrinking over time, from almost 138k FTEs to 125.5k FTEs from 2021 to 2024. This doesn’t exactly point to a new golden age outside the university.

Happy Sunday, I’m just awake and here and trying to be optimisitic

“Filipinos now see that they don’t necessarily have to be at the mercy of the global energy market.” Solar helps people who have failed monopoly utility grids or who have no electricity at all. People themselves are building solar around the world! www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10... #energysky

CO2 as a volatile has to be air benders, right? Water vapor could go either way? Who can bend supercritical fluids?

I have a logistical question about Avatar: The show clearly demonstrates that waterbenders can manipulate ice, but since ice is a mineral, would earthbenders also be able to bend it?

Immigrants have been awarded 40% of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics since 2000 nfap.com/research/new...

West Cornwall officially goes into ‘severe drought’ status. www.southwestwater.co.uk/environment/... After the extremely hot & dry summer, our reservoirs are v low (Stithians at 21% capacity!) We urgently need to conserve the (often v heavy) winter rainfall for increasingly dry summers. 🧪⚒️🌍

Interesting idea from President of Wesleyan: Make all fraternities co-ed. Certainly better than leaving fraternities all male. Maybe banning them, as Amherst did, is better? But a good addition to a needed discussion. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/16/o...

Totally banal observation, but I do think it’s a good thing that everyone in small Italian towns apparates at around sundown to hang around and say CIAO at each other in the town square while drinking coffee I think this habit is probably good for humans

PSA: For anyone writing a recommendation for the NSF grad fellowship this year, recs are due on Fri Oct 16, 8pm Eastern, cleverly *before* the actual application deadline. This tidbit isn't on the NSFGRF front page anymore; it's buried inside the program solicitation:

Just a couple screenshots to close things out. First from a 2021 presentation showing a 272 Mt resource at Konkola. Second from a summary of deposits in this prolific Cu-mining area. (and, ok, maybe Mingomba is Konkola West, but still, extension of known orebody, not new discovery!)

today in 1926 English writer A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh. “Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.’” “You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” “Weeds are flowers, too,...

I use a picture of fruit salad to get them thinking about the properties that they use to identify "stuff". Then I show them how all those same properties apply to minerals. Might incorporate the caramel wafer idea 👍

yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your CV? Petrologist: it’s a simple miscibility gap - two phases (my work vs. my life) were no longer compatible under prevailing environmental conditions. Just give me a minute - it will take simple mass balance to reconstruct the original assemblage.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your CV? Geophysicist: That's a large low-shear-velocity province. We're still working on resolving it better, and you shouldn't expect much agreement on its origin.

New upcoming workshops from Bellingcat, October 27th - Conflict Monitoring in Data-Scarce Environments: An Open-Source Introduction Focused on Africa www.bellingcat.com/workshops/co...

***Know Your Rights Cards*** Under the U.S. Constitution, all people in the U.S., regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s red cards give examples of how people can exercise these rights: www.ilrc.org/redcards

If American airports are going to make you obtain and then re-check a checked bag when connecting domestically after an international flight, the baggage return carousel must be mandated by law to produce more than one bag per minute! Absolutely psychosis inducing

I saw an Instagram video where the guy had a mini laundromat in his own home, two massive washers and two massive dryers, and rather than "what a waste of energy" my first thought was "those are gonna last way longer than mine, their motors will get a chance to rest"