Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons @invaderxan@scholar.social

"Photonic multilayer structure of Begonia chloroplasts enhances photosynthetic efficiency"
Jacobs et al (2016), Nature Plants

https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants2016162

available via unpaywall

(With thanks to @daylight for the article link!)

I'm going to keep a thread of these here, in case I need them later. It's helpful for me, but others may find them interesting! Open access versions wherever possible.

"Solar Synthesis: Prospects in Visible Light Photocatalysis"
Schultz & Yoon (2014)
http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC4547527&blobtype=pdf

Beautiful Science art competition

"Que vous soyez scientifique en herbe ou prix Nobel, si vous aimez la science, qu'elle vous inspire, vous fait rêver : montrez-nous ses merveilles!"

http://www.beautifulscience.fr

Solar cell efficiency tables
(version 52)
Green et al (2018)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pip.3040

Note to self:
ラマン分光法 not ラーメン分光法 🍜

So there's this weird little contradiction in my work and it bugs me.

The things I work on aim to mimic the kind of photosynthesis which plants use. A molecule commonly used as an electron relay in molecular photocatalyst systems is methyl viologen. Methyl viologen is also known as paraquat, which is an industrial herbicide.

Copying plants by using a contact plant poison feels... not good. I'm hoping I can find something better to use.

This will be the sixth time we have reanalysed the data, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

So my office on campus currently has 4 people.

I was supposed to have 2 years of postdoc funding, but after a grant proposal got rejected I only have 1, and most of it is already gone.

The other postdoc got her second year of funding rejected for bullshit reasons.

The Masters student got her PhD application rejected because of bureaucracy and probably some amount of internal politics.

Needless to say, none of us are really in the mood for research right now.

"It was a game. A very interesting game one could play. Whenever one solved one of the little problems, one could write a paper about it. It was very easy in those days for any second rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work."

– Paul Dirac, on the early days of quantum mechanics

TFW you realise you did a whole bunch of calculations on the wrong isomer.

Ideally, an international union for postdoctoral researchers is an idea which I find very appealing. Properly setup and managed, it could be very helpful in a world which never has enough funding to go around, where permanent faculty jobs are notoriously difficult to get. International too, because when work can be found in any country, borders have very little meaning.

I wonder how anyone could go about organising such a thing...

"Until research institutions recognize the valuable contributions of postdoctoral scholars and cease to treat them as a source of inexpensive labor, the unionization of postdocs is a trend that should not be disappearing within the near future."

How Postdoctoral Scholars are Collectively Bargaining for their Welfare
https://medium.com/@sda287/the-state-of-the-postdoc-union-how-postdoctoral-scholars-are-collectively-bargaining-for-their-668a558e52e5

Dammit DFT, you're not supposed to just mash all the atoms together in hopes they'll magically find the right structure. That's not how it works. You should know that!

Word of caution. If you, like me, save PDF copies of papers to a directory called "to read" or "unsorted" or similar, try not to let them accumulate.

This advice brought to you by that one scientist who just spent literal hours sorting through a folder full of several hundred papers.