Joined October 2018
Here is a simulated spherical Nickel electron channelling pattern (EMSoft) made into a football shape so I can hold it and pretend I am an electron diving into atoms. I like electrons and shapes and matlab and this has all 3 😍😍😍😍 @aunt_daisy doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2818.…
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Ahhhh - I had not realised before that about half my spoken words consists of 'um'😮. How can I get better at talking?
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There is always time for #ScienceCake when preparing slides: meet this very hungry fatigue crack in a cake-jelly composite 🐊🍰 Do these cake crystals have an easy-crack plane? What about WC crystals in WC-Co hardmetals? Find out at #EUROMAT2023
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Hexagons are the Bestagons!
Giants Causeway (Northern Ireland) - stunning! ... #braggyourpattern @IUCr2023
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"Just add water" pancake mix under SEM. Looks like blobs of buttermilk/oil and crystals of baking soda in a sticky gluten substrate
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Super exciting news about Smith, Meyers, @cs_kaplan, Goodman-Strauss's discovery of an "einstein"—a single shape that tiles the plane aperiodically! I decided to create a 3D-printable version of it. You can find it here: thingiverse.com/thing:592330… Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798
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Just wrote some notes from #MTEX 2023 workshop - ended up with >1700 words! Super grateful to have 8 days to focus 100% on #EBSD #MATLAB #crystallography. I learnt so much, & so many exciting things I want to do / help with / contribute to now!
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Ngl - my workload in the run-up to the workshop was rough! (If I tried to keep it up for much longer it would have broken me.) But I am grateful for awesome colleagues at NPL who took on a lot of my 'normal' work so that I could join in #MTEX 2023.
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I'm not great at managing travel admin, and get *very* tired from new places & people - this can be chaotic/stressful! Virtual meeting options help a lot. This time, attending in-person was definitely worthwhile as it's easier to actively participate.
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Would any Berlin-based folk here be up for meeting on Friday afternoon? :) Alternatively, any recommendations for interesting things to do?
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I am running out of time to prepare slides for a talk and therefore procrastinating with powerpoint stick figures... meet the 5 main EBSD users in our lab👍
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stop-motion microscopy 📷
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An MP4 file (first draft - feedback is welcome!)
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Black/white balls = W / C atoms. The left model shows part of a <11-23> {10-10} edge dislocated structure, except where do all the other atoms go? 🤷
😄 I will finish the slides as long as I stay disciplined and don't get too distracted building hexagonal ball and stick models
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Today I learnt: residual stress (as I understood it) is also a myth... as is crystal symmetry... Are chemical bonds and lattice distortions still real? 🤷
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I have no idea what a real dislocation looks like. The extra half plane edge dislocation picture is a lie...
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527 days (4.55 x 10^16 nanoseconds) ago, me and @mv_castrillon’s picture book ‘Nano: the Spectacular Science of the Very (Very) Small’ came out. It explores the magic of nanomaterials and how we can use them to create incredible new technologies. 😃 – at Camden Town, London
Today is "Nano: the Spectacular Science of the Very (Very) Small"'s first birthday. Woohoo! In the past year it has been translated into five languages (🇫🇷, 🇬🇷, 🇪🇪, 🇮🇹+🇨🇳) and received FOUR starred reviews (Kirkus Reviews, BCCB, SLJ + PW). The paperback version just dropped!
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September 10, 10/09, 10⁻⁹ > today is Nano Day! It’s a great day to celebrate the super small science (and super small scientists) in your life. 🔬🌀 #NanoDay – at Camden Town, London
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C. V. Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Raman effect. Today, Raman spectroscopy helps scientists understand and optimise nanomaterials. Raman made his extraordinary breakthrough after studying the physics of Indian musical instruments.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._… – at Camden Town, London
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Today I defended my PhD and passed! Now you can call me Dr. Barber 😇 My wonderful friends made me a viva cake celebrating my cancelled fieldwork plans in Indonesia, including accurate topography and tectonics. Just one more reason to do field work there one day 😅 – at Cambridge, England
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Making this #ScienceCake involved a satisfyingly large amount of engineering :) Here, a FIB cross-section of a crack in a cake sample on an aluminium SEM stub! Including ion beam damage artefacts & the beam scan flyback artefact on the deposited Pt layer :)
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The internal crack is made by 1. cut a supermarket Madeira cake, 2. paint chocolate cake batter onto the cut surfaces, 3. Reassemble, wrap and freeze, 4. slice crusts off frozen cake, put into cake tin, mark crack long axis! 5. Pour batter over the cracked cake, bake. 🎂🌡🔥
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6. When the cake is done & cool, slice the top off to level it, put upside down on an Al-foil wrapped plate. Check the crack long axis BEFORE peeling off baking paper, 7. slice FIB trench across crack. 8. Replace trench, pipe Pt strip out of molten choc bar w/ corner cut off :)
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