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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.…
Ahhhh - I had not realised before that about half my spoken words consists of 'um'😮. How can I get better at talking?
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
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!
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.
Would any Berlin-based folk here be up for meeting on Friday afternoon? :)
Alternatively, any recommendations for interesting things to do?
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👍
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? 🤷
I have no idea what a real dislocation looks like.
The extra half plane edge dislocation picture is a lie...
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
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
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
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 :)

ALT Square sponge cake on a plate wrapped in aluminium foil, a small surface wedge has been cut out of the top surface of the cake, shows a brown branched line running diagonally along the cake cross section. The wedge is somewhere else on the cake surface on top of a knife. A wide strip of chocolate is piped onto the surface and intersects the vertical cut line of the wedge.
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. 🎂🌡🔥





























