@darrkespur
Associate Professor in Materials Physics at the University of Bristol. Editor-in-Chief of Materials Today Communications. Father of a toddler and a cat, husband. Science fiction author, miniature painter, climber, nerd. He/him
I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Stay free
Danish Parliament Deputy Speaker Lars-Christian Brask:
"If I could come with some advice, it would be for the Senate & House to start to take control of political power in America because with this erratic & mad behaviour, you have to ask the question, is the President capable of running the US?"
If you look at the ridiculous case studies they dredged up & the desperate attempts to hang Reeves for ‘lying’ about the rationale behind a policy she *did not introduce*, you might work out why right-wing media is straining *not* to talk about the finer detail of her (unremarkable) budget.
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.
Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
This summer, solar has been meeting about 10% of global electricity demand😎
Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025.
www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...
Updating my LEGO White House
“.. On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart ..”
@theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
NEW: Something remarkable happened recently and hardly anyone noticed – GB electricity demand was 100% covered by clean power
We took a look at the data and this has happened for a record 87 hours in 2025 to date, twice as often as ever before
🧵
www.carbonbrief.org/...
1/7
Taken just a few minutes ago outside the ICE facility in Portland that Trump claims is under siege. My message to Donald Trump is this: we don’t need you here. Stay the hell out of our city.
Nathan Gill, Reform's leader in Wales at the last Welsh parliament election, has pled guilty to 8 bribery charges, taking Russian cash while he was one of Nigel Farage’s MEPs to speak in favour of Putin's Russia in that parliament
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
![Norah Jones - Something Live at George Fest [Official Live Video]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wqv4vkbdg3sefccqypdizdl7/bafkreihgqcbkfi2owc6djmobl7cq5vnlqrgkoqskznlis7rrxlnykwrlbi)
It is - he did a full song earlier in the gig. Norah Jones is there on backing vocals as well, she did a great version of 'Something' - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nct9....
The first time Charlie Chaplin used his voice in a film, he wielded it to forcefully condemn the rising forces of fascism around the globe.
Will we listen to his words today?
In just 10 years, the UK's electricity sector has gone from #1 emitter to #6 emitter... what a transformation 👏🇬🇧
Now to see what clean power can do to help cut the other sectors..
Hydroxyapatite for destruction.
Painted miniature of a Lumineth Light of Eltharion character from Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Managed to get some hobby done ahead of a local painting competition - the Light of Eltharion miniature from Warhammer Age of Sigmar was a really lovely model to paint (and very different to the hordes of Imperial guard I have on my painting to do list)
Quite possibly the biggest climate story of the year (especially when we look back on this in a few years' time)
For the first time on record, China's emissions are falling due to clean energy growth, not slow power demand...
Random new wind fact for big boat fans: Romania and Bulgaria are not expected to build offshore wind by 2030, because the bridges in Istanbul are too low to let offshore wind installation vessels get into the Black Sea.
After decades of solar PV deployment, the world crossed the 1 TW (a million MW) line in 2022. Just two years later, after adding 0.6 GW in 2024, we already crossed the 2 TW mark too!
Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
I'm not convinced that's much better at this point...
📢ANALYSIS: UK emissions fell 3.6% in 2024 to lowest since 1872
🏭Coal lowest since 1666, when Great Fire ravaged London
🚗EVs pushed oil down despite more traffic, saving £1.7bn
🌇Gas down on "cleanest ever" power
📈📉Since 1990, CO2 -54% / GDP +84%
www.carbonbrief.org/...
1/9
Next time someone tells you that the energy transition cannot be done remember:
In 2012 almost 40% of UK electricity was coal.
Since 1 October 2024 it is zero.
This is the moment Britains last coal power plant shut down on 30 September - the end of 142 years of coal.
HT @neso-energy.bsky.social
The ones we haven't seen: The Brutalist, Nickel Boys and I'm Still Here - the latter I really want to see, but getting access to it in the UK so far is so far eluded us.
Every year my wife and I try to watch all the Oscar best picture nominees. This year we got to 7/10. I really enjoyed Dune II, admired Wicked and Conclave, struggled to get through the chaos of final act of The Substance. Of the ones we watched I think Anora is most deserving.
Same franchise, but the Xwing series of novels by Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston are really great expansions of the star wars universe without any of the original characters (except Wedge but he's pretty minor in the movies).
For films, does Blade Runner 2049 count?
Congrats!
Being a Tottenham fan is exhausting.
My #spotifywrapped for 2024 is going back to basics/comfort music a bit for me - most things at the top are also in my all time top list.
Transmission electron microscopy image of layers of oxide on the surface of Eurofer 97 steel after exposure to high temperature water. There is an iron-rich magnetite/haemetite oxide layer with larger grains at the top surface, with a porous Cr-rich spinel oxide below it and a denser Cr-rich-spinel at the metal-oxide interface.
Our new paper led by Ron Clark from the National Nuclear Laboratory looked at the corrosion behaviour of the reduced activation steel Eurofer97 with and without ion irradiation. This helps understand materials behaviour in cooling circuits of future fusion tokamak reactors. doi.org/10.1016/j.jn...
