Axel Schmidt
@physics-axel
Physicist, nature lover
Not totally confident on this one, but it’s possible this bright-eyed fellow is a male emerald jumping spider, Paraphidippus aurantius. He was super curious, always turning to face me, and hard to photograph on the abdomen.
Another spider from this week: a goldenrod crab spider, Misumena vatia. This one was found by the kiddo, who snapped a photo and immediately sent it to me. 😃🥰
It was a pleasure making your acquaintance, but this no place for a spider.
A new spider species for me this week! I think it’s a long-jawed orb weaver, Tetragnatha elongata. It was a passenger on my kayak, but I was able to paddle to shore and convince him to disembark. Very distinctive body shape and crazy looking jaws!
Bill Bertozzi is a legend in my field of nuclear physics, so at first glance, I naturally assumed he was the namesake of Bertozzi Road on the campus of Lawrence Berkeley Lab. But no, it’s Carolyn Bertozzi (his daughter), 2022 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, of the Berkeley scientific pantheon.
I was today years old when I learned that the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover has a fifth Beatle.
I spotted this t-shirt at a big name clothing store, and I was immediately curious to read the international maritime flags. So many fun possibilities, but this shirt just says, “NDCIFK.” Lame
My students diffracted sunlight this afternoon and confirmed the sun is indeed very woke. Next step: improving their spectrometer’s resolution to identify the Fraunhofer lines.
This is one of the toroid magnets that will be part of the upcoming MOLLER experiment at Jefferson Lab. Finally got to see it with my own eyes. It’s not my research; this is just an admiration post.
I bet "Surgery Technology International" would be excited to receive my latest paper on quasi-elastic electron scattering from light nuclei.
I received this very oddly specific spam, which is especially weird considering I'm a physicist for whom cows are abstract spherical objects.
It’s September, and with school starting, we decided to harvest our carrot crop. Here’s what a summer got us, with all others munched by rabbits. Glad I don’t do this for a living, because I wouldn’t be.
This is the experiment I was working on last week. This enormous spectrometer detects particles emerging from collisions of high energy electrons with stationary helium nuclei.
An issue of the European Physical Journal A that I guest-edited on short-range correlations between protons and neutrons inside nuclei has been made open access until Aug. 6. It's great summer beach reading. www.epj.org/epja-news/28...
For spider enthusiasts: I've been seeing a bunch of these around the house and garden the past week, and I cannot figure out what it is. Its body shape is giving me yellow sac spider vibes, but the color is wrong, and she's bigger than what I usually find. Ideas or suggestions appreciated! #spiders
I know you probably got tons of feedback on Bea Wolf already, but here’s some more, unsolicited. After we brought it home, I didn’t see my kiddo for hours. It has been a constant traveling companion and the topic of I don’t know how many discussions. You hit a home run on this one.
The world may be coming apart, but the evening is warm, the trees are in bloom, and the sunset is perfectly aligned with the grid of the neighborhood.
This “photo” appeared in an ad I saw on a respectable website. I wonder if we are in an early era before image generation stops making these mistakes, but I fear humanity will just start tolerating this in the media we consume.