William H. Grover
@wgrover
Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside | loves microfluidics, sensors, and weird computers | hates fake medicines | groverlab.org
While we're venting about Adobe: I love having price tags in the menus... 🤬
Seriously, look how the new People Mover tracks (top) and walkway (left) go out of their way to *avoid* the Theme Building. If the Theme Building can't be a restaurant again, I wish the new transit infrastructure could have utilized it somehow, instead of avoiding it like it's a leper colony.
The weird emptiness of the Theme Building will be even more acutely evident when (if?) the People Mover opens. It'll be right at eye level for train riders.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Clavicle fractures on the shoulder of Orion. I watched kidney stones glitter in the dark near the bowels. All those moments will be lost in time, like barium in an esophagus..."
Hey Bluesky geologists 🧪, we've had about 60 earthquakes over the past few weeks in a pretty small area in the hills between Riverside/MoVal and Redlands (including a few >3.0 that I've felt in Riverside). Is there anything interesting going on here?
Interesting. I made an animation that switches between your Feb Instagram version and Trump's version of this (despicable) image. It looks like the whole top ~5% of the image was changed, not just the horned beast. Maybe the original image was cropped then extended using AI? Regardless, weird.
I've got one! After learning from @who.int about the global problem of substandard and falsified medicines a few years ago, I made it a priority in my research lab to develop low-cost and easy-to-use tools for identifying fake drugs: groverlab.org/fakes/ #WorldHealthDay #StandWithScience
We used DF to test pills from 32 different drug products and found that it correctly identified 90% of these pills. Even when testing pills from 33 different manufacturing lots of two similar drug products, our technique still correctly identified 100% of the pills. [3/4] 🧪
The technique converts the disintegration and dissolution of a pill into a digital fingerprint that can be compared to other pills' fingerprints to find a match and determine the authenticity of the medicine. [2/4] 🧪
Our latest out today in the journal Analytical Chemistry: "Disintegration Fingerprinting" uses a $4 optical sensor (meant for use in toy robots!) to identify substandard and falsified medicines, which are a massive problem in many parts of the world. [1/4] 🧪#chemsky
"The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
For comparison, downtown Atlanta has over 70 skybridges, most of them the work of John Portman (who coincidentally designed L.A.'s Westin Bonaventure in your video). Convenient for workers in Portman's buildings, but criticized for making the street-level pedestrian experience less pleasant.
The twins really got into @tmbg.bsky.social’s music this year, so you know what that means they’re getting for Christmas:
Good morning from Riverside, where a blanket of fog made Mt. Rubidoux and the Jurupa Hills look like islands in an inland sea.
Japanese-style sandwiches at 7-Eleven in the US? I'm intrigued... The egg salad seemed pretty accurate, though the bread was maybe not as sweet and soft as the Japanese version. Anyway 7/10 and much cheaper than a flight to Tokyo
Days like this provide a rare insight into how much of our technology runs on Amazon’s infrastructure.
Semi-related: I had a recent collaboration with some entomologists - I built little circuits that read tiny RFID tags attached to the bumblebees they study (one shown here) as the bees come and go. It's like a FasTrak or EZPay tollbooth, but for bugs!
Looks like you can still find Letraset rub-on chemical structures on eBay; I might need to buy a sheet just to show the young'uns how good they have it with ChemDraw.
My favorite Robert Redford movie, though lately it feels like a relic from a time long gone.
❤️❤️❤️ these posters in the Geology building at UC Riverside ❤️❤️❤️ Seriously, why aren't we putting messages like these everywhere? I'd happily chip in some pro-NSF and pro-NIH billboards? 🧪
I've never been to one of these events, so my knowledge of them is based on their depictions in episodes of "Mr. Bean" and "Wallace and Gromit," which I assumed were satires. But now I'm questioning that assumption...
Is this a thing? Because someone I don't know just offered me roast beef:
"Disintegration Fingerprinting" converts the disintegration and dissolution of a pill into a digital fingerprint. We used it to test 32 different drug products and found that it correctly identified 90% of these pills. 🧪 Read more at www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...