realChem

Hey folks! Here's a pinned post where you can ask science questions!

Here's a quick rundown of what this post is and isn't:

• This is a place where you can ask science-related questions!
• This is a place to provide science-based answers to others' questions!
• This isn't reddit's askscience community. By this I mean we don't have the resources (or, really, desire) to vet users' credentials, and you shouldn't expect that whoever is answering your question is necessarily an expert. That said, this community does have a large share of professional scientists and engineers, and I'm hoping that those folks will be interested in sharing their expertise when they can.
• This isn't a place to ask for medical advice – since we can't vet qualifications these kinds of questions won't be allowed here in the interest of preventing harm, and I'll remove any comments that ask personal medical questions. If you have a question about medicine that's not asking for advice, that is fine and allowed.
• This isn't the only place on this community where you're allowed to ask questions! If you have a question related to another post, ask in the comments there. If you have a question not related to another post, I'd like it if you tried asking here first (to help this thread gain some traction), but you're also free to ask in a separate post if you'd prefer (or both).

I'm going to post this inaugural thread with no set expiration date. I'm currently thinking a new thread maybe every 2–4 weeks, but I'd like to see what the volume of comments here ends up being like before deciding for sure.

Edit: Alright, it's been more than 48 hours! We got lots more feedback this time, and most of it has been in support of the idea! I'm going to give this a try, and see if it gets any traction. If not many people end up using it I can always just unpin and let the post fall down the sorting list.

@[email protected] made an interesting point about pinned comments being less visible to folks browsing from feed other than /c/science itself, but I'm hoping that having the pinned post might let some folks realize that asking questions is even allowed on this community in the first place! I'll make it clear that asking questions as a separate post is also allowed (at least for now, may change if the feed ends up being flooded by them but that's the opposite of the current situation so I'm not too worried).

Original text of this post below:

So it turns out if you set a language on your post, anyone who hasn't explicitly picked any languages in their profile can't see it. So I'm gonna repost this with no language selected and see if we get a little more feedback this time.

There were a couple of Q&A posts here ~~yesterday~~ the other day that got some pretty good engagement, and I was wondering if folks would be interested in a weekly/biweekly pinned Q&A post?

I don't think it makes sense at this point to do anything like reddit's /r/AskScience does in terms of organizing themed panels or vetting people's credentials, nor is that something that's really supported by lemmy as a platform at the moment. It seems, though, that we do have a fair number of users around who are working scientists and engineers in a pretty wide variety of fields.

So: if a pinned Q&A post existed, would you ask questions? Likewise, would you contribute answers? If you wouldn't use it, I'd love to know that too! Do you think it would be better to leave things as they are and just ask questions in post form? Let me know here in the comments, and also of course feel free to raise any additional thoughts or concerns you might have. If it seems like enough folks are interested I can set up a thread to try the idea out.

A lot of science communication in the media can be, to say it gently, not the best. Important things get left out, conclusions are often misrepresented or extrapolated to things that they really don't say, and methods are often left out completely.

I want to find some more sources for good science communication that people have generally found to be both accurate and well written for folks outside the field (since if all we wanted was accuracy, we'd just read the primary literature).

I've always personally been a fan of Quanta. They occasionally write about topics I'm well versed in (materials / crystallography) and I find that on those topics they're very accurate, so I assume that's also true about the articles they write in other fields. I also think that the folks writing for them do a good job at the communication aspect, e.g. being willing to cover the basics a bit before jumping into the new science.

What about you all? Do you have a favorite or a go-to for high quality science writing?

I assume a fair number of folk around this community have been aware of the labor negotiations going on at UPS right now, and the potential strike next month. This video from More Perfect Union that came out today is sharing the stories of a couple of part-time workers (the workers whose exploitation is at the center of the current negotiations).

Here's the relevant paper (which does not appear to be open access, unfortunately): Polygonal tessellations as predictive models of molecular monolayers

A very thought-provoking video about Gell-Mann amnesia, its compliment (which she calls Mann-Gell amnesia, which I think is a fun name), and science communication

Also the beginning of the video is framed around reddit, which I think is interesting to bring up in the context of lemmy/beehaw, building a new community, and the choices we make about how we communicate with each other online

This paper describes an amazingly deep principle underlying a lot of physics. The paper might be a little tricky if you're not familiar with group theory, but it's got some pretty good illustrations that help a lot.

The one-line takeaway is:

It is only the absence of some symmetry elements, which is obligatory. It is this property – dissymmetry – which makes phenomena

Essentially, if you can find a broken symmetry in some effect, you know that you'll also find that broken symmetry in (the superposition of) it's causes. You can't necessarily say anything about the set of symmetries of the causes, but you can about their dissymmetries.

The reason I love this paper so much is because it's part of a line of mathematical thinking about science that eventually lead to Emmy Noether's famous theorem, where she was able to prove that wherever we find a conserved quantity (e.g. energy, momentum, etc) it is due to an underlying continuous symmetry in the system. (This isn't the same thing as this paper is discussing, but her result uses this same application of ideas from group theory to physics.)

Note: This paper should be available as part of an open archive but sometimes it's hard for me to tell, since I have institutional access; lmk if you can't access the paper

I've been curious how many working researchers we've got in this community, and what you all do!

If you're working in science (physical or social), engineering, etc in a research capacity, give a shout in the comments and let us know what you work on! Same goes for students and amateur scientists at any level. (And by amateur I mean those of you who are working on your own experiments but just not being paid for it / not working on a degree; I'm upset that "amateur" has a negative connotation, it shouldn't.)

I'm currently a PhD candidate, working on transmission electron microscopy and electronic materials (mainly ferroelectrics). In the past I've been involved in research / product development in a few different industries, including medical devices, aerogels, and materials for RF devices.

This video is a little bit old now, but still, I think, relevant. Results of the union vote on whether to strike are due on June 16.

It's not sports news or anything, but I'm pretty excited! Finished my open water yesterday, got my card today! Really looking forward to getting some more dives in (I can tell I'll need a bunch more practice).

Anyone else here scuba dive?