Brief items

 

Some news items:

• Big news yesterday was the announcement at Condensed Matter Theory Center conference (I'll put up the link to the talk when it arrives on the CMTC youtube channel) by Andrea Young that ABC-stacked trilayer graphene superconducts at particular carrier densities and vertically directed electric field levels.  There are actually two superconducting states, with quite different in-plane critical fields (suggesting different pairing states).  Note that there is no twisting or moiré superlattice here, which suggests that superconductivity in stacked graphene may be more generic than has been thought.  Here is a relevant article in Quanta magazine.
• Here is a talk by Padmanabhan Balaram, about greed in the academic publishing industry.  Even open-access journals apparently have profit margins of 30-40% (!!).  Think about that when publishers claim that production costs and their amazing editorial experience really justify that authors pay $5K per open-access publication.  (Note to self:  get around to putting manuscripts up on the arxiv....)  The talk is also an indictment of fixation on publication metrics.
• On a lighter note, my very talented classmate, Yale chem professor Patrick Holland with a song about Reviewer 3.  It's more mellow than another famous response to Reviewer 3.
• I was going to write a blog post about the physics motivating the use of sticky substances on baseballs, only to discover that someone already wrote that piece.  The time is ripe for someone to try to go to the other extreme:  Some kind of miracle superomniphobic coating on the ball so that the no-slip condition for air at the surface is violated, and every pitch then travels more like a knuckleball.