Karmela Padavic-Callaghan (they/them)
@kpcallaghan_
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Now: @newscientist . Past: @sciam @WIRED @QuantaMagazine @techreview @aeonmag @PhysicsWorld . Physics PhD. Ex @BHSEC teacher. Croatian in Queens. Vegan. Queer.
Joined July 2013
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Pinned Tweet
Could not be more excited to be working on my first book with
@CatherineTung1
for
@BeaconPressBks
. It is such a privilege to get to bring something personal into writing about the science that has always been integral to who I am as a person
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Now that I'm writing multiple news stories a week I'm interviewing (primarily) physicists constantly and again realizing how few get any media training. Here's an imperfect/incomplete list of things to keep in mind if you find yourself interviewed for a news/magazine story 🧵
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Me, a science journalist, in a giant fridge
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Beyond excited to start the next chapters of my writing career as a physics reporter at the
@newscientist
It was so bittersweet to leave my teaching job but I’m looking forward to writing about physics all day every day from now on.
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Throughout grad school + college ppl always told me I didn’t look like a physicist. One of the things that keep me returning to my classroom with energy and enthusiasm is the chance to model for my students that physicist can look however they want
#thisiswhataphysicistlookslike
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V pleased to inform that I defended my PhD in an Iron Maiden shirt I bought in high school. I’ve wanted to be a physicist since the 7th grade and, putting all my future anxiety aside, I’d like to politely vouch for unapologetically being who you are throughout all your journeys
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Exotic neutron matter existed in the lab so briefly that we only have odd words for it: it lasted a 100 trillionths of a trillionth, a 100 septillionths or 1 univigintillionth of a second. It's called a tetraneutron and I wrote about it for
@newscientist
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I'm very proud of how we have been covering LK-99 at
@newscientist
A lot of work went into giving our readers clarity and sourcing expert opinions while staying current and reacting to news quickly. These are some of the trickiest stories I've ever reported. A short summary 🧵
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@bettinamak
I grew up eating it with lots of salt, a dollop of sour cream and a side of crusty bread and was utterly shocked when I moved to the US and found that that's not normal here
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Me and the
@IBM
super-fridge just hanging out in this week’s print edition of
@newscientist
No big deal.
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Artificial, electronic skin that can stretch, conform, sense, and send electrical signals into the brain such that the brain could understand and act upon them, in my latest for
@newscientist
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Superfluidity in helium was discovered in the 1930s and it just kept being interesting. In my latest for
@newscientist
I wrote about levitating droplets of superfluid helium in vacuum forever as a step towards some amazing fundamental physics experiments
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In the latest issue of
@newscientist
I wrote about exotic objects that, if they existed in space, could be mistaken for black holes but not suffer some of their contradictions. The catch? You need extra dimensions and string theory to justify them and see what they’d look like
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This potentially revolutionary finding has been garnering hype on social media for the last day or so but experts have been advising caution and expressing skepticism. The situation is messy and only replication attempts will get us to full clarity.
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about tiny worms that are exceptional at jumping at insects that they then feed off of as parasites and how it's not just their muscles that help them jump but also the electrostatic attraction to their prey, like fruit flies
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For
@newscientist
I reported on tech from
@UCL_MSD
that uses ultrasound to levitate and manipulate objects in real time. Researchers can make floating, 3D displays even in crowded spaces where sound would usually be scattered. A step towards mixed reality!
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My first space story ever but it's really a thermodynamics story set on an icy moon of Saturn. A classic physics problem: how to tell what's beneath a surface if you cannot break it? Except that here the answer is salty water that could maybe sustain life
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about on of those experiments where finding nothing extremely precisely is both extremely meaningful and it invites even more research, innovation and pushing of the limits of instrumentation.
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For
@newscientist
I reported on a stunning intersection of active matter physics, biology and mathematics of knots because blackworms figured out how to shape shift by tangling and untangling with each other in ways researchers are just starting to grasp
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My latest for
@newscientist
is another update on LK-99. Quick work form researchers around the world unfortunately seems to indicate that whatever is happening with this material will not resolve the issue of room temperature superconductivity anytime soon
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My story about the
@QunnectInc
quantum network in New York City is now also in print in this week’s issue of
@newscientist
Grab it to read about quantum light that’s already running around neighborhoods like mine, as a precursor to a more futuristic quantum Internet
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My arXiv shirt came in, it had to be documented
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about a quantum chemistry experiment that managed to observe and quantify a super rare tunneling event that can happen even when molecules and atoms don't have enough energy to undergo any conventional chemistry reaction
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New Scientist New York crew ready for the eclipse
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Last summer, NIF managed to output more energy than the facility has ever done before in a nuclear fusion experiment. Now, a year later, the researchers definitively know that they achieved a huge milestone: ignition. I wrote about it for
@newscientist
🧵
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My latest foray into reporting on new types of computers for
@newscientist
is about a proposal for building a liquid crystal computer that shares some features with quantum computers
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In my latest for
@newscientist
, the Holy Grail of fluorochemical production (and as I learned while reporting, these chemicals are in everything from antibiotics to fertilizers)
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Today marks 1 year since I started as a physics reporter on the
@newscientist
news desk in New York. If my math is correct, I reported 135 stories, took half a dozen reporting trips, and compared the universe to a cake on our pod at least once. Hoping for an even better year 2!
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about glass origami. Glass itself is, of course, not foldable, but researchers got around that by cleverly using a soft material called a polymer and tiny particles of silica
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about everyone's new favorite material, the alleged miracle superconductor LK-99, and how independent replications and verifications of its unusual properties are going
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Often the biggest lift for the writer is explaining why a study/paper is important or interesting at all. The reader rarely has knowledge of past work, trends in the field or what is even standard for some subgenre of research. Start broad and try to give lots of context first 1/
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Random fluctuations, tiny unexpected changes and all sorts of noise usually make your devices, like computers, underperform. In my latest for
@newscientist
, however, I report on a new one that thrives on this because it plays by the rules of thermodynamics
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I've been trying to write about chemistry more and this was a neat story to put together. Until very recently we could not make element number 4 in the periodic table make a metallic bond with itself. My latest in
@newscientist
is on what changed.
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about an effort to package quantum tech into the kind of practical box that your router or Roku box already are by
@QunnectInc
who are working to make quantum internet that much more real
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Terminator II vibes aside, changing your size and shape when you're a robot (like T-1000 and this tiny thing) is crucial for practicality, especially if the robot's task is as precise as removing occlusions or delivering intense drugs within the body
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about a new type of soft robot that can not only stretch and crawl but also fully shape-shift by changing its phase - it can be made switch between solid and liquid
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My latest for
@newscientist
is one of those stories that I told everyone about because I was taught the barest bones of photosynthesis in school and as it turns out, on the microscopic level, there are still many unknows about how exactly it works
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For
@newscientist
I wrote about Europe's fastest supercomputer getting connected to a tiny Finnish quantum computer. Folks are increasingly discussing quantum-classical hybrids and mix-and-match modular designs as future of quantum and this is an example
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One of the first calculations I learned in quantum mechanics was probably how a wavepacket spreads over time and now I got to write for
@newscientist
about a quantum microscopy experiment that imaged just that. Super cool!
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I may be accidentally becoming the New Scientist Weekly science-that-sounds-like-fiction correspondent. This week I discuss an experiment where an AI uses EEG readings from a person's brain to make images of objects the person's eyes cannot see directly.
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Conference attire, still not sure what science journalists are supposed to look like
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about a type of superconducting qubit, a key ingredient for quantum computers many industry leaders are building now, called fluxonium. It has a sci-fi name, but could be a real contender for useful quantum tech in the future
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For
@newscientist
I wrote about what happens to mathematical billiards when you let the ball have spatial memory - and it is very intricate chaos. Thanks to
@maziyarj
and his team for insights and images from this cool study, which was published in PRL
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For
@newscientist
I wrote about a new, possibly more sustainable way of making things out of wood: grounding leftover wood into "wood flour" than using that for 3D printing where you print one shape and then it morphs into another as it dries
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Latest from me for
@newscientist
, a short, accessible guide on why we even care about high temperature superconductors and what has been going on within superconductivity since H. K. Onnes studied very cold mercury wires in 1911
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Some days you come into work and it's not even 9 am but folks are asking you to explain what quantum spin states are in half a sentence of plain English and these are days I wish I had become a tomato farmer instead of getting a PhD
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Crystals are some of the most fundamental structures in physics, almost everything we touch is touchable because it is an ordered arrangement of atoms, and now research by
@FakhriLab
and
@tzerhan29
shows that tiny moving animals can form crystals too
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Mom’s first visit to New York since I started working at
@newscientist
and she immediately became a super loyal reader. She’s leaving for Croatia today with all our back issues in her carry on 🥹🥹
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There's more and more junk and more and more satellites that could collide with that junk in Earth's orbit. Quantum technology, the kind that originated in fundamental research, may be part of how we begin to deal with that. My latest for
@newscientist
:
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I wrote about the world's brightest X-ray machine being just about ready to turn on in December and now it is up and running, ready to catch molecules in action in a many situations we really want to understand more, in my latest for
@newscientist
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In my latest for
@newscientist
, a really cool intersection of information theory, music, physics, and cognition science
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“This is the ocean taking a deep breath!”
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A really intriguing study on using quantum techniques to communicate across interstellar distances that I reported on a while back for
@newscientist
just got published in
@PhysRevD
today.
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Delightfully to hold my
@newscientist
feature in my hands. The gorgeous illustration really pops in print and my colleague’s humor really did me some favors here
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about a stunning meeting of experimental skill, unexpected mathematical correspondences and big questions about spacetime
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I became a physicist in a time when the Higgs boson was already a big deal, so it was a privilege to call folks that encountered Higgs' ideas when they were brand new and learn some of that history. My retrospective on Peter Higgs, for
@newscientist
:
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about how playing with your food, and your kids, can teach you an awful lot about fluid dynamics and bubbles
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The ultimate perk of being a science reporter is that most days you can say something like "I had to call a man about a dead star" or "I was on the phone discussing the true nature of time" whenever someone asks how your morning's been going
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This essay for
@aeonmag
about how quantum mechanics reveals that imaginary numbers are not all that imaginary was the last piece I filed before moving onto my current news beat and I am delighted to finally see it out in the world
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My latest for
@newscientist
is maybe the best argument I have come across yet for both letting your kids play with Legos and asking students to build things from scratch in their classes.
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I read one of those silly "for dummies" books about quantum mechanics when I was 15 and have not stopped thinking about it since. I'm so lucky to get to think and write about it every day. Happy
#WorldQuantumDay
, here are some recent quantum stories by me for
@newscientist
1/6
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Super excited to see this next step for quantum internet in New York. I previously reported on some earlier stages of this project here:
New York City, the concrete jungle where
#quantum
particles fly: For the first time ever, we sent qubits through standard telecom in NY, making the roadmap to building a full-scale network that much clearer. More on this milestone with
@nyuniversity
:
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It was the best of times to be a physics reporter and it was the worst of times to be a physics reporter
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Technical language and process details are really hard. Stories have to include a section that describes what was done but expect that section to be simplified and shortened or to rely on analogy. Most words that need to be defined for the reader typically get edited out 2/
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After almost 2 yrs of applying + waiting I received my green card in the mail today. I am beyond grateful. Knowing that I can keep teaching, keep writing and, most importantly, stay with my family here in NY without all this legal anxiety hanging over our heads is a huge relief.
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For
@newscientist
, I reported on a quantum computing record - the largest number of quantum bits verified to be entangled. Similar past experiments got close or even went bigger, but could not verify that all the bits were genuinely entangled to all other.
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Smallest autonomous machines are made by nature and keep our cells working, but scientist are getting really close to making nanoscale machines from scratch too. For
@newscientist
I reported on a nanoturbine made from DNA by
@cees_dekker
and collaborators
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Day 2 of
#NewScientistLive
and I’m introducing a few talks on the Universe Stage, starting with atmospheric physicist and sicrnce communicator extraordinaire
@simonoxfphys
talking about what weather is, why the atmosphere flows and how the atmosphere is changing
@newscientist
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One of the coolest thing I saw at
#acsfall2023
was a talk about using bacteria-killing viruses as naturally available nanobots that can help out with food safety. I wrote about it in my latest for
@newscientist
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A small thread of science-of-food stories I've written for
@newscientist
recently. Today: grinding coffee too finely makes espressos worse and part of the reason may be uneven packing of very fine grains into the the coffee machine 1/3
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In August I reported on NIF achieving ignition in a nuclear fusion experiment and at the time it sounded like they were having a hard time replicating this result. It is so, so exciting to see them go a step beyond that with this new announcement!
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More often than not writers will not show you a full draft of a piece and may just double-check quotes or excerpts with you before sending a draft to their editor. This is not personal, just a matter of journalistic integrity 6/
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about how if you build a solar-powered balloon then put a low frequency sound microphone on it and let it rise up super high, you will absolutely encounter some mysteries.
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It's super cool to see this work published. I wrote about it for
@newscientist
while it was a preprint here:
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Are you wearing the… the March Meeting merch? Yeah, I am
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How wonderful is it to see so many folks turn up for a talk on the joy of maths?!
@DrEugeniaCheng
at the
#NewScientistLive
Universe stage is about to invite us into understanding category theory
@newscientist
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Am I paying for therapy just to then spend 20 minutes of the session explaining what a quantum superposition state is to my therapist because truly I cannot control the impulse to always spew quantum nonsense? I hope they're feeling intellectually enriched.
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about a new gel that becomes a soft, pliable electrode when injected into living animal tissues. It could be a less invasive alternative to inserting electrodes into organs like the brain for electric stimulation therapy
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This varies, but it's probably better to assume that the writer doesn't have 1000s of words and will have to leave out really interesting parts of your interview in favor of other really interesting parts. It's never personal 3/
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And I cannot fail to mention an older story that had me take a train upstate to see a fridge so large I could barely close its door that may also one day become a necessary supporting technology for powerful quantum computers 6/6
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An unexpected perk of the new job is that I learned a lot about eels today. Turns out science writers really love eels
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What can combining super-sized atoms, a superconducting cavity and lasers do? As I reported for
@newscientist
, these may be key ingredients for turning outputs of some quantum processors into optical signals that could then be transmitted through fibres
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Excited to share the first in a series of columns I'll be writing for
@newscientist
on one of my favorite hobbies - vegan baking! If you know me IRL, I've definitely made you eat this cake, and if you don't you should definitely make your own!
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@bettinamak
I’ll throw in a vote for grated carrots with a squeeze of orange juice, maple syrup, salt, and something spicy
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APS March Meeting days 0 and 1, personal edition. Baby’s first Meeting as a reporter, also first time seeing a circus open a physics conference. A real adventure all around.
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Maybe I'm naïve, but I believe that the best way to stop journalists from over-hyping a paper is to go on record and say "I think this paper is over-hyped" instead of writing vague, snippy emails about the dangers of hype and not engaging with the content of the work in question
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For
@newscientist
I reported on a theory that builds on ideas about time and quantumness from back in the 1980s. This new work strengthens the case that we may live in a world where without quantum entanglement there is no such thing as the passage of time
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about a chip-sized device that shows that the quantum tricks that we know particles of light do can also be done by particles of sound. In other words, it has all the ingredients needed to build sound-based quantum computers.
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My latest for
@newscientist
is about cracks that propagate through soft but brittle hydrogels at speeds that don't make sense within any analytical theory of material failure that we have right now - they're shattering a seemingly fundamental speed limit
2
6
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Something slightly different from me, for
@newscientist
series on the science of cannabis. As it turns out, determining when someone is too high to drive is a much thornier issue than coming up with a device that detects the presence of THC in the driver
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Engineering materials with specific and unusual properties can be difficult, but you can often find them in nature, in places as unexpected as swirling, pheromone intoxicated groups of insects, as per my latest for
@newscientist
on fire ant rafts
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Sometimes when you add hard parts into a soft robot it gets new and useful functionality, as in my latest for
@newscientist
. This little pangolin-inspired thing gets up to 70C, enough to coagulate blood or burn tumor cells
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This comes up semi-regularly so, a note to researchers: if a journalist approaches you for comment on someone else's work, you are not being asked to praise it, we are not trying to do anyone's PR, we just want your honest opinion so a non-expert reader can have some context
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Maybe my favorite robot I got to report on yet: it's small, it's soft and it's ultrafast. Amazingly, the design was inspired by electromagnetic motors but could eventually find use in medicine, for procedures inside the human body
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I'm lowkey jealous of the reporter that wrote this, but
@newscientist
is featuring some excellent atomic clock talk today. Super exciting to have an expert like Jun Ye discuss a clock that loses less than a second in as long as our universe's lifetime
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The
@newscientist
video team made the most delightful video based on my feature on physics and cocktails, the holidays are over but it is overflowing with cheer
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I finished the
#BrooklynHalfMarathon
in the rain this morning, in under two hours, feeling so immensely grateful that I get to live here the whole time I was running
@BK_HalfMarathon
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Sending good holiday vibes from rainy Croatia!
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