This accent is fake, isn't it?

Remember incels that she only exists because scrotes create the demand

Am I the only one that has no trouble believing that in our contemporary culture a miserable and alienated child could, of their own volition, decide to commit a senseless act of violence? Trying to say that they were convinced by the FBI or "digital networks of adult reactionaries who groom them to commit mass shootings" (actual take I just saw) is just as much of a cop-out as blaming violent video games and violent music. It's more comfortable to believe that there's a lone catalyst or sinister outside actor persuading all these kids to commit atrocities, but it turns these shootings are just a symptom of our rotting culture, with causes so disparate and pervasive that there isn't a satisfying villain to point your finger at.

Also make t-shirts about that mod u guys hate and then keep yourselves safe

--forpe out

LORE: Kills straightanists who screenshot Platysfield NFTs! do NOT misappropriate rDrama copyrighted NFTs or you will be sorry

Spent the entire day playing stardew valley, so a couple of quick ones

Just when I thought dawnwalker would be free of DEI as opposed to upcoming CDPR games. 🙁 pic.twitter.com/NLYuNlwHyA

— Legend (@Born10000BC) January 14, 2025

I love sucking peepee

^{* Pending daddy doesn't keel over for being a 90 year old who's diet is mostly McDonald's and diet Coke.}

Remember...we are nice until we're not...

Then Canadians are well known as the troops the Nazi's feared most...the storm troopers.

I wouldn't suggest pushing us around...we may make jokes about it all...but when push comes to shove, we're all pretty badass.

— 🇨🇦$CardanoCanuck🇨🇦 (@KevinBarss) January 7, 2025

Ok not really. But why are so many redscarepod people repeating this exact talking point? Why is it always DoorDash and not Grubhub?

Back in 2022 - and it looks like this is still the case in 2025 - anyone with a Bank of America credit card could get Grubhub+ free for 1 year. It's nothing special but it knocks off a lot of the junk fees from food deliveries.

A meal that would cost $20 at a restaurant might be $28 to $32 to have delivered. I went through my order history and it looks like I utilized it about a dozen times in 2 years. Is this "bleak" on my part?

Downstairs

Upstairs

Other/Minor Characters

I think I remembered most of the peeps. Who yo favorite?

For the first time, scientists have observed a quasiparticle—referred to as a semi-Dirac fermion—that behaves uniquely: it is massless when moving in one direction but possesses mass when moving in another. First theorized 16 years ago, this quasiparticle was recently identified within a crystal of a semi-metal material known as ZrSiS. Researchers believe this discovery could pave the way for advancements in emerging technologies, including batteries and sensors.

The research team, led by scientists from Penn State and Columbia University

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.

" data-gt-translate-attributes="[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]" tabindex="0" role="link" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; font-size: 15px; font-family: inherit; text-decoration: none !important; color: rgb(102, 102, 102) !important;">Columbia University, published their findings in the journal Physical Review X.

"This was totally unexpected," said Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author on the paper. "We weren't even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn't understand — and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none."

What Are Semi-Dirac Fermions?

A particle can have no mass when its energy is entirely derived from its motion, meaning it is essentially pure energy traveling at the speed of light. For example, a photon

A photon is a particle of light. It is the basic unit of light and other electromagnetic radiation, and is responsible for the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy and momentum. They travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, and can have different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors of light. Photons can also have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies of light.

A photon or particle of light is considered massless because it moves at light speed. According to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, anything traveling at the speed of light cannot have mass. In solid materials, the collective behavior of many particles, also known as quasiparticles, can have different behavior than the individual particles, which in this case gave rise to particles having mass in only one direction, Shao explained.

>The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to researchers who made the discovery. Credit: Yinming Shao/Penn State

Semi-Dirac fermions were first theorized in 2008 and 2009 by several teams of researchers, including scientists from the Université Paris Sud in France and the University of California, Davis. The theorists predicted there could be quasiparticles with mass-shifting properties depending on their direction of movement — that they would appear massless in one direction but have mass when moving in another direction.

Sixteen years later, Shao and his collaborators accidentally observed the hypothetical quasiparticles through a method called magneto-optical spectroscopy. The technique involves shining infrared light on a material while it's subjected to a strong magnetic field and analyzing the light reflected from the material. Shao and his colleagues wanted to observe the properties of quasiparticles inside silver-colored crystals of ZrSiS.

Accidental Discovery Through Magneto-Optical Spectroscopy

The team conducted their experiments at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. The lab's hybrid magnet creates the most powerful sustained magnetic field in the world, roughly 900,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. The field is so strong it can levitate small objects such as water droplets.

The researchers cooled down a piece of ZrSiS to -452 degrees Fahrenheit -- only a few degrees above absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature — and then exposed it to the lab's powerful magnetic field while hitting it with infrared light to see what it revealed about the quantum interactions inside the material.

"We were studying optical response, how electrons inside this material respond to light, and then we studied the signals from the light to see if there is anything interesting about the material itself, about its underlying physics," Shao said. "In this case, we saw many features we'd expect in a semi-metal crystal and then all of these other things happening that were absolutely puzzling."

When a magnetic field is applied to any material, the energy levels of electrons inside that material become quantized into discrete levels called Landau levels, Shao explained. The levels can only have fixed values, like climbing a set of stairs with no little steps in between. The spacing between these levels depends on the mass of the electrons and the strength of the magnetic field, so as the magnetic field increases, the energy levels of the electrons should increase by set amounts based entirely on their mass — but in this case, they didn't.

Using the high-powered magnet in Florida, the researchers observed that the energy of the Landau level transitions in the ZrSiS crystal followed a completely different pattern of dependence on the magnetic field strength. Years ago, theorists had labeled this pattern the "B^(2/3) power law," the key signature of semi-Dirac fermions.

An illustration of the calculated structure of ZrSiS near the crossing points of its structure, showing a semi-Dirac point as a black sphere on the left. Data points as purple dots support the existence of semi-Dirac fermions in ZrSiS material with the characteristic B2/3 power-law behavior on the right. Credit: Yinming Shao/Penn State

To understand the bizarre behavior they observed, the experimental physicists partnered with theoretical physicists to develop a model that described the electronic structure of ZrSiS. They specifically focused on the pathways on which electrons might move and intersect to investigate how the electrons inside the material were losing their mass when moving in one direction but not another.

"Imagine the particle is a tiny train confined to a network of tracks, which are the material's underlying electronic structure," Shao said. "Now, at certain points the tracks intersect, so our particle train is moving along its fast track, at light speed, but then it hits an intersection and needs to switch to a perpendicular track. Suddenly, it experiences resistance, it has mass. The particles are either all energy or have mass depending on the direction of their movement along the material's 'tracks.'"

The team's analysis showed the presence of semi-Dirac fermions at the crossing points. Specifically, they appeared massless when moving in a linear path but switched to having mass when moving in a perpendicular direction. Shao explained that ZrSiS is a layered material, much like graphite that is made up of layers of carbon atoms that can be exfoliated down into sheets of graphene that are one atom thick. Graphene is a critical component in emerging technologies, including batteries, supercapacitors, solar cells, sensors and biomedical devices.

"It is a layered material, which means once we can figure out how to have a single layer cut of this compound, we can harness the power of semi-Dirac fermions, control its properties with the same precision as graphene," Shao said. "But the most thrilling part of this experiment is that the data cannot be fully explained yet. There are many unsolved mysteries in what we observed, so that is what we are working to understand."