Full house to hear this year’s Reines Lecture by Nobel Laureate Adam Riess, who discovered the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. The Reines Lecture series is hosted by UCI Physics & Astronomy and the UCI School of Physical Sciences

#UCIrvine #cosmology

Here's a new paper led by #UCIrvine graduate student Raymond Remigio. These are the first results from a program using the new red channel of the Keck Cosmic Web Imager to search for extended Lyman-alpha haloes around high-redshift quasars.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae67ed

#astronomy #quasars

"The Black Student Union (BSU) cookout on Feb. 28 was supposed to be a protected community event, but BSU members who left the event quickly became targets for bigoted violence, putting their physical safety and mental well-being at risk."

https://newuniversity.org/2026/03/31/standing-with-the-student-victims-of-on-campus-hate-crimes/ #UCIrvine #Racism #HigherEd

What's not in my profile?

I used to be a huge Wirth-ian in the 1990s and spewed excellent tirades against the evils of C. Niklaus Wirth is also my "PhD grandfather" via Michael Franz at #UCIrvine.

I prefer lecturing sitting down in front of a laptop and talking while I do stuff on said laptop. I very much dislike slides and prefer chalk and blackboard for things like data structures.

I got my "15 minutes of fame" served unexpectedly:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get
https://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/students-get-class-wide-as-by.html
https://archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/gaming-the-system/

But it still was fun.

I got my undergraduate degree from https://www.cs.hm.edu/ which back then was not allowed to feed into PhD programs. It's a thing in Germany: Everything is tiered and changing the tiers requires a change to the constitution of the republic (I am joking, but not really) so it takes a while. (Nowadays it would be easier to go on to a PhD from there.) The "plus" was that I spent two semesters in industry. In one I quickly out-FORTRAN-ed my boss, in the other I learned C++ from Stroustrup in two weeks while riding the bus. Beat that Ivy League!

I grew up on #c64 #basic and #mos6502 (well, #mos6510 I guess) assembly, went on to #m68k assembly, #gfabasic and lots of #oberon. Of course I was dabbling in #modula2, #prolog, #scheme, and more. Then it was mostly whatever I needed so #fortran, #cpp, #java, lots of #python, lots more #c, lots more #arm and #x86 assembly, some #golang, some #ocaml, some #csharp even if you can believe it. Nowadays it's pretty much #c all day with chunks of #python and bits of #rust now and then. And chunks of #bash too.

(Proudly self-plagiarized off of a few 2023/2024 posts from my previous account.) #introduction #SorryItsLate

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/01/26/wireless-transceiver-120-gbps-fiber-optic-speeds-xcxwbn/

Wireless Transceiver Hits 120 Gbps, Rivaling Fiber Optics

#6G #UCIrvine #6G #Wireless

Congratulations to Dr. Helena García Escudero in successfully defending her PhD dissertation today at UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy, titled “ΛCDM and Beyond: Neutrinos and the Puzzle of Cosmological Tensions.” She joins the USC Department of Physics & Astronomy as a postdoctoral scholar in December!

#ucirvine #academia #physics #cosmology

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has discovered massive galaxies at 37 billion light years away, when the Universe was ~1% of its current age (z~25!). Galaxy formation appears at odds with the efficiencies capable of making such galaxies at beyond 100% (the solid purple line).

Work led by #UCIrvine NSF Graduate Research Fellow Jay Krishnan shows that systematic uncertainties in the inferred mass, along with the steeply falling halo mass function at these scales, leads to large uncertainties that asymmetrically prefer lower efficiencies. The asymmetry is caused by the steeply falling mass function: there are many more smaller galaxies to upscatter into your sample (upper orange curves) than there are larger galaxies to downscatter into it (lower orange curves).

Many new physics models have been proposed in response to the apparently anomalous JWST galaxies, and we provide the code to test these models when more galaxies are detected and uncertainties are reduced.

The Scatter of the Many Outweighs the Scatter of the Few: Systematic Error Asymmetry in Steeply-Falling Mass Functions for High-Redshift JWST Galaxies ➡️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13708

#Science #astronomy #astrophysics #cosmology

First paper submission today for #UCIrvine graduate fellow Jay Krishnan! There is much interest in NASA's James Webb Space Telescope potentially showing early galaxy formation as incompatible with standard cosmology and structure formation We show that current systematic uncertainties, when combined with the steeply falling mass function of galaxies, relax the apparent tension. We provide the tools to test cosmology as new detections come from JWST. The paper Is scheduled to be on the arXiv tonight.

#science #astronomy #astrophysics #cosmology