For more context, the idea that any biological protein responds to magnetic fields is (at least slightly) controversial. Our observation (a commonly used, well-known fluorescent protein gets slightly but unmistakably dimmer in response to a handheld magnet) is surprising, but it's straightforward to reproduce.
It's not an immediately useful result, but there's a long history of successfully engineering small effects into big effects in fluorescent proteins. If that's possible here (unproven), we could imagine noninvasive control of arbitrary biological machinery ("magnetogenetics").
Even if it's technologically useless, this observation also raises interesting questions about the effects of magnetic fields on biochemistry. Is this a unique edge case, or an instance of a more general phenomenon? What are the necessary/sufficient conditions for magnetic fields to affect life? Given that MRI is nonlethal, there are bounds on how strong these effects can be... but are they really zero?
"...multiplying a vector by the matrix returned by dft is mathematically equivalent to (but much less efficient than) the calculation performed by scipy.fft.fft."
fft-as-a-matrix-multiply is much slower to compute than a standard fft, especially on large input.
That's a good example! I never bothered soliciting formal peer review for that article, but many of the principles we simulated there have since been demonstrated:
As opposed to the traditional publishing high-school popularity game? I'm partially joking, but traditional publishing is very much a popularity contest. You're free to ignore this, but I don't recommend it.
My personal experience (twelve years of traditional publishing followed by five years of DIY publishing) is that I spend substantially less of my time on publishing/dissemination, have higher impact, and produce higher quality work. You should give it a try!
Every since I got my own lab, I've been skipping "traditional" publication, for these reasons and more. I've had great success and satisfaction sharing my research via "DIY" publishing:
Advancing my field is my life's mission, and disseminating my research is too important to outsource.
Believe it or not, Twitter has been crucial to the process. It's not great for nuanced discussion, but it's AMAZING for advertising the existence of technical information. For example:
FPBase and Talley Lambert ( twitter.com/talleyjlambert ) are both awesome. I'm a physicist working with fluorescence microscopy, and I use tools that Talley developed or contributed to all the time.
Which reminds me, also check out napari.org for a nice viewing/annotation tool for N-dimensional numpy arrays.
What's cool about this work though, is we show that magnetic effects on ENGINEERED biological systems can be enormous:
https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1797408565742776348