Horrified to learn that the Particle Physics and Astronomy groups at Sussex University are facing a proposed 35% cut in staff numbers! That would be devastating to a high quality department.

oh!

"Program managers would normally rush to inform potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. 'This information is highly confidential...Please do not communicate anything to PIs.'” www.science.org/content/arti...

Hrvatska! 🇭🇷

We need more rich people with normal interests like "your movie sounds neat" instead of, like, white fertility rates.

The scientific method in action

You should always try to help your friend!

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

When you look up at the night sky, you're looking out on a vast universe that is constantly in motion and ever evolving: planets orbit, stars twinkle, and black holes collide. Moreover, thanks to @ligo.org, we know that the "spacetime fabric" also evolves as gravitational waves ripple through it!

Today the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Collaborations released our fifth catalogue of Gravitational Wave Transients. This is extra exciting for us here at @unlv.edu as the flagship publication (dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P260015...) was led by Leo Tsukada, a postdoctoral research fellow at the @ncfa.bsky.social.

Hey Bluesky peeps, I'm looking to speak to astronomers that are looking for alien life in unusual ways - think Ceres, weird technosignatures, unexpected exoplanets, etc - for a story in the BBC. If that's you, or you know someone, do let me know. jdaoca[at]gmail[dot]com Thanks!

This is bullshit

AI boom discourse has gotten so out of hand that it’s making the New Yorker relatable🫢 (with alt text)

This is a composite of the Moon, Mars, and Earth I made. The Moon and Earth are from Artemis II, and Mars is from the Psyche mission. Each image was taken *in the last six weeks*

American science right now is basically 10,000 of these stories, all with their own heartbreaking specificity Lost careers, lost progress, lost discoveries I feel so sad every day for all we’ve lost and continue to lose 💔

My student told me he ran his paper through an AI checker to see if it would get flagged even though he wrote it, and it offered to “humanize” his paper by changing the sentence, “Illicit cocaine use is responsible for many potential adverse cardiovascular events” to “Cocaine is a bad, bad drug”

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

The University presents this as 'Future Nottingham' but it absolutely guts the arts and humanities. They want to sack 40% of the Dept of English, for example. Languages will be cut entirely. If that's the future, it's shit (and very far from what a University should be)

What a legend. 91 years old, Nobel laureate in physics, basically jump-started the field of cosmology as we know it, super nice guy, and just continuing to write random papers for the love of the game.

How to use signals from black hole collisions to measure & correct detectors that observed them. "How cool is that!” says Dr Lilli Sun @ozgrav.bsky.social, & Int'l team, part of @ligo.org & team [email protected] physics.anu.edu.au/news_events/... @aip.org.au @scienceanu.bsky.social

Gravitational-wave detectors are amazing! Giant lasers to measuring effects so small we need to bend quantum uncertainties How can you check the detectors are calibrated? Use a signal from two black holes colliding hundreds of millions of light-years away! arxiv.org/abs/2605.11703 🔭⚛️☄️🧪

Yo, anyone want to be a Bird Identification Machine Learning Software Engineer for the wonderful Cornell Lab of Ornithology, home of the Merlin app?!? It’s remote! I do not have these skills but maybe you do! #jobs jobs.hr.cornell.edu/us/en/job/WD...

Valid use, it might not be filling any water bottles but it's filling my heart with joy

Galaxy formation / gravitational waves / exoplanets

U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. https://scim.ag/4cxQWhl

Breaking: Trump has fired the membership of the National Science Board, which is oversees NSF. I have confirmed separately with multiple now-former members of NSB.

Detta är en longshot. I min forskning fångar vi svidknott för att se vilka sjukdomar de sprider till olika fåglar. I de fällor vi använder behöver vi Johnsons baby oil gel med camomil doft. Nu har den slutats säljas och vi letar desperat efter nya flaskor. Vi måste ha samma doft för att kunna

From Tori Bonidie and Skylar Grayson: The president’s budget requests for NASA and the NSF were released last week. We summarizes the major cuts and their impacts while providing resources to help fight back against this attack on science. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/04/16/budget-request-fy2027/

Bra konspirationsteori: att Stanley Kubrick verkligen filmade månlandningen men att han hade så höga kvalitetskrav att den var tvungen att spelas in på plats.

Physicist has written a fascinating big beautiful paper.Let’s not be afraid to call it what it is - groundbreaking. arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852

The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out. We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal. This is another extinction-level event for NASA science. Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science

You get assigned some stories. You pitch others. This one, I wholeheartedly chased. www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

FRANCE: we're fancy WORLD: ok FRANCE: a fried ham sandwich is our national lunch WORLD: FRANCE: a fried ham sandwich with an egg is its wife

Amazing stat from space debris expert Hugh Lewis: if SpaceX launches 1 million orbital data centre satellites it will have to perform 1 billion collision avoidance manoeuvres every year, or one manoeuvre every 0.03 seconds

This is like the Titanic night sky

"Achieving the UK’s net zero target by 2050 will cost less than a single oil shock and bring health and economic benefits while insulating the country against future costs, the government’s climate advisers have forecast." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

For reference, without AXIS, the earliest that a high-resolution X-ray imaging mission can launch -- the successor to the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- is 2050s or 2060s. 🔭

壁紙

A satellite re-entering every 3 minutes. Seems fine.

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan. darksky.org/news/two-sat...

🍂 What if a black hole born from the merger of two black holes merged with another black hole? We may find out thanks to gravitational waves, such as those observed by the @ligo.org - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration in autumn 2024. Let's learn about these signals!

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

The money does not go into space. The money does not go into space. The money does not go into space. Sure, the money helps us in exploring and understanding the universe, but the money actually goes to people, to local economies, to universities, it provides jobs, and gets young people into STEM.

The solution to homeless people is giving them homes.