In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Anna Doel interviews Ankita Anirban about her interview/book project on the successful push at Bell Labs to elevate black scientists. At a time when such efforts are on the back foot, it's important to know more about these examples.

Great blend of personal narrative and compelling nuclear physics. Colliders like RHIC (and the EIC) are often overlooked by people focusing on the highest energies of particle physics—which I've been guilty of. A fitting final toast(ed bagel) for RHIC.

The funding cuts also include £59 million for the Electron-Ion Collider in Brookhaven.

Very bad news for CERN, it seems.

So, who's going to write the five-volume history of star culture in science, 1975 to 2020? What needs to be in there?

If we all agree it is convincing, we can prove the philosophical primacy of social epistemology.

The Trump administration is expected to soon propose adjustments to the minimum pay levels that employers must offer foreign researchers. This will pick up where a proposal from the first Trump administration left off. AIP's Lindsay Milliken takes a closer look. #scipol

Richard Carrington was the namesake of history's largest known geomagnetic storm, but no one knew what he looked like--until now! Today's #histSTM & #astronomy lunch read: @royalastrosoc.bsky.social archivist Kate Bond discusses the serendipitous discovery of the 1st known photo of Carrington 🗃️📜🔭📷

That she was frequently nominated is known, but, with the death of Chen-Ning Yang last year, the 1957 archive has been opened, when she might have won with Lee & Yang for parity violation. Wu received no nominations in '57 as her paper (w/ Ambler) appeared after the deadline.

Many people have wondered why the Chien-Shiung Wu never won the Nobel Prize for Physics. New findings from the Nobel archives, exclusively revealed in Physics World, show she was nominated 23 times by 18 different physicists - and yet was still left empty-handed. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/twenty-thr...

Sad news in the UK #histSTM community - my former University of Kent colleague and admired historian of 19thC energy physics and steam ocean navigation, Crosbie Smith, died at the weekend following a short illness. We owe him a great deal. www.kent.ac.uk/history/peop...

Sopka raises the issue, twenty five years later, of how colleagues responded to Melba Phillips being targeted by the McCarran Committee in 1952. (10/10)

The AIP has an excellent oral history interview with Melba Newell Phillips. Katherine Sopka spoke with her in 1977. (9/n) repository.aip.org/node/128531

Here is the summons sent to Phillips, ordering her to appear before the McCarran Committee. (6/n) Image: Box 1, Folder 1, Melba Phillips papers / AIP www.aip.org/library/melb...

After the war, Melba Newell Phillips became a professor at Brooklyn College and also worked at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory. Both institutions fired her in 1952 when she refused to testify against her colleagues during McCarthy's witch hunts. (5/n)

Nuclear physicist Melba Newell Phillips was born #OTD in 1907. Author of two standard textbooks and numerous articles on physics history, she worked tirelessly to promote the teaching of physics as an AAPT member. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬 (1/n) Image: Ellen and John Vinson, in link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social looks at a new issue of Centaurus examining what is and is not distinctive about the new era of "multi-messenger" astronomy. 📷IceCube Laboratory and South Pole Telescope, Moreno Baricevic, IceCube / NSF.

Remembering how 12 years and eons ago CEI got into a years-long lawsuit with the White House under the Data Quality Act because John Holdren made a video that supposedly didn't use hedgy-enough language to connect the wandering of the polar vortex to climate change. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eDT...

Tomorrow's front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 24, 2026

Can you tell the difference between a hydrometer & a hygrometer? A Leyden jar & a Crookes tube? An armillary sphere & an equatorial ring? Then you should follow @sis-instrument-soc.bsky.social for updates concerning the history of scientific instruments! #histSTM #histsci #histtech #FollowFriday 🗃️

It's cold out, so it's a good time to think about racing through the searing heat of the Sun's corona at 430,000 miles per hour. In today's AIP History Weekly Edition @jowiph.bsky.social looks at the how space scientists carried the idea of a solar probe from the 1950s through to launch in 2018.

Thousands of Minnesotans marched in downtown Minneapolis to protest ICE. The wind chill was 30 below during the march. Hundreds of businesses closed their doors Friday in support of the protest as activists urged Minnesotans to abstain from economic activity.

I’m excited to share the @aip.bsky.social 2026 Research Agenda. Developed with leaders across AIP’s Federation, it outlines five initiatives on policy & funding, workforce, digital preservation, international collaboration, and identities in the physical sciences. www.aip.org/aip/2026-aip...

The whole story is worth reading, but I want to highlight this plot of science agency staffing that we pulled together from historic and current data. It shows that cuts to science staffing are almost uniformly steep across the board and unlike anything seen in the first Trump administration.

A year ago, under a flurry of executive orders, it became clear that the second Trump administration was going to make dramatic changes on US science. Here's our 10,000 foot look at the damage. with @maxkozlov.bsky.social, Jeff Tollefson, and Rich Monastersky

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

Speaking as a Minnesotan, oh, gosh, yeah, that'll sting, for sure. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/u...

By the way, in a few weeks or so, NASA is going to fly some astronauts around the Moon for the first time since Apollo.

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Anna Doel spotlights two BJHS articles, by Matthias Heymann and Carolina Granado, covering the international balancing act of assembling the Global Atmospheric Research Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The common factor? Bert Bolin.

Sorely tempted

🔥 My book Conversations on Rational Choice is finally out: Conversation partners include Kenneth Arrow, Gary Becker, C. Bicchieri, D. Kahneman, P. Suppes, Christian List, Vernon Smith, Tom Schelling, L.A.Paul, C. Camerer, Martin Shubik, R. Kranton, and many others. www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

Why isn't Purdue talking about its new policy to halt graduate student admissions from China and other "countries of concern"? www.science.org/content/arti...

Want to study the history of science and/or technology? We invite applications for fully-funded MA+PhD (1-3 years) or PhD-only (3 years) Hans Rausing scholarships. Deadline is 17 April 2026 (we advise to check @kingshistory.bsky.social application deadlines) Find out more: tinyurl.com/mw84w7py

Hey, The Secret Agent is getting some wins! I saw this a week ago. It was very good. Great film for historians, and even for historians of science (Moura plays a scientist in hiding). Great film for our times. I especially enjoyed it having spent two weeks in Salvador, Brazil last summer.

Shameless Flamsteed/Royal Observatory plug, this talk by @hillemmalouise.bsky.social and I: youtu.be/Hn6FeZ2UlZo?...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, we look at recent articles by @rhiggitt.bsky.social and Yuto Ishibashi, which show how record-keeping, history, and institutional governance intertwined during the centuries-long evolution of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

Roman Space Telescope on track for September launch NASA expects to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as soon as September, seeing it as evidence the agency can do flagships on cost and schedule.

Short fascinating article by Ben Wilson looking at how Hans Bethe and Dick Garwin's advisory work on anti-ballistic missile tech diverged from the more broadly critical stance they took when writing and speaking as public scientists. More questions than answers on why they let SciAm rewrite them.

MSR had serious issues for years. I would very much like to see a detailed case study of it.

Very good news for NASA Science in the compromise 2026 funding bill released by Congress today:

I come back from my winter PTO and day one Congress drops the text of a minibus. The dashboard has been updated with the Senate Homeland numbers, and all the info in the CJS-Int-E&W minibus. A House vote is scheduled tomorrow night, and Senate likely later this week. www.aaas.org/news/fy-2026...

Check out the recording of the AHA’s Congressional Briefing offering historical perspectives on federal science funding. Panelists Melinda Baldwin, Arthur Daemmrich, & Bhaven Sampat, with moderator Alexandra Levy discussed the history of the federal govt's approach toward science in public policy.🗃️

The semiannual AIP History Newsletter is out! The feature article highlights a surge in scholarship around experiments on quantum entanglement. The topic is most associated with tests of Bell's theorem but the history predates and is broader than those efforts. aip.brightspotcdn.com/83/0f/cc825f...

Before the holiday break, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social queued up a spotlight on Peter Pesic's @physicspip.bsky.social article on Einstein's sockless ways. It addresses not only Einstein's motivations, but also the cultural reasons behind why it was a topic of fascination www.aip.org/history/pete...

It can sometimes feel like the history of the physical sciences is on its back foot. The AIP History Weekly Edition set out to show that, globally, there's so much going on that you can talk about it weekly and not get to everything. Here's some of what we couldn't get to in 2025. #histsci

This is the library at the Goddard Space Flight Center here in Maryland, a crucial center for NASA's scientific work. Funnily enough, I've just been reading Yuto Ishibashi's Isis article on George Airy's cultivation of the Royal Observatory's library and archive doi.org/10.1086/733991

Before the holiday break, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social queued up a spotlight on Peter Pesic's @physicspip.bsky.social article on Einstein's sockless ways. It addresses not only Einstein's motivations, but also the cultural reasons behind why it was a topic of fascination www.aip.org/history/pete...

The semiannual AIP History Newsletter is out! The feature article highlights a surge in scholarship around experiments on quantum entanglement. The topic is most associated with tests of Bell's theorem but the history predates and is broader than those efforts. aip.brightspotcdn.com/83/0f/cc825f...

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."