If you’re roughly my age, it’s wild to reflect on the optimism for the future Americans felt when Obama was elected — young Americans spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate! — and contrast with what we face today. The falloff over the past 18 years is hard to process.

🔭 Sky Glows over Paranal Observatory Image Credit & Copyright: Julien Looten ap260310

The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.

These authors went looking for technosignatures around (in)famous exoplanet K2-18b with 2 of the world's best radio interferometers. They found none, but cool work and great to highlight that these searches are happening. arxiv.org/abs/2602.09553 🔭

We deserve better trains

The blatant bigotry of this has already been covered, but "we're not making therapy" is pretty rich from the guy who made for example UP and INSIDE OUT.

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

What inspires someone to pursue physics for life? From discovering general relativity to the encouragement of mentors, women in our community share the moments that shaped their journeys. This #InternationalWomensDay we’re celebrating women advancing physics and inspiring the next generation. 🌟

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

i love this little website youraislopbores.me

Working on a q&a lecture for a class today: The story of robots is always a story about slavery. The story of LLMs labeled as AI is a story about class, and which humans pay the cost, including the physical toll on their bodies/minds, and the lack of water and electricity, so data centers can exist.

It’s hard to properly convey the lunacy of these proposals to people outside aerospace. Reflect wants to put gigantic mirrors in orbit and beam down sunlight at nighttime. SpaceX wants a million more starlink sats. If either of these actually happens, space will be unusable.

fish doorbell fish doorbell fish doorbell FISH DOORBELL FISH DOORBELL🐟🛎️

Strong recommend if you are interested in cosmology. The videos are succinct – most around 6 minutes long – and the explanations are satisfying. Same goes for the "Quantum 101" videos.

I've been going through these videos for some work reasons, and they're so well done. Just great work all around by @astrokatie.com and @perimeterinstitute.ca.

I initially shared this, not knowing it was a Claude screenshot (because, having never used Claude, I didn’t know what Claude screenshots looked like), and since I’d seen similar claims in other sources I assumed this was journalism. But I should have checked it before sharing. Apologies, all.

For all the but how can we afford space exploration folks…this means we’ve already spent more on this war that started last week than Cassini cost in the 26 years it took to build, launch, and operate it.

There have been MULTIPLE early leaks of scientific discoveries via DECORATED CAKE. Scientists are good at many things, but shutting up is definitely not one of them.

This is a good response.

Skateboard stop-motion

I am 100% intrigued by the fact that in an article in the San Antonio Express-News, about this weekend's Pop Madness Convention at the city's public library, all the other authors mentioned get conventional headshots and I get a picture that's me all, like, "yeah, I'm wearing my hands backwards."

If, like me, the #TrollClouds have ruined your #LunarEclipse experience, which has now commenced - tune into Griffith Observatory's live feed. The music is great!

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could

Lot of us got a real “gnawing on furniture” vibe and could stand to go for a walk

It is deeply annoying how extremely well this works for me.

This is a great awards program for science communication. Enter now (before April 3) and/or please encourage others to do so. Categories include researchers (early, mid- & late career), journalists, independent & institutional. From @nationalacademies.org & @schmidtsciences.bsky.social

#LunarEclipse FAQ: Q: Is it safe to look at? A: Absolutely! Unlike a solar eclipse, there's no UNsafe time to look at a lunar eclipse. Q: Do I need a telescope? A: Nope! Best view is with naked eye. Just look up! Q: Does the eclipse portend terror & doom? A: Not at all! The news has that covered.

Where I live in Ontario it should be possible to see the total phase from around 6am until the Moon sets around 7. I am setting an alarm!

🌕➡️🔴 Lunar eclipse alert! Depending on where you are (mostly: Central/Eastern Asia, Oceania, most of North/Central America), you may be able to see a TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE ("blood moon") overnight! You can find information about timing and viewing locations here: www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/luna...

The savings we're getting here by annihilating decades of American science will pay for whole minutes of the operation to create decades of death, immiseration, and chaos in Iran.

that they have kept their relationship intensely private to the point that this is how we find out is probably the best sign they might actually make it anyway, rules are rules, here is the exact moment she fell in love

Saturday. #aviation #avgeek

There is no marketing I'm more susceptible to these days than any company saying they don't use generative AI in their projects. I'm a sitting duck for that promise even if they're selling graham crackers or masking tape.

The timing of the initial strikes is unusual. Often you see these types of operations launched in the pre-dawn hours at the target site partly to limit civilian casualties. This operation began at the beginning of a work and school day, with millions of adult civilians and children in harms way.

In case you’re just waking up, the U.S. has teamed up with Israel overnight to start an illegal war of regime change, apparently on a presidential whim with no involvement of Congress, and they are already committing horrific atrocities.

So anyway I guess this is what it feels like to be one of the tiny humans running through the streets while the giant supervillain monsters are fighting by throwing passengers trains and apartment buildings at each other

I have made peace with the typo in my post. It is not tormenting me with each repost and comment. I am not haunted by it. I can rise above the shame.

TESS confirms what we saw with Kepler and K2 - on average, ***every single small red star has a planet around it***! And a short-period one at that (<30 days). And you know what the galaxy is mostly made of? Small red stars. PLANETS. PLANETS EVERYWHERE!!! Happy weekend pondering that, everyone.

I mean, it's this, or we just send chatbot-written e-mails back and forth to each other forever

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

Indeed. New grants are not getting funded, already funded grants are not getting paid, and non-competitive renewals are being held up. Focusing on the top line budget, instead of looking at what is really happening on “the ground” is deeply misguided.

Cover of The Lancet: @thelancet.com www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

NASA press conference with BIG updates on the Artemis programme. Artemis III will no longer be a lunar landing mission, and Jared Isaacman wants to increase NASA’s launch cadence to yearly - or ideally every 10 months. He’s underlined the importance of rebuilding the work force. #Artemis

Artemis II/Artemis program update press conference starting momentarily. I'll live post the highlights in this thread!

Chat, is it bad when one tech dude having a modicum of a conscience is the only thing hindering the plans of the worst people in the world to use hallucinatory robots to automate crimes against humanity?

The cuts to existing programs and graduate research fellowships have a pattern: the Trump Administration is dismantling our ability to study ecology, biodiversity science, and climate research: They’re putting Silicon Valley billionaires above studying Earth’s life support system.

The National Science Foundation is systematically being converted to the National AI and Quantum Research Foundation. “I see it as the administration exerting political control over what has traditionally been NSF’s ability to fund the best science.”

Federal science workforce in 2025: NSF down over 30% USGS, NOAA, and NIH down 20% DOE down 17% NIST down 15% NASA down 12% By comparison, the total federal civilian workforce was down approximately 10% last year. www.aip.org/fyi/federal-...

There's a "is anyone even reading this" sort of honesty you get in the software update release notes from a project that's been around for a long time.