It's raining now but it was a good cycling morning earlier, dry, still. I paused on the Partick-Govan bridge for snapshots #glasgow #cycling #fairlightcycles

Some Sunday listening! In our new album the Kp index, a measure of geomagnetic activity, from six solar rotations is sonified and then imbibed with the flavours of early chant, jazz and ambience. Enjoy! 🔆🌎🎼🎵🎹 ⬇️

Why neoliberalism will ultimately be self-defeating. God knows what sort of rubble we'll have to rebuild from though

PLACES still available for ASTRONOMY walk with Prof Andy Lawrence. Start 12.45 on Saturday (6 Dec) from the Portuguese Cannon, watch the falling of the black time ball, learn about great Victorian astronomers and more. Free for members, donation for non-members. Contact <[email protected]>.

How not to waste your life www.themarginalian.org/2025/10/31/h...

By 2040, ~40% of the images from Hubble Space Telescope, and more than 96% from new and future space telescopes like SPHEREx, ARRAKIHS, and Xuntian will be contaminated by internet satellite constellations. Read our new NASA article in Nature: nature.com/articles/s4158…

PhD position available at QUB/ARC on investigating how solar flares with different spectral profiles impact the Earth’s ionosphere. More details here: www.qub.ac.uk/courses/post... Information session at noon on 8th December. Fill out this form to attend forms.office.com/e/DSk4A9K3dB

I like this hashtag, #10minutesfromhome

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen: Richard Thompson Magma Alasdair Roberts Keith Tippett Bruford

This afternoon in 1942 at 3:25pm, in an abandoned squash court beneath the West Stand of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team led by physicist Enrico Fermi used a secretly-built reactor (Chicago Pile-1) to achieve the world’s first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Did you feel today's earthquake in Perth & Kinross? help our scientists gather contextual data seismic events by sharing what you experienced via our felt report questionnaire: earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/questionnair...

Applications Now Open for the University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship scheme - supporting scholars from across academic disciplines to come to Glasgow to work on our unique research collections. Please RT or pass on: www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/li...

last Wednesday I gave a talk about space weather. I was keen to emphasise for the taxpayers in the audience that this isn't just fascinating science but a subject with serious real world impacts. Didn't know how timely these comments were! #spaceweather www.theguardian.com/business/202...

An interesting #spaceweather story developing. Airbus has made a statement saying that “Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Oot behind a lorry, Peyin nae heed, Ablow a doubledecker, A poor wean deid… —James Copeland (1918–2002), “Black Friday” Actor & writer James Gordon Copeland’s much anthologised poem “Black Friday” packs tragedy, compassion, & a sense of close community into nine short verses #poem #poetry

Looking Christmassy already in Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow #glasgow #christmaslights #photography #m43photography

Tells you more about the Beatles than several long Guardian articles

🚨The Petition calling for a public inquiry into Russian influence on UK politics & democracy has now rocketed past 65,000 signatures! Let’s get it to 70,000 tonight. If a petition is what it’s going to take let’s get this done! petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Have you e-signed @sciencecentres.bsky.social's letter to the UKGov? Today is your last chance before it goes to Downing St! Join 1000s of us in calling for fairer funding for the UK's science centres currently excluded from UKGov infrastructure funding.🧪🔭 ✍️ www.sciencecentres.org.uk/openletter20...

Pollok Park misty morning part 3 #photography #glasgow #mistymorning #m43photography

in Pollok Park, Glasgow this misty morning #photography #mist #glasgow

misty morning, Pollok Country Park, Glasgow. #photography #whitecart #glasgow #misty #autumn

misty morning, Pollok Country Park, Glasgow. #photography #whitecart #glasgow #misty #autumn

John's Away again. A reminder of a time when mainstream record companies were still taking a punt on jazz. This one, from 1976, is my favourite of the three he recorded for Vertigo. Lucky enough to see Away a few times, including the one supporting Steve Hillage on the L tour.

when I was a lad BBC2 used to run seasons of 'foreign' films. Apparently we weren't afraid of subtitles in those days and we got introduced to all sorts of arthouse wonders. It's great to see @talkingpicturestv.bsky.social picking up that mantle

in Pollok Park, Glasgow this misty morning #photography #mist #glasgow

The weaponisation of global finance, ironically built up in the first place in the spirit of cooperation that Trump despises. This is horrible, must feel like Sauron turning his fiery eye on you from across the world

Billionaires shouldn't be able to buy a bigger voice in politics. Add your name to ‪@electoralreform.bsky.social‬'s call to put a cap on how much they can donate in the #ElectionsBill action.electoral-reform.org.uk/page/179420/...

The origin of 'pedigree'. This type of C12 figure (not a family tree but a way of calculating relatedness – the titles of various relatives have not been put in the circles) looked like a crane's foot, thought medieval folk. So 'pied de grue' and hence 'pedigree'. Source in alt.

Things like this will become increasingly common as billionaires increasingly treat low earth orbit like their personal playground and garbage dump

who decided to give all the nebulae and galaxies funny names? When did M100 become the Blowdryer Galaxy? Who named M78 the Casper the Friendly Ghost nebula? As an old guy familiar with the M numbers I'm feeling quite excluded by this development!

I remember the time before bales #ruralscotland #kintyre

For this week's DOOMSDAY MACHINES, I wrote a little bit about Martin Amis' essay "Thinkability," which I think is just one of the sharpest pieces of writing on nuclear war that I am aware of... doomsdaymachines.net/p/nuclear-we...

This guy knows nothing. Thrakattak is a creative pinnacle

Video of an Orionid meteor passing through the constellation of Eridanus at 01:26 UT on 22 October 2025. #Astronomy #Orionids #Astrophotography #MeteorShower

Peter Thiel is in the Epstein emails, enjoying himself. Peter Thiel is an overt, convinced, outspoken Nazi. Peter Thiel's company is being paid by the UK government to crawl all over YOUR personal data. Oswald Mosley's grandson runs his UK operation. You can't make it up.

Bonkers! Wonderful!

Scotland looks likely to be cloudy all over :-(. Anyway fingers crossed

A very hungry planet! 🪐 What appears to be a ripple in space is actually a newborn planet, eating its way through its dusty cradle around a younger version of our Sun 🌞 Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2534a/ 🔭 🧪 #exoplanets 📷 ESO/R. van Capelleveen et al.

Sketch made in 1871 by Henry Holiday (the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", 1876) of a moon crater using the Newall Telescope at Gateshead (built by Thomas Cooke, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newall_...). (University of Cambridge Repository, www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/...)

🚨Storm Watch Upgraded! 🚨 G4 (severe) geomagnetic storm watch now in place for 12th November. This is due to the predicted arrival of the third CME. Aurora likely visible further south across the UK (weather permitting)! 🌞💨🌍 #SpaceWeather #StephsStormWatch

Didn't click "like" on this

The first surviving successful image of Jupiter was taken in 1879 by Andrew Ainslie Common in Ealing, London, using his 36-inch Newtonian reflector and the wet collodion process invented in 1851 by portrait photographer Frederick Scott Archer

Maybe Keir should demand the heads of major US news networks any time they imply Britain is on the brink of civil war or that we live under sharia law. Or does it not work both ways?

🚨 AR4274 just fired off another X-class flare! ⚡ CME confirmed, main bulk doesn't appear Earth-directed, though it's difficult to determine atm. If AR4274 keeps this up... are we heading for a situation similar to May 2024? Keep watching 👀 #SpaceWeather #StephsStormWatch

The NASA Technical Report Server is not being updated due to funding cuts. This is a disaster. 🧪 🔭

Written before the BBC resignations but this by @arusbridger.bsky.social is really worth reading. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/...