I guess it's post your favourite Popcorn cover time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=O775...

Come on, Guardian, "McDonald's serves up slop" was right there... www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Your brain uses 20 watts of power constantly. This is a massive reproductive fitness cost. Why can natural selection not reduce that cost?

I'm hiring a postdoc -- come and do awesome cosmology with great people in one of the nicest cities in the world (not that I'm biased or anything) 🔭 🧪 cosmology.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/2025/12/12/p...

Last cosmology lecture today, so we had open questions. A student asked a question about quantum gravity...

Inverse challenge for the @zachweinersmith.bsky.social books: Divide by a hundred. A year of solitude

Can't wait to see who's gonna win the Nobel prize for football.

Finishing 2025 with a bang: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03645 Scaling symmetries can even reduce singular theories, like the standard model. Next stop: General Relativity!

1/4 How do you escape the "parallel universe of fake papers?" @nicolakimjones.bsky.social spoke with Ilka Agricola, chair of the IMU's committee on publishing and a physicist and mathematician at the University of Marburg, in Germany. Full story: qspace.fqxi.org/articles/281...

I'll be in New York at a Simons workshop from Feb 20th until March 11th. If anyone on the east coast wants a physics talk around those dates (or just to meet up) let me know.

Masterclasses with Julian Barbour, courtesy of @fqxi.org !

Marking time www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFS...

It is time for universities — not just staff and student unions, but the senior management too — to admit out loud that this government is actively trying to make universities fail. We *all* need to come together and collectively try to fight their attempts to loot and pillage.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth. George Orwell, 1984 www.msn.com/en-us/health...

Are Labour MPs having a competition to see who can come up with the most disgusting policy proposal? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... This isn't about economics, it's about being fucking horrible to people.

The science journals Critical Care Medicine and Biology Open and the science platform Research Hub have been testing how paying reviewers affects the science publishing process. Reporter Geoff Marsh found out more. Full podcast: qspace.fqxi.org/podcasts/125

Life imitates art...

Another not-at-all dated reference from today's lecture.

Looking for a postdoc in foundations of physics/cosmology/science? Come work with us at @fqxi.org on the Foundational Answers project fqxi.org/jobs-postdoc...

This Halloween special edition of the FQxI podcast features Bernard Carr, who discusses primordial black holes, the notorious 1970s Enfield poltergeist case that Carr investigated, and more! Listen to Part 1: qspace.fqxi.org/podcasts/126...

Almost all my publications have authors listed alphabetically. How nice for those of us with surnames from the arse end of the alphabet. Forever last author regardless of our contributions. And of course you can't fix metrics by introducing new metrics. Particularly one-size-fits-none approaches.

French police finally realease an image from the Louvre heist getaway.

Postdoctoral Research Positions in the Foundations of physics. fqxi.org/jobs-postdoctoral-research-associate/ We're looking for postdocs to work on the "Foundational Answers" program. Work with some brilliant, friendly people on a fun and exciting research project.

Harvard is destroying its PhD programs, instituting a hiring freeze and stopping work on "non-essential" spending. The reason given: A defecit of $113 million this year. I can see the concern - with their $57 billion endowment, if they keeps up for 503 years they could be in real trouble!

28th hour of the meeting. I imagine at this point someone has a question, or "..really more of a comment than a question"

For anyone who needs the musical accompaniment www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Ho...

Now on its tenth hour.

A wonderful quirk of Teams seems to be that online meeting officially continue until everyone has left the call. Due to what I *really hope* is a somewhat distracted professor, it appears that a meeting I attended but left earlier is just entering its eighth straight hour.

This remains the most accurate depiction of history lessons as I experienced them in high school.

Won't someone please think of the poor merchants of death - however will they defend themselves? www.theguardian.com/education/20...

This is the best answer. Our understanding of the universe is part of our shared culture. It's a beautiful end in itself. Yes, the spinoffs make money eventually, but the value of great literature is more than the box-office taking of the films based upon it. Understanding science enriches us all.

When I see requirements (from reviewers, funders, etc.) to motivate research in terms of economic benefits/ #commercialisation, I want to scream. #PublicGoods often have far-reaching economic benefits, but this should be a perk, not the driving reason. #PublicHealth #Science #ProfitCorrupts

An external grant for shovel time has overheads to pay the others. The workload model won't allow a reduction in form filling for digging, so you have to do it on your own time. But you should be demonstrating how you contribute to the Hole Excellence Framework.

The one advantage to having to write exams so damned early is that by the time we get to the revision sessions I can honestly answer that I have no recollection of the content whatsoever.

FQxI is seeking an Academic Managing Editor for a new project, the Foundational Review Series. Remote (Global applicants welcome) Full-Time (will consider alternative working arrangements for the ideal candidate) ~$70,000 – $100,000 based on experience fqxi.org/academic-man...

Sara Walker and Paul Davies on the physics of life. Our $53,000 quantum biology essay contest asks: How Quantum is Life? qspace.fqxi.org/competitions...

Now on the arXiv: Dynamical Similarity in Multisymplectic Field Theory arxiv.org/abs/2509.16099 In which my students maths the hell out of reducing field theories by eliminating redundant scale. Comments, questions and complaints welcome!

@fqxi.org is hiring We're looking for an Academic Managing Editor for the Foundational Answers series. Come work with brilliant, kind colleagues. Also me. fqxi.org/academic-man... Non-geographic - work remotely anywhere in the world.

Cursed knowledge. Why would you do this to us @zachweinersmith.bsky.social ? www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nuke

The Picard-Worf interactions in this episode were great. Michael Dorn was great portraying a man who was righteous, strong and wrong.

'What does a good mother eat⁉️' I wish this wasn't a choice anyone had to make❗ Here is a piece by our very own Dr @charu220.bsky.social from her experience in the field. You can read more about it in our project Newsletter#6(page 4): wp.lancs.ac.uk/foodequity/f... #foodequity#foodinsecurity#India

Postdoc job! I expect to have an opening at Johns Hopkins for a postdoctoral researcher working somewhere in the broad realms of physics, philosophy, and complexity. Apply at Academic Jobs Online: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30496

Catalina Curceanu explains electron tunneling and smell at XPANSE. Some researchers think receptors might use this quantum effect. The idea is still being tested. We'd love to hear your ideas! FQxI’s $53,000 Essay Competiton on Quantum Biology: qspace.fqxi.org/competitions...

Academic Accounting: Researcher: Hi University, can you accept $200,000 in grant funding to pay out costs of $100,000? Accounting: No. That would only be $200,000 of income on a $300,000 total transaction, so our recovery rate is just 67% - we'd be losing money!

Today's vision of our dystopian hellscape: Being unable to pick the GCSEs you want because you can't afford them. www.theguardian.com/education/20... It is beyond ridiculous that we do not as a society invest the tiny amount necessary to support students in this way.

Found on Mastodon... fediscience.org/@kaiarzheime...

"...most of whom successfully claimed asylum...", i.e. it was legally found that they had completely legitimate reasons to do so, is hidden the dog whistle title. Do better @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

I've got to give them credit for honesty in the conference acronym.

Mass arrests in the UK for exercising free speech to support a group that is politically inconvenient for the government. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

This is incredible. $30 per paper in practice. That would mean the entire arXiv would cost about $6m/year based on the 2023 usage report. RLUK puts UK payments to journals alone at about $250m www.rluk.ac.uk/strategicact... We wouldn't all be cash strapped and losing jobs if we didn't waste so much.