The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨 On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍 A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔭🧪☄️ 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...

misgendered by the machine 🚫👩‍🔬🚫 It's actually quite depressing that LLMs will replace women scientists with the name of men - especially when these tools are being pushed *so* hard (even by universities!) as tools that should be the primary way to look things up...

thought I'd give it another chance. now i'm an andrew lol (and I have never written a paper about Kepler before so it's wildly wrong)

I'm starting to find that papers mis-cite my own papers in really, really perplexing ways. It's quite obvious why if you just go to that one hyped up tool and ask it about your own work... ChatGPT got my supervisor's name right but changed me to be a "William" (lol) and gave the wrong number

when people talk about AI used in moderation of social media posts, you must remember there is always the human-in-the-loop, often a woman, often in the Global South, always dehumanised and forgotten 1/n www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Interesting paper out today discussing improvements in the point spread function model of @esa.int's Gaia satellite in preparation for Gaia DR4. Every time that I read about this instrument I am blown away by how technical and complicated its data is to process ☄️ #galactic #astromethods

Cancelling my Google subscriptions sure is self-help 😂 (I'm switching to self-hosting all cloud stuff I need)

So-called 'nudify' apps. Smart glasses that secretly record video. An explosion in sexualised deepfakes. Tech has turned against women, and it's time to regulate it properly, says author and gender equality campaigner Laura Bates. Read more: ft.trib.al/Z3gd5bP

:( the hosting provider we use @astrosky.eco & that I use for personal stuff (Hetzner) is putting up their prices by ~35%. But I also can't even blame them, AI hype is making demand for hardware insane - even basics like RAM have tripled (!!!) in price.

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I despise the fact that month is zero-indexed in JavaScript, it is SO confusing 😭 Interestingly, it's a quirk that comes from Java's JDK 1.0 in 1995, which the first version of JS was based on - except it hasn't been fixed/improved in 31 years...

Non-nuanced take: this is a bad idea More nuanced take: this is a really, really, ridiculously bad idea

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Please please please leave a public comment about this!! Also @darkskyintl.bsky.social is out there doing important work!! Follow them and learn what you can do to keep our skies dark at night

🆕 Our NASA/CSA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope image of the month features the stellar lifecycle in a nearby spiral galaxy named NGC 5134 🌌🧪🔭 🔗 esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/02/The_stellar_lifecycle_in_a_nearby_spiral @stsci.edu @science.esa.int

HEATED RIVALRY IS SO GOOD OMG (just finished it and I absolutely love it)

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.” You can’t trust chatbots.

If left unchecked, we are racing towards a world where searching for "struggling to breastfeed" makes baby formula more expensive for you in your local supermarket (that's one dystopian example anyway)

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

"Wait, jalapeños come fresh??" - my German partner 😂 German cuisine is completely devoid of spice so it's taking some training

Using AI makes science communication worse. Period. AI use necessarily reduces accuracy, transparency and authenticity. But sci comm *needs* to be accurate, transparent, and authentic. Otherwise you’re just goofing around, which will destroy your audience‘s trust in you and in other sci comm.

Making bookings in Canadian dollars is stressful because the exchange rate makes everything look so expensive 😅 Anyways, I just booked my travel for the #ATmosphereConf and #ATScience in Vancouver!!! So excited!

I hate the modern need to remake everything. Threads was the most harrowing thing I have ever watched and it will stay with me forever. Nuclear war is NOT a subject matter that needs 'hope' and the original executed that perfectly.

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More people should listen to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social When people say AI is inevitable, let them know the future isn’t settled.

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📣 Reminder: E-STEEM Call 👩‍🔬 Deadline: 📅2 March 2026, 14:00 CET The University of Vienna awards at least 20 four-year and full-time (40h/week) #postdoctoral positions to outstanding female scientists in natural sciences, life sciences & economics #AcademicSky #STEM Find all information here: ⤵️

11 February is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science‼️ This day aims to draw attention to the gender gap in #STEM subjects. It is a day that inspires, challenges & shows how #science can become more equitable. 👩‍🔬 #univienna

OpenAI fired a VP who opposed their erotica rollout (and had started a company-wide peer mentorship program for women), allegedly telling her it was because she discriminated against a man 🤔 www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

Happy 10 years to gravitational wave astronomy!

"A philosopher working at Anthropic" also known as marcomms

🧵1/9 Fascinating stuff— #JWST has spotted the oldest supernova ever confirmed. It exploded when the #universe was just ~730 Myr old (~5% of its current age). The whole thing began with a very bright gamma-ray burst, GRB 250314A.🔭 🧪 ➡️ science.nasa.gov/missions/web... #space #astronomy #science

Benefits of the EU countries I've worked in so far (🇩🇪 & 🇦🇹): - better salary - better healthcare - better pension - higher standard of living - cheaper rent - more access to research funding - *significantly* more trans friendly I have basically no reason to move back to the UK. 🤷‍♀️

*raises hand* this is me! I will probably never move back to the UK given how awful the research funding situation is. Also, prohibitive immigration rules would make it difficult and expensive for my (EU) partner to move there, adding another financial disincentive on ever returning.

🔭☄️ #exoplanets

Bluesky hivemind: anyone know much about charity / community interest company law in the UK? We'd like to start hosting user data with @astrosky.eco, but it would be extremely important to first establish some legal entity to take liability & have a proper privacy statement. It gets complicated...

More on catastrophic cuts to UK astronomy & particle physics. Costs of facilities & international subscriptions go up so grants line and individual projects are cut. If the Government is serious about backing science & technology, they need to fix this. www.space.com/astronomy/uk...

Extremely good analogy. The endgame for AI companies is that everyone becomes dependent on their tech, and has to keep paying $2000 / year to write software. High-quality software is not actually necessary to achieve that goal.

The ski jumper story is a great example of how journalism has gone to shit. The original 'news' was broken by Bild, an awful newspaper in Germany which is mostly gossip & drama. But other papers can't miss out on the clickbait! So it has spread like wildfire despite the evidence being scant.

I just looked at the source code of a friend's vibecoded game, and it is probably the ugliest code I have seen in my life. E.g.: EVERY modal (pop up) in the game is hundreds of lines of repeated code, and the game state is a 1000 line (!!!) arrow function. It was made with the latest Claude model.

It's just over a year since we joined @bsky.app. Check out our updated #StarterPack and see what's changed!

🔊 Calling UK early career researches in astro, particle & nuclear physics. Please sign this open response to the proposed cuts at STFC ⚛️🧪🔭 "Protecting the UK's reputation as a science superpower requires not only investment, but continuity, confidence, and people" ✍️ ecr-openletter-stfc.github.io

This is not a drill, we need to be ready to counter and we're not.

I've read a lot of slanted papers from tech company employees about the 'benefits' of AI, but the fact that Anthropic themselves have put out such a cautious paper should be a big cause for alarm for people who are trading learning for prompting And it doesn't improve productivity!

I ❤️ @svelte.dev! I'm not a web developer, but I often need to make websites... and I was always frustrated by the boilerplate & learning curve of other frameworks. IMO, Svelte is the easiest JS framework to learn as an outsider: it's just normal HTML & CSS until you need more. My latest project:

Go read about star & planet formation on the shiny new website of The Star Formation Newsletter! It's back! 🎉

This is very cool and I strongly support this effort (you may note I almost always tag the astrofeed when I post about astronomy). They need (small) donations, too! opencollective.com/the-astrosky...

The programme of EAS 2026 is now available! 🔭 #galactic This year, @emily.space, Josefa Großschedl, and I are chairing a special session! We are co-organising it with notably @mac0598.bsky.social on the topic of young stars, clusters & association in the Milky Way! #EAS2026Lausanne

It is January 😭

I see Stephen Miller has selected this month's Venezuela