Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

showed my fiancée (master's in English literature) the new Taylor Swift lyrics. there was screaming

Paper day! My PhD student Mariana Júlio, with @readdark.bsky.social, @pengfeili.bsky.social and others, studies the internal dynamics of dwarf galaxies and finds they don't agree with the Radial Acceleration Relation, challenging the dark matter alternative MOND. arxiv.org/abs/2510.06905 🔭☄️🧪 1/7

This x1000. And I think there is a huge amount that scientists can learn from the creative world. The work I'm proudest of has used very creative solutions to problems - I think that seeing creating a painting on the same level as writing a paper is an important part of that

🔭☄️ (this is terrible)

Are you interested in working on astronomical transients/ radio astronomy, all while exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest on your weekends? I'm hiring a postdoc! Come work for me! aas.org/jobregister/... Please get in touch if you have any questions! 🔭🧪🎢

This is tragic - UW is a great place for grad students. 🔭☄️ Do we know why? 🫤

Live tech demos don't scare me anymore, it's hilarious fun when something doesn't work and I have to improvise in front of 50 people 😅

Oooh the Nobel Prize is out today, so it's time for my yearly round of ignoring that news and reading about many of the women who were snubbed of the prize in the past and who the Nobel Prize committee refuses to apologise for. 🧪🔭

It is absurdly depressing to ask a class of Bachelor students if they don't like using Python, and immediately 50% of the women in the room (and almost no men) put their hands up. #astroedu

ATProto devs - what do we need to do to ship independent PDS hosting to the Astronomy community ASAP? Main Qs: 1. What software should we use (reference PDS implementation? The rsky one? Or another) 2. Legal aspects: what do we need to be careful of? Does GDPR apply? + are there PDS mod tools?

It feels like there has been a huge tone shift in the last 1-2 weeks from the Bluesky team, and I think it's very plausible that they're under major threat from the US government. Most of the foundational work has already happened - now is the time to decentralise the network ASAP.

Absolutely fascinating data: almost everywhere other than in North America, screen time use has gone *down* since 2022. Has social media enshittified itself too much?

It's the start of postdoc job application season again. I see quite a few #astro fellowship postdocs posting the same salary this year as they offered when I was applying in 2016, almost 9 years ago :O For those who are applying, this was the hardest part of my career! Take care of yourselves <3

I'm supposed to be writing a paper about what we've built with the Astronomy feeds this month & presenting the project at two seminars and a conference. I've poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into building stuff for the astro community here. Way to demoralize your devs, @bsky.app.

I have mostly stayed out of Bluesky drama, but I am PISSED at this situation. Between the awful PR disaster that has been @jay.bsky.team's posts over the last few days, to this ban, I have MUCH less faith in Bluesky PBC as an entity that can pull off managing actual, decentralised social media.

So, apparently Bluesky PERMANENTLY banned someone for posting a single Charlie Kirk meme. AJ is a fantastic community builder who had a big account & is an adjunct prof at Howard University. The idea that he doesn't even deserve a first warning is absurd.

as a non-mac user, one thing I've never understood about macs is why people don't fullscreen every application they use please explain yourselves

guitarists/musicians, this is your regular reminder that you don't need to keep using enshittified guitar tab websites - freetar.de exists instead!

Register yourself or a student for the 'Python and Astropy for Astronomical Data Analysis' workshop at @aas.org on January 4, 2026. 🔭 #aas247 #astrocode You'll get a broad overview of the astropy functionality that powers astronomy, taught by the @astropy.org team. github.com/astropy/astr...

#exoplanets 🔭

🔭🧪

I do not know what I would do with myself if scipy.stats didn't exist. It is SO useful to have so many complicated statistical distributions & methods in such a simple Python package. It's a heavy lifter in basically every paper I've ever written. Best library ever

Stars in our galaxy make a stadium wave, Gaia finds 🙌 Our Milky Way galaxy never sits still: it rotates and wobbles 🌀 But #ESAGaia has just revealed that our galaxy also has a giant wave rippling outwards from its centre 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭 🧪 ☄️

petition to remove dust from the milky way 1 like = 1 dust grain removed

there is nothing more british than bonding with a fellow brit at the immigration office about how annoying Brexit was (she was also there to get a residency permit for Austria post-brexit 😅)

ADS has given astronomy THE BEST literature tools available anywhere. I almost never have to use the garbage that other academics have to suffer through (GoogleScholar, JSTOR, LexisNexis, WoS, PubMed...) Literally anytime I have to interface with those tools I weep

Increasingly looks like there will be a giant impact crater where the software industry was, not because there isn’t profitable high margin businesses but because c-suites, private investors, and public markets only know how to double down until they’re forced to unwind and offshore to makeup losses

A team from Uruguay & Mexico have found an RR Lyrae variable star associated with an intermediate-age (~4 Gyr old) cluster, Trumpler 5. 🔭☄️🧪 #stellarastro There is a growing body of evidence that binary interactions can make RR Lyrae at much younger ages, and this paper seems pretty conclusive!

I'm hiring 1-2 postdocs this year! If you're interested in: GW astrophysics (Binary) Stellar Evolution Stellar dynamics (esp. w/ massive BHs) Galactic dynamics (inc. stellar streams) plz consider applying! You don't need letters initially, just a list of references. 🔭🧪 aas.org/jobregister/...

List 3 things you can talk about for 3 hours with no prep. 1. Open clusters 2. Why DS9 is the best Star Trek 3. How to sail a boat ⛵

📣 Attention students! 👩🏾🔬🔭 Want to win a cash prize and certificate for your research? A reminder that we have an award for the best student paper submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 🏆💫 ⤵️

🔭☄️

🤔 another study that suggests GenAI is not helping workers. "workslop is AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...

How much is too much to ask when refereeing a paper? I don't feel like the authors quite did what I asked them to in the first report, but they've done *some* stuff. Also, some of the new plots show some potential new issues with the paper. But, I also don't want to be too mean...

If you care about Bluesky (the platform) but do not follow @laurenshof.online's analysis, then you should! Another great piece, this time about creating an open social web while under major threats from authoritarianism.

NGC 55 in H alpha & Oxygen III (both great for star formation) - it looks mesmerizing 😮

I hate SMS two-factor authentication with a passion, it can be so damn slow 😭

If Reform wins the next election, it will be because Labour paved the road for them by pursuing anti-immigrant and transphobic Reform-lite policies, instead of challenging and rejecting this hateful, self-destructive populism. To Reform I say fuck you, to Labour I say do fucking better.

At the risk of repeating myself: there’s no bargaining with these people. What they’re calling for now is mass expulsions of long-term residents deemed insufficiently economically productive. There’s no way these demands won’t get even more extreme by election time.

“Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting.” Meta has 100% stopped even *pretending* not to be astoundingly evil. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

This fee is absolutely horrendous, and I feel sick for multiple friends in the US or who were planning to take up positions in the US very soon. Hell, even people I spent time with this week at @stellarorigins2025.bsky.social here in Vienna might not get back into the US tomorrow

I would love for a single democrat to reckon with the fact that conservatives are not in fact motivated by reasonable concerns. They are — just as they were with ‘concerns’ over blacks and gays and numerous other minorities over the last five decades — motivated by bigotry.

Lia Thomas met the NCAA requirements for transition when she started competing as a woman. Did the right accept those standards? Or, if they disagreed, argue that they could be more stringent? No. They said she was a man who was unfairly competing and pretended that there were no standards at all.

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

History repeats itself.

The Flame Nebula steals the spotlight in this image 🔥, but it’s not the only gem on display! You can also see the Horsehead Nebula (lower right), and the bright, bluish star to the right, which is one of the trio forming Orion's Belt. 🔭

This story about South Koreans with visas (!!!) who were detained is utterly insane. B-1 & visa waiver program visas allow you to do "business activities" like meetings or presentations (which they did). If that now risks getting thrown in jail, conferences in the US are sounding awfully dangerous

On the 🔭🧪 postdoc job market? Excited about science with Rubin and big surveys? Come join us at DiRAC. I’m so excited that we’re able to offer a few of these Fellowship positions this year! Please share, LMK if you have Q’s! aas.org/jobregister/...