The more I use AI for development, the more concerned I am about the fact that knowing what makes an effective prompt and the appropriate, opiniated, guardrails necessary to consistently get high quality output is much harder if you don't have quite a bit of experience doing things by hand first.

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

✨ Announcing Shock Detectives! Help solve a space mystery! Hunt for clues where the Sun’s solar wind collides with Earth’s magnetic shield. The case begins here: www.zooniverse.org/projects/vic...

Spatial navigation is the future..

Meet the academics refusing to use generative AI Researchers say they have their reasons for avoiding AI tools — and they’re sick of arguing about it. www.nature.com/articles/d41... h/t @maartenp.bsky.social

Happy #EuropeDay from orbit! 🇪🇺 On 9 May, Europe Day reminds us of something our astronauts witness every day from 400 km above: a continent of remarkable diversity, bound together by shared skies 🧪🌍

..... ""It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living."

Always love to be reminded of this. A lot of it was hand-stitched too. Really amazing, precise work. Women’s work is so often minimised and forgotten.

Our second ICARUS system is in space 🚀🛰️ At 9am PT, a Falcon 9 rocket left Earth from California, taking an ICARUS payload with it. This is the beginning of ICARUS 2.0—independent, robust, real-time—with more ICARUS satellites to come. Read more▶️https://tinyurl.com/mw48c398 📸 Space X, EnduroSat

🥳 New paper alert 🥳 The first of the data chapters from my DPhil, and the works from my first few field seasons on Skomer, is out! "Shearwaters make efficient navigational decisions, even at very fine scales" - doi.org/10.1242/jeb.... A huge thank you to everyone involved 🩵

🌍✨ May brings us a new seminar with Eva Nuhn who is a Research + Teaching Associate in the Geoinformatics Group, Uni of Augsburg "Beyond Visual Landmarks: Auditory and Olfactory Cues for Urban Navigation" Date: Tues 12th May 2026 @ 2pm UK time (online) Register here: tinyurl.com/yvuvhbmn ✨🌍

“I am the Walrus”, yes Magnus, you are indeed! Absolutely fascinating to observe and photograph this Arctic visitor on his tour of 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #walrus #atlanticwalrus #magnus #wildlifephotography #nature #marinelife #scotland

Funders must take action before an increase in submission of high-quality proposals written using AI models makes it impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff go.nature.com/4eQTit4

I'd be interested in a decent analysis of what is driving this increase, but I suspect a decent proportion of it is driven by increased use of LLMs. If it is, please just stop. I get we are all under pressure but at some point we have to take a step back and ask what we're doing all this for

If you’re born on or after Jan 1 2009, you’ll never be able to buy cigarettes- I look at why there’s strong public support behind this new law in the UK

Since ChatGPT came online in late 2022, grant application numbers across 12 UK and EU funding bodies have increased by *57%*. For MSCA fellowships the number is *+142%*. I do believe that what we’re doing is insane and that we need to stop doing it IMMEDIATELY. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This country (and the world?) seem to be running a massive curiosity deficit.

🔭 Comet R3 PanSTARRS Behind Satellite Trails Image Credit & Copyright: Uli Fehr ap260427

I show my intro students a picture of a radium-infused chocolate from the early 20th century. My point is always: don't always jump on the bandwagon. AI everywhere is the 2026 radium chocolate.

“Conferences were much more exciting as a young, early-career researcher, when every contact felt like an instant friend and every new city, a gift” My most recent blog post on the effect of age on travel perceptions occamstypewriter.org/mindthegap/2...

Well, it had better be worth it.

Happy Earth Day! Our planet is beautiful.

Models of everyday life were deposited in #Egyptian tombs. They were supposed to support the deceased in the afterlife. One of the most charming examples is the model of a #cow giving birth. Carved in wood, painted. Probably from Meir, #Egypt, dating c. 2040-1985 BC. 📷 Royal Ontario Museum 🏺

Grad school: to be successful in a future career you're going to need to focus on THIS ONE THING for the next 5 years. The actual career in question: you can't focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes at a time and you have to keep switching between 1000 things endlessly

Perhaps our most familiar and charismatic auks, these bright-billed burrow nesters certainly catch the eye! Find out more about Puffins in the graphic below and by visiting their BTO BirdFacts page: www.bto.org/learn/about-... #seabirds @btobirds.bsky.social @jncc.bsky.social @rspb.bsky.social

Huge #Saharandust cloud coming to #Italy. The @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social CAMS forecast shows a high concentration of PM10 - due to the #dust transport triggered by the vortex centered in the Mediterranean - over the Southern and Central part of the Country for April 13. #airquality

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸 We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto. The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

I also get annoyed by ‘hallucinating’ because it implies it’s sometimes making stuff up and sometimes not. To be clear, it’s *always* making stuff up - it’s just that sometimes that stuff resembles reality more closely than other times It has no idea if what it’s generating is right or not.

Key quote for me: “an entire profession might gradually lose its capacity to question and redefine its goals, because AI systems embed assumptions about what those goals are.”

@movebank.bsky.social just passed 10 Billion animal locations! Must be the largest geospatial biodiversity database? www.movebank.org/cms/movebank...

The Platial Analysis lab is involved in organizing two workshops at this year's Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe Annual Meeting (#AGILE2026). We would love to see you there! stko-lab.github.io/agile2026-ge... mobilitybank.org/events/mobil...

✅ #Artemis II update: 'Earthset', 6 April 2026, and 'totality', 7 April, seen from lunar orbit, the Moon eclipses the Sun, a view few humans have ever witnessed (pics: NASA) 🔗 www.nasa.gov/gallery/jour... @exploration.esa.int l

There's a nice #Artemis II mission tracker here: artemis.cdnspace.ca LOTS of data about its current position, crew activities, and whether or not the toilet is currently "Go"

An LLM is nothing like a sewing machine, and only a dickhead who devalues textiles could even come up with that. Every single garment is handmade, from the cutting up. We have been attempting to automate for literally a century. It’s not happening. Circular knits are about the pinnacle.

😮 Awesome views from Day 2 of #Artemis II this morning. @exploration.esa.int @esaearth.esa.int

This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew. Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right. Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

It's April 1st, 2026. The Supreme Court scheduled a hearing over whether the President can change the US constitution by executive fiat. NASA is launching a Moon mission equipped with a never-tested-in-space life support system and a heatshield of questionable safety. Jokes are dead, basically.

It's that time of year, folks--as extra credit on their final exam, students in my geophysics and seismology classes are invited to write a relevant haiku. If you're a geophysics or seismology geek, enjoy!

In spite of all the talk of Claude Code and Codex meaning the end of humans writing code, software job adverts are actually going up, according to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's crunching of millions of job ads for this week's The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/7325...

Striking chart on the gender skew among AI researchers. In academia, the number of top AI scientists who are women has been growing slowly. In the private sector? Not so much. (chart from this vg paper from Uni of Chicago bfi.uchicago.edu/working-pape...)

thinking about the medieval cat door in Exeter cathedral again

Here is a brief overview of existing approaches to studying "real-world" navigation. Really happy to have worked on this with @hugospiers.bsky.social & @antoinecoutrot.bsky.social! arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11347

Honestly, quit being a professor. If you think your research and "insight" is so valuable that you are willing to abdicate the actual core of being a professor, then you should quit.

One issue is, what happens when the big AI companies start charging the actual costs of running these models? I predict that future AI-agent use may be restricted to big companies and universities. Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

You know those people who magically appear whenever there’s free food? Ravens do that too – but in Yellowstone, it’s not luck and not because they trail wolves. Instead, they remember where and when kills happen, navigating a mental map of the “landscape of death". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Today I thought I would bring you a little bit of Venice colour. It also works really well in B&W but felt like a change

🚨 UPDATE: fireball over Europe – 8 March 2026 At 18:55 CET on Sunday, 8 March, a very bright fireball streaked across the skies of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, glowing for around six seconds before fragmenting. 🧪🔭 🎥 Allsky7

One of the coolest photos of the lunar eclipse this week generated from over 800 images taken with a portable all-sky imager. You can see the transition of the moon into total eclipse with a very bright auroral substorm reaching overhead. What an amazing experience this was!