It's not 1536, but Anne Boleyn has taken over the news. Recently a team of computer scientists, electrical engineers and a historical novelist think they have discovered the “true face” of Anne (& her mother) by applying AI-based computational facial recognition to Holbein sketches. The catch? /1

Advice for @erc.europa.eu : Prohibit the use of LLMs for grant writing. Let applicants sign a declaration that they have not used such systems and that the text is written by them and them alone.

'Rainbow Sky' 10 days of infrared water vapor bands remixed to RGB & retimed using frame interpolation to create a 01h22m film in 4k with music by Stellardrone...

Checking the answers means losing the productivity gain

Eind mei organiseert #Gent een heus #archeologiefestival tijdens de #Archeologiedagen in #Vlaanderen. Dit festival ‘Stad onder de stad’ vindt plaats van 20 tot en met 31 mei. (Afbeelding: Stad Gent) www.pzc.nl/gent/gent-or...

Made a view of FU Orionis with Spitzer and WISE data. No particular reason other than an interest in FU Orionis after reading the name in the Star Formation Newsletter. As always, more to read at the Flickr page: flic.kr/p/2sdQhtR

Today the Moon and Venus are only a few degrees apart. Here's a 20 sec timelapse, spanning about 30 min real-time. 🧪 🔭

I want to talk like lovers do

Leo Jordaan (Leendert Jurriaan Jordaan) (1885-1980) Dutch Illustrator and film critic Anti-Nazi-Cartoons, 1940-45 Source: Geritsel t1p.de/16h0 #Art #Illustration #Antifa #LeoJordaan Thread 🧵:

A “reverse” contrail, i.e. the clouds clear briefly along the plane’s path (not from a plane going backwards lol). I don’t see this often. 🧪

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

The AI rot is worse than you think in academia. Our own administrators (and sometimes colleagues) who have drunk the genAI KoolAid and are insisting students have a right to use AI "responsibly" in doing their assignments. The fight is hard enough without fellow academics betraying us.

GOD. DAMN. This Louisiana man fucking COOKED like I’ve seen very few people cook before.

1/x I'm about to leave for a holiday, so my timeline might be a bit quieter. However, I want to share the story of the MSC Napoli. I previously wrote a thread about it in Dutch, but I find it to be an interesting case.

We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...

Less than two weeks for the Liege Colloquium! #LiegeOcean26 🌊🧪 These two weeks are the craziest and most stressful of the whole year 🤪 So to relax myself, I'll be posting pretty submesoscale ocean images 😊 You can have a look at the programme and register at www.ocean-colloquium.uliege.be

🌍 Meet Yuting Cheng - Early Career Scientist 📌   Meet Yuting, postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, where she works on the ambitious GENESIS project. Her research focuses on a unique ESA satellite co-locating all four space geodetic techniques... 🔗 Read more – link in comm

An epic webcam capture of the sun skirting the horizon at Utqiaġvik, Alaska, this morning. @alaskawx.bsky.social

In the real world of cutthroat academic competition this happy academic will never have a permanent job.

Are you looking for an alternative to overwhelming AGU or complicit LPSC? Try DPS! It's right-sized, inclusive, and backed by an active professional society who lobbies hard for planetary science. We'd love for you to join us in expanding our meeting scope to encompass your science!! 🔭🧪

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I'm happy to share that I've been awarded the 2026 Carl Sagan Medal! As someone who has enjoyed investing lots of time in communicating science, and as an enormous fan of the work of Dr. Sagan, this means a great deal to me. Big thank you to my colleagues! www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Un...

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Bert and Ernie should have their own show. I don't want to have to watch Sesame Street to see what they're up to. I'm not 5

Alright it's Saturday night, time to repost my tests of the Moon-forming collision set to My Chemical Romance

That the sun is a star like the ones we see at night is something that will never stop being astonishing to me. Its surface has a texture, the solar granules, which are the result of very strong convective motion. The sunspots are magnetic anomalies, a bit cooler than their surroundings. 🧪 🔭

Caléndula

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It’s really sunny 🧪🔭

Dr. David Morens - who is 78 years old and served his country for nearly 50 years - used Gmail, which he shouldn't have done. However, "[he] was stripped and handcuffed [by] a half-dozen federal agents carrying guns and wearing tactical gear [..] and jailed". www.science.org/content/arti...

It’s happening

6/6 Credits: NASA, Eric Karkoschka (University of Arizona), Heidi Hammel (MIT) and STScI. Original article, 29 March 1999: science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

A big reason I advocate so strongly for Venus missions is that Venus is not a niche topic. It sits right at the intersection of planetary interiors, atmospheres, climate evolution, and exoplanet interpretation. The Venus story improves a huge fraction of planetary science.

Over 50% of American adults can't read above a 6th grade reading level, and this is an absolutely catastrophic civil rights crisis with implications for every facet of individual and collective life, including processing political statements by politicians, doctors, and so on

Vandaag Erfgoeddag in België, en logistiek kwam het zo uit dat ik een mini-harpje bij me had in het restauratie-atelier

@chrislhayes.bsky.social ICYMI, a piece that reminded me of Twilight Of The Elites, for obvious reasons. "a world with universal basic income is more meritocratic than a world without one" www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-d...

Not sure who needs this today, but here it is. Mary Oliver, "I Worried"

A University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa study shows that Waikīkī faces increasing sewage flood risks from sea-level rise through storm-drain backflow and groundwater emergence. The findings call for updated flood strategies focused on contamination, not just surface damage and economic loss.

Small original paintings currently available in my etsy store: monicamorrillart.etsy.com

Sometimes, when the end justify the means, the thing becomes a caricature of itself. Here in #mountaineering, but many analogies in #academia with their the indiscriminate use of LLM's and the #PublishorPerish culture. Re: www.bbc.com/news/article...

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

A recommended read by Hiranya Peiris: "[we] had a quality problem long before LLMs...publish or perish, citation metrics as proxy for impact, volume as proxy for productivity... have been producing incremental, poorly checked, & sometimes wrong papers for decades"🧪🔭⚛️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today the Euclid space telescope team are launching a new search for Space Warps! Come and be the first to find warps in space and time in Euclid's unseen Data Release 1, before the DR1 publication in October @ec-euclid.bsky.social 🧪🔭 www.zooniverse.org/projects/apr...

The #moon is very close to the #Pleiades today. With strong #Earthshine too. Here's a #timelapse as it sets. If you pay close attention you can see the relative motion of the moon against the stars. 🔭 🧪 #astrophotography

#SilentSunday #SoundOn

More dollars are being made outside of the US than in, because that's what oil and international trade uses. The end of petrodollars will undoubtedly bring about big change. "For the first time, the countries that want to forge ahead with the energy transition cannot be held back by the naysayers":

1-minute backyard astronomy! Episode 2: Centaurus A 🌀 Have you met this excellent Galaxy? Have you seen it in radio light? Have you seen the jets from the supermassive black hole?! 💨 🔭

🤷 Simply a consequence of national-level austerity policies affecting research across EU countries, driven by budgetary or ideological reasons (or both)?

Thinking about this more, the 2 and 3 year bans are real career killers… who’d hire a tenure track candidate, or an (associate) professor that has one of those hanging around their necks?