Nuclear power will not be cheaper nor bring down emissions any time soon in Australia. The Liberal Party seems committed to kicking the can down the road when it comes to climate change.

Australia's household battery boom suffers from the same walled-garden ecosystem lock-in that's been enshittifying tech across so many different areas Imagine what's going to happen when Tesla collapses under the weight of its own racism and bigotry, for instance......

A reminder that tech billionaire supporters of Trump don’t really like science and engineering, which Trump is nuking.

Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences 6/11

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

Bad for both science and US democracy. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instructed NASA to temporarily pause funding for a number of science missions. The move aligns with the White House’s proposed cuts for NASA’s 2026 budget, which were later restored by Congress.

"The World Health Organization (WHO) underscores that the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine is an effective, and essential public health intervention, with a proven record." Yet again, USA: #ImpeachRFKJr and remove him & those with him before they kill even more people than they already have.

Even if you are not surprised, this is important reporting documenting the bigoted ideology (and often, falsehoods) that Musk is promoting to his zillion online followers. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by @the74.bsky.social reveals.

EPA abandoned the DOE CWG report in the Endangerment Finding revocation. It makes sense, though. It would have been destroyed in court. They violated so many rules in the production of that report. Also, the May draft was never publicly released, so that’s also a big problem.

Pseudoscience features the same characters repeating the same lies and half-truths year after year, often boosted by the same media. Not surprising the "Climate Study Group" ran dodgy ads in News Corp papers that breached advertising standards (again). www.theguardian.com/media/commen...

Need somewhere with the challenges of the vacuum of space combined with the challenges of landing on a planetary surface?

OpenAI Introduces Premium Video Generator For White House Advisors Manipulating Trump https://theonion.com/openai-introduces-premium-video-generator-for-white-house-advisors-manipulating-trump/

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪

oh so just dumb luck these idiots didn’t shoot down a passenger aircraft

Wuthering Heights you say? youtu.be/212yQoHqCYQ?...

Yet another indictment of the United States health system that James Van Der Beek’s wife and six kids need a gofundme because his unsuccessful cancer treatment destroyed them financially www.gofundme.com/f/support-fo...

In her @newscientist.com column, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein did not mince words: Elon Musk has misunderstood the point of Star Trek. The idea that a heavily corporate and militarized approach to exploration will create a prosperous future? Illogical. @chanda.blacksky.app

Australian Census on University Staff Wellbeing results are out. Every uni recorded scores indicating high/very high psych risk. And in news surprising no one, "only senior execs and deans rated their workplaces as medium or low risk while all other staff groups reported high-risk conditions."

Incredible update: "This article was updated to note that CNN reports there were at least four party balloons shot down by DOD, not just one." gizmodo.com/one-mexican-...

Totally unsurprised by these differences between physics and astronomy programs.

Went to a workshop at Kooyong tennis club today - only other time I’d been there was a David Bowie concert in the late 1980s.

I mean, if Musk announced his plan to begin ranching frogs since the average frog weighs 50% more than a cow, you'd think that someone at the FT might pause before putting "frogs, which on average weigh 50% more than cows" in a news story.

This would have been a good point for someone to have asked, is that really how things work? Or is vacuum in fact an excellent insulator? www.ft.com/content/a5cf...

900,000 times I can forgive, but

A 69-year-old woman is recovering in hospital with four broken vertebrae after a police officer allegedly pushed her down “very violently” and “without warning” at Sydney’s protest against a visit by the Israeli president. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Plans to invade Greenland have just been cancelled after this

Additional footage shows Australian police using force against other protesters: Video: David Shoebridge via X (@DavidShoebridge)

Assistant police commissioner Peter McKenna: "It was really quite precarious at times for our officers who were significantly outnumbered by the protesters and the people who wanted to act in a violent and offensive manner." #auspol #nswpol #PoliceViolence #HerzogNotWelcome

I had to get a grumpy picture taken especially! Note mild threat of the ‘good scissors’ 🤣

How’s Big Bunny doing?

Cartoonist Jon Kudelka has passed away, his wife Margaret has confirmed. www.facebook.com/margaret.kud...

The first Super Bowl I watched live was in 2000. It featured an ad for pets dot com - how are they doing these days?

Perhaps lost in the noise about illegal Ebikes for kids - what is the market and sales of properly registered electric motorcycles and scooters for adults with relevant licenses? www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Slashing red tape. “Industry experts attribute the boom partly to the federal government’s relaxation of import standards in 2021. Those standards were tightened again in late 2025, meaning road-legal ebikes will be required to have motors that only activate when the rider is pedalling…”

You should read this. It is the type of detail that experts in authoritarian regimes see as telling. In this case, state agents are offered impunity from higher ups, and the legal system is rendered inoperative as a mode of accountability. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/u...

A good fraction of the scientists mentioned in the files did have a reputation of being arseholes (but certainly not all of them).

The mood music is very bleak for UK astronomy funding at the moment. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Concentration camp things happening at the concentration camps

Oh gawd the replies

This is actually real. And it's very illustrative of what DOJ has done. The document in question has redaction boxes over the face of every femme-looking person (including the Mona Lisa). It's clearly done using some sort of AI-assisted process.

You've got nice university here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

Kind of wild this act of terrorism hasn’t been picked much internationally — a 31-year-old man in Australia threw a homemade bomb into a crowd of Invasion Day protesters (which fortunately didn’t detonate) “and was allegedly motivated by racism, hatred and ‘pro-white’ ideologies”

Australia vows to repair ‘distressing’ damage to war graves in Gaza bulldozed by Israeli army

At what point does a misrepresentation become a lie?

INBOX: Washington Post Ukraine Correspondent Lizzie Johnson announces that she has been laid off in the middle of a below-freezing war zone without power, heat, or running water.

There’s plenty of cooling water for data centres in the sea and Musk has a well established method for getting them there.