Physics teachers. Please help identifying this demo. @hookean.bsky.social

Do you have a steady hand and an eye for detail? We're looking for volunteers to help us with our conservation work! This is an exciting opportunity to help us look after the past for generations to come. If you're interested, get in touch at [email protected]

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

periodic reminder of the existence of Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font available from the Braille Institute designed to improve readability for people with low vision I use it in talks because it's pretty and also because, as an audience member, I am perpetually squinting at people's slides

But why? How does the O2 concentration affect the wavelength? Whats the Physics?

Aurora color guide! What creates the different shades? Different atoms getting "excited" at different altitudes The bright reds are a sign of a particularly intense event

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Fellow parents! Carers! Anyone looking after children over half-term! Here is a thread of videos showing TOYS you can MAKE at home from scrap stuff you probably have lying around. First, the utterly delightful "balancing bird" alomshaha.com/balancing-bi...

every sports team is a Ship of Theseus

Amazing how setting up your #microsoft authenticator account with an organisation requires logging in with your org. credentials, followed by… two-factor authentication using… you guessed it: the authenticator account which you are trying to set up in the first place. Catch-22. *slow clapping*

If you don’t teach your students your subject, you’re not doing your job. If you teach your students to ask AI first, you’re ensuring they’ll never be *needed* for any job. You’re also guaranteeing that knowledge of your subject slowly dies. Asking ChatGPT is gaining neither knowledge nor skills.

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

Top #Equinox fact: Today is the day that the Sun rises due East and sets due West. At the December solstice the sun rises in the South East. At the June solstice it rises in the North East. As the days pass between the two, the sunrise position slowly changes passing due East each equinox.👇🤩 🔭🧪

Dear @ukri.org, I think JJ Thomson nailed the perils of having Government agencies use “clear eyes” to decide where to focus research funding to maximise benefit to society. 🧪 (www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...)

Spot the difference: John the Baptist from the Hours of Joanna I of Castile and our Community Engagement Officer remembering how many emails he has to respond to

How does lava sound when it comes to the surface of the Earth? Listen to a lava flow oozing out of its effusive vent high on the southwestern side of #Etna, 28 August 2025. That day no visits by tourists were allowed on the site, which permitted this (relatively) clean recording

A very hungry planet! 🪐 What appears to be a ripple in space is actually a newborn planet, eating its way through its dusty cradle around a younger version of our Sun 🌞 Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2534a/ 🔭 🧪 #exoplanets 📷 ESO/R. van Capelleveen et al.

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

Delightful story about a 17-year-old homeschooler who disproved the 40-year-old Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. She decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping the rest of high school and college. When she finishes, a PhD will be her first degree.

Honestly, this 8.8-mag quake and tsunami seems a fabulous demonstration of the capabilities that the US, Japan, and others have marshalled to protect their citizens. This doesn't just exist. It has to be built and maintained.

I see grocery/takeout shaming discourse going around again, so this is your periodic historian reminder that cooking from scratch daily while working has never been sustainable, and for millennia everyone either relied on takeout & restaurants or ate in huge households w/ big dorm-like group dining.

Will it be enough to stop the predictable clickbait antics about a SN every time it dims, precisely like it has done for the last few decades ? My gut feeling says no…

An excellent opportunity to join the curatorial team at the Science Museum has come up! Please spread the word. 🌍Curator of Climate & Earth Sciences ⚗️Part of the excellent Team Science in London Curatorial ⌛ Permanent, Full-Time 💲 £41k p/a bit.ly/4m3uQFp

Our final updates have been posted to the Climate.gov website, and this will be our final post to our social media channels.

🔭 APOD is 30 Years Old Today Image Credit: Pixelization of Van Gogh's The Starry Night by Dario Giannobile apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25061...

Hello #Oxford - if you're around on Monday you're all invited to come and celebrate the first images from the @vrubinobs.bsky.social. We're running a free event at 6pm in Oxford Physics: www.physics.ox.ac.uk/events/vera-...

'The artificial intelligence boom means the Environment Agency has no idea how much water England will be short of in future decades, as datacentres do not have to report how much they are using to cool their servers.' Maybe the policy of 'turbocharging' AI everywhere & all the time needs thought?

This tiny device can shrink dangerous blood clots. It’s called the ‘milli-spinner’ and its invention was partly an accident…

Some personal thoughts on the recent death of the historian of science, Mario Biagioli #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2025/05/23/m...

...it concluded since the landslide was triggered by the melting glacier, and since *that* happened due to rising global temperatures... This was a signal - and a warning - from our rapidly changing world, heard in every single part of it. Best we listen up. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 10/

Picked up another good one!

Arrived! Looking forward to reading this. All I’ve got to is Dava Sobel’s book and the fondly remembered Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons Longitude TV drama #histsci #histastro #histastronomy

Right Now, most of the American can relate to this message from the 90's.

Possibly the weirdest planet yet discovered? Newfound world 2M1510 (AB) b appears to orbit not one but two stars...and they are actually failed stars, known as brown dwarfs...and the planet orbits sideways, in a unique up-and-down polar orbit. 🧪🔭 www.eso.org/public/news/...

A phrase which might help with sixth formers remembering how to answer the question of why something is a wave: “something does what it does, not because it is what it is, but it is what it is, because it does what it does”. empiricist undertones in A-level wave-particle duality #iteachphysics

Rosetta Earth Flyby #3, Outbound - From Gordan Ugarković (ugordan.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/cevFv1

If you missed Derek Muller's @perimeterinstitute.ca public talk last night about AI and the future of education, you can watch the video here: www.youtube.com/live/PYeBGyX... It was a really great discussion of how we learn and what effect AI (and other technologies) can have on that.

Nothing else on this list was a self-imposed policy choice.

🔭 Jupiter and Ring in Infrared from Webb Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25040...

"Preventing the addition of new debris is no longer sufficient. We must now actively clean up the space environment to halt the onset of a chain reaction that could render heavily utilised regions unusable. Immediate and decisive action is necessary." Read the ESA Space Environment Report 2025 👇

Gorgeous weather today for the RMS for Girls solar eclipse event! 200+ attendees enjoyed views of the Sun from three solar telescopes using HA filters. Many smiles all around and happy students on the Garth. Onwards and upwards! #girlsinstem #girlsinastronomy #solareclipse #iteachphysics

Dark Matter and Dark Energy have been staples in secondary school textbooks for maybe 20years now. The scientific method of “when the theory can’t explain new data we change or abandon the theory” is also a staple in textbooks. The kids are watching. Some of them, anyway. Will scientists behave?

🧑‍🔬🔭 Research news! 🧑‍🔬🔭 A new paper published in #MNRAS suggests that at least two mass extinction events in Earth's history were likely caused by the "devastating" effects of nearby supernova explosions. ⤵️

Our latest research paper published today on a type of biodegradable plastics called PAC plastics. We did field trials in Dorset and found they did not biodegrade. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Fellow Physics/Astronomy folk - need help tracking down a person whose details I’ve misplaced, who was at the SPEED IOP Physics workshop in Cambridge in 2019, who brought an inflatable planetarium dome and projector. @hookean.bsky.social @allyphysics.bsky.social

🔭 Driveway Analemma Video Credit & Copyright: Nick Wright apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap24120...

Aristotle's crystalline spheres, their destruction and the consequences for the development of celestial mechanics #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2024/12/05/f...

Listened to #BBC4 #inourtime on the AKM last Thursday. Same old narrative about it being “for the mantlepiece” or for “instruction”. As always, the AKM is introduced as an analog computer and everyone then forgets that it was one, just because its planetary predictions were not very good, 1/3