Alle Demos nächste Woche: Wien: Mi, 27.05., 13 Uhr, Uni Wien Linz: Do, 28.05., 16 Uhr, Hauptplatz Graz: Do, 28.05., 14 Uhr, Wilhelm Fischer Allee Salzburg: Do, 28.05., 14 Uhr, Kapitelplatz Klagenfurt: Do, 28.05., 10 Uhr, Uni-Vorplatz www.oeh.ac.at/info/unisret... #UnisRetten @nuwiss.bsky.social

The Austrian government has proposed hitting universities with an €800 million / year budget cut (after inflation). This could lead to redundancies for up to 20% of staff. 🫠 Quite ironic after the last year of advertising Austria as a "safe haven" for researchers impacted by Trump.

🧵1/13 Morgen startet Pint of Science – das Wissenschaftsfestival! 🧠🔬 Vom 18.–20. Mai gibt es in Wien 30 Events an 11 Locations – Forschung zum Zuhören, Fragenstellen & Mitdiskutieren! Ein Überblick über das Programm im Thread. 👇 🎟 pintofscience.at/events/wien/ #pint26 #pint26AT

A brief history of the cosmic distance record The cosmic distance record has grown, in just a few hundred years, from millions of light-years to over 30 billion light-years. Here's a look back at our history of ever-receding horizons. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #physics #telescope

Dark matter passes a new cosmic test, while MOND fails A new cosmic test has finally, with CMB and large-scale structure data, become realistic: using the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect to test dark matter vs. MOND. Guess who wins? bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #darkmatter #MOND

Freu mich diesmal auch dabeizusein!

Very excited to be part of this year's #PintOfScience festival in Vienna (May 18-20). Many interesting topics and fun opportunities to chat about science pintofscience.at

"By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan bullshit. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism."

Just realising that @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social 's classic crackpot index criterion #15 might need an update. AI readily solves this little obstacle: "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".

🦈 Rare picture of a shark stepping on a Lego. #MadeMeSmile 🤭

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.

The flimsy case for evolving dark energy There's been a lot of talk about evolving dark energy, and how DESI data demands it. But the case for this remains somewhat weak, while the true underlying puzzles remain unsolved. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #physics #astro #space #darkenergy

So happy to finally share this: I made a long-form comic about Hawking radiation for Physics Today! Although it's a short read, I hope it sucks you in ;) physicstoday.aip.org/features/bla...

it's not a pigeon, it's a feature...

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

Not so marvelous news. ~95,000 scientists have left the federal government since the Trump regime took over.

Watch as the Crab Nebula changes over time with Hubble. Two images, taken 25 years apart, show the ongoing expansion of a supernova remnant: https://news.stsci.edu/4bAN6m4 🔭

Christ on an electric bike. Trump Administration to Pay $1 Billion to Energy Giant to Cancel Wind Farms www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/c...

Good move! www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn...

The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨 On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍 A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔭🧪☄️ 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...

What has happened in the 10 years since #GW150914? @space.com picks their top 10 discoveries. What are yours? www.space.com/astronomy/li... by @robleascijorno.bsky.social #GW10Years 🔭 ⚛️ 🧪

A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations. arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... #AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Misconduct #ScholComm

🧪 🔭🧵 #histsci #February11 is International Day of Women & Girls in Science. So I would like to highlight Katherine Johnson, #NASA mathematician and computer scientist. A biography➡️ nasa.gov/centers-and-... She was a trailblazer in the quest for racial equality and, as a champion of STEM education,

More on catastrophic cuts to UK astronomy & particle physics. Costs of facilities & international subscriptions go up so grants line and individual projects are cut. If the Government is serious about backing science & technology, they need to fix this. www.space.com/astronomy/uk...

Elon Musk et al are totally fucking up the night sky ALREADY and they plan to make it worse 🔭 www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/satelli...

Perhaps it was coincidental timing, but nothing underscores the collapse of the Washington Post like firing most of the Pulitzer prize winning #climate reporters the very same day as their opinion pages publishes a BS screed by climate misinformer Bjorn Lomborg.

Here's the data:

Starts With A Bang podcast #125 – Large-scale structure Here at the start of 2026, the biggest puzzles in the expanding Universe are the Hubble tension and the question of whether dark energy evolves. Two cosmologists, me and Kate Storey-Fisher, discuss. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro

Eine Geburtstagsparty für die Schrödingergleichung gibt's am 22-23 Jänner am @esivienna.bsky.social www.esi.ac.at/events/e596/

How recently have we understood the Universe? The Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years. But it's really only over the most recent millennia, centuries, and decades that humanity has understood it at all. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #universe #cosmos #astro

Brightest-ever lensed supernova reveals astronomy’s coming revolution Astronomers found our first gravitationally lensed superluminous supernova. With the Vera C. Rubin Observatory now operational, hundreds, maybe thousands more should be coming. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #supernova

It's as if there is a pattern...

Happy birthday to #mathematician & #computerscientist US Navy rear admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) who popularized the revolutionary idea of developing machine-independent programming languages based on English. 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬 #histsci She began teaching at Vassar in 31 & got PhD (Yale) 🧵#artAdventCalendar

Wow 98,000 peculiar velocities The DESI DR1 Peculiar Velocity Survey: Fundamental Plane Catalogue by C.E. Ross and co-authors arxiv.org/abs/2512.03226 For comparison: the Great Attractor was discovered with 400 PVs, Laniakea with 8000 PVs, South Pole Wall with 18,000 PVs #Cosmicflows #Cosmology 🧪

A cartoon by Charles Barsotti, from 1994. Shop your favorite cartoons: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/ZjVXum[…]id=...

Der #FWF fördert 3 neue #Spezialforschungsbereiche für mehr Grundlagenwissen in der Medizin, Quantenforschung und Kosmologie. Die neuen Netzwerke werden von Forscher:innen der @uniinnsbruck.bsky.social, der @unisalzburg.bsky.social und der @tuwien.at koordiniert. 📚 www.fwf.ac.at/aktuelles/de...

Very excited and honoured that we got funding for this exciting new research network with a fantastic group of people.

Very excited and honoured that we got funding for this exciting new research network with a fantastic group of people.

I haven’t seen this label used before but it seems apt. The video contains a good discussion of what “science populism” is and how it’s harmful. youtu.be/sQnOFGWsXNM?...

LiteBIRD Mission Takes One Step Forward The next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization satellite has been approved to move forward, following a review held at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. #LiteBIRD 🧪 #Cosmology www.ipmu.jp/en/20251201-...

Der Beschluss des Grünen-Parteitags gegen eine Erstattung von Homöopathie durch gesetzliche Krankenkassen ist ein wichtiges Signal. Es geht nicht (nur) ums Geld. Es geht auch um Abgrenzung: Was durch die Solidargemeinschaft finanziert wird, muss wissenschaftlich belegt sein. Die Erstattung führt…

Still among my favorite science memes lol

I didn’t know it was this bad at Goddard. Infuriating. 🧪

It was a huge pleasure to be back at the Royal Institution last month! I gave a lecture all about the mysteries of dark matter, which is now up on YouTube. 🧪🔭 (As a bonus, my demo actually worked, unlike in my 2021 Ri talk...!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLa3...

Speaking out for science ... My subjective conclusions to a short talk on "From Einstein to Astrology: 
On Misquotes, Scepticism, and Speaking Out for Science" at the VISESS doctoral school in Vienna

Enjoyed giving a short talk "From Einstein to Astrology: 
On Misquotes, Scepticism, and Speaking Out for Science" at the #VISESS doctoral school, remembering our open letter to Austrian public TV ultimately cancelling an astrology show. A small victory given the constant attacks on science...

How far back in time can the naked eye see? To see back in the Universe farther than ever before, we need large, powerful telescopes. But the naked eye, if you look just right, can take you impressively far. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #cosmology

24 November 1859: 'On the Origin of Species', Charles Darwin's groundbreaking book, was published. Darwin's magnum opus is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology and is undoubtedly one among the most important books in the history of science. 🧪 #science #histsci #Darwin 1/3