A star has died! For the first time, astronomers have used #NASAWebb to identify which specific star exploded as a supernova. The star—located in galaxy NGC 1637—was a red supergiant surrounded by so much dust that it was invisible to Hubble: https://news.stsci.edu/4alt51V

Couldn't log in to my gas/electricity provider, and the email address on file didn't work. Clicked "Forgot email?" and entered my account number; was greeted by this...

Happy Lunar New Year! 🧧 Courtesy of the Poem of the Day: A Horse Named Never www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

So I finally finished this book and it's really really good! They say never meet your heroes but getting to know her through her autobiography, her scientific outlook and politics hold up extremely well! Some highlights for me: 🔭🧪🧵

I don't pay for Claude (web version), so I wonder what the free tier would say ... hang tight, I'll screen cap the first response

Come work with me atlanticmedia.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/Careers/job/...

Excellent points made here, which I mostly agree with. Even though I don't think LLMs are just "text-interpolators" as Hogg says,* I do feel strongly that they are not scientists, and cannot be made accountable in the way a scientist must. * This is because of RL training objectives

This is my America.

Registration closes today for the Astrophysics x NLP conference! Happening March 9-12! www.stsci.edu/contents/eve... #astronomy 🔭 🧪 🌌

New job opportunity at @stsci.edu: Senior Astronomical Data Scientist for data analysis tools, working closely with my team and me. This role is very similar to mine. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. 🧪🔭

AI discovered 12 securities in OpenSSL(!) which were confirmed and patched by the devs. Article is obviously a bit self-promotey, but imo deservingly so. aisle.com/blog/aisle-d...

"While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not 'happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to good communication tools." Paper day! ⤵️

YOUR PHONE CALLS TO THE SENATE ARE WORKING. KEEP CALLING. 202–224-3121 Three Democrats who previously broke with the party and voted with the GOP are now saying they will not vote for the bill. That’s enough for the bill to be unpassable right now.

Flurries scattered around Baltimore when the relative humidity is just 31%. Dew point expected to rise from -23C this afternoon to -3C tomorrow!

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.

Deservedly so! (Also felt surprisingly seen, as an Asian American who spent part of his childhood in rural Louisiana)

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Yes.... Ha ha ha... Yes!

Well that was a good game

Today I was staring at some museum art piece, thinking that it looked kind of AI generated, when a nearby docent came over and mistook my interest for genuine admiration and then proceeded to explain the artist's life history and motivations and unappreciated genius

The most informative thread I've read on auroras!

My textbook on SETI is published! I hope you like it! Please see if your libraries offer a free download—mine does! iopscience.iop.org/book/mono/97... 🧪🔭

It's good that they plan these things ahead 2027 is the year of the locust 2028 is the year of alpha radiation

Erdos problems, a set of famous difficult math challenges, are a clear example of AI models breaching a threshold. The idea that an AI could solve one, let alone many, would have been insane a year ago (o1 was brand new). Now we have multiple Erdos problems solved by GPT-5.2 in the last couple weeks

I'm unreasonably excited for the Bad Bunny super bowl halftime show

Another telling of this piece of history by local young filmmakers: vimeo.com/1127642117

For my fellow Baltimorons: Jones Falls Gateway public meeting tomorrow. streetsofbaltimore.com/jonesfallsga...

At the center, two galaxies known as NGC 3921 are in the late stages of merging. Their collision started about 700 million years ago. Their clash, captured by Hubble, caused a rush of star formation. Credit: ESA, NASA; Judy Schmidt.

Congratulations Kailash! He has led some truly creative and inspiring work!

Not sure why the fans are booing... did anyone really think the Steelers would advance?

POV when I make a cappucino in front of my Italian colleagues at 12:01 pm

Linus Torvalds vibe-coding guitar pedal software was not on my 2026 bingo card github.com/torvalds/Aud...

Just one more week to visit the interactive House of Melo exhibit at the Enoch Pratt Free Library Central Branch! Celebrate Baltimore's own Carmelo Anthony, his storied basketball career and his lasting impact on the city and the game. The exhibit is open through January 16. https://loom.ly/mz0yfd0

Any Baltimoreans know where I can get this wallpaper? (Seen in Catalog Coffee)

arxiv.org/abs/2601.02484 Yes, it's that Schwartz -- QFT textbook author -- writing a paper wherein "All calculations, numerical analysis, and manuscript preparation were performed by Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, working under physicist supervision."

🚀 The Roman Research Nexus is now LIVE! 🚀 A new cloud-based platform built to help the community prepare for—and fully exploit—data taken with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. A thread 🧵 1/5 #AAS247 #RomanResearchNexus #Nexus #NexusLaunch 🔭☄️

Timeline cleanse except instead of a cat it's the fact that there exists a city in New Mexico named Truth or Consequences. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_o...

Well that certainly was a Ravens–Steelers game.

In a study following 23 million people age 18-59 (pretty young) for 4 years…despite the fact that the ones who got the COVID vaccine were overall older and sicker at baseline, they not only had 74% lower risk of dying from COVID than the unvaccinated but 25% lower risk of dying from any other cause!

Seriously, don't do this. Not a good look when my first thought is "whoa they have four first author papers" and then I have to correct that with "wait no, they have one first author paper and three in prep."

To include some numbers here, StackOverflow in Dec 2025 had 3862 new questions. The last time SO had this few questions was in *Aug 2008*, the first full month that SO was in operations! In its peak month (March 2014), SO had 207,493 new questions!

the life and death of Stack overflow Data from data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflo...

Make America War Pigs Again

Maybe your 2026 resolution should be to move to Baltimore

"Now What?" by John J Hopfield is a beautiful read for researchers at all career stages, and especially so for those who wish not to simply solve problems, but rather identify and solve a PROBLEM -- a kind of the deepest question. pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/file...

For their anti-immigrant, white nationalist post about 100 million deportations, DHS stole the artwork of a non-white foreigner: Japanese illustrator Hiroshi Nagai. Apparently no white Americans were available to design an image. View Nagai's work here: hiroshinagai.com/contents.html

Here's a really easy New Year's Resolution: If you're sick with something contagious, you will stay home if your circumstances allow. If you can't stay home, you will mask around others until there is no possibility you are contagious. By making these choices, you will literally save lives.

“The federal government spent $7.6 trillion in the first 11 months of calendar year 2025, approximately $248 billion higher by November of 2025 compared to the same month in 2024,” [the Cato Institute] report said.

From @noirlabastro.bsky.social: This image reveals details in the outskirts of the Orion Nebula. The white-blue spots are clouds of gaseous iron ‘bullets’ being propelled at supersonic speeds from a region of massive star formation. #astronomy 📷: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA