Announcing new fossil fuel exploitation in the middle of a heat wave is certainly one way to lose votes to the Greens on day one

It is objectively terrifying that an Editor-in-Chief of Science, the academic journal of American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Medicine/Chemistry Professor is not only using ChatGPT as a search engine, but also openly stating it as if it’s a rational normal thing to do.

Perhaps, for reasons, you would like to make text you write more expensive for any LLM to ingest. May I introduce adversarial tokenmaxxing: alex-parker.github.io/tokenmaxxer/ Increase the tokens needed to represent any text by 3-6 times. It seems that l33t may have been ahead of its time.

“England’s green and pleasant land” becoming “England’s brown and scorched land” — effects of a long-lived heatwave and little rainfall on vegetation in England evident in these images from NOAA-20 today (left) and 18 July 2024 (right) during closer to average conditions.

Classic

really thinking about this tweet as i’ve been struggling to breathe through nausea for the last 5 hours

Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air! That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).

Interested in Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences in Wales? In Languages throughout the UK, or in Linguistics, Anthropology, Classics or Theology and Religious Studies? If so, this briefing on the health (sic) of the nation is for you. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/62...

"Fundamental research should not be allowed to decline through attrition while public statements continue to suggest it is being protected." @jim-wild.bsky.social in @resprofnews.bsky.social today. Well worth a read. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...

A proposal that doesn't add up

We looked at the possibility of their being second generation black holes back in the second observing run arxiv.org/abs/2011.05332 Evidence was interesting then, but far from conclusive. It's interesting seeing some of the features confirmed in more comprehensive analyses 🔭

I've spoken to UKRI and received further clarity about STFC cuts, including assurances that PPAN research careers shouldn't be impacted. The SITC remains concerned about the cuts and their impact on the UK's world-class science and international reputation.

Sir Ian Chapman for @ukri.org cuts STFC national labs by 58%, has already discontinued more than 200 PPAN postdoc positions per year, cuts national particle physics and astronomy centers by 20%, but he keeps doing self promotion, and is very at ease with his research commercialisation strategy. 🧪🔭

Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface

What's going on at STFC? wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/... What *is* going on in one of the UK's science funding councils? It does not look good for maintaining the country's scientific capabilities 🧪⚛️

Congratulations to our collaboration member Dr Isobel Romero-Shaw on wining the @royalastrosoc.bsky.social 2026 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship! Her lecture is at the University of Bath in November ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre... 🔭

he UK‘s research funding agency @UKRI_News has received a record increase for funding Science by the government. Why then is it having to cut the budget of some of the most important labs in the country?🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Temperatures have exceeded 34°C today for the 8th day this year 🌡️ That makes it a record for the most number of 34°C or higher in a calendar year 👇 The record was previously set in 1976 and 2020 for 7 days

Discouraging an activity with a benefit-to-cost ratio of nearly 10:1. A triumph of policymaking.

Respect to student 22. Good work on making progress through the semester!

On display this morning, parliamentary scrutiny at its very best with @chionwurah.bsky.social and her committee questioning Secretary of State Liz Kendall about the STFC funding cuts. Worth watching in full, but here are some of the highlights! 1: Doctoring the minutes!

Alongside CERN, cuts include scaling back UK facilities including the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. Jodrell Bank is local to me and the Lovell is much beloved. Making me think about how this short-termism impacts beyond discovery science and extends to our social and cultural infrastructure.

Wait everyone shut up for a second: the discovery of the Brachiosaurus holotype is at the exact midpoint between the founding of the United States and today (July 4, 1901)

Stats on teacher recruitment in Scotland from the last year The intake of Physics teachers is only *21%* of the target. Not all of that 21% will complete initial teacher training and continue in the field www.gov.scot/publications... 🎢 #AcademicSky

This is such an important thread as we face a growing crisis in higher education. So many public universities are being taken over by people who treat them as a business and not a public good, and those are fundamentally different philosophies. And it’s destroying the road to upward mobility.

Some thoughts on the planned closure of @resprofnews.bsky.social . And what the lack of media coverage on the planned closure of Research Professional News tells us about what life might look like without a functioning trade media.

Congratulations to @zooniverse.bsky.social on reaching a billion classifications! So much of what happens on the Internet is terrible. The Zooniverse remains one of the few things that is purely a positive for the world. www.twelvemountains.com/2026/07/a-bi...

UK Universities are world class, makes a lot of money from international students, and also invigorate local communities. The UK government on the other hand, is trying to choke us dead by restricting visas, and letting us die.

Well said Brian Schmidt! "Sovereign research capacity must be funded by the government – you can’t rely on other foreign countries to invest in your research base [through student fees].” www.timeshighereducation.com/news/nobelis...

www.nature.com/articles/s42... banger piece in Nature Reviews Physics from Hiranya V. Peiris. 'fewer things better' is a fake idea.

At today's UKRI board meeting, the fate of UK particle physics and astronomy will likely be decided. Have we done enough to convince the powers-that-be to halt the proposed funding cuts? 🤞 Read Prof. Hiranya Peiris in Nature today eloquently explaining why these cuts are wrong.🧪🔭⚛️ 📖: rdcu.be/friwM

We’ve joined the Science Council and other member bodies to issue a joint statement expressing our concerns about the government and UKRI’s recent changes to research and development funding. 🔗 Read the full joint statement on the Science Council website: sciencecouncil.org/science-coun...

I especially love this diagram.

🔥🐶 ☕ 🔥

Indeed. It's also surprising that UKRI thinks it can make a dent in a research space where 20 million is several orders of magnitude smaller than the amounts FAANG are shoveling into R&D. Why not fund stuff commercial interests cannot do than try and compete?

The University of Sussex is proposing to reduce the academic staff in Experimental Particle Physics, Theoretical Particle Physics & the Astronomy Centre by around 35%. Please read, sign & share this open letter opposing these damaging cuts with your colleagues. sussexphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/

Letter in today's Times by climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins: "The discourse around net-zero is increasingly decoupled from…science and our changing weather. "Net-zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics."

'A senior member of one of STFC’s advisory bodies told RPN that the..exercise represents “a major crisis for the UK"...all of the outcomes modelled are “shocking”....the government would be “committing an act of national self-harm by imposing these cuts”.' 🙏 @francesjones.bsky.social

At this event, a forecast for 2056 was shown for a heatwave in 2056 with more than a week of over 40°C over a large part of the UK. By burning fossil fuels, we’re creating an increasingly hot, chaotic, and dangerous world, sending our children and grandchildren there, and they’re never coming back.

It seems to have become commonplace to blame net zero for Britain’s high energy bills and/or weak job market… … and I guess I’ll have to explain again why there is very little evidence of this. Britain has plenty of economic problems; net zero is not high on that list (though climate change is) 🧵

Let’s do jobs first, the easy one. Net zero is creating a lot more jobs than it is destroying. The CCC estimated it will create 135,000 to 725,000 *net* new jobs by 2030. Many of them technical jobs. Until the labour market loosened recently, these extra jobs were kind of a problem with net zero

The secret to this problem is basically to whack a university nearby, because you suddenly have a high spending population, who go out quite a lot to sustain nice coffee shops and brunch places and also a cheap labour force to staff them.

Stargazer’s Rest 🏕️💫 #art #illustration

This is * insane *. STFC council minutes from December have been removed from their website, changed, and reposted. The new version rolls back on funding commitments made explicit in the initial version. I can't think of another adjective other than Trumpian behaviour.

This might be one of the funniest chart about energy scenarios I’ve seen. You can hardly see “actual” for gas

A long-shot: do any of you lovely people live in the North #Shropshire constituency? We had a super visit from your MP, Helen Morgan, to our drop-in event in Westminster about the impending cuts to UK astro & particle physics. We'd love her to hear that her constituents are as concerned as we are.🙏

now thatsa meatball!!!!

Cloud Nine #art #illustration #pokemon

Did you see the sign today about hobbies?

Deeply concerning. We were calling for a robust, transparent impact assessment to ensure the UK’s strengths in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear (PPAN) research are protected. Good policy depends on good evidence and listening to the community.