It should go without saying, but please, please get vaccinated if you can. The COVID vax is still safe and effective, and it’s still covered by most insurance providers. You can get it at most pharmacies.

LLMs get a lot of attention but if you are interested in the original (allegedly) stochastic parrots come to my poster Tuesday where I will present new work on the natural vocal behavior or parrots and its cortical control #Sfn2025 #SfN25

'Mother and Child' - Kobori Tomone, ca. 1910. #JapaneseArt #shinhanga

What I love most about this story is the NYT’s obliviousness to the fact that in other anglophone cultures the slang for tight male underwear or swimwear is ‘budgie smugglers’ www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/u...

How Close Countries Are To Meeting Their 2016 Paris Climate Agreement Contributions ⚫ – Critically Insufficient 🔴 – Highly Insufficient 🟠 – Insufficient 🟡 – Almost Sufficient 🟢 – 1.5°C Paris Agreement Compatible More on the agreement here: brilliantmaps.com/meet-pari...

Kazuo Kasai (Japanese Artist, born 1955) "Stretched Shadow", 2020. Watercolor on Paper, 40 × 30 cm. Private Collection. #art #painting #painters #BlueSkyArt

Going to beat @aussiastronomer.bsky.social to it and say that at past 5pm ET this Friday we have all done enough this week. I have done enough this week. 👩‍🔬

Just enjoyed using the word sporadically. Small pleasures.Also I can't believe there's no "I hope not sporadically" GIF available!

"We shouldn't be responsible for teaching men to fish. This is something that the parents should be doing. Not my tax dollars."

Several emails a day with "can you just quickly [do this thing that will take at least an hour]" is not sustainable.... even if the things only takes 10 minutes, I'm struggling.

Hey so “underage girls” are…children. The word you’re looking for is children. They’re not like, women-in-waiting or women-lite or whatever. They’re children. I think some of you are very uncomfortable with what that means for you but it is still true.

Also I'm excited for the science symposium celebrating her award which will happen at UPenn on Apr 29th 2026. :)

Delighted to have played a small role in this decision as a member of the Physics Cluster of the Committee of Sciences and Arts at Franklin: news.uchicago.edu/story/prof-w... 🔭👩‍🔬

Two very interesting papers about dark energy on the arXiv today, both very relevant to the ongoing interest in possibly evolving DE as suggested by the DESI results 🔭🧪 Here's the first and potentially more explosive one: arxiv.org/abs/2511.07517

Son (15) asked my husband and I today if we have published any papers (we have) and then looked us up in his high school recommended publication database. I can’t tell if he was impressed or not by our academic records.

Beautiful morning moon today with the last of our Autumn colours. 🔭🌓

A hell of a resumé

Observatory getting ready for a (cloudy) open evening. Still fun thay we can turn off the nearest street lights.

Any spider fans know what this is (other than some kind of egg sac?). It’s very sticky. On the underside of our sky brightness monitor.

My local food bank got so many donations this week they are asking for no more food (just help sorting it out) until they are through the backlog. We shouldn’t need this but it warms my heart it happened.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey image of Arp 13, also known as NGC 7448. NGC 7448 has a disk of tightly wound, clumpy, and particularly bright spiral arms. Credit: SDSS Source

I always find it interesting how the story changes when a lawyer gets to court. They can say anything they want outside of court without accountability but the rules are vastly different in court where you can get seriously penalized for lying.

In light of today’s discourse, a reminder: Women have always worked. The big shift from feminism was women getting access to all types of workplaces with an expectation of equal compensation. When they say they want to kick us out of the workplace, they actually mean they want us to work for free.

When people talk about the excesses of MeToo, they have to lie, because the reality is that there was no massive social reckoning forcing people to believe survivors or hold perpetrators accountable. In fact, there has been a significant backsliding and new punishments in rejection of MeToo

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week. @wired.com #ICE www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

It’s Guy Fawkes Day - the strangest British celebration to explain to non-British folks. 🔥🍎🎇

My art shop has a collection of my original animal art. Good news for buyers in the USA, your art will be sent duty paid, and art is exempt from the tariffs! folksy.com/find/shop/th... #AnimalArt #OriginalArt #Drawing #Painting #Artwork #GiftIdeas #SupportSmallBusiness #ChristmasGifts #bsnm

Yes, but could we please use some term other than “soft skills”? Both “non-technical” and “professional” are more descriptive.

Some of the students I met at Louisville last year worked at UPS at night (and college in the day). I hope everyone is ok.

The @herts.ac.uk astronomy MSc and PhD applications are open. I'm offering PhD projects on JWST spectroscopy of young stars in Tr 14 and star-cluster formation. I'm also offering an MSc project on variability of YSOs. www.herts.ac.uk/research/cen... #galactic #stellarastro #astro #Physics

Mostly local stuff in PA, but I also voted in PA Supreme Court retention decision. I voted by mail. What’s your plan to vote fellow Americans?

Back from taking students on educational trip to @greenbankobservatory.org.web.brid.gy - and was excited to catch GBT while it was observing MaNGA @sdssurveys.bsky.social galaxies for me! 🔭👩‍🔬🧪🎢

This a million times. Denial never really changes, just shifts to update its language with new discoveries and new terminology. We see the same with evolution and HIV denial. Plus, people were sick of antivaxxers even in the late 1800s.

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

The USDA has more than $5 billion in emergency funds available to cover SNAP benefits but is refusing to spend them during the government shutdown. It's the first time in the history of the program that the federal government has refused to spend those funds

Poor Kevin Masters - gets absolutely none of the emails about his kids's athletics team, and I can't figure out how to respond to tell them to remove me and actually add Kevin....

Excellent Halloween display found this morning in the @haverfordcollege.bsky.social Astronomy Library. Skeleton is reading Stellar Structure by Chandrasekhar of course! :) 🔭🧪🎃

The NY Times and WaPo may be lost causes but holy shite look at PEOPLE out here absolutely killing it with 100% unvarnished truths 🌟

Python was awarded a funding grant, funding grant asked Python foundation to remove all diversity and inclusion initiatives they have. Python foundation said no and rejected the grant. If you use Python, send a few dollars to the charity to keep it going. I’m pushing a dono on behalf of ScamGuard.

A little bit of fun trivia ... the old Australian $50 note, also features Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, and the first pulsar it observed. You can see The Dish in the centre and the pulses on the left hand side of the note.

Finally caught some shots of Comet Lemmon (iPhone 16 pro)

Normally I grumble about letters of rec... I'm sure I'll get there. But right now I'm just enjoying being reminded how awesome our students are as I draft/update letters ready for the Nov/Dec onslaught of deadlines!

Born #OnThisDay in 1930 was Gladys West. As a mathematician and computer programmer, West created an accurate model of the Earth's shape, and her work on satellite geodesic modelling laid the foundations for GPS technology. #WomenInSTEM #BlackHistoryMonth https://bbc.in/4nsn0FA

Did you know that over 1.3M active duty service members and veterans rely on SNAP benefits to feed themselves and their families? Now you know.

Happy birthday to #mathematician & geodesist Gladys West (née Brown 1930)! 🧪🐡👩🏾‍🔬🧮⚒️ #histsci Shown with 3 satellites important to her career + tracks: Seasat, GEOS-3 & a GPS satellite. Her work, using math to precisely model the shape of Earth, laid the groundwork for GPS! Born to sharecropper parents🧵

Often no idea how file systems work either….

Exhibit A