Less than one week after this post, the theoretical particle physics grants have been ruthlessly cut. PDRA positions are down by ~70% compared to the last funding cycle. Some groups cannot even hire postdocs for the next 4 years. This is on top of an effective 100% hiring cut for October 2026.

Synthesizer is now published in JOSS: github.com/synthesizer-...

Our paper where we test how reliably one can recover galaxy properties using nebular emission lines at high-z due to star-dust geometry and variation in the underlying stellar populations is now published in the OJAp. All the scripts and data to reproduce the results are on GitHub. Do have a read!

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

For more than a decade now the government’s answer to how to fund universities has been to make money from overseas students. The last lot then tried to discourage students from coming here. This lot just want the money back. But then how do we fund ourselves? Crazy.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables" by Christopher Lovell (Cambridge), William Roper, Aswin Vijayan, & Stephen Wilkins (Sussex), Sophie Newman (Portsmouth) and Louise Seeyave (Sussex) doi.org/10.33232/001...

The sophisticated COLIBRE simulations finally land on the arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2508.21126. Treating these with sonification, we can get new intuition for galaxy evolution to augment our visuals. Sound on for the explainer vid, visit the site for more! colibre.strw.leidenuniv.nl/videos.html 🔭🧪

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

Mohamed Salah calls out UEFA for not mentioning Israeli forces killed Al-Obeid as he waited for aid at Gaza distribution center. The "Palestinian Pele" leaves behind a wife & five kids. His death means Israel has now killed 321 footballers in Gaza (players, coaches, admin, refs etc)

New paper alert! We have a paper on arxiv (arxiv.org/abs/2507.20190), where we test how reliably one can recover galaxy properties using some of these incredible galaxy emission lines that JWST has been collecting. We approach this by using a combination of synthetic observations from simple toy

Very promising news on the next seven-year EU budget, with a proposed substantial increase for Horizon Europe including the ERC. We are analysing the other parts of this proposal in more detail. @Vonderleyen @EZaharievaEU research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-res...

British surgeon Nick Maynard, who has just returned from volunteering in Gaza, explains to #GMB viewers how Israel confiscates all baby formula that doctors like him try to take with them. Why does Israel do this? Because they want to starve Palestinian babies to death.

"it seemed to us like this was almost like a game of target practice. We're going to shoot the head today. Tomorrow it'll be the chest. The next day it'll be the testicles" British surgeon Nick Maynard on IDF soldiers shooting Palestinian kids.

Police in Canterbury today informed a protestor that the phrase "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza" could be considered a declaration of support for Palestine Action and therefore a terrorism offence.

Thanks to support from @esa.int and @sussex.ac.uk, #HumansOfEuclid from UK universities are at the Goodwood #FestivalOfSpeed! Today, Astronaut Tim Peake dropped by to learn about more about the Dark Universe. If you’re visiting #FOS near Chichester this weekend, be like Tim and come say hi!

Home Office refuses to refund immigration health surcharge paid for wife who died before entering UK www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Another great colleague who got her visa too late to travel to #eas2025 😭

Shame on the Home Office for forcing parents to abandon their children! www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

NEWS! Man defends his use of copyright football streams by insisting he needs them to 'train his AI model' newsthump.com/2025/06/02/m...

Videos show Israeli air attacks levelling residential buildings in Gaza, reducing them to rubble amid Israel's ongoing war on the besieged enclave.

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

It's important to know the warning signs.

I believe this means the sun will set over the entirety of the British Empire tonight for the first time in several hundred years. Chagos is the dot below India on this map. Sunset in the Pitcairns (dot in the Pacific) will happen ~40 minutes before sunrise in Akrotiri and Dhekelia (dot on Cyprus).

This statement about the transphobic Supreme Court ruling by the UK's Crab Museum (yes a museum about crabs) is better than 99% of the statements I've seen on the topic www.crabmuseum.org/visit 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

Could JD Vance please also pray for the good health of Vladimir Putin?

About the leaked NASA budget proposal that kills an almost-ready-to-launch flagship mission: "It sets back a program that is clearly the leading program in the world—in a historic fashion. You take that program and shoot it through the head." www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa...

Historians: Quibbling Over Exact Definition Of Concentration Camp Sign Of Healthy Society

My analysis of today's UK Supreme Court judgment. The UK Supreme Court Rules That Trans Women Aren't Women Under the Equality Act 2010 www.wearequeeraf.com/uk-supreme-c...

Trump Assures Wall Street He’ll Go Back To Just Fucking Over Poor People Soon http://theonion.com/...

Until a couple of months ago, this sign hung in the lobby of the Space Telescope Science Institute: "STScI promotes an inclusive, equitable workplace and cultivates a diverse, engaged workforce." It has now been removed.

Gonna keep saying this: In the 1840s, Southerners insisted that they could kidnap any person they alleged was a slave without any state or federal process. This turned even minimal process into resistance and raised the salience of the issue, which radicalized a bunch of people against slavery.

Our magnum opus (that is until the next one 😇) arxiv.org/abs/2503.24312

NEW: GlobalX flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then the company started expanding into deportation flights. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

LOL. Savage (but accurate I guess) Also, another well written 'Big Story' from @wired.com 👏

My friend from graduate school found out that funding for her NF1 project got pulled. From $25 mil to 0 with a stroke of a pen. NF1=Neurofibromatosis Type 1, an inherited genetic disorder. Both of us are early career scientists. 🧪🔬🧬 #Science #AcademicSky www.wired.com/story/the-ch...

If you are visiting the United States, having a negative view of Trump is enough to get you denied entry. If this was coming out of Russia or China, we would deplore such an authoritarian attack on freedom of expression.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "First Light and Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) – XV: The physical properties of super-massive black holes and their impact on galaxies in the early universe" by Stephen Wilkins & Jussi K. Kuusisto (Sussex) et al doi.org/10.33232/001...

A thread. It's intensifying. Quickly. A Brown professor from Brown university:

1/ So this Fulbright scholar wasn’t a protest organizer or even participant, got kettled coming back to campus and released, had liked some posts about human rights and signed an open letter, and DHS came to her door three times to arrest and deport her www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/n...

How do you say The Onion in Portuguese?

Got rejected for the Marie Curie fellowship - time to trash talk reviewer comments and pin all hope on the next one!

5th person to be cured of HIV “Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.”

Belgium found guilty of crimes against humanity in colonial Congo

Exciting news everyone! I am hiring a postdoc scholar to work with me at Oregon State Physics. If you love computational astrophysics, supernovae, and/or compact object mergers, this may be a great fit for you. More information here: aas.org/jobregister/...

Last week we put on arxiv the 16th paper from the FLARES team, exploring the panchromatic sizes of massive high-redshift galaxies: arxiv.org/abs/2408.11037. This was done by Paurush Punyasheel, an excellent master's student, who did his thesis with me, at the the Cosmic Dawn Center, DTU Space. 1/3

Hello Bluesky! Joined here recently, thanks to @emily.space, with invite code from Elsie Lee. Many thanks to them. Hope to remake the astronomy network here as well!