I finally realized I can make my own specific plots to teach introductory concepts instead of finding one in a text. I needed a plot showing the idealized blackbody curves for stars of varying photospheric temperatures. thinkingwithcode.com/datascience/...

The brightest sun dog I’ve ever seen

NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky! This is the most comprehensive spectral view of the infrared sky, with 102 colors (or wavelengths) of infrared light from observations made between May and December 2025. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭

As Nessa Carson moves from organic chemistry into a computational team, a chemical science education is proving fruitful for developing effective ways of learning.

🧪 “These findings underscore the critical role of social interventions; shifts in behavioral norms and trust can permanently alter epidemic outcomes, suggesting that such interventions are as crucial as biomedical controls” In other words, get Fox News off the air. #ImpeachRFKJr.

A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Although other factors may have contributed, results highlight admixture as a possible key mechanism driving their disappearance.

One Laptop Per Child, 10 years later: "we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression... computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills" www.nber.org/papers/w34495

Looking for lesson plans for #CSEdWeek? Go to csedweek.org/heroes#CSEdWeek?and filter for 2025 to meet this year’s CS Heroes! Each hero has a downloadable poster for your classroom, materials to read and watch, and accompanying discussion questions to use in your lesson plan.

Tomorrow, December 3 at 5:30 PM CT, join Think Data Ed for Stop Guessing! Bootstrap Your Way to Confidence, a hands-on workshop that makes confidence intervals click. Register: thinkdataed.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Re-upping this today, citing the concluding paragraph we wrote as I just responded to a frustrating survey about integrating GenAI into humanities education at my institution.

"the issue isn’t that we need more 'boy-friendly' reforms. It’s that boys are socialized to compete only with boys and to read girls’ success as illegitimate or emasculating. The result is dissonance, resentment, and disengagement for boys—and hostile climates for girls." time.com/7335723/auto...

Authoritarians use technology to spy on us and silence our voices. We're pushing back to defend democracy. Learn more and Take Back CTRL today: takebackctrl.org/fight-for-d...

I take Wikipedia for granted. Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires our support. So I’m finally donating. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/m...

Another board game night - tonight is Patchwork Christmas Edition

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

I left the classroom in 2024 after teaching physics, astronomy, and computer science because I finished a doctorate in science education. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing in academia. I assume this is normal…

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

UPDATE: Americans who use YouTube 84% Facebook 71% Instagram 50% TikTok 37% WhatsApp 32% Reddit 26% Snapchat 25% X (Twitter) 21% Threads 8% Bluesky 4% Truth Social 3% Full Pew Research Center report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-social-media-use-2025/

🧵Why I'm loving cluster photometry. Point a telescope, measure brightness in B and V filters, and suddenly thousands of stars tell a single story: temperature, evolution stage, and where the cluster sits in space. Short, sharp, and addictive. 1/6 🧪🔭

so yeah, your students should learn basic physics, not just what's immediately required for their specialty

20 years ago there was huge pressure to train for “financial physics”, then computer science, now AI. And while a good physics program will give exposure to tools relevant for the area of the day, it will strongly resist focusing on that area and instead focus on the fundamentals.

Those claiming Dems should retreat on racial justice aren't hard-headed realists, they're pushing against the electoral tide rather than leaning into it. The story of Gen Z isn't about racist backlash or red-pilled young men. It's the most racially progressive generation in American history. 🧵

periodic reminder of the existence of Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font available from the Braille Institute designed to improve readability for people with low vision I use it in talks because it's pretty and also because, as an audience member, I am perpetually squinting at people's slides

Saturn’s rings remain disconcertingly thin

hashtag data science

From Niloofar Sharei @astroneal.bsky.social : JWST reveals galaxies that built up heavy elements at record speed, reaching near-modern metallicities only a billion years after the Big Bang. ⚛️🔭☄🧪 astrobites.org/2025/11/10/f...

Next week, I am presenting with a teacher friend at the Texas science education conference about how to bring data science into a high school astronomy class. The activity is using a few different data moves. Here is the coding version. github.com/jimmynewland... #datascience #astronomy #csed

Ever handed your students a “ready-to-paint” dataset? In our latest Learning Progressions Blog post, Tim Erickson shows why students should help prepare the data—filtering, grouping, and summarizing—before diving in. Read → ds4e.substack.com/p/making-dat... #LearningProgressions

I’m a big fan of Desmos. Yesterday I taught BigO notation to teachers practicing for the CS Praxis certification exam. www.desmos.com/calculator/h... #csed

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Do K–12 computer science education policies boost CS majors in college? Using 20+ years of data, Paul Bruno & colleagues show these policies are often too light-touch to matter, reflecting, not driving, rising CS interest. 📄 edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1301

CHOOSE STATISTICAL TEST in 4 QUESTIONS (NO MATH! 🤯) Stop struggling with T-Tests, ANOVAs & Chi-Square. Use this simple flowchart guide to pick the right test every time👇 Watch the full beginner's guide now: youtu.be/EeASQZvGRcg #Statistics #DataScience #DataAnalysis #stats

"Pairing computer science with culturally responsive education shows results" great to get details of this study via Ed Finkel in K12 Ed Dive whose bluesky handle i can't find anywhere. #cseducation #k12 #research www.k12dive.com/news/compute...

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

🔭 ~1,400 people globally have contributed to the construction of Rubin, including 500 construction staff, 500 contractors, 100 staff on operations (so far), and 300 in-kind contributors, from software and hardware contributions to follow-up observing time on other telescopes

Rubin First Look is FIVE days away! The best part of NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory? The community we've grown along the way 💫 Rubin is only able to #CaptureTheCosmos because of its global collaboration. ✨ 🌎 Over the past couple of decades, over 4,000 people made Rubin a reality!

From Kaz Gary: For Pride Month, Astrobites is interviewing one transgender astronomer every week. This week we interviewed Dr. Eliot Halley Vrijmoet, a postdoctoral fellow at Smith College! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/06/06/e...

On Tuesday at the WeTeach_CS Summit, Dr. Stella Offner will share with CS educators how CS and AI can lead to new science. Below are animations from the STARFORGE showing a simulation of star formation (Guszejnov et al. 2021, Grudic et al. 2021).

Another one, again a bit on the nose, on the definition of #MachineLearning, #ArtificialIntelligence and variants of the above.

An object called 2017 OF201 is shaking up our ideas about the outer zone of our solar system. It follows an extreme, 25,000-year orbit. It may be 1 of 100s of such bodies filling a seemingly vacant region. And its existence casts doubt on searches for Planet 9. 🧪🔭 www.ias.edu/news/extreme...

Nicely done video applying foundational educational and cognitive psychology ideas to the case of GenAI. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?...

A recent paper led by collaboration members Yoonsoo Kim and Elias Most (both at Caltech) is in @aasnova.org today! This work explores the formation of strongly magnetized "monster" shocks and a transient "black hole pulsar" state from mergers of a magnetized neutron star and a black hole. ⚛️🧪🔭

🚨 First annual LA Area PICUP Workshop 🚨 THIS SATURDAY!!! 📍 Riverside City College 📅 Saturday, May 17 ⏰ 8:30am to 4:00pm. Workshop details and registration information can be found here: www.compadre.org/PICUP/events... Registration is open! #iteachphysics #physicssky #astrosky #physics

jimmynewland.com/astronomy/ip... Trying to create a pipeline to categorize young stellar objects through SED analysis. Not there yet, but the SED look pretty!

I think we downplay the role of social media algorithms and targeted disinformation campaigns in drawing voters to Trump and away from Democrats at our own risk — it’s frankly a refusal to reckon with reality. Social media has created a matrix-like info control environment.

Elevation scan source: observablehq.com/@neocartocnr...

Boycotting on Feb 28th? Make sure your impact goes on the record! Click to add your name! bit.ly/boycottcentral #BuildTheResistance

Knowledge is power. Each day during this Black History Month—a month the government doesn’t want us celebrating—I will be sharing amazing books by Black authors. Book 1: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. A title written decades ago, but begins on February 1, 2025. #Edusky #Books #Booksky

The Astropy Project is made by our community, for our community. But who are we, exactly? We want *your* input in the first astropy user survey: forms.gle/KX2cNuFsQYgV... Share how you use astropy, how to improve it, and how we can support you and your work! 🧪🔭

Computer Science Teacher: CSTA Ends Free Membership blog.acthompson.net/2025/02/csta... #CSed #CSTA