This banger from the academia / writing / research meme stash definitely has wider applicability but I do really like using it for coaching, mentoring, and workshop activities when we talk about the importance of saying 'no' to things as researchers. #academicchatter #academicsky #PhDchat

vanmorgen was ik te gast bij de leuke sterrenstof-podcast van anco van hal (oa over mijn boek 'onbegrensd universum', maar nog veel meer ⭐). vanaf 1 december online! sterrenstofnieuws.nl

Australia's environment protection laws are being debated in Parliament this week and our full submission to the inquiry is available here bit.ly/envirosub

Guess who just got out of bed to update our toilet stats. Thanks to a Chinese launch, the current count is 10 toilets in space: International Space Station: 4 Crew Dragon Docked at ISS: 1 Soyuz Docked at ISS: 1 Tiangong Space Station: 2 Tianzhou Docked at TSS: 1 Tianzhou headed to TSS: 1

DECRA success rate is the lowest in 14 years, since 2012 (1st year the scheme ran). What a pathetic system we have for supporting new ideas, new people… DE26: 13.1% 25: 17.9 24: 19.6 23: 15.0 22: 19.7 21: 17.1 20: 16.0 19: 17.2 18: 16.3 17: 16.7 16: 16.4 15: 14.3 14: 13.6 13: 15.6 12: 12.8

Fantastic work by Ariel Graykowski and our @setiinstitute.bsky.social citizen scientists. Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) is breaking apart — and some of you caught it live. After passing 0.3 AU from the Sun, it erupted, and three days later a third appeared. K1 is now officially in pieces.

Enjoying lovely late autumn weather in Beijing for the first meeting of our new international team focused on "Thermonuclear X-ray Bursts: From Simulations to Multi-Wavelength Observations" led by Zhaosheng Li (XTU) and myself. @issi-bj-director.bsky.social teams.issibern.ch/thermonuclea...

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. 🧪

This is a lovely article. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The world bet on collective but voluntary action to keep global warming at a safe level.

HEY FRIENDS For @thepointau.bsky.social, I decided to do the unthinkable and just actually check whether Australia's gas exports are being a magical climate solution and displacing shittonnes of Asian coal You know what I found, but you will enjoy me saying it: thepoint.com.au/opinions/251...

rond 09.45 (za 22 nov) ga ik bij #nieuwsweekend (radio 1) uitleggen waarom 'onbegrensd universum' zo'n mooi sinterklaas- of kertscadeau is 🙂⭐📚 alleen klopt de prijs in volkskrant magazine niet (moet € 39,99 zijn) 🤔

'“It’s the most shortsighted lack of investment by a federal government since before the Abbott government. And they were stupid," [a former long-serving researcher at #CSIRO] said.' www.theguardian.com/australia-ne..., article by @sbasfordcanales.bsky.social and @donnadlu.bsky.social

25 years of humanity at its best. #Wikipedia25 Donate now ➡️ donate.wikipedia25.org

In case you aren't already aware of one of the nerdiest, nich-est online games: TeXnique, where the goal is to type LaTeX formulae as quickly as possible. texnique.xyz It is "fun."

Researching this week's column, I stumbled across something that amazed me: the near-absence of reliable data about climate impacts over most of the world. Due to the rich world's failure to fund research. We don't know because our governments don't care. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

There’s no straightforward explanation for why airplanes stay in the air.

Paul Brown's succinct summary of the past 30 years of climate diplomacy. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/no...

🔭 3I/ATLAS: A View from Planet Earth Image Credit & Copyright: Rolando Ligustri apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25112...

1/ No surpirise that Business Council of Australia's leading the charge for further regressive changes to Watt's already regressive EPBC package But 🤯 that the Group of 8 Unis (ANU, Monash, UAdelaide, UMelb, UNSW, USyd, UQ, UWA) have signed the 'Letter from the Alliance of 26 industry Groups' 🤬🤬🤬

Running a government during Covid was almost impossibly difficult. But I think it’s pretty indisputable that if someone else - Cameron, Sunak, May, Hunt, Stewart, Starmer - had been in Downing Street in 2020-21, tens of thousands of Brits would still be alive www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

My employer has added yet another step to the login process, so there are now THREE web pages to click through *each time I log in*. With a TTL of around 1 hour, this means I have to log into each individual system multiple times per day. This is a huge waste of time. 😔 #academia

70 teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute & observed weekly over 5 months. 80% of spoons disappeared; spoon halflife~81 days. Communal room halflife lower than in specific labs. 250 spoons annually required to maintain 70 spoon population. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Billionaires in the world’s leading economies made US$2.2 trillion (S$2.9 trillion) in 2024, which would have been enough to lift all the world’s poor out of poverty, global campaign group Oxfam said on Nov 20.

Very excited to share the NASA/ESA/STScI press release of our team's work on Apep! It's a terrific writeup, complete with a brand new beautiful visualisation of the nebula geometry. 1/? ⚛️🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

the Dutch senate last night

Same day as CSIRO is getting defunded Ninajirachi gets an Aria award for an album with a song celebrating CSIRAC - their first computer - the first computer used for digital music. Vandalising science is vandalising culture

"For fossil fuel polluters, gas seems to have become the lifeline that vaping was for the tobacco lobby." - The Hon. Mike Rann AC CNZM delivering the 2025 Dr Hugh Saddler Memorial Lecture #auspol

Where to start, with a statement like this? "Tim Ayres said the cuts were aimed at refocusing … CSIRO towards research priorities, such as critical minerals, iron & steel production in Australia." From some rando down the bus stop, one would brush it off. But this is from our Science Minister 🤯

He’s not wrong, the former Science Minister* *In the same Party as the current one! (From Guardian Australia “live”)

I feel like writing about this again. CSIRO / broader research tips welcome: [email protected]

🔭 Crossing Saturn's Ring Plane Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, ISSciclops.org/iss/iss.php), Cassini Imaging Team; Processing: Fernando Garcia Navarro apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25111...

Writing my 🔭 lecture on AGN and accretion variability, and finishing with Hanny’s Voorwerp (by @chrislintott.bsky.social @zooniverse.bsky.social et al) and, wow, what a wonderfully interesting object and a great paper ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009MNRA... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny's...

Today is #LGBTQinSTEMDay 🌈 ESA proudly joins the STEM community in celebrating the unique contributions of LGBTQ+ individuals. The Pride Flag will fly across ESA sites as a reminder of how far we’ve come, and how much more there is to do. #SpaceForAll

⭐️🔭Applications open at Anton Pannekoek Institute in Amsterdam for the 7th ASPIRE program: aspire.science.uva.nl. This 2026 summer school provides astronomy research experience for talented MSc students from countries where opportunities to move into a PhD program are limited. [1/2]

Have you ever heard of Betty Webster? I hadn't until recently, and she co-discovered the first black hole ever found! Here's her story, to honor her memory and fantastic accomplishment. badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-woman-... 🔭 🧪

Our fourth LIGO @egovirgo.bsky.social KAGRA observing run has now drawn to a close. We will be busy analysing data for a while to come—watch out for more discovery announcements. We will be back next year observing.docs.ligo.org/plan/

Super cool paper from @johannesbuchner.bsky.social this morning! And very excited to see* X-PSI and NEoST in there 🤩 *NEoST is too small for us to have found it yet but according to search it's in Figure 5 somewhere 😅 arxiv.org/abs/2511.12195

The Netherlands is investing €1 billion in cycling infrastructure to connect hundreds of thousands of new homes nationwide. These funds will build bike highways and improve bike-train intermodality, enabling residents to access jobs, healthcare and education without being locked into car dependency.

Pretty remarkable how high Australia sits on the scale for lifestyle carbon emissions globally - and how little this gets mentioned in domestic climate discourse. hotorcool.org/publications...

In its own words, the CSIRO says "CSIRO is now facing long-term financial sustainability challenges, with funding not keeping pace with the rising costs of running a modern science agency" FYI, the science minister is Tim Ayres, and his email address is [email protected]

“Budgetary savings”.

Genuinely I don't understand why this government is trying to dismantle science locally when it's at its most vulnerable point globally. Like, what on earth are they trying to achieve. What's the endgame here. What's the constituency for just vandalizing expensively built societal infrastructure

This is obscene. The challenges facing the nation means we should be scaling up CSIRO, not cutting it to shreds. While we are sending billions to the US for nuclear shipyards, our science and industrial base at home is falling apart for lack of funds and direction.

That's more than 1,100 jobs lost at the CSIRO over the last two years. "Combined, the staff association estimates that equates to cutting the agency’s size by a third." This is more cuts to the CSIRO than was attempted by the Abbott government. www.smh.com.au/national/csi...

“CSIRO has announced it will slash up to 350 jobs as the national science agency grapples with long-term financial challenges … with current funding failing to keep pace with the rising costs of running a modern science agency.” Not “challenges”. They’re choices. 😡

A little reminder of science history: air temperature change after a shutdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation #AMOC, as simulated in climate models 36 years apart. Suki Manabe went on to win the physics Nobel prize in 2021 jointly with his colleagues Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi.

collaborative proposal writing tip: start the narrative out with one font size larger than the minimum allowed. Then in the final days when everyone is squeezed for space, drop down to the proper font size. This forces everyone to write more concisely from the start.

COP - A HISTORY OF BETRAYED PROMISES COP30 started last week: while the stakes keep getting higher, the inadequacy of this assembly is getting painfully more evident year after year. (1/5)

🔭 Comet Lemmon's Wandering Tail Image Credit: Ignacio Fernández apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25111...