Beautiful graphic of the day (because that should be a thing: Our Solar System By my data hero Eleanor Lutz

Want to do something good for change today? ➡️Are you an academic, a student, or an alumna/alumnus of an Australian University? Of 37 Australian public universities, 9 have already deleted or inactivated their accounts on X. I don’t see why we can’t get that to 100%! (See end for what you can do)

Australia needs to seriously come to terms with how much the Labor Party fucking sucks

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

A life well lived. Read this if you want to feel better about people.

Seeking scientist volunteers for the 2026 spring semester! Want to practice science communication and help author a 🌟comic🌟 about your research? Apply by 1/25. Please share widely. bit.ly/comicscollabspring2026

Acting to prevent dangerous climate change is too costly for the economy, some say… www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

"Australia’s longest waterway is under such dire threat of collapse that the entire lower Murray River ecosystem, which stretches nearly 1000 kilometres from western NSW, through Victoria and to the sea in South Australia has been classified as critically endangered." www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Qs for any landlords in light of recent extreme weather events. Does your own home + your rental property have: - functioning flyscreens? - functioning blinds/curtains? - proper installed insulation? - energy-efficient heating + cooling? Everyone deserves safe and healthy homes in climate crisis. ❤️

Fascinating piece about how the fear of microplastics is almost certainly overblown. One takeaway for me is that even the scientists behind the microplastics=bad papers are VERY reserved about whether these findings are really problematic. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Want to make a submission into the inquiry on the "Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill that was released yesterday? You got till 4pm Thursday (ie TOMORROW) That is quite disgraceful www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentar...

The @jewishcouncilau.bsky.social " urges pause on rushed and dangerous hate speech Bill"

📚 REVIEWS: A former rock journalist reviews memoirs by Lemonhead Evan Dando, teen Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe and feminist punk legend Kathleen Hanna. 👉 Read the review: theconversation.com/whats-c...

An amazing result out of #AAS247 - Astronomers discover the first galaxy-wide wobbling black hole jet in a disk galaxy keckobservatory.org/vv340a/ Congratulations to @justtheletteru.bsky.social, @justinkuder.bsky.social and the whole team for this incredible discovery

Unions connect people. Be part of making our universities better with Jude: nteu.au/join

The Albo government's antisemitism bill is a rushed hatchet job. Nobody has proper time to consider it carefully enough, and it will have all sorts of unintended consequences if passed. It is the worst kind of law-making: moral panic induced, pandering to powerful lobby groups' demands.

NASA-raket in startblokken voor eerste bemande maanvlucht sinds 1972

For any Titanic nerds out there, my colleagues in the UCL Marine safety group have just published an astonishingly detailed analysis and supercomputer simulation of how Titanic sank, linked to witness statements & the best available evidence. Full paper here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

Congrats to @exocytherean.bsky.social who now has his own (minor) planet!

An under-appreciated (good) news story of 2025: ➡️Covid-19 has still not reached endemism, and continues its steady march to extinction. (long thread) 1/

Here's @instanterudite.bsky.social . "Why is a Labor Premier silencing a writer?" (In case you're only familiar with her work on The Shot, Jo used to run the AWW.)

Warrior Louise Adler. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

We'd love to see more graduate students here because we want to hear about your work! So what else could make this better? We'll build it.

Oh, nothing, I just found out that there's now an actual minor planet with my name on it, and I am (literally!) over the moon about that fact: whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/12/a...

Big day for the read count of the bulletin of the Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature: www.wgsbn-iau.org/files/Bullet... . Due to @scalzi.com .

How's that even going to work with the 2x DP cap, given +1 yr on responses? Seems as well thought through as a paper raincoat. ECR/MCR precarity is already ridiculous, but this is only going to make it worse. Genuinely have to wonder if it'd be easier for the ARC if we all just left research.

The final version of our Dawes Review on the Dynamic Radio Sky is now published! doi.org/10.1017/pasa... Everything you need to know about what causes radio transients: how we detect them, the history of radio transient surveys, and what new widefield radio telescopes will do. #RadioAstronomy 🔭☄️🧪

I’m in several online travel groups, mostly for typical European destinations. Without fail, 70% of the posts are white Americans asking about all the crime. How to avoid the crime. How to eat without being crimed. Crime, crime, crime. What is wrong with people? Don’t answer that.

“It’s certainly time that the Tour Down Under looks for a new sponsor to more align with the values of the modern world, the Australian people, the natural world and athletes,” Brodie Chapman says. Cyrus Monk says it is “embarrassing” that Santos sponsors the biggest race in Australia.

interesting! The folks who assign safety ratings for cars are asking manufacturers to bring back tactile buttons for basic functions in cars, becausetouch screens are distracting. I talked about this in my adaconf keynote. I hope manufacturers take note! theconversation.com/yes-those-bi...?

Here's GOTO's 2025 Wrapped with the Transient Name Server (courtesy of David O'Neill)! In 2025 we discovered 2539 new sources, up from 1543 in 2024... 6602 total observation reports to TNS (~18 per day!) up from 4060 in 2024... 301 classified (60% SN Ia) up from 218 in 2024...

Join us on Wed. 21 January at 4pm (Beijing time) for the next #ISSIBJ "Infinite Horizons" webinar. Prof. Hiroyuki Kurokawa from the the University of Tokyo, Japan, will discuss "MMX and Beyond: Exploring the Origin and Evolution of the Martian System" (zoom ID on poster).

So glad we all put in so much effort demonstrating why our proposed research is 'timely'... 😱

The ARC’s processes are back to being farcical, @jasonclaremp.bsky.social You advocated for a streamlined, efficient, faster ARC, but all that progress has been undone. How can they claim to fund “innovation” with more than a year between initial proposal & outcomes? It should be 6 months, not 16!

If the government wants research to work more with industry, they need to sort this out. It's impossible to plan anything with industry partners when you have to tell them its over a year to know whether a grant is successful or not.

hard to see how they would be running the ARC differently if they wanted to wind down Australian science

"This is further evidence that the share of Australia’s wealth held by the very rich is increasing.” Read the full piece on The Point: https://thepoint.com.au/off-the-charts/260112-capital-gains-for-the-rich-outpace-the-national-wages-bill-by-whopping-300-billion

⁉️The ARC has delayed outcomes of ALL grants 1–4 months & increased scheduled outcome windows from 2 weeks to 3 months! This reverses 4 years of progress in providing greater certainty & ability to plan for researchers, their families & unis. Their excuse? Security checks under new ARC legislation👇

OK #exoplanet friends, is it super-jupiter or super-Jupiter? I'm thinking much like we have the Galaxy (Milky Way), and galaxies (the rest), big exoplanets should be super-jupiters: there is Jupiter, unique in our solar system, and then other jupiters and super-jupiters around other stars? 🤔

2025 was the hottest year on record for ocean heat content. Unfortunately, we now say this every year. 🥹 "In addition to setting a new record in 2025, the global ocean continues to show sustained and intensified warming." + #OpenAccess Study: doi.org/10.1007/s003... + Data: www.ocean.iap.ac.cn

Finally proceeded to deactivate+delete my Twitter account. I had kept it open but inactive as an archive of sort, frozen and unused, but given what X+Grok have become and now enable *by design*, it has become impossible to justify even that.

The world feels rough right now So please enjoy this shrimp, filmed off Cozumel, Mexico. It may be a larval reef shrimp, but we don’t know what species or how long it lives or what it eats. The world is still full of wonder and beauty and mystery. 🎥 @pedrovalenciam scuba diver on Insta

I always find it funny that we (globally) just accept that one country's regulator speaks for all of us. FCC approves another 7,500 space vermin, like Low Earth Orbit is the authority of the FCC and we've all been consulted and ok'd another 7,500 starlinks in our shared sky. It should be UNOOSA.

Three short paragraphs, and you've got the whole mind-bending mess that is #UKHE finance & governance neatly laid out. This is why it's all so exhausting: our managers declare there's only one static frame, while we know their framing is part of the issue. 💡 www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...

well well well

So when we want Dutch government to leave X (I do), we'd better follow them here. A starter pack! Nederlandse overheden: ministeries, provincies, gemeenten Aanvullingen welkom go.bsky.app/V4Bf6mB

Hear, hear www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

#Science in America right now – Half of the tenure-track jobs in math have been lost between 2024 and 2025 (150 to 70) and the Simons Foundation is funding 1/7 of the remaining jobs. Science is being held together with philanthropy and dental floss. 🧪 issues.org/american-sci...

Reading: '2025 State of the Geomagnetic Field Report' 🌏🧲🧭 Summary points: - Nth magnetic pole travelling faster than Sth magnetic pole (36 km/year vs 9 km/year) - South Atlantic Anomaly continues to grow - Two models: WMM2025 and WMMHR2025 are accurate Report: www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/defaul... 🧪

Denmark responds