The UK also has one of the best university systems in the world so we can train our own people to do high skill jobs. And the whole concept of "high skill" is dodgy anyway; there is human capital in excess demand and human capital not in excess demand.

I am going to continue to push back on "high skill migration" even if I am the last dead ender. The UK has a much more pressing shortage of low-skill labour than high-skill labour. We have people giving up jobs as magic circle lawyers to take care of their parents.

Terence Tao doesn’t think AI will replace human mathematicians anytime soon, but he does consider it well suited to helping solve certain types of complex mathematical problems: ones that can be broken into thousands of small, manageable subproblems.

Can people please stop giving me short and easy tasks?! Can't they see this is helping me procrastinate on the big, difficult task I need to do?

The Arrakihs mission has been adopted as ESA's next F-class mission, with an expected launch in 2030! It will look at the low surface brightness outskirts of 80 Milky Way-like galaxies. www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Reposting for the Sunday morning reading crowd with a free-to-read link that isn't behind the Nature paywall! 🔭⚛️🧪👩‍🔬 📖: rdcu.be/floXQ

The freezer in the house we are renting, at the border of the black region here, is currently unable to stop ice cubes within it from melting.

Undecided whether this forecast is good or bad for our half term holiday. Certainly far too hot to do anything but better to have that weather on holiday than at work?

The guy on my street who has been flying a 'Stop the Boats' St George's cross in his garden for the last 18 months has taken it down! 🎉 And has replaced it with a Heart of Midlothian football flag 🤔

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

This is crazy - Clare is amazing, and the whole physics and astronomy group at Nottingham is incredibly strong. Just disastrously short-sighted from the university leadership. Please do sign!

An extraordinary scorecard from the lower divisions of the Hampshire Cricket League - the winner of the league batting award for the season already decided 2 games in, I think!

A significantly better result than I was fearing, especially in my ward. We had lots of Reform flags around, but luckily avoided the worst outcome.

Absolutely extraordinary - and hilarious - story. Ivented a non-existent prize, bought himself a €250 medal from a Paris jewellers, told everyone it was at the level of a Nobel or Fields medal, all in order to get promoted to associate professor! www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

My student Nathan has just put out a new paper that forms the final part of his PhD thesis - and it is a good one! A new tool for cosmology with cosmic voids, both an order of magnitude faster, and more accurate … 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2605.03779

The lunch option at our university canteen today is chicken katsu served with spiced cous cous, flatbread, and vegetable samosas. True commitment to international cuisine 🫡

They don’t say “fourth”, though. They say “force” - “the force” being a very important part - a pivotal part- of the world building of the series. Honestly, calling yourself fans and making such elementary mistakes, I’m embarrassed for you.

Large Scale Structure of the Universe: This is a map of the universe. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona, has finished its five-year survey. It observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and created a 3D map centere… Credit: NASA/ APOD

An exciting astronomy milestone was hit last night, as DESI completed its original 5-year survey mapping 40 million galaxies in the night sky! DESI continues operation, now aiming for an 8-year survey and ~60 million galaxies. 🔭🧪 #cosmology newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/04/15/d...

STFC chief commits to making no further cuts to postdoc funds Michele Dougherty also promises top-up funding for additional early career researcher positions after outcry www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

My five-year old daughter has for some reason started writing these little aphorisms that now randomly appear on our fridge. It's a mystery where she's getting the inspiration from, but I do enjoy reading them - and her spelling is delightfully inventive!

Kemi Badenoch! Roger Scruton! MattGPT! Bari Weiss! Rod Dreher! Jair Bolsanaro! Howard from the Halifax adverts! JD Vance? You hear me JD Vance? Your boy took a hell of a beating! Your boy took a hell of a beating!

You may think this is very very stupid but the plan is that hopefully Iran gets confused and responds by threatening to blow up their own nuclear enrichment facility. Something similar worked for Bugs Bunny. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cn...

A new development: I've recently started receiving regular emails (once a week or so) from random people asking me for arXiv endorsements for their AI-generated, nonsense physics theory papers. I got crackpot emails in the past too, but never arXiv endorsement requests - not sure what's changed? 🔭🧪

Today is one of my favourite days of the year - the day I'm down at the cricket club prepping for the start of the season: hanging sightscreens, painting the clubhouse, erecting the marquee. All in the sunshine, with friends, and the promise of a happy summer ahead.

Almost certainly the best thing I was ever told about owls was when I met an owl handler at an owl sanctuary and he told me that the wild owls who lived near the sanctuary worried about the tame show owls there and sometimes stopped by to leave them shrews and mice as presents.

On my way home from a conference in the snowy Alps and lovely as it was, now that I'm back in England where blossoms are out on the trees and it is still bright until nearly 8 pm I have officially had enough of winter thank you very much.

the human body was not designed to know what the worst person in the world is doing every fifteen minutes

The future of UK Astronomy & Particle Physics is at risk from proposed 30% funding cuts that, if implemented, will be "genuinely catastrophic". Great to see this detailed BBC report on the issue by @pallabg.bsky.social 🔭🧪⚛️ #STFCcuts #SaveUKAstronomy 🗞️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Five year Astro career development fellowship in Oxford open for applications, broadly in survey astronomy including transients and cosmology. College teaching and research. Do think about joining us. Happy to answer questions! 🔭

Hahaha

The spending review moved >40% of all UKRI funding away from basic research, and into "strategic government and societal priorities" or "innovative companies". The budgets for all the research councils have been slashed. Clear message from govt is that bright young scientists should leave the UK.

These cuts would indeed be absolutely catastrophic. The UK has been a world leader in astronomy, we should not throw that all away

Did anyone watch the Alex Honnold live stream from Taiwan? I couldn't bear the thought of watching live, but quite interested in catching up on it now

So true.

I think it would be quite nice for me to be able to wake up in the morning and think about my plans for the day, and more broadly about my own little life, instead of immediately having to ponder the overnight actions of The Guy Over There

If you stare at this movie it looks like nothing is happening, but then you notice groups of lines appearing and disappearing. No, you're not on drugs - it's math.

If you are close to Portsmouth and interested in an evening learning about astronomy and our place in the Universe, come to our Stargazing public event! 28th Jan, free entry but booking essential. There will be lots of hands-on demos and public talks (including one by me). www.port.ac.uk/stargazing

The prize is the Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize and Daniel Eisenstein (on behalf of the DESI collaboration) is receiving it

Looks like we might have the first time AI directly solved an open Erdos problem: github.com/teorth/erdos... A couple times recently this appeared to be the case only to turn out to be a successful deep lit review by AI.

I got a few of these this year, and yeah, probably don't do that. But absolutely never in any circumstances email to say "I saw this position you advertised and I'd like to apply, but can you please change the project to something else I'd rather work on instead?" 🙄

The US is more dangerous to the stability of the world and democratic states than China and just as dangerous and hostile as Russia. This is the realist position.

I've always liked Khawaja - one of the most interesting people in world cricket IMV. I'm glad he gets to call time on an excellent career on his own terms. www.espncricinfo.com/story/usman-...

Brydon Carse - I guess no option but for him to play this game, given Archer is out. But why is he still opening the bowling?!

I just became aware of an astronomy paper from a large collaboration where the lead author appears* to have asked an LLM to help inputting all co-author names in the arXiv metadata ... ... and guess what, the LLM made up a bunch of names. Out there on the arXiv with fictitious authors 😬 🧪🔭

Were classical statues painted horribly? buff.ly/fS78ULM It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. This essay proposes an alternative explanation.

Brydon Carse is extremely lucky to be playing this game, and I suspect he won't be in the team for Melbourne. Pretty dreadful first few overs there for England.

Two men meet in the carpark of a Leeds hospital. They sit on a bench and start chatting. One of them has a bomb in their backpack and the other must talk them out of using it. A mindblowing and entirely true story that reads like a thriller. as.ft.com/r/13756c02-0...

What is also interesting is how much less I pay in tax today than someone on the same nominal income did 3 or 5 years ago. Perhaps not surprising the state can't afford to pay for anything.

Just attended a really great colloquium by Brodie Popovic about this paper 🧪🔭 UK colleagues: Brodie is now a Marie Curie fellow at Southampton, and would be a great addition to your seminar schedules.