At today's UKRI board meeting, the fate of UK particle physics and astronomy will likely be decided. Have we done enough to convince the powers-that-be to halt the proposed funding cuts? 🤞 Read Prof. Hiranya Peiris in Nature today eloquently explaining why these cuts are wrong.🧪🔭⚛️ 📖: rdcu.be/friwM

Royal Astronomical Society@royalastrosoc.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Stars of physics are in Westminster right now to call on the Government to halt funding cuts to astronomy and particle physics research. Professor Brian Cox called them "inexplicable", urging the Government to instead "trust, inspire and continue to invest in the next generation of scientists".

Piece on the UK's mistakes in science funding, which parallel the disaster we have made for ourselves in New Zealand. (Written by the awesome Hiranya Peiris) www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Discovery is not the opposite of application - Nature Reviews Physics

Restructuring research funding as a choice between discovery and application gets the economics wrong, the evidence wrong and the people wrong.

nature.com

📣 Event tip: Data Science + AI Day 2026 „Advancing Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust and Understand" 🔬 @ds-vienna.bsky.social invites to an #AI showcase on June 22 — panels & keynotes highlighting how Vienna's university researchers are advancing interpretable AI systems we can trust. 🔍 More: ⤵️

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...

ESA adopts galactic archaeology mission Arrakihs

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Science Programme Committee has adopted the Arrakihs mission. Planned for launch by the end of 2030, Arrakihs will capture the faint light from nearby galaxy haloes. ...

esa.int

Alle Demos nächste Woche: Wien: Mi, 27.05., 13 Uhr, Uni Wien Linz: Do, 28.05., 16 Uhr, Hauptplatz Graz: Do, 28.05., 14 Uhr, Wilhelm Fischer Allee Salzburg: Do, 28.05., 14 Uhr, Kapitelplatz Klagenfurt: Do, 28.05., 10 Uhr, Uni-Vorplatz www.oeh.ac.at/info/unisret... #UnisRetten @nuwiss.bsky.social

Sparkurs stoppen - #UnisRetten! - Österreichische Hochschüler_innenschaft (ÖH)

Milliardenkürzungen bei den Unis? Nicht mit uns! Gemeinsam mit den Universitäten gehen wir als Studierendenvertreter_innen auf die Straße.

oeh.ac.at

The Austrian government has proposed hitting universities with an €800 million / year budget cut (after inflation). This could lead to redundancies for up to 20% of staff. 🫠 Quite ironic after the last year of advertising Austria as a "safe haven" for researchers impacted by Trump.

Eine Milliarde weniger Budget: Unis drohen der Regierung und sagen ihr den Kampf an

Kommenden Mittwoch wollen die Rektorinnen und Rektoren am Ring demonstrieren. Aus Protest steigen sie auch aus dem Hochschulstrategieprozess des Wissenschaftsressorts aus

derstandard.at

🧵1/13 Morgen startet Pint of Science – das Wissenschaftsfestival! 🧠🔬 Vom 18.–20. Mai gibt es in Wien 30 Events an 11 Locations – Forschung zum Zuhören, Fragenstellen & Mitdiskutieren! Ein Überblick über das Programm im Thread. 👇 🎟 pintofscience.at/events/wien/ #pint26 #pint26AT

A brief history of the cosmic distance record The cosmic distance record has grown, in just a few hundred years, from millions of light-years to over 30 billion light-years. Here's a look back at our history of ever-receding horizons. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #physics #telescope

A brief history of the cosmic distance record

Only nearby objects appear to the naked eye. With telescopes of all types, especially in space, we've smashed those records many times over.

bigthink.com

Dark matter passes a new cosmic test, while MOND fails A new cosmic test has finally, with CMB and large-scale structure data, become realistic: using the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect to test dark matter vs. MOND. Guess who wins? bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #darkmatter #MOND

Dark matter passes a new cosmic test, while MOND fails

On cosmic scales, only dark matter (or something equivalent) gives us the Universe we observe. Now, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect agrees.

bigthink.com

Freu mich diesmal auch dabeizusein!

Universität Wien / University of Vienna@univie.ac.at · 6mo ago

Save the date! 📅 Vom 18. - 20. Mai findet wieder Pint of Science Austria statt, ein internationales Science Festival, bei dem Forscher*innen in den Lokalen nebenan ihre Forschungserkenntnisse mit den Besucher*innen teilen. 🔍 Mit dabei: Jede Menge Expertise der #univie. ✨ Zum Programm hier entlang: ⤵️

Very excited to be part of this year's #PintOfScience festival in Vienna (May 18-20). Many interesting topics and fun opportunities to chat about science pintofscience.at

Pint of Science AT

Bringing researchers to your local bar or cafe to share the latest happenings in the world of science.

pintofscience.at

"By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan bullshit. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism."

Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ

Our 4th most-read article of 2022. CALENDAR 2027 3/31/24 4/13/25 4/5/26

buff.ly

Just realising that @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social 's classic crackpot index criterion #15 might need an update. AI readily solves this little obstacle: "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".

🦈 Rare picture of a shark stepping on a Lego. #MadeMeSmile 🤭

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

The flimsy case for evolving dark energy There's been a lot of talk about evolving dark energy, and how DESI data demands it. But the case for this remains somewhat weak, while the true underlying puzzles remain unsolved. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #physics #astro #space #darkenergy

The flimsy case for evolving dark energy

Is dark energy evolving with at least 99.99% confidence? Despite the quality of recent data, scientists have every reason to be skeptical.

bigthink.com

So happy to finally share this: I made a long-form comic about Hawking radiation for Physics Today! Although it's a short read, I hope it sucks you in ;) physicstoday.aip.org/features/bla...

Black holes aren’t black

A half century after the discovery of Hawking radiation, we are still dealing with the quantum puzzle it exposed.

physicstoday.aip.org

it's not a pigeon, it's a feature...

Randall Munroe@xkcd.com · 7mo ago

Centimeter Wavelengths xkcd.com/3224/

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content

“In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”

404media.co

Not so marvelous news. ~95,000 scientists have left the federal government since the Trump regime took over.

Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA, Citing Trump’s Attack on Science

nytimes.com

Watch as the Crab Nebula changes over time with Hubble. Two images, taken 25 years apart, show the ongoing expansion of a supernova remnant: https://news.stsci.edu/4bAN6m4 🔭

Christ on an electric bike. Trump Administration to Pay $1 Billion to Energy Giant to Cancel Wind Farms www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/c...

Trump Administration to Pay $1 Billion to Energy Giant to Cancel Wind Farms

nytimes.com

Good move! www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cn...

The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨 On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍 A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔭🧪☄️ 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...

What has happened in the 10 years since #GW150914? @space.com picks their top 10 discoveries. What are yours? www.space.com/astronomy/li... by @robleascijorno.bsky.social #GW10Years 🔭 ⚛️ 🧪

A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations. arxiv.org/abs/2602.058... #AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Misconduct #ScholComm

The Case of the Mysterious Citations

Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four ma...

arxiv.org

🧪 🔭🧵 #histsci #February11 is International Day of Women & Girls in Science. So I would like to highlight Katherine Johnson, #NASA mathematician and computer scientist. A biography➡️ nasa.gov/centers-and-... She was a trailblazer in the quest for racial equality and, as a champion of STEM education,

More on catastrophic cuts to UK astronomy & particle physics. Costs of facilities & international subscriptions go up so grants line and individual projects are cut. If the Government is serious about backing science & technology, they need to fix this. www.space.com/astronomy/uk...

UK government proposes 30% budget cut to astronomy and physics research: 'It's pretty disastrous'

"You can't have a cut of that scale and not expect to see a massive impact."

space.com

Elon Musk et al are totally fucking up the night sky ALREADY and they plan to make it worse 🔭 www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/satelli...

Are we destroying our window to the cosmos? Satellite trails could make space science nearly impossible, say astronomers | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Projected 560,000 satellites could overwhelm future observatories. Astronomers worry satellite trails will mar every view of the Universe.

skyatnightmagazine.com

Perhaps it was coincidental timing, but nothing underscores the collapse of the Washington Post like firing most of the Pulitzer prize winning #climate reporters the very same day as their opinion pages publishes a BS screed by climate misinformer Bjorn Lomborg.