A great article with receipts on what "protecting women's sports" actually amounts to.

Frankie de la Cretaz@thefrankiedlc.news · 14h ago

Really great work here from @maggiemertens.bsky.social:

NASA has ignored recommended funding levels for planetary research & analysis for 15 years, according to a new investigative report by Mark Sykes (@coop.planetary-research.org). And for FY2025, it hasn’t even spent 50% of what it budgeted for R&A. 🧪🪐🔭 eos.org/research-and...

NASA has Underspent on Research and Analysis for 15 Years - Eos

Spending for NASA’s research and analysis programs has remained relatively flat for 15 years, ignoring recommendations from community-led decadal surveys and directives by Congress.

eos.org

Per @chanda.blacksky.app: I would like it if scientists did not refer to their machine learning projects as "AI". Because it takes me a while to read through a paper and confirm that it is not about using text generator slop in place of actual science.

i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward

Excellent thread! There *are* rewards for being A Good Guy Who Speaks Up even if they are not immediately obvious or publicly bestowed. First, integrity is its own reward. Maybe you didn’t save the world or change hearts & minds. But if you held the line on not making it worse, that’s something.

Hannah Vardit@hannahvardit.bsky.social · yesterday

i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward

"Especially competitive..." Right because it was such a cakewalk before. Vought can go step on a thousand Legos...

Mike Boylan-Kolchin@mbkplus.bsky.social · 16h ago

Russ Vought's attack on the scientific apparatus is snowballing. Much stronger restrictions on the grant application process for the one (1) NSF call for basic astronomy research are going to be in place this year. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Love that a PO told me this would be basically AAG when I asked a couple weeks ago 🙃 no I don't think that's true actually

Mike Boylan-Kolchin@mbkplus.bsky.social · 16h ago

Russ Vought's attack on the scientific apparatus is snowballing. Much stronger restrictions on the grant application process for the one (1) NSF call for basic astronomy research are going to be in place this year. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

I definitely spent too long making these, but I'm excited to use them: name tags for celestial buddies so I can include them in a scaled Solar System walk 🌞🤓

Want a little distraction that can help me with a class demo in Intro Psych? Take a short (1-2 minute) color perception test at ismy.blue Then report your results in the google form below! I'll post a figure of results by gender and age later this week. 🙂 forms.gle/dPkMztpNLNQK...

Is my blue your blue?

Test your color perception with this interactive test.

ismy.blue

LOOK AT THIS FUCKING SHIT. The easiest way to tell that trans women are women is that the right is so desperate to control what they do with their bodies. WE HAVE EVERYTHING IN COMMON.

I hate doing the "a rollback of trans rights is the gateway for a rollback of women's rights" thing because trans rights are human rights in and of themselves, whatever the impact on cis women. But goddamn I wish more cis women had a sense of history and self preservation.

Please accept this perfect photo of Max hiding under the hallway runner from the rest of 2026 as my contribution towards your mental health for the day. Also, stand up, stretch, drink water, and maybe don’t step on the lump in the rug.

… the greatest theft of labor in human history…….. *blinks Black / Indigenous / Guyanesely* Does at his mean everybody will admit that teh philosophy around AI is closer to slavery than just about “intellectual property” Or we gone keep making the American mistake

Tyler King@tyleraking.com · 2w ago

“A senior executive at Microsoft said A.I. systems built on the work of others will be seen as ‘an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions’ and possibly the greatest robbery of labor in human history, according to court documents unredacted Thursday in an ongoing Manhattan lawsuit.”

we gotta stop calling these this things “agents” because they only have as much *agency* as you permit them to have, either by instruction or by environment

TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 2w ago

The fix for rogue AI agents could be more AI

🥳 First-light doughnuts from the very recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope! 🔭 Fear not - it will all look a lot prettier when focused!

Space Telescope Science Institute@stsci.edu · 2w ago

#NASARoman activated the Wide Field Instrument—a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow it to explore wide swaths of the cosmos quickly. This test image captures the very first photons of starlight to reach the instrument—taken as an initial performance assessment: https://go.nasa.gov/4rg4qEc

Friends! Friendos! Pals o' mine! Looking for someone whomst is an expert on the formation of the Moon and/or other early Solar System collisions! Is that you? (For an article, natch) 🧪🔭

This is one of many reasons I search Wikimedia commons for lecture images before I go to a generic search engine. There are at least some guardrails around what gets posted there

m@keptsimple.bsky.social · 2w ago

what's weird to me is how frequently people use AI to reproduce things that you can already easily obtain for free. like how many human made separation of powers infographics were already freely available on the internet via a 5 second google search?

Fewer, larger grants means narrowing the scope of research to a few pre-selected topics. Fewer, larger grants means wasting talent and having fewer eyes on the problem. Fewer, larger grants means losing steady, reliable progress. Fewer, larger grants means more pressure and more failure.

For the record, "fewer larger grants" is the opposite of how to fund good research. Give a bunch of researchers financial stability and basic funding, without wasting their time on increasingly competitive applications and widening the have/have-not gap, and look how far we'll go.

Spent almost an hour drafting exam questions and then immediately managed to overwrite them

If you find yourself thinking MAHA has a point, stop and take a breath. Pipelines are insidious, reasonable-sounding, and tend to confirm gut feelings for a *reason*. We can fight for better systems w/o conceding ground to ppl who genuinely think there are categories of humans who should not exist

It still persists to this day. Watch how any time some white guy is caught doing mass murder, the media say "ah, this isn't terrorism, just some disaffected white guy." The word "terrorist" is being taken to mean "someone Muslim and brown."

Puff the Magic Hater@mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 3w ago

Two things it’s hard to convey if you weren’t alive back then: the extremity of hysteria, nationalism and Islamophobia the attack prompted, and how efforts to capture this can inadvertently obscure how Islamophobic things already were.

the thing about vocally refusing to vote all the time is that politicians will, entirely logically, write you off as “those people who refuse to ever vote”

Save for a couple sprinters, everybody lost the race to the bus. Transit advocates were excited about that

European Space Agency: BepiColombo Begins Mercury Arrival with Mercury Transfer Module Separation Success www.esa.int/Enabling_Sup...

BepiColombo begins Mercury arrival with MTM separation success

On 3 September 2026 at 15:49 CEST, the European Space Agency's BepiColombo Mission Control Team at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) received the signal they had been waiting for&n...

esa.int

I don't think I have anything truly odd, but I did work on a Christmas tree lot for many years

SarahJSloat@sjane.bsky.social · 3w ago

Happy labor day (USA). What's one of the oddest paid job you've had? Mine was probably as a reader for a medical professor at Rutgers, whose eyes were failing. I read him many academic texts, as well as Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh."

Getting a little nervous watching the AOC/MAHA backlash swing into "we must always trust the medical system" territory. Especially coming from folks who have never had to ask the medical system to give a shit about their ovaries being covered in cysts or endo scarring eating their intestines.

However you feel about AOC it’s good for us to have a broader convo about how these MAHA people use keywords that you might agree with (pesticides! Chemicals! Safe food!) but the way they want to implement their ideas would kill the chronically ill, the disabled, the poor, and the marginalized.

I have known many trans kids (and cis kids who needed procedures that would fall under "gender-affirming care"). None of them have suffered harmful consequences for getting the care they needed. The harmful consequence for having that care denied is frequently death.

Chris Geidner@chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 4w ago

BREAKING: The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday that it reached an “agreement” with Mount Sinai Health System in which it will “cease providing” gender-affirming medical care to minors and dedicate $2 million to providing care to those “suffering harmful consequences” of such care.

Good job, Seattle Times Editorial Board. Excluding trans girls from sports (or telling them they have to play with boys, which is the same thing) is ritual humiliation. www.seattletimes.com/opinion/edit...