seeing academics and colleagues I respect and/or know openly and happily talk about their chatgpt and claude use feels so awful and disheartening. I’m not going to do the calling out thing because what’s the fucking point

Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...

Trump administration limits student visas to four years, changing longstanding policy - The Boston Globe

The new rule, which also restricts the international students’ ability to transfer schools or change majors without approval in their first year, will go into effect in mid-September.

bostonglobe.com

i’m just a girl asking people to come talk to her at her first ever @spie.org poster tonight @ 5:30 PM 🥺 #instrumentation

Welcome to #SPIEastro 2026! 👋🔭 📍Copenhagen, Denmark

This is where the fun begins. ✨ From tech talks to the welcome reception, here are a few highlights from Sunday at #SPIEastro. See our Instagram or LinkedIn pages for more photos! 📸

I'm super excited to share a HUGE paper out from Young Worlds Lab team member Andy Boyle. I present for you, ~900,000 rotation periods from TESS! 🤯🔭🧪⭐ #exoplanets #stellarrotation arxiv.org/abs/2603.05586

The TESS All-Sky Rotation Survey: Periods for 944,056 Stars Within 500 pc

Stellar rotation is a fundamental tracer of stellar magnetic evolution, age, and activity, with broad implications for Galactic archaeology and exoplanet characterization. The Transiting Exoplanet Sur...

arxiv.org

From Tori Bonidie and Skylar Grayson: The president’s budget requests for NASA and the NSF were released last week. We summarizes the major cuts and their impacts while providing resources to help fight back against this attack on science. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/04/16/budget-request-fy2027/

Back to work to save science funding! All you need to know about the FY2027 Budget Request

The president’s budget requests for NASA and the NSF were released last week. We summarizes the major cuts and their impacts while providing resources to help fight back against this attack on science...

astrobites.org

Well, isn’t this a sight for sore eyes! 😍 Our beloved Hubble appears in this amazing image from one of Vantor's WorldView Legion satellites. It was 36 years ago today that Hubble was launched in the bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Credit: Vantor.

Muddy floodwaters from severe rains have inundated streets, swallowed vehicles and prompted evacuation orders for more than 4,000 people in towns north of Honolulu. Officials are warning about the possible failure of a a 120-year-old dam. n.pr/4so7td8

Over 4,000 told to evacuate flooding in Hawaii as officials warn 120-year-old dam could fail

Muddy floodwaters from severe rains have inundated streets, swallowed vehicles and prompted evacuation orders for more than 4,000 people in towns north of Honolulu. Officials are warning about the possible failure of a a 120-year-old dam.

n.pr

NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory has officially started releasing world-public alerts! 🎉 Here's what you need to know about these first alerts and what's coming up for Rubin ➡️ 🔭🧪☄️

Hey y'all. I'm hiring. Are you interested in building instruments for astrophysics? wd5.myworkdaysite.com/recruiting/u...

It's a nationwide digital spotlight on ICE arrests and detention centers.

Rice students expose ICE raids with new interactive map

It's a nationwide digital spotlight on ICE arrests and detention centers.

bit.ly

if stellar continuum has 0 haters, I am dead

GoFundMe is allowing a fundraising campaign tied to the potential legal defense of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good, to remain online despite what appears to be a breach of the platform’s own terms of service, prompting questions about selective enforcement.

GoFundMe Ignores Own Rules by Hosting a Legal-Defense Fund for the ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good

The fundraiser for the ICE agent in the Renee Good killing has stayed online in seeming breach of GoFundMe’s own terms of service, prompting questions about selective enforcement.

wired.com

It's happening!!! Pandora is going to space in just over 16 hours (if all goes well). Pandora is going to help us study exoplanet atmospheres, even when their host stars are misbehaving. I am headed up to Vandenberg to watch the launch shortly, and will make a thread about the mission/launch here!

nobody can tell me shit now that i have a blue rose in animal crossing. it took me four months of dedicated work to get this baby

bit.ly/453uzfx

2025 Word of the Year: Slop

Plus 'gerrymander', 'touch grass', 'performative', and other words that defined the year

bit.ly

Re-upping this today, citing the concluding paragraph we wrote as I just responded to a frustrating survey about integrating GenAI into humanities education at my institution.

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 9mo ago

This is not the way, and @cnygren.bsky.social and I lay out in detail why it isn’t in this essay here. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...

Abolishing ICE is only the beginning. Have you looked at your local cops? .. According to mappingpoliceviolence.us, police kill at least three people per day; from a meta analysis published in NYT, we now know the number could be six or even more.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

The Conversation U.S.@us.theconversation.com · 9mo ago

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

I really hate it when scientists keep saying that “we need to rebuild trust in science,” because it implies that scientists are to blame for the mistrust rather than the millions of dollars of dark money that have funded political attacks on science in order to advance a far right agenda.

THEN YOU PURCHASE THEM AND DO NOT USE THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS

Felipe Gaona@felipegaonar.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Open AI loses copyright case in Germany. Judge Elke Schwager summarized the case saying that if you want to build something and need components, "then you purchase them and do not use the property of others."

Lots of folks captioning aurora photos like "for a few minutes we didn't think about politics" guess I'm built different, every time I'm out trying to see night sky stuff I frequently think about how much light pollution is entirely preventable with just a tiny bit of regulation

update: it was a terrible last night of 4.5-5 arcsecond seeing 🫩 i love feeling cold front weather but i hate observing as one rolls in

Erica Sawczynec@ericasawczynec.bsky.social · 9mo ago

out observing targets for my thesis (and some running survey programs) with IGRINS. Had some great weather the past few nights and hoping for more! 🔭✨

out observing targets for my thesis (and some running survey programs) with IGRINS. Had some great weather the past few nights and hoping for more! 🔭✨

WOW! An incredible discovery. The first ever image of a baby exoplanet embedded in the dust rings from which planets are forming around a star. Confirms the developing view of planet formation that we’ve never before seen in action. 🧪🔭 www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...

They're tearing Goddard apart for scraps and I'm supposed to write as many proposals as I can to scramble for a fraction of the money NASA has left? Depressing, degrading, and dehumanizing in a time when the future of planetary science can be measured in the number of people it leaves behind.

What is happening at Goddard is absolutely devastating. We are losing history. We are losing an incredible amount of human talent, skill, and knowledge. Rebuilding it will be impossible same for same. Industry can not absorb the people or the equipment. This is undoing space science in the US.

Brad Johnson@climatebrad.hillheat.com · 9mo ago

Goddard spacecraft engineer: "I think it just kind of speaks to the atmosphere of the agency and the nation, where people are like, 'Well, laws don't matter for the people at the top anymore.'"

Chat… Are Black Holes Dark Energy?? In my new longer-than-usual piece for @astrobites.bsky.social, I do a deep dive into the background of the controversial 2023 paper which claimed black holes expand in step with the universe and can therefore explain dark energy. 🧪 astrobites.org/2025/10/30/a...

So… Are Black Holes Dark Energy?

Title: Observational evidence for cosmological coupling of black holes and its implications for anastrophysical source of dark energy Authors: Duncan Farrah,

astrobites.org

Seven Machina Rasmussen@toomanyspectra.bsky.social · 2y ago

hold the fucking phone are you telling me the conversion of regular matter into black holes powers the evolution of dark energy AND adequately resolves the hubble tension. are you fucking with me. are you pulling my leg. chat is this real