“Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”

‘We can’t make it better again’: what Europe’s wildfires tell us about the climate crisis

In this week’s newsletter: As France and Spain battle huge fires in this summer of relentless heat, will it be enough to spur us to take action?

theguardian.com

christ if that’s not a metaphor for our times

Familiar from the other end of Europe. My undergrad physics department was overwhelmingly applied, and you could watch a professor's face fall when a student said they wanted astronomy for their thesis

Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪@telescoper.bsky.social · 7d ago

Astronomy Envy In 1998 the Department of Physics at the University of Nottingham was struggling in both esearch and undergraduate recruitment. To remedy the situation it decided to add a new group in Astronomy. The main idea was that having astronomy in its portfolio would attract more students…

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Has NASA already found life on Mars? A controversial new assessment of half-century-old data suggests the space agency’s life-hunting Mars lander Viking 1 found exactly what it was looking for. By @nadiadrake.bsky.social. www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-...

Has NASA already found life on Mars?

In searches for past and present Martian life, some scientists say we’ve been too cautious to see what’s right in front of us

scientificamerican.com

Think of all the awesome science-ing we could do with an extra £20M......🧪

Kirsty Grainger @kirstygrainger.bsky.social · last wk.

Earlier this year UKRI launched a funding call to invest £40M in ONE AI lab. www.ukri.org/opportunity/... For some unknown reason they decided to fund TWO AI labs at the cost of £60M. An extra £20M. Just found. That's the equivalent of 7 more years of Jodrell Bank. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-la...

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

bbc.co.uk

Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 3w ago

“What will the Lovell Telescope discover/enable 20 yrs from now? I can’t tell you, and that’s the point. It will either be something extraordinary that none of us can yet predict, or we will defund it and leave Cheshire with a rusting monument to unfulfilled potential and discoveries never made.” 🔭🧪

turns out the reason he only does podcasts is that podcasters don't ask follow-ups

Elon Musk Melts Down Over Perfectly Normal Questions in Wild New Interview

"Maybe some people do loathe me. And that's probably true. I don't care," said Musk.

gizmodo.com

Love how the right-wing trolls who spent months crying that Nolan’s Odyssey would be "too woke" instantly pivoted to crying that he committed an "even bigger atrocity" by making it an apocalyptic nightmare instead. The whiplash is crazy.

Ty Cobb, a former White House attorney under Trump 1, believes Trump’s speech is intended to justify declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections. Cobb suggests Trump aims to intimidate voters, seize voting machines, and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Trump setting stage to declare emergency around midterms, former White House attorney says

For perspective on what President Trump is trying to achieve with Thursday night's speech, the limits of his authority and the potential consequences for future elections, Geoff Bennett spoke with Ty ...

pbs.org

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

My upcoming book is absolutely packed to the brim with em dashes—more em dashes than any well-adjusted human being could possibly need or want—and if any of you tries to claim they are the result of some soulless LLM rather than my own unhinged compulsion I will fight you.

ICE is engaged in a very large escalation nationwide, with the agency claiming to be hitting record arrest numbers amid the return of quotas. This has gotten very little attention from the media because ICE learned lessons from the chaotic disasters of Kristi Noem’s tenure. Keep a watch.

WA Whistles@wawhistles.bsky.social · 4w ago

ICE is surging in the Seattle area. (Map shows activity in the last week) Do you have your whistle with you?

If you read just a few comments on any article about Graham Platner it should become crystal clear why victims don’t come forward earlier. The level of cruelty people direct at victims is gutting

I actually don’t care what the founding fathers would say about the present and I don’t think you should either

A delightful thread for those of you at Universities that prize Nature articles above all other... #cosmology 🔭

Sesh Nadathur@seshnadathur.bsky.social · last mo.

In summary: no, gigaparsec-scale anisotropic structures violating the cosmological principle have not been discovered. Score +1 for the "if it is in Nature, it's probably wrong" rule-of-thumb /end

dammit.

White House picks Harvard professor with polarizing alien theories to lead new UFO council

A polarizing Harvard astronomer known for splashy theories about alien visits has been tapped by the White House to lead a team of outside scientists to study the national security risks posed by UFOs...

pbs.org

After Nottingham, now Sussex: ~35% cuts proposed to Particle Physics & Astronomy. A world-class department, built over decades, gutted to patch a temporary budget gap. Reputation and talent like this don't come back. Add your name to the open letter: sussexphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/

The publisher Springer claims it can only discuss why it retracted Planck's paper with... Planck! But until they hold a seance, they are happy to sell you a completely redacted version: a blank page for $39.95.

Thiago Carvalho@cyrilpedia.bsky.social · last mo.

This is what makes it art: '(...) the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.' www.science.org/content/arti...

Horrified to learn that the Particle Physics and Astronomy groups at Sussex University are facing a proposed 35% cut in staff numbers! That would be devastating to a high quality department.

oh? you think we can cope??? Let me introduce you to Venus. Thanks to the greenhouse effect, it is an inhospitable hell-hole, with temperatures over 400°C (750°F). The probes we've sent usually lasted mere minutes on the surface due to the heat. Venus is why fucking with our climate is a bad idea

Emily Hunt@emily.space · last mo.

as an astronomer, I can safely tell you that stars are really fucking hot, and we should be doing everything in our power to protect our planet from the star next to us

Feels like endless bad news for basic science research funding in the US and UK these days. All to throw money at AI and other sectors that were nurtured by basic science in their infancy. www.science.org/content/arti...

Exclusive: NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say

Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year

science.org

The policy treats foreign STEM graduates as a drain. A sustained one-third drop in their numbers cuts US GDP by up to $481B a year, PIIE finds. Another of this administration's self-inflicted wounds

Peterson Institute for International Economics@piie.com · last mo.

A sustained 1/3 reduction in US STEM graduates from abroad would shrink the high-skill STEM workforce by 6.2%. The decline would cut annual US real GDP by $240-$481 billion over a decade—a loss the size of a US state like Wisconsin or Utah. By @mclem.org, Jeremy Neufeld, & Amy M. Nice:

An associate editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience has resigned. He asked the editorial office to turn off the AI assistant, and was told it was "not possible". 😵 Read the whole thread!

Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

This is such a bummer.

Asher Elbein@asherelbein.bsky.social · last mo.

Employees at Scientific American were told today that the magazine has been sold to LabX Media Group, the outfit that runs Discover Magazine and IFLScience. And that means -- of course! -- editorial layoffs. The media mass extinction rolls ever onward.

A24 announces that they want to put storyboard artists out of work. That's what the headline should be written as. Becuase we should be honest about what these AI "tools" are trying to do, and who it is trying to circumvent. variety.com/2026/film/ne...

Google Invests $75 Million in A24 to Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools

A24 and Google have struck an AI research partnership that will see the independent studio work to develop new AI-powered technologies for filmmakers.

variety.com

Know what TV show actually wouldn’t get made today? The Twilight Zone. Half of these fuckin’ episodes are about fascism.

english.elpais.com/usa/2026-06-...

Trump administration tasks ICE with tracking ‘false’ voters ahead of the midterms

In an election year that could reshape the political balance, Homeland Security Investigations directly asked election officials in Texas and North Carolina for information on at least nine voters

english.elpais.com

In spot tests I've done, I see this happen *all of the time*, such as with my own papers. The LLM would often rather hallucinate a male scientist than get my name right. 🤷‍♀️ It's kind of unsurprising that models trained unscrupulously on the entire internet are misogynistic

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Demon-Haunted World reference ftw

They came here fleeing persecution; rather than give them refuge, Marco Rubio’s state department will send them to die in countries they’ve never been to. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/w...

Women Who Fled Iran Are to Be Deported to Central African Republic, Lawyers Say

nytimes.com