Andrey Kravtsov

Outside reviewers are reviewers from academic institutions outside the NSF (postdocs, professors, researchers), who have been instrumental in providing comprehensive reviews of NSF proposals in "review panels" that produce formal written evaluations for each proposal used in funding decisions.

National Science Foundation significantly downgrades the review process of its proposals...

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www.science.org/content/arti...

Presentation slides are undergoing an AI transformation as we speak. Whether it's a good thing is another matter, but having lived through the transparency -> ppt transition, I am optimistic.

It's a great productivity tool for research, and coding and writing, especially. Is it great for generating new ideas? Yes, in the sense that it can summarize existing ideas and in the process of reviewing these new ideas can be generated.

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

I disagree with a significant fraction of this article, but still it's an interesting and thought-stimulating read on an issue I've been grappling with...

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

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ESA/Webb picture of the month - image of interacting dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485. Interaction between these galaxies led to a recent starburst and formation of star clusters.

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esawebb.org/images/potm2...

Schrödinger's plates: the plates are simultaneously whole and broken and we won't know their true state until we open the cabinet... )

p.s. This month marks the 90th anniversary of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment involving cat in a chamber.

Andromeda, Unexpected - how three amateur astronomers and astrophotographers changed our view of the Universe Learn about the brand-new discovery that earned Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty the title of Astronomy Photographer of the Year – and a place in the science books

The blue arc above the Andromeda galaxy at the center top of the image was discovered by 3 amateur astronomers in 2022. It is line emission by doubly ionized oxygen.

www.rmg.co.uk/stories/spac...

A fantastic image by @ajamesmccarthy.bsky.social

cosmicbackground.io/pages/ea_int...

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I think the statement/argument is not so much about the present, but about the future and Python is just an example. Can be any programming language.

Francois Chollet's post saying "The most powerful scientific instrument of the 21st century isn't the electron microscope or the particle collider. It's the algorithm. Today, a scientist in biology, physics, chemistry etc. is more likely to be debugging a Python script than to be running a wet lab. Going forward, the biggest breakthroughs will be mostly software achievements, like AlphaFold."

Food for thought/discussion.

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Aurora over lake Michigan tonight. In the background are Castor, Pollux, Jupiter, and Procyon.

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Comic. PERSON 1 with white hat: How tall are you? PERSON 2: 5ft 24cm [caption] When switching to metric, make the process easier by doing it in steps.

Metric Tip

xkcd.com/3164/

Euclid’s “Tuning Fork” By way of a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, here's another Euclid Q1 product. This one is an updated version of the famous "Tuning Fork" representation of galaxy morphology: Credits: Diagram: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, Diagram by J.-C. Cuillandre, L. Quilley, F. Marleau. Images alone: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi You can click on the image to make it (much) bigger.

Euclid’s “Tuning Fork”

By way of a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, here's another Euclid Q1 product. This one is an updated version of the famous "Tuning Fork" representation of galaxy morphology: Credits: Diagram: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, Diagram by J.-C. Cuillandre, L. Quilley, F.…

Rising sun eclipsed by the Adler Planetarium dome.

(Adler) Planetarium eclipse...

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"Beyond Hubble": a workshop aimed to trigger cross discussions between observers and theorists on our current understanding on galaxy morphology and kinematics, with an emphasis on revisiting the Hubble Sequence in the modern-day galaxy formation framework.

sites.google.com/cam.ac.uk/be...
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Congratulations! Great and even race! It was a fantastic day...

The most detailed map of galaxies, black holes and stars ever made Humans have been studying the stars for thousands of years, but astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier is on a special mission: creating the most detailed 3-D maps of the universe ever made. Journey across the...

www.ted.com/talks/juna_k...

Have a great race!

So how much of the £2356 you charge per paper goes to these "essential" peer reviewers?

This well-composed telescopic field of view covers over a Full Moon on the sky toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Of course the brighter stars show diffraction spikes, the commonly seen effect of internal supports in reflecting telescopes, and lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. The faint but pervasive clouds of interstellar dust ride above the galactic plane and dimly reflect the Milky Way's starlight. Known as galactic cirrus or integrated flux nebulae they are associated with the Milky Way's molecular clouds. In fact, the diffuse cloud cataloged as MBM 54, less than a thousand light-years distant, fills the scene. The galaxy seemingly tangled in the dusty cloud is the striking spiral galaxy NGC 7497. It's some 60 million light-years away, though. Seen almost edge-on near the center of the field, NGC 7497's own spiral arms and dust lanes echo the colors of stars and dust in our own Milky Way.

🔭 Galaxies, Stars, and Dust

Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Eder

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...

Die Zauberflöte

A spiral galaxy viewed face-on, with its tightly packed golden arms and faint purple clouds spiraling around a hazy core.

a BEAUTIFUL image of spiral galaxy ngc 1068 that uses combined data from hubble, jwst, AND chandra telescopes!!!! 🌌

More seriously, this passage demonstrates just how deeply Newton was committed to the corpuscular view of things...

Seemed like a perfect description of setting up initial conditions for cosmological N-body simulations... 😆

I used this from the Opticks in my PhD thesis:
it seems probable to me that God in the Beginning form'd Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable Particles of such Sizes and Figures and with such other Properties and in such Proportion to Space as most conduced to the End for which he form'd them

Reading a section of Newton's "Opticks", I think he should have enlisted ChatGPT to help him with his spelling.

A starburst shines in infrared A starburst shines in infrared

esawebb.org/images/potm2...

I also think that most of the atoms in our bodies (definitely, oxygen, carbon, etc.) were inside stars in the past, and actually not one, but several different stars.