Steve Eales

That is really scary. I think AI would generate something that didn’t sound quite as much bullshit. The really annoying thing is that most university managements now seem to be operating in a way that discourage the sentiments expressed here. And ‘brand’! Come on!

So sad! Part of my life, but I guess telescopes are not alive

Done

Enjoying the politics and the jokes

bsky.app/profile/roya...

Looking forward to the meeting about the Euclid early results next Friday. Also be good to meet some of the Euclid folk in person, since so much of this vast collaboration is done on Zoom, email and Slack

If you're into your science podcasts, check out BBC R4 Inside Science this week, as the lovely @apontzen.bsky.social,
@amsterdammed.bsky.social and I have a nice long geeky chat about the new dark energy results from @desisurvey.bsky.social 🤓

📻: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

#cosmology 🔭

While the headline takeaway from the ACT results yesterday was "LCDM is fine", the headline from DESI is quite different - evidence for evolving dark energy, at up to 4.2 sigma, and over 3 sigma even without any supernovae, which persists with many different combinations of datasets. 🧪🔭

First images from the Square Kilometre Array Low Frequency (SKA-Low)!

Taken with only 1,024 of the planned 131,072 antennas, and it's already looking good :)

#RadioAstronomy

Our qualitative study with natural scientists on ultimate reality has been published. We look at the influence of religious background and disciplinary field, as well as inspiration from humanities. Care for the planet an enduring concern. Read it open access here! Thank you to participants

Quite fascinating. Interesting that most of them said that they had never articulated these views to anyone else

Beautiful Hubble image of Andromeda. We have made a nice submillimetre image of the dust but it isn’t as pretty as this

Sounds the same as what’s happening in the UK - plunging numbers of international students due to visa changes, which had been used to plug the gap from domestic tuition fees (which the politicians won’t allow to rise for political reasons)

Not sure I believed the arguments against the ‘hard steps’ model, which was a little depressing. But my positive take was that the upcoming searches for bio signatures on exoplanets will be a nice empirical test

Never heard of the ‘hard steps’ model until I read this. It does provide a neat explanation of the Fermi Paradox. Not sure I believe the authors’ arguments against

bsky.app/profile/jmac...

Sorry to hear you’ve left astronomy