Gavin Lamb 🇳🇿🇬🇧🏴‍☠️

A green grasshopper with brown wings on a white uPVC window frame

Spotted this grasshopper in my yard.
Erin(10) identified it as a long-winged cone-headed grasshopper - she has a few insect books.
Could this be a climate change migrant? Because these are southern coast Britain at best, and we're up North --> in Merseyside, UK
#climatechange in action?

We are over half way through #NAM2025 @royalastrosoc.bsky.social @durham-university.bsky.social 💫

Here is our incredible conference photo with 100s of the nearly 1000 attendees of NAM! Possibly one of the largest astronomy conference photos ever!

We hope you’re having a great week 🪐

This is a constant thing in transient astronomy. It also puts pressure on the proposing team to publish quicker than, perhaps, they'd care.
FWIW, the collabs I'm part of don't pursue this route, but the pressure is on for every DDT

The grout line between white tiles in a slightly grubby pub toilet. Written in the grout line is the statement, "TAX THE RICH"

Tax the rich graffiti spotted between the tiles above a pub pisser in Cork, Ireland.
Always good advice for policy makers

Unlocking the mysteries of the universe with multi-messenger gravitational lensing Combining the way that massive galaxies and galaxy clusters bend space and magnify our view of the distant universe with powerful new instruments sensitive to gravitational waves and electromagnetic r...

Setting the foundations for our next generation astrophysicists.

Here's a press article that describes the two @royalsocietypublishing.org issues we recently published on the prospects for multimessenger gravitational lensing.

And I get a quote! #LJMU #ARI #astronomy 🔭

phys.org/news/2025-06...

Bird feeder hanging from a beam with a wisteria around it. The bird feeder is a third full of seeds with two bird perches above the seed line and two below. Through the transparent body of the bird feeder, a mouse is happily gorging itself on the seeds

Zoom out of the bird feeder for context on the parkour level skills of the mouse. The bird feeder hangs a third of the way along a beam that is 3.5m above the ground. Wisteria winds along the beam but offers no (easy) access to the feeder

Mouse in my bird feeder.
Quite the adventurous little fellow.

Not sure if it's stuck, but it is very happy

Truth-tellers, not rioters. Protect these two men at all costs.

“You feel tough with your assault rifles and your sticks. You should be standing here with us. You’re on the wrong side of history.”

“John Lewis said make good trouble… that means make trouble on behalf of democracy.”

The proof editor of my recent paper changed every instance of "disk" to "disc".

In accretion disk parlance, both are fine... but I had a section titled, "diskoseismology", and that is now, "discoseismology"!?

My science gets the dance floor shaking! 😅

Monte Mader
@montemader.bsky.social

At the cinema.
By myself.
To watch the first 3 episodes of the new Dan Da Dan S2.
Treat yo'self.
#DanDaDan
#LightCinemaNewBrighton
#GrandmaAyase FTW

Four charts showing the extent of cuts to NASA in the FY26 budget:

- Cuts to every science division
- Smallest science funding since 1984
- 19 active, inflight missions cancelled
- Smallest NASA budget since FY 1961

#highenergyastro
🔭

@ljmuofficial.bsky.social led research into the origins of periodicity in an extra-galactic flash of high energy gamma-rays

With my collaborators from Leicester, Melbourne, Hamburg, Sendai, Birmingham, Baton Rouge, Fullerton, and Nijmegen

@ljmu-ris.bsky.social #ARI #LJMU #astrophysics #liverpool

Prompt Periodicity in the GRB 211211A Precursor: Black-hole or magnetar engine? Abstract. The merger origin long GRB 211211A was a class (re-)defining event. A precursor was identified with a ∼1 s separation from the main burst, as wel

The long duration, but likely neutron star merger origin, gamma-ray burst GRB 211211A had a short and low luminosity pre-cursor with duration ~0.2s - and looks to have a 20 Hz periodicity.

The question we asked, "what would cause that!?"

Our paper in #mnras

academic.oup.com/mnras/advanc...

This is actively bananas. LIGO is doing (literally) Nobel winning work, and you need both of them -- the second one is not a spare or a nice to have; this is like buying a fire engine, but deciding it doesn't need wheels on the left hand side...

Kick Big Oil Out of Plastics Talks Fossil fuel companies want to keep flooding our home with plastic for profit. They’re trying to block action to tackle plastic pollution - we must stop them.

Fossil fuel companies make billions turning oil in plastic.

They want to keep shovelling plastic down our throats to grow their profits.

We need the UN to ban them from the Global Plastics Treaty talks - sign the petition now: act.gp/4kgDL5U

YouTube video by Physics Girl First Update From Dianna (Physics Girl)

ME/CFS is an awful, awful disease that can randomly take all quality of life away from... anyone. And there's no known cure - sometimes people get a bit better, other times not.

I'm really glad to see Dianna Cowern aka Physics Girl (an amazingly talented science communicator) get a bit better.

My boss when I was at University of Leicester, and continued collaborator and mentor.
A well deserved appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society
@royalsociety.org @physicsuol.bsky.social

Leicester cosmic explosion expert among exceptional scientists elected as Royal Society Fellow | News | University of Leicester

🔭🧪 Congratulations to Prof Nial Tanvir who has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work studying gamma-ray bursts, the most violent explosions we've ever seen.

le.ac.uk/news/2025/ma...

Urgh! I'm just catching up with UK news!
"Incalculable damage..."
...yep, but not by who you say but by what you say, Mr. Prime Minister.
Racist apologists everywhere

Breaking News!
Code Yikes!

One for the record books -- May 9, 2025 was the hottest May 9th on record globally, with daily records dating back to 1940.

And yes, this means that May 9, 2025 was likely the hottest May 9th in the last 120,000+ years.

The climate 8-ball says: f&%kery ahead!

1. This is Piles Copse, the largest remaining fragment of high-ground temperate rainforest on Dartmoor. It’s a tiny speck of green in a dismal, human-made desert. Prepare yourselves for a story of breathtaking perversity, told in this thread. (There’s a one-page version at the bottom). 🧵

🚨BREAKING: The new Reform Mayor for Lincolnshire has said she will MEET with a fracking company to discuss extracting gas from the county - claiming it will 'save money for taxpayers.'

92% of Reform's donations come from oil/gas interests.

Who else thinks Reform is just a mouthpiece for Big Oil?

LJMU academics and postgraduate students will present their research @pintofscience.uk in Liverpool, 19–21 May.

Join us at Murphy’s Distillery for engaging talks on science, technology, health and the environment.

Tickets £5 via Pint of Science ➡️ www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/new...

The BBC is utterly beholden to the right. Why else would it fear a podcast about heat pumps? | George Monbiot The broadcaster behaves like Starmer’s government: suppress the left, cave to your critics, and undermine your own survival, writes Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The BBC is institutionally biased towards the right and the far right, and here's the proof: the results of an almost perfect before-and-after experiment.
My column today.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

With NAM and EAS either side I couldn't commit to Amaldi... ☹️

Watching UK media fawning over the proto-fascist, try hard, Enoch Powell wannabes of Reform in a few UK council elections. Giving credibility and airtime to bigots makes me keep my fingers crossed for the rapid development of an Artificial General Intelligence, so we can welcome our robot overlords

Half of my face covers the left quarter of the photo. My beard looks a little auburn, my hair is brown and trimmed short. A shop behind me on the far side of the street has the name, "Boutique Fanny". I found this funny because I'm a child

Ah 2016. Little did we know!?

This is me (less grey and short hair) somewhere in Corsica wandering around aimlessly on the spare day between an astronomy summer school, "Astrophysical Jets, Cargese 2016" and my flight back north.

In my simple mind, I find this hilarious -- still do #boutiquefanny

Space elevators are the future tech our space-billionaires should be building. Rockets are so 20th century 😉

You want to know what #climate scientists got wrong about #climatechange?
We were too cautious. It's happening faster than we anticipated and the impacts are going to be worse.