Moon has amazing Eartshine. I can't take a photo of that, but it is stunning. Thank you for reminding us to look up.

Crescent Moon and Venus on a twilight sky among clouds

Here they are, avoiding clouds, as seen from St Andrews just now.

The photo shows a wooden model of a cow giving birth accompanied by two men. One man calms the cow while the other ensures a proper delivery.The calf emerges from his mother, licking the hand of the man.

Models of everyday life were deposited in #Egyptian tombs. They were supposed to support the deceased in the afterlife. One of the most charming examples is the model of a #cow giving birth.
Carved in wood, painted.
Probably from Meir, #Egypt, dating c. 2040-1985 BC.

📷 Royal Ontario Museum
🏺

Grad school: to be successful in a future career you're going to need to focus on THIS ONE THING for the next 5 years.

The actual career in question: you can't focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes at a time and you have to keep switching between 1000 things endlessly

The graphic shows a Puffin with its English and Latin names (Fratercula arctica). There is a key facts box on the graphic that covers their wingspan, lifespan, diet, breeding behaviour, seasonality, and UK breeding abundance.

Perhaps our most familiar and charismatic auks, these bright-billed burrow nesters certainly catch the eye!
Find out more about Puffins in the graphic below and by visiting their BTO BirdFacts page: www.bto.org/learn/about-... #seabirds @btobirds.bsky.social @jncc.bsky.social @rspb.bsky.social

Huge #Saharandust cloud coming to #Italy.
The @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social CAMS forecast shows a high concentration of PM10 - due to the #dust transport triggered by the vortex centered in the Mediterranean - over the Southern and Central part of the Country for April 13. #airquality

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

I'm a data scientist @ourworldindata.org and I need help from a botanist or someone local to Kyoto, Japan! 🌸

We present one of the world’s longest climate records: 1,200 years of peak cherry blossom dates in Kyoto.

The researcher who maintained it, Prof. Yasuyuki Aono, sadly passed away last year.

I also get annoyed by ‘hallucinating’ because it implies it’s sometimes making stuff up and sometimes not.

To be clear, it’s *always* making stuff up - it’s just that sometimes that stuff resembles reality more closely than other times

It has no idea if what it’s generating is right or not.

Key quote for me: “an entire profession might gradually lose its capacity to question and redefine its goals, because AI systems embed assumptions about what those goals are.”

@movebank.bsky.social just passed 10 Billion animal locations!
Must be the largest geospatial biodiversity database? www.movebank.org/cms/movebank...

The Platial Analysis lab is involved in organizing two workshops at this year's Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe Annual Meeting (#AGILE2026). We would love to see you there!

stko-lab.github.io/agile2026-ge...
mobilitybank.org/events/mobil...

On a black background of space, a blue and white Earth just before 'setting' behind the Moon, in foreground, seen from Artemis II, 6 April 2026

Totality seen from lunar orbit, the Moon eclipses the Sun, revealing a view few humans have ever witnessed, a dark disc surrounded by a pale solar corona.

✅ #Artemis II update: 'Earthset', 6 April 2026, and 'totality', 7 April, seen from lunar orbit, the Moon eclipses the Sun, a view few humans have ever witnessed (pics: NASA)

🔗 www.nasa.gov/gallery/jour...

@exploration.esa.int l

There's a nice #Artemis II mission tracker here: artemis.cdnspace.ca

LOTS of data about its current position, crew activities, and whether or not the toilet is currently "Go"

An LLM is nothing like a sewing machine, and only a dickhead who devalues textiles could even come up with that.

Every single garment is handmade, from the cutting up. We have been attempting to automate for literally a century. It’s not happening. Circular knits are about the pinnacle.

Spectacular high-resolution image of our home planet viewed through the Orion Crew Module window by the Artemis II astronauts as they continue their journey to the Moon on Flight Day 2, 3 April 2026 (pic: NASA)

A full disc image of Earth, as seen from the Orion Crew Module. The planet is a pale blue, swirling with white clouds and glowing slightly lighter blue in place from reflected light. At lower left, a large brown landmass is Africa, with Spain and Portugal with twinkling lights where the planet curves. At top right, auroras glow in a thin green glow, just barely separated from the planet's surface. Earth is set against the black of space (pic: NASA/R.Wiseman)

😮 Awesome views from Day 2 of #Artemis II this morning.

@exploration.esa.int @esaearth.esa.int

That's home. That's us.

This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew.

Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right.

Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

It's April 1st, 2026.

The Supreme Court scheduled a hearing over whether the President can change the US constitution by executive fiat.

NASA is launching a Moon mission equipped with a never-tested-in-space life support system and a heatshield of questionable safety.

Jokes are dead, basically.

It's that time of year, folks--as extra credit on their final exam, students in my geophysics and seismology classes are invited to write a relevant haiku. If you're a geophysics or seismology geek, enjoy!

In spite of all the talk of Claude Code and Codex meaning the end of humans writing code, software job adverts are actually going up, according to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's crunching of millions of job ads for this week's The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/7325...

Nope, not this week.

13000 steps

😱😱😱🥵

Striking chart on the gender skew among AI researchers. In academia, the number of top AI scientists who are women has been growing slowly. In the private sector? Not so much.

(chart from this vg paper from Uni of Chicago bfi.uchicago.edu/working-pape...)

an old wooden cathedral door with a hole in the bottom through which a cat pokes its head

thinking about the medieval cat door in Exeter cathedral again

Here is a brief overview of existing approaches to studying "real-world" navigation.
Really happy to have worked on this with @hugospiers.bsky.social & @antoinecoutrot.bsky.social!
arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11347

Honestly, quit being a professor. If you think your research and "insight" is so valuable that you are willing to abdicate the actual core of being a professor, then you should quit.

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

One issue is, what happens when the big AI companies start charging the actual costs of running these models? I predict that future AI-agent use may be restricted to big companies and universities.

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

Ravens anticipate wolf kill sites across broad scales Scavengers generally rely on patchily distributed, unpredictable carrion. A long-standing hypothesis suggests scavenging ravens reliably locate such food by directly following large carnivores to thei...

You know those people who magically appear whenever there’s free food? Ravens do that too – but in Yellowstone, it’s not luck and not because they trail wolves. Instead, they remember where and when kills happen, navigating a mental map of the “landscape of death". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...