Earth Signals: Wisconsin Weather YouTube video by Mead Witter School of Music

Awesome stuff by @lizthered.bsky.social !

www.youtube.com/watch?v=flZ0...

Please read this essay. 🧵

"AI boosters seem to think that when people write they are directly transferring thoughts and ideas that exist pristinely in their heads directly into language. They see the effort of writing as something that gets in the way of this pure process."

News: Leading atmospheric science summer undergraduate research program canceled due to NSF funding loss Quieter weather on tap for a few days for most of the country

News: a leading NSF supported University of Oklahoma atmospheric science summer undergraduate research program that has mentored hundreds of top atmospheric scientists over two decades has been canceled for 2026 due to funding loss. (repost w/correct link) More: tinyurl.com/3zjzf7vu

Cover of report "Mission Aborted: how NASA illegally implemented the president's budget request without congressional approval. Minority staff report, prepared by members of the committee on science, space, and technology, us house of representatives, April 2026

This report came out today by minority staff of the House science committee on how three NASA missions were aborted due to NASA illegally following the FY26 president's budget request instead of congressionally approved budget. Very important reading. 🔭🧪 democrats-science.house.gov/staff-report...

A report from the House Science Democrats documents how, at OMB direction, NASA attempted to execute the president’s FY26 budget request rather than follow Congressional appropriations

Got bored tonight, so I downloaded 3 hours worth of Earthcam replay / archive footage from their Skydeck camera atop of the Willis Tower (Sears Tower) in Chicago and made a time lapse of the fog rolling in off Lake Michigan. Good illustration of how our atmosphere behaves like any other fluid. #ilwx

#ImpeachRussVought

Headline reads: White House budget seeks to scrap 54 major NASA science missions. Over an image of Jupiter.

Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions: www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the niverse, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from

elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan,

Carl Sagan said it best. www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-...

This would be truly disastrous :(

One example, close to my heart, is the INCUS mission. This will (for the first time!) provide observations of vertical velocities in deep convective storms in the tropics. These are very important for tropical dynamics and extreme events, but v.poorly understood.

American science is at risk not because of budget cuts, but because of executive interference In this clip excerpted from my recent livestream, I explain why American science is currently at existential risk, and how the current crisis stems not primarily from budget cuts from Congress, but instead from direct interference from the executive branch. I discuss the immediate implications of th

I've excerpted a ~5 minute segment from my recent livestream discussing my deepening concerns regarding on the ongoing (and accelerating) threats not only to weather and climate science, but American science leadership and continuity at large.

Earthrise from Artemis 2

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.

The utter, horrid contrast

This is a really thoughtful and helpful article about LLM use in science

A view of the interior of the Orion capsule. A window takes up most of the frame, through which Earth is visible. About 1/3 of the planet is shown, with cloud patterns over the ocean

A view out a window of the Orion spacecraft. Earth is visible as a slim crescent in the distance, with most of the field of view being black space

Can you image what it would be like to go from the first image to the second? To literally watch your home planet shrinking behind you until most of what you see is the emptiness of space? For every minute to further hammer in our insignificance against the vastness of the cosmos? (1/2)🧪🔭

This is beautiful, and feels more impactful than the original version. It somehow conveys the fragility of the Earth better than the super sensitive/bright one, who makes it seem like the Earth is almost giving off its own light because it's so bright

Work with me!

Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University invites applications for a Doherty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ocean Sciences. This competitive postdoctoral fellowship will be awarded for a one-year period, + 2nd year possible. Please see apply.interfolio.com/183855!

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

NASA has just shared the first high-resolution images of the Earth taken by the Artemis II crew, meanwhile, massive budget cuts are once again proposed for US science, including for NASA

🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

There is something deeply sad about the fact that on the same day we get THIS INCREDIBLE PHOTO from the Artemis mission, we also get the White House attempting to defund the very science that protects our planet.

White House releases FY27 budget proposal, continuing plan of massive cuts to Earth science, including elimination of NOAA Research NOAA grant data shows agency awarding grants at a much slower rate than previous years, likely showing administration strategy to reduce scientific spending through budget execution

News: WH released proposed FY27 budget, continuing to push plan to eliminate NOAA Research and massively cut Earth sciences - while NOAA grant data for FY2026 shows only 7 new grants so far compared to 379 in FY2025, further evidence of curtailed science budget execution. tinyurl.com/5e3ptub2

Zeroing out OAR's budget...again! Deja vu much?

Incredible

Well put!

In this context "careful" has a few meanings. We hold the responsibility for what we publish, not the LLMs, and so the burden of fact-checking is on the researchers. Also, the brain is a muscle and if we lean on LLMs too strongly then we may find ourselves getting worse at things which we value.

Could you expand on how you encourage students to use LLMs? For research, I broadly agree with Andy that LLMs are not great at making the type of arguments required in our field. But using them to double-check/assist with derivations/code/writing seems fine to me, as long as you're careful.

Beautiful:)

Humans can do anything apart from break our coffee addiction

@nasaartemis.bsky.social

www.nasa.gov/missions/art...

The first line of this is "The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in artificial intelligence (AI) research."

What a truly depressing ambition to have.

Towards end-to-end automation of AI research - Nature An artificial intelligence system can produce research papers with minimal human involvement, even passing the first round of peer review for the workshop of a main machine learning conference.

One of the more cursed Nature pieces I've seen

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Manipulative, AI generated, slop like this is turning me into Farnsworth