iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Dr Robin George Andrews @squigglyvolcano.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

NEW: On Oct 20, Japan will launch its most audacious space mission. It’s hoping to fly to Mars, land twice (!) on Phobos (“fear”), steal pieces of that alien moon, and bring ‘em home. That’s right: to pull of this heist, Japan must confront fear itself. @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon

Samples from Japan’s MMX mission could reveal how Phobos formed—and may contain pieces of Mars

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

critic & conscience &c. bit for a Friday

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Ocean Networks Canada @oceannetworks.ca · 08/10/2026

Happy #OctopusDay! ONC's fixed cameras have been capturing footage these amazing creatures for two decades! From the shallows of Folger Pinnace to the deep, dark Cascadia Basin, octopuses regularly steal the spotlight on our live cameras. #KnowTheOcean

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

"A crucial aspect of our strategy has been moving away from the traditional, and often counterproductive, expectation that scientists must personally drive technology transfer while carrying out cutting-edge research. "

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 08/10/2026

Our home planet sure is pretty. Earth, from Artemis II.

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cara giaimo @cjgiaimo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

i was fortunate enough to profile Margaret Hamilton in 2019. A really kind and curious person. This was my favorite story she told me:

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Nature @nature.com · 07/10/2026

None of this year's science Nobel Prizes have gone to women. The number of these prizes to go to women remains at 27 out of more than 600. See how many you can name in our quiz: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

me: a work day! I can clear the backlog and schedule the things and make some actual progress! And even some science! unavoidable new thing slides into inbox: hiiiiiii

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Alejandro Soto @soto.space · 07/10/2026

Plus, there's a Preliminary Lunar Science Report, if you want to dig deeper into the Artemis II results. #planetaryscience assets.science.nasa.gov/content/dam/...

assets.science.nasa.gov

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I love this article and always used to show it to our first year undergrads as a reading

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Very sad to hear that Margaret Hamilton has passed away. Here's a short thread about her role in the Apollo mission, and her lesser-known work on the simulations that led to the discovery of Chaos Theory. 🧪 👩‍🔬 ⚛️

news.mit.edu

Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90

Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.

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Steve Crawford @astrocrawford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The Apollo guidance code that Margaret Hamilton led is available online! It was scanned and shared openly. Her legacy will live on in the fundamentals of software engineering that she created that still form the basis for software design for many space missions. github.com/chrislgarry/...

github.com

GitHub - chrislgarry/Apollo-11: Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code for the command and lunar modules.

Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code for the command and lunar modules. - chrislgarry/Apollo-11

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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Julianne Dalcanton @dalcantonjd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Like many scientists, I’ve been mulling over the impact of LLMs on our fields. I’ve not yet seen it articulated, but I think there is a largely unspoken “invisible labor underclass” framework at play.

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Interesting thread on the mathematician side that reflects similar concerns (here from the point where this discussion starts)

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Grant Jacobs BioinfoTools/NotJustDNA 🔬🧬🖥️✍️📚🇳🇿 @notjustdna.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

#Christchurch #NZ New tsunami zone A closer view of Christchurch’s new tsunami blue zone ⬇️ The black line on the right is the coastline. West of that covered in blue is the tsunami zone. Near the rivers are blue zones quite a long way inland, too.

A closer view of Christchurch’s new tsunami blue zone ⬇️

The black line on the right is the coastline. West of that covered in blue is the tsunami zone.

Next to the rivers are blue zones quite a long way inland, too.

Blue evacuation zone: Long or strong, get gone

This is an area that is most likely to be affected by a tsunami.

You should leave this zone immediately if:

You experience a long or strong earthquake
You see sudden sea-level changes or hear unusual noises coming from the sea
You receive an official warning from Civil Defence Emergency Management

An official warning will most likely be issued through an emergency mobile alert to your phone. If there is an announcement to evacuate the blue zone, follow the instructions immediately. Stay out of this zone until you are told by an official source that it’s safe to go back.

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Delivery of Nobel-level work, but after 6 months not 20 years, and with immediate commercialisation outcome, kthnksbye

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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 05/10/2026

If you are an academic who uses arXiv, please consider signing this. **Give Authors Control: Let Us Decide If AI Bots Can Read Our arXiv Papers** math.mit.edu/~elmos/petit...

Currently, authors posting to arXiv have no control over whether bots scrape their full-text PDFs and LaTeX source files.

We are calling on arXiv to implement a simple permission toggle during submission, allowing authors to decide what automated scrapers can access:

Full Access: Bots can read and scrape the full text and source files.

Metadata Only: Bots are restricted to the Title, Abstract, and Citation metadata.

Open science for human readers should not mean mandatory, unconsented data harvesting by commercial entities. Advancing scientific knowledge demands immense time, resources, and intellectual rigor — we deserve a say in whether our original work is fed into massive, opaque training sets.

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I respect that. I have happy memories of visiting Merritt Island some years ago, and it was pretty incredible. Something like that for improving Te Waihora would be hopeful

en.wikipedia.org

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge - Wikipedia

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Have decided that asphalting machines are the undeclared type of dragon

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

If anyone can make things work, it'll be Tāwhaki. They're going at this with the right values and pace, let's hold the chance for them to achieve

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'll note the reorganizing of the NZ funding landscape has just disestablished the Marsden Fund, which is what supported local work for IceCube... www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/f...

royalsociety.org.nz

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 06/10/2026

How rare are neutrino interactions? A neutrino (of the type emitted by the Sun) could go through a light year of lead with only a small chance of interacting. They pass through the Earth, and each of us, constantly, without anyone noticing. 100 trillion neutrinos go through you every second.

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Keith Smith @drkeithsmith.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The Nobel Committee's scientific reasoning for the prize cites five key discoveries, made by Halzen and the IceCube Collaboration, that were published in @science.org. I had the pleasure of being the editor who handled four of them. Here's a thread of what each of those studies found. ☄️🔭⚛️🧪

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And New Zealand! Very happy for Jenni Adams and her team

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

No shade on IceCube, but given the 450 collaborators, the idea of the prize being 'solo' is uh, an approach?

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I've been saying this in talks for over a decade

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Jess Keating @jesskeatingbooks.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Hey yeah, friendly reminder that men denying or minimizing the work of women and taking credit for it themselves happens so much we have a NAME for it. (It’s the Matilda Effect.) 2nd fun fact: I’ve written many bios of women in STEM at this point and this is *always a factor in their history*

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Oo it is sunflower planting time. I managed two roses

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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

As arXiv announces a new submission rate limit policy, I refer anyone who is up in arms about it to👇Hogg 2026👇. I'm so confused who would want to submit so much slop? For me (both writing and hiring) it's always been about quality over quantity, every single time. 🧪⚛️ blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/u...

blog.arxiv.org

Fair Moderation, Equitable Access, and AI: arXiv’s Updated Rate Limit Policy

arXiv, and the scientific community at large, are facing a watershed moment. Scholarly publishing is currently changing at a rapid pace, and we are seeing a…

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yes, well. Helps if it can have an economic impact

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

<10% success rate for grant, irrespective of whether awarded time in hand

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Nice to see the art that is part of the flight radiator cover of Hēki: here in person, and its time on the ISS. Back from space! #nzas26

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Many of us propose who aren't reimbursed by the spacecraft, mind you

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Emily Hunt @emily.space · 01/10/2026

Great to see in this bumper review of the LMC & SMC ditch the pointlessly colonial language that we have for the Milky Way's two nearest neighbours. arxiv.org/abs/2609.38277 Magellan had *nothing* to do with discovering them, and they were known to indigenous communities for millennia. 🔭☄️

1.1 Historical context: the cranes of the southern night sky

The two nearest star forming galaxies to the Milky Way are readily observable to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere. Consequently, these two galaxies have been known to humans, since there have been humans in those regions of the planet. Just like today, the origin and purpose/meaning behind their presence have been the subject of discussion and conjecture, as reflected in the mythology of most civilizations in the Southern Hemisphere. For example, the Mapuche people of Chile referred to these objects as “water ponds” (Rüganko or Menoko). The Clouds also feature in the oral histories of most Aboriginal groups in Australia. For example, in the Lower Murray they are known as Prolggi, which has been translated as “Cranes”.

The earliest written records of the Clouds are possibly traced to the work of Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman al-Sufi (around 964 AD) in his treatise Kit¯ab suwar al-kaw¯akib (“The Book of Fixed Stars”). In western astronomy, these galaxies have been known collectively as the Magellanic Clouds, and individually as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), for the larger of the two, and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), for the smaller. The term “Magellanic” for the Large and Small Cloud was not coined by Magellan himself or his chronicler, and Magellan did not directly refer to the LMC and SMC themselves in his writings (Dennefeld 2020).

In this review, we will refer to these two galaxies collectively as “the Clouds” and separately as the LMC and SMC. As a field, Astronomy must adopt naming conventions thoughtfully and be ready to modify historical precedent (de los Reyes M 2023). As with the story of our understanding of the dynamics of the Clouds themselves, conventional wisdom cannot dictate modern astrophysical discourse. If we wish to advance our physical understanding of the universe, we must build an inclusive community that can support and sustain a diversity of scholars who will…

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And the couple of pohutukawa with gnarled bark to greet, and if it was the season: flowering!

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Oh look, everyone crashed APT. Surely the proposal can be further iterated now!

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Postdocs: EU Global Fellowships can be held in NZ

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I really wish Ōtautahi had this vision. Felt like it was there for a bit post-quakes and then tailed off

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Eddie Clark @dreddieclark.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I honestly don't think we make enough of this. We decided to reverse a trend of a century or more of birdlife dying out & with time and money and community we did it. There are *goddamn kiwi* in the back yards of my neighborhood. There are species we haven't seen in a century in & around Zealandia.

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CosmicRami 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @rami.spaceaustralia.com · 30/09/2026

Yeah, um, I think the words I am looking for here are "JFC" This is what Sydney's skies would look like tonight under these conditions.

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Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A persistent feeling of having ended up in the wrong timeline "But memory is everything to lose"

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 29/09/2026

I will soon be interviewing candidates for this ~2-year role (22-23 months, actually, for reasons of grant arithmetic) if you are interested in studying auditory perception and music in adults with mild cognitive impairment or mild-to-moderate dementias, all over new zealand, please apply!

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 28/09/2026

This is a photo of our home planet taken only a few hours ago! So what? We have photos of Earth taken from space every day. Ah, but *this* photo was taken by a spacecraft ON ITS WAY TO JUPITER.

From the source: "Mostly black space, most of Earth visible at the top right of the image. Part of a spacecraft visible on the left."

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Eddie Clark @dreddieclark.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Unscheduled photo dump because I was treated on my walk to work today to two quite different "bird enjoys spring flowers" experiences. Tūī: "I shall delicately sip nectar yum yum" Kererū: "FEED ME FLOWER"

Tui reaches up to sip from a white blossom

Tui curls around a white and pink flower cluster, about to drink.

kereru bends around a kowhai branch, about to snip a flower off with its beak.

kereru attempts to stuff entire kowhai flower down its cavernous gob. It ate about another half dozen in the minute after I took this photo.

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Paul Voosen @voosen.me · 28/09/2026

New Horizons is now *three days away* from shutting off its two heliophysics instruments, simply because NASA has not provided the $2M in funding it had promised to the mission last year or this year. There is no science basis for shutting these off. Our earlier coverage:

science.org

NASA’s New Horizons mission may shut down two instruments over lack of funding

Decision risks “incalculable loss” of data from the edge of the Sun’s influence, scientists say

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