iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

💻 Nebular Emission in synthesizer We integrated stellar photoionisation (HII regions via Cloudy) into synthesizer—our open-source Python tool! • Tested across SPS models, IMFs, densities, and dust depletion. • Applied to toy galaxies, TNG50 & EAGLE to generate mock spectra & lines.

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

🌌 Dust in COLIBRE We tracked the evolution of dust scaling relations in the COLIBRE simulations. We recover most of the observed scaling relations, finding • Silicates dominate at all epochs • Grain sizes shift from large-grain dominant at high-z to a balanced mix today. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2607.26058

arxiv.org

The evolution of galaxy dust scaling relations in the COLIBRE simulations

We present dust scaling relations across cosmic time ($0 \le z \le 15$) for galaxies in the COLIBRE cosmological simulations. COLIBRE self-consistently tracks dust production, growth, destruction, and...

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

🚨 Double paper drop on arXiv this week! 📄✨Excited to share two new preprints focusing on dust physics in cosmological simulations and synthetic observations. 🧵👇

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

I've decided to compile a definitive thread of photos of the best sheep I've photographed during my walks in the countryside, together with supporting biographical information. I will put the vital story associated with each sheep in the alt text, since some of it is a little long to fit in a post.

A nihilistic sheep, who, like so many other sheep, just wants to watch the world burn, staring at me insouciantly, moments after it has set fire to a large portion of the United Kingdom.

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Michael Merrifield @astromikemerri.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Those paragraphs baldly describe £95M squandered by @uniofnottingham.bsky.social’s senior managers, *none* of whom were held to account; they slipped off to new jobs. The staff they left behind are being made redundant to pay for it. It’s sickening. (www.timeshighereducation.com/news/careers...)

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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

"Someone, somewhere, has taken the decision to defund astrophysics research in the UK, but no-one seems quite sure who that was, or why." The latest on the impact of the catastrophic funding cuts to UK astrophysics, by me, in @natastron.nature.com 👩‍🔬🧪🔭 ✒️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

World View: A change in UK policy jeopadizes the future of UK astrophysics - By Catherine Heymans

The latest budget proposal announced by the largest UK science funding agency threatens to severely affect UK astrophysics research. My colleagues and I are fighting back.

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Simon Williams @si-wills.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Less than one week after this post, the theoretical particle physics grants have been ruthlessly cut. PDRA positions are down by ~70% compared to the last funding cycle. Some groups cannot even hire postdocs for the next 4 years. This is on top of an effective 100% hiring cut for October 2026.

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Our paper where we test how reliably one can recover galaxy properties using nebular emission lines at high-z due to star-dust geometry and variation in the underlying stellar populations is now published in the OJAp. All the scripts and data to reproduce the results are on GitHub. Do have a read!

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

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Chris Lintott @chrislintott.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

For more than a decade now the government’s answer to how to fund universities has been to make money from overseas students. The last lot then tried to discourage students from coming here. This lot just want the money back. But then how do we fund ourselves? Crazy.

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The Open Journal of Astrophysics @ojastro.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables" by Christopher Lovell (Cambridge), William Roper, Aswin Vijayan, & Stephen Wilkins (Sussex), Sophie Newman (Portsmouth) and Louise Seeyave (Sussex) doi.org/10.33232/001...

doi.org

Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables | Published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics

By Christopher C. Lovell, William J. Roper & 4 more. A suite of software tools for creating synthetic astrophysical observables for use in mock galaxy catalogues

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James Trayford @trayford.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

The sophisticated COLIBRE simulations finally land on the arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2508.21126. Treating these with sonification, we can get new intuition for galaxy evolution to augment our visuals. Sound on for the explainer vid, visit the site for more! colibre.strw.leidenuniv.nl/videos.html 🔭🧪

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Sarah, manic pixie dream MILF @goatsarah.org · 29/08/2025

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

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Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Mohamed Salah calls out UEFA for not mentioning Israeli forces killed Al-Obeid as he waited for aid at Gaza distribution center. The "Palestinian Pele" leaves behind a wife & five kids. His death means Israel has now killed 321 footballers in Gaza (players, coaches, admin, refs etc)

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

We have been working on synthesizer for quite a while now (~3yrs 😅), expect more papers coming out using it. There is already a paper out on arxiv (arxiv.org/abs/2506.15811), submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software. An introduction paper will be out very soon!

arxiv.org

Synthesizer: Synthetic Observables For Modern Astronomy

Synthesizer is a fast, flexible, modular, and extensible Python package that empowers astronomers to turn theoretical galaxy models into realistic synthetic observations - including spectra, photometr...

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

documented and easy to use package to create synthetic observations.

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

We also provide a github link (github.com/aswinpvijaya...) where there are a few notebooks that you can run to reproduce all the plots in the paper or if you want to do your own exploration. This uses the open-source python package, synthesizer (synthesizer-project.github.io/synthesizer/), a well

github.com

GitHub - synthesizer-project/synthesizer: Synthesizer - a code for creating synthetic astrophysical observables

Synthesizer - a code for creating synthetic astrophysical observables - synthesizer-project/synthesizer

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

model galaxies and hydrodynamical simulations. We look at the SFR, ionising photon production efficiency and the mass-metallicity relation. The variation in the properties of stellar population and star-dust geometry can make them unreliable. You can read the paper to find out more!

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

New paper alert! We have a paper on arxiv (arxiv.org/abs/2507.20190), where we test how reliably one can recover galaxy properties using some of these incredible galaxy emission lines that JWST has been collecting. We approach this by using a combination of synthetic observations from simple toy

arxiv.org

Interpreting nebular emission lines in the high-redshift Universe

One of the most remarkable outcomes from JWST has been the exquisite UV-optical spectroscopic data for galaxies in the high-redshift Universe ($z \geq 5$), enabling the use of various nebular emission...

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Maria Leptin @marialep.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Very promising news on the next seven-year EU budget, with a proposed substantial increase for Horizon Europe including the ERC. We are analysing the other parts of this proposal in more detail. @Vonderleyen @EZaharievaEU research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-res...

research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu

Horizon Europe 2028 - 2034: twice bigger, simpler, faster and more impactful

Research and innovation news alert: As part of the next long-term EU budget 2028-2034, the Commission is proposing to double the budget of the research and innovation framework programme to €175 billi...

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Saul Staniforth @saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

British surgeon Nick Maynard, who has just returned from volunteering in Gaza, explains to #GMB viewers how Israel confiscates all baby formula that doctors like him try to take with them. Why does Israel do this? Because they want to starve Palestinian babies to death.

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Saul Staniforth @saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

"it seemed to us like this was almost like a game of target practice. We're going to shoot the head today. Tomorrow it'll be the chest. The next day it'll be the testicles" British surgeon Nick Maynard on IDF soldiers shooting Palestinian kids.

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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Police in Canterbury today informed a protestor that the phrase "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza" could be considered a declaration of support for Palestine Action and therefore a terrorism offence.

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Euclid UK @eucliduk.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Thanks to support from @esa.int and @sussex.ac.uk, #HumansOfEuclid from UK universities are at the Goodwood #FestivalOfSpeed! Today, Astronaut Tim Peake dropped by to learn about more about the Dark Universe. If you’re visiting #FOS near Chichester this weekend, be like Tim and come say hi!

A wide shot of part of the Euclid exhibition at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. In the foreground are lots of people wandering around the exhibit. On the left is a huge screen displaying a Euclid image. The exhibition is held in a large black tent, which drapes from the top of the image.

Researcher Dr Will Roper is on the left, talking to Astronaut Tim Peake featured on the right. They are in the Euclid exhibition, seen in the background. In particular they are looking at an interactive screen of a Universe simulator called Swift.

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Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 01/06/2025

Videos show Israeli air attacks levelling residential buildings in Gaza, reducing them to rubble amid Israel's ongoing war on the besieged enclave.

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Annalisa Nicholson @apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

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Ryan Godfrey @ryangodfrey.com · 22/05/2025

I believe this means the sun will set over the entirety of the British Empire tonight for the first time in several hundred years. Chagos is the dot below India on this map. Sunset in the Pitcairns (dot in the Pacific) will happen ~40 minutes before sunrise in Akrotiri and Dhekelia (dot on Cyprus).

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Katy Montgomerie 🦗 @katymontgomerie.com · 22/04/2025

This statement about the transphobic Supreme Court ruling by the UK's Crab Museum (yes a museum about crabs) is better than 99% of the statements I've seen on the topic www.crabmuseum.org/visit 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Also methods like sph, which is also used in industrial applications. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothe...

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Raluca Terry-Enescu @ralucahippie.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Could JD Vance please also pray for the good health of Vladimir Putin?

Tweet from JD Vance:

"Today I met with the Holy Father Pope Francis. I am grateful for his invitation to meet, and I pray for his good health."

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Nadia Drake @nadiadrake.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

About the leaked NASA budget proposal that kills an almost-ready-to-launch flagship mission: "It sets back a program that is clearly the leading program in the world—in a historic fashion. You take that program and shoot it through the head." www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa...

scientificamerican.com

NASA’s Next Major Space Telescope Is Ready to Launch. Trump Wants to Kill It and Other Vital Science

Amid harsh cuts, the Trump administration has proposed canceling the nearly ready-to-launch Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

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Jess O'Thomson @jessothomson.co.uk · 16/04/2025

My analysis of today's UK Supreme Court judgment. The UK Supreme Court Rules That Trans Women Aren't Women Under the Equality Act 2010 www.wearequeeraf.com/uk-supreme-c...

wearequeeraf.com

UK Supreme Court Rules That Trans Women Aren’t Women under the Equality Act 2010

The legal definition of a woman in the UK now excludes trans people: This is what it means for Trans+ rights in the country

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The Onion @theonion.com · 04/04/2025

Trump Assures Wall Street He’ll Go Back To Just Fucking Over Poor People Soon theonion.com...

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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Until a couple of months ago, this sign hung in the lobby of the Space Telescope Science Institute: "STScI promotes an inclusive, equitable workplace and cultivates a diverse, engaged workforce." It has now been removed.

Lobby plaque with motto proclaiming the virtues of inclusiveness, equitability, diversity, and engagement.

Blank wall after plaque has been removed, presumably reflecting an underlying change in values.

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

I think the only reason I could finish the second book, was probably because I was listening to the audiobook on my bike commute.

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Dan Farbman @danfarbman.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Gonna keep saying this: In the 1840s, Southerners insisted that they could kidnap any person they alleged was a slave without any state or federal process. This turned even minimal process into resistance and raised the salience of the issue, which radicalized a bunch of people against slavery.

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Aswin Vijayan @aswinpvijayan.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Our magnum opus (that is until the next one 😇) arxiv.org/abs/2503.24312

It is the screenshot of the abstract from arXiv of a paper describing the discovery of an absurdly high-redshift galaxy

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 01/04/2025

NEW: GlobalX flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then the company started expanding into deportation flights. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

propub.li

Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time”

Current and former flight attendants for GlobalX, the private charter airline at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown, expressed concern about their inability to treat passengers humanely and…

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WIRED @wired.com · 27/03/2025

Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

wrd.cm

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science

Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

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CosmicRami 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @rami.spaceaustralia.com · 27/03/2025

LOL. Savage (but accurate I guess) Also, another well written 'Big Story' from @wired.com 👏

Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation. Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices to ordinary readers, and institutions were forced to pay exorbitant fees for access.

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Dr. Princess Vimentin PhD | Cancer Biologist @princess-vimentin.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

My friend from graduate school found out that funding for her NF1 project got pulled. From $25 mil to 0 with a stroke of a pen. NF1=Neurofibromatosis Type 1, an inherited genetic disorder. Both of us are early career scientists. 🧪🔬🧬 #Science #AcademicSky www.wired.com/story/the-ch...

Depiction of the status of early career scientists. Instagram.

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