Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerNo More Deaths | No Más Muertes @nomoredeaths.bsky.social · 17h⚠️ Border wall contractors plan to remove thousands of sacred saguaros (ha:ṣañ) on sovereign O'odham land starting Monday — Indigenous People's Day. Tadai Me:i Camp calls supporters to join in prayer and protest on the Tohono O’odham Nation. 19283
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerArs Technica @arstechnica.com · 09/10/2026arstechnica.comAI coding agents generate more code, but not more softwareStudy finds coding efficiency gains get "absorbed" by human review "bottleneck." 27395130
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerJayke Samson Nguyen @jayke.io · 10/09/2026Hot off the press! Via the magic of differentiable forward modeling and of non-redundant masking on JWST we may have found a new exoplanet! One of the most challenging papers I've written, but I'm glad its finally out! Submitted to AJ, pending peer review. arxiv.org/abs/2609.10507arxiv.orgA Candidate Innermost Fifth Planet In the HR 8799 System Revealed By JWST NIRISS Aperture Masking InterferometryWe detect a candidate fifth planet in the HR 8799 system, directly imaged with the JWST/NIRISS Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI). The detected source lies just above a $3σ$ contrast curve at a con... 2489
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerAndrea Mann @andreamann.bsky.social · 19/08/2026"By writing, you are literally firing up your brain and therefore stirring up your conscious thoughts and something new emerges. You are not, or at least not always, transcribing something already present in your conscious thoughts.“ LOVE this piece. www.historians.org/perspectives...historians.orgHow Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around) – AHAWriting is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words. 181039336
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerMichael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 19/08/2026AI makes children better at doing their homework but 20% stupider so it's impossible to say whether it's good or not 251466297
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerCharles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026Northwestern University admin accepting $35 million for the football program from MAGA donors Dick and Liz Uihlein while also shuttering the African Studies program and its 80-year-old history is a pretty good encapsulation of higher ed in the US. 311997645
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerJohn Aerni-Flessner @lesothojohn.bsky.social · 15/08/2026This is an absolute travesty. Northwestern has, probably, the 2nd best library collection for African History/Studies in the USA (behind Yale and ahead of MSU, UCLA, etc). A self-inflicted wound that is absolutely, 100% unnecessary given the massive wealth of Northwestern--north of $15 billion.thepurplewire.beehiiv.comSCOOP: Northwestern moves to close Program of African Studies 471937806
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 25/06/2026helpful coverage from @elpais.com english.elpais.com/usa/2025-08-...english.elpais.comIn the heart of the Miccosukee, the Native American tribe that shut down Alligator AlcatrazThe community found refuge from white persecution deep in the Everglades swamps centuries ago. Together with environmental groups, they succeeded in forcing the closure of the immigration detention ce... 2888374110
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerProf Stephen Serjeant @stephenserjeant.bsky.social · 18/06/2026Don’t trust LLMs with your literature searches. Horrible gender biases as found in this paper (from later in the thread below) arxiv.org/abs/2508.02740 🧪🔭arxiv.orgWho Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference SelectionLarge language models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted as research assistants, particularly for literature review and reference recommendation, yet little is known about whether they introduce demogra... 19148
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 05/06/2026thank you so much Tad! that means a lot to hear :) 010
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 04/06/2026it was the night before the thesis defense, and all through the house... 2180
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 08/05/2026what do you evem write in a thesis guys (it's due in two weeks btw) 290
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerSimon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 23/04/2026If you have a passion for science, work hard at your research, & get some lucky breaks along the way, you too can achieve your dream of a life dedicated to management & administrative issues. 312331
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 14/04/2026you can read more about this in our press release from NASA here: you can read more at nasa's site here: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-redefines-dividing-line-between-planets-stars/ or read the paper, published in ApJ Letters this morning, here: arxiv.org/abs/2604.09785science.nasa.govNASA's Webb Redefines Dividing Line Between Planets, Stars - NASA SciencePlanets, like those in our solar system, form in a bottom-up process where small bits of rock and ice clump together and grow larger over time. But the 140
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 14/04/2026🔭🪐 my team took this image of 29 Cygni b, a super giant planet 130 light years from us, with JWST. we found some interesting clues that suggest that this planet (~15x the mass of Jupiter) accreted more than 100 times the mass of the Earth in carbon- and oxygen-rich material during its formation 2266
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerJason Wang @thejason.wang · 13/04/2026Super excited for @balmer.bsky.social to be joining us this fall! Welcome to the @heisingsimonsfdn.bsky.social 51 peg b family! 0111
Reposted by Dr. William O. Balmerxkcd title text @xkcd-titletext.bsky.social · 16/03/2026Title text: "An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion." Alt text: explainxkcd.com/3219#Transcript 12128
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 13/03/2026🤠 back to protoplanets. somehow we return to our roots 010
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 13/03/2026give me enough time in the control room and ill dig them the dark hole myself 000
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 13/03/2026...!!! this would have been perfect to know for a brown dwarf proposal i submitted, that was accepted! we got time for direct imaging in the same filters instead... unlikely, but maybe there's a way to work together? 230
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerKatie Mack @astrokatie.com · 28/02/2026In case you’re just waking up, the U.S. has teamed up with Israel overnight to start an illegal war of regime change, apparently on a presidential whim with no involvement of Congress, and they are already committing horrific atrocities. 164912730
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerBenjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 13/02/2026Suleiman Baraka in Gaza says this about his work: “I decided to fight the killing of the children by educating the children.... astronomy “is also a window for breathing freedom that we were denied for our whole life". I think this is the reason the world needs it. All of us need his example.undark.orgIn Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not DronesA Palestinian scientist's effort to bring astronomy to Gaza has begun to bear fruit, but steep hurdles remain. 1217
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 07/02/2026needs a catchy limerick for memorization. periapsis in abstract, perihelion for the Sun, perigee for the Earth, and periastron for binary stars (inherited by exoplanets, which are really just very small binary stars), lil omega, a.o.p., the forgotten one, etc 220
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 07/02/2026that's an easy fix. just plot the upper 1 sigma uncertainty on argument of periastron on the abscissa, and the lower 1 sigma uncertainty on the tess input catalog stellar effective temperature on the ordinate. basically as informative as m or r vs P imo 150
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 14/01/2026we found the same with nircam last year! two independent instruments showing strong CO2 features and the power of JWST at high contrasts 011
Dr. William O. Balmer @balmer.bsky.social · 07/01/2026woohoo a high throughput coronagraph in space 😀 000
Reposted by Dr. William O. BalmerThe Onion @theonion.com · 06/01/2026NASA Discovers Distant Planet With Conditions That Could Sustain Rocks theonion.com/nasa-discovers-distant… 331996281