iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 01/09/2026

I know it is written that Thou Shalt Not Get Too Excited About <3 Sigma Results, but this is — potentially — very cool. Crossing fingers that they might have found a hint of something real, and very much looking forward to what more data might bring… www.sciencenews.org/article/dark...

sciencenews.org

Have scientists glimpsed the first dark matter particle?

Shadowy dark matter has eluded scientists for decades. The LZ experiment may have spotted one particle, called a WIMP, but more data is needed to check.

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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Well I think I am liking this new +ve PM! In response to @sarahrussellmp.bsky.social on Jodrell: "there must be a way to save #JodrellBank and I give her a commitment at this dispatch box - we will find it" Brilliant Burnham! Can you now save all the other epic projects that have also been cut 🙏🔭

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 30/08/2026

Nothing like a call to go on BBC news to shake up a relaxing Sunday morning! I spoke about all things Nancy Grace Roman — how powerful it is, the amazing discoveries that await us, and the fact that all the data will be completely public. Bring on the launch :)

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 18/08/2026

After trying a few, my absolute favourite (even better than a sharpie!) is a Pilot V Sign Pen. It’s literally perfect. Thin and glides like a dream, and no bleed through 😊📖

A pilot V Sign Pen, the best pen for signing books

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 09/08/2026

Forecast is looking promising so far! anything can happen in three days…

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 09/08/2026

Arrived in northern Spain for the #eclipse and scoped out a viewing spot up in the mountains. The clouds have three days to move...

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 09/08/2026

I always find it a bit odd that Hank Green positions himself as a general science communicator. Not biochem (which he has a degree in), but just, like, everything. All science. As an astro sci-comm person (with a PhD) I’d feel weird about positioning myself as an authority outside my own field…

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 04/08/2026

The first draft of my next book is done! Coming 2027…

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Royal Institution @rigb.org · 28/07/2026

Patterns in the Universe's "baby picture" contain evidence for dark matter. 🌌 Astronomer @mattbothwell.com reveals how tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background help scientists determine what the early Universe was made of. Watch the full talk: youtube.com/watch?v=bLa3k0NoHvY

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 17/06/2026

Venus and the moon putting on a good show this evening 😀🔭🧪

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 12/06/2026

Currently needing multiple people across different departments to read and sign off an extensive risk assessment, all so a small group of adults can attend a daytime lecture and eat a packed lunch. What was that about admin bloat strangling universities?

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anil oza @aniloza.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Twitter thread from Thomas Dietterich, reading "Attention
@arxiv
authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
3:03 PM · May 14, 2026
·
66.7K
Views
Relevant
View quotes

Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). 2/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper. 3/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue. 4/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
Examples of incontrovertible evidence: hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM ("here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?"; "the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments") end/"

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 30/05/2026

Seeing billion dollar publishers using AI book covers is pretty depressing. Who needs graphic designers when you have the magic slop machine

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 21/05/2026

32 degrees in May is illegal, actually, so could you not

A weather forecast, showing a heatwave up to 32 degrees this coming Monday.

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 20/05/2026

I’ve got a writing buddy today. He is not helping.

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 07/05/2026

It's publication day for Mastering the Multiverse, the latest instalment of the Supervillain Academy series from @dkbooks.bsky.social! Black holes, time travel, wormholes, dark matter, and the big one: do we actually live in a multiverse? Available everywhere books are sold 😀🧪🔭

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Jacob Aron @jjaron.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Incredible video made using images taken by the Artemis II crew shows satellites in orbit around Earth. This is at 30x speed x.com/i/status/205...

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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

A recommended read by Hiranya Peiris: "[we] had a quality problem long before LLMs...publish or perish, citation metrics as proxy for impact, volume as proxy for productivity... have been producing incremental, poorly checked, & sometimes wrong papers for decades"🧪🔭⚛️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Deckard was wrong, in the end, not because the replicants were dangerous, but because he had misunderstood the nature of the problem. The question was never really about the machines. It was about what kind of society had produced them and why. The same is true here. LLMs are not a threat to astrophysics. But the mirror they hold up to our profession is not entirely flattering, and we would do well to look at it honestly. The problems it reveals — the perverse incentives, the erosion of mentoring, the substitution of volume for thought — are ours, not the machine’s. Fixing them is our problem. It always was.

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 10/04/2026

This is from my Ri talk last year, all about the mysteries of dark matter. Always fun to give lectures in such a stunning venue 😀

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Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

A bit of a different take on the amazing Artemis II launch footage. Here I stitched clips from the four Solar Array Wing Cameras to make this panoramic video. This is during the later part of the Core Stage burn until MECO and stage separation, sped up to 10x. 🔭🧪 #Artemis

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 07/04/2026

The new Artemis 2 pictures are stunning! 🧪🔭

The crescent Earth, behind the much larger foreground horizon of the Moon

The moon eclipsing the Sun, as seen from Space. The moon is a shadowy sphere, with rays of sunlight and stars all around it

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 03/04/2026

Humans are going beyond Earth orbit with 2026 cameras instead of 1970s cameras. The images coming out of this mission are going to be stunning

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 02/04/2026

I have a new book coming out next month -- my children's astronomy books have become a trilogy 😀 Want to know about time travel, black holes, wormholes, and whether we live in a multiverse? Mastering the Multiverse is out May 7th, and available to preorder now. 🔭🧪 dk.com/products/978...

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 23/03/2026

Star Formation xkcd.com/3222/

4-panel comic. (1) [Glowing black dot surrounded by clouds.] DOT: I think I did a good job with this universe. Pressure waves dance through gas clouds. They clump together and then pressure pushes them apart. (2) [Some of the clouds are clumping together.] DOT: Oh weird, that big clump of clouds is staying together. Their gravity is overcoming the pressure and more gas is falling in. (3) [More clouds are sucked in.] DOT: It’s not stopping! The heat is rising but the collapse is only accelerating! I messed up. I messed up *bad*. (4) [The clump has become a shining star.] DOT: NOOOOOOOO!!! My beautiful clouds! Ruined! It’s all ruined!

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Cliff Pervocracy @pervocracy.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

astronomy is so funny because it's this fairly niche interest for a small community of nerds and also it's 99.9999% of everything that exists

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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

The Science, Innovation & Tech committee have written the most amazing letter to DSIT/UKRI/STFC: "What is clear is that, despite your assertions to the contrary... widespread cuts have been proposed before adequate consultation with those affected was undertaken. This is wholly unacceptable" 💪🔭⚛️🧪

The letter reads:

We were deeply concerned by what we heard, both from witnesses representing the PPAN community and those who contacted us in advance of the hearing.
It is not clear whether the current situation is the by-product of irresponsible financial management and inadequate governance; a conscious decision to set aside the 2009 ‘Drayson partitions’ in order to deprioritise a particular area of scientific research in favour of research facilities; an unintended consequence of wholesale, rushed reforms to the way the UK funds scientific research; or a combination of all three.
What is clear is that, despite your assertions to the contrary in evidence to my committee and our counterparts in the House of Lords, widespread cuts have been proposed before adequate consultation with those affected was undertaken.

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Michael Merrifield @astromikemerri.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

That really is… quite a letter. committees.parliament.uk/publications...

committees.parliament.uk

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 11/03/2026

Professor Collins! Bravo, very well deserved 😊

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 25/02/2026

This is so cool! You can see that at solar maximum (around 2002, 2013, and 2024 ish) HST drops more rapidly, because the increased solar activity puffs up the atmosphere, increasing drag on orbiting satellites 🧪🔭

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Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com · 13/02/2026

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

academic.oup.com

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪

arxiv.org

Why do we do astrophysics?

At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 07/02/2026

Yup! We need to be reposting every year.

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 06/02/2026

Binary Star xkcd.com/3203/

Comic. [Over dark background, a five-pointed pentagram-style star orbits around a white circle with a smaller orbit.] [caption] Space news: Astronomers have found the first known system with a main-sequence star orbited by a five-pointed one.

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ESO @eso.org · 02/02/2026

Exclusive view into the heart of the ELT! 👀 This image captures the interior of our ELT, under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert. The main structure shown here will host the ELT’s five mirrors. Read more: www.eso.org/public/images/potw2605a 🔭 🧪 📷 ESO/J. C. Muñoz-Mateos

This image shows the interior of the Extremely Large Telescope's (ELT) dome. The telescope structure, supported by struts, takes up most of the image in the centre, with some cranes around working. The gigantic doors of the dome are open, allowing sunlight to shine through.

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 17/01/2026

This is obviously getting less airtime than normal on account of The Horrors, but it’s incredibly cool and exciting that within weeks people will be going back to the Moon after more than half a century www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

theguardian.com

Nasa readies its most powerful rocket for round-the-moon flight

Artemis II mission could launch on 6 February, sending astronauts on a 685,000-mile journey

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Kit Whitfield - fantasy writer @kitwhitfield.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking? Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me. 1/

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Luke Ontario @coolhand.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Beautiful graphic of the day (because that should be a thing: Our Solar System By my data hero Eleanor Lutz

An annotated map of the solar system with hundreds of solar elements in beautiful rings

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 11/01/2026

We’ll see! I’ve submitted it to a human, but I’ve been told to expect an answer in a couple of weeks…

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 08/01/2026

The train company website insists my journey isn’t delayed, even though it knows my train got in at 9:57, and the connection left at 9:56. Glad to know LNER thinks I can literally time travel

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 07/01/2026

I’m going to be in Northern Ireland this February, talking about the search for alien life across the galaxy! If you’re around in Belfast, please come along 😀👽 nisciencefestival.com/event/the-gr...

nisciencefestival.com

The Great Alien Hunt with Dr Matt Bothwell | NI Science Festival

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 30/12/2025

Look Out: Egocentric Bullshit

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 29/12/2025

Eww why is the Guardian running advertorials for Macdonalds. These fake paid-for articles seem so much more pernicious than just regular ads

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 26/12/2025

There absolutely was ‘BookGate’: the Sad Puppy fiasco. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Pup...

en.wikipedia.org

Sad Puppies - Wikipedia

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Matt Bothwell @mattbothwell.com · 22/12/2025

Yes, the pulsar array is now a few old poles in an overgrown field. Which is a great shame. But the wider MRAO site is still in use, both for active instruments (AMI) and for SKA pathfinder stuff. Still going strong for now!

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