Prof Anna Watts

a ground squirrel standing on its hind legs with buckets written on a wooden surface Alt: a ground squirrel standing on its hind legs with buckets written on a wooden surface

I have now identified more than 100 bloody buckets just to be allowed to read journal papers in SciX.

ai:du This makes me so angry and sad. 😡😢

A group of astronomers peering at a rack of compute nodes.

A huge treat to get a tour of Dutch supercomputer Snellius as part of our X-PSI team hack week! A chance to salute the hard-working nodes in person. Thank you @itcooperativesurf.bsky.social !

Why does quantum chromodynamics get quote marks?! It's a real thing! And definitely easier to understand than American politics.

You can already find the mass-radius samples for our headline run in a Zenodo. We'll update this with a full reproduction package in due course!

zenodo.org/records/1874...

Egg colours Purple: chocolate goop Blue: nuts? Indeterminate Teal/green : crunchy white stuff ( vanilla) Pink: strawberry Dark orange: white choc and caramel

X-PSI spring hack week is underway! The most important part of the hack board? Identifying the chocolate egg flavours in the hack snack tin.

The results are - incoming pun klaxon - much nicer! Results for the different geometric models are more consistent, and tension with other results, for the statistically preferred model, is reduced. Phew!

A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Updated Constraints from Six Years of NICER Observations Pulse-profile modeling of rotation-powered millisecond pulsars targeted by NICER has enabled mass--radius constraints of several neutron star sources, with implications for the dense-matter equation o...

New NICER neutron star results this morning, led by Yves Kini! For the first rotation-powered millisecond pulsar we ever reported on, PSR J0030+0451.

More data (6 years!), background constraints fully incorporated, and improved sampling. #highenergyastro 🔭🧪

arxiv.org/abs/2602.23743

a man wearing a vest and tie stands in front of a group of men with the word apollo 13 on the bottom Alt: Control room, Apollo 13 movie, Gene is standing and saying "good job"

Family movie night, Apollo 13. Kids - thankfully - loved it. There would otherwise have been ructions.

The American-Israeli Strikes on Iran are (Again) Manifestly Illegal After weeks of threats, the United States, joined by Israel, has launched military strikes against Iran. It remains to be seen whether these strikes will be fairly limited, or are the opening of an ex...

Unsurprisingly, Marko has already written something… /3 www.ejiltalk.org/the-american...

Dame Carole Jordan – first female president of the RAS – 1941-2026 We are saddened to hear of the death of Professor Dame Carole Jordan – the first female president of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) – who has passed away a...

A trailblazer (which I did not appreciate enough when I sat in her lectures!).

ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Sigh saying E = m c squared Energy = milk times coffee squared

Wise words from the hoardings on the building site of the new Graz Centre for Physics

I've been aware of this impending change - which hits my dual national kids - for months, as soon as I realised I couldn't get them an ETA on their Dutch passports. I am quite bemused that many of my friends missed it.

But they *did*, and the consequences suck... so fixing it seems wise?

Plaque saying " Ihrem mitgleide in den jahren 1869-1873 und 1876-1890 Ludwig Boltzmann die philosophische fakultät der universität Graz"

Hanging out with the Big Physics Cheeses in Graz....

It's awful isn't it?

Leader of Columbia Brain Institute Quits Over Friendship With Epstein

Gift link from the NYT story about Axel and Epstein. When I was at Columbia he ran a lab where sexual harassment of women was business as usual. We all knew. We all warned each other.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/n...

Not open to anyone needing a visa, is that right?

Ik begrijp dat de inkrimping van de veestapel afhangt van de vraag of ‘we de
boeren meekrijgen’. Dat hoor je nou nooit bij bezuinigingen in de zorg of sociale zekerheid. Dan maakt het niets uit wat de betrokkenen ervan vinden.

Our institute is being renovated so we're packing up to move to a temporary location. Cue a LOT of clearing up....

Well maybe reading a final draft of a PhD thesis to a little BLΛƆKPIИK? It's a tough one.....

a woman in a white shirt is sitting in front of a window with her hands outstretched . Alt: Marie Kondo, tidying guru extraordinaire, is bowing. She too, doubtless hates the piles of old exam scripts that litter the office of every Dutch academic.

Does anything spark more joy than despatching old exams to the shredder? I think not.

“Mooie woorden, weinig daden”, kopt Volkskrant. Met de huidige plannen worden klimaat- en stikstofdoelen niet gehaald. Die conclusie trekt PBL op basis van het coalitieakkoord dat vol ambitieuze woorden staat. Het verschil tussen cijfers en woorden.

YES! I used to do this and it was amazing for mom sanity. Light pottering and coffee in town, maybe a pedicure? Bliss.

Read the whole thread. Then pre-order Chanda’s book.

I haven’t yet gone looking to see if the professors who ultimately convinced me that higher ed wasn’t a place I wanted to be due to their behavior are in the files. But what Chanda says resonates deeply nonetheless.

Oh I'm so sorry to hear this! Give that poor kitty baby all the hugs.

Chart of Physics doctorates earned from 1978 to 2024, with a steady increase in the number of women but overarching trends closely tracking the number of men earning PhDs

Chart showing doctorates earned in astronomy from 1978 to 2024 with women making steady gains and closing in on parity, and an overarching increase in number of PhDs earned linked to the increasing numbers of women entering the field.

The AIP stats team has released its latest data of physics & astronomy PhD trends, with breakdown by gender. What is extraordinary to me is how clearly the overall trends exhibit an important gender dimension, and that that story is quite different between physics and astronomy.

That's awful. I'm so sorry.

We have fondued. It was spectacular. #Bern

An intrepid group of astrophysicists standing and sitting in front of the space mural at the International Space Science Institute in Bern. We are solving all of the puzzles.

Having a lot of fun addressing the evergreen question "What is going on here??!" with the Polarimetric Insights into Extreme Magnetism @issibern.ch team....

Flashbacks to the last time I was at ISSI, when I was pregnant with sprog number 1 with associated epic morning/all damn day sickness 😅. Fun times, fun times....