Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Sep 3

My friends in NYC got tickets thanks to your reminder, thanks Jon :)

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Aug 18

Following up on this, here's an even cooler animation of the SWOT overpass!
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/15466...

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Aug 8

An intern on SWOT showed me a preliminary version of this earlier this week, even cooler to see it plotted against the NOAA tsunami forecast model!

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Jul 30

Excited to try this out! Earth foundation models have frankly been hit-or-miss, but this seems promising.

deepmind.google/discover/blo...

AlphaEarth Foundations helps map our planet in unprecedented detail

New AI model integrates petabytes of Earth observation data to generate a unified data representation that revolutionizes global mapping and monitoring

deepmind.google

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Jul 9

Our EMIT cloud mask work is published in PNAS! This is my first major first-author publication ☁️🌎🛰️
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Just in time, we're releasing an improved model to be used for our new data product: github.com/emit-sds/Spe...

SpecTf: Transformers enable data-driven imaging spectroscopy cloud detection | PNAS

Current and upcoming generations of visible-shortwave infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectrometers promise unprecedented capacity to quantify Earth syste...

www.pnas.org

Reposted by Jake Lee

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · Jun 11

A friend just asked me what I do to stay hopeful and I told him one of my favorite strategies…I stay hopeful by remembering that no one has any idea what the fuck is going to happen, so as long as we don’t know, we gotta do what we can.

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Jun 9

Congratulations to @columbiaseas.bsky.social and Columbia Space Initiative (SEDS) on a successful launch and recovery of the first US student-led LOX hybrid rocket!!

As a board member of the founding class it's incredible to see how far we've come 🚀🚀

www.engineering.columbia.edu/about/news/c...

Columbia Students Reach New Heights in Hybrid Rocketry | Columbia Engineering

The Columbia Space Initiative’s rocketry team was recognized by competition officials for achieving what’s believed to be a rare feat among U.S. student-led groups: launch and recovery of a liquid oxy...

www.engineering.columbia.edu

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · May 26

I was just looking for something like this for a motivated high school student, is the AAS copy equivalent to the free copy up on prappleizer.github.io by the same author?

Python for Astronomers

prappleizer.github.io

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Reposted by Jake Lee

The New York Times @nytimes.com · Apr 29

Breaking News: The Trump administration dismissed all the scientists working on the government’s premiere report on the effects of climate change in the U.S.

National Climate Assessment Authors Are Dismissed by Trump Administration

The Trump administration told researchers it was “releasing” them from their roles. It puts the future of the assessment, which is required by Congress, in doubt.

www.nytimes.com

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Apr 22

CGP Grey has taken "thumbnail optimization" very literally by applying common deep learning augmentation techniques to his older videos' thumbnails: color inversion, tile flipping, gaussian noise... It's certainly working, I myself absentmindedly clicked on one.

Top Left: YouTube thumbnail for the video "The Race to Win Staten Island", but the colors are inverted: the land is blue and the ocean is orange. Top Right: "Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant", a square crop in the center is mirrored horizontally. Bottom Left: "Is Pluto a planet?", the entire thumbnail has gaussian noise added, resulting in a grainy image. Bottom Right: "Death to Pennies", the thumbnail has noise added, as well as a small square flipped horizontally on the left.

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Apr 13

New preprint! We use generative diffusion models to quickly produce realistic #Euclid -like galaxies, a step towards addressing challenges in calibrating and validating weak lensing analyses. 🔭🧪
arxiv.org/abs/2504.07183

Caption: "DDPM-generated Euclid-like galaxies" Content: a grid of black-and-white images of galaxies generated by a diffusion model.

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Apr 13

We got so busy I forgot to follow up, our team did amazing and we were recognized with the Rising All-Star Award! I'm very proud of everything we accomplished despite the challenges, from our first swerve year to the wildfires. #firstrobotics #frc

About 30 students and mentors of First Robotics Competition Team 2404 standing around their competition robot, about 2ft across and 3ft tall.

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Apr 3

Day 1, here we go! #FRC2404 #FRC #AVR

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Mar 3

So excited to get our first complete swerve, vision, and kinematics stack working!!! I'm very impressed by how easy it was to build with the wpilib and photonvision APIs. Yes, the camera is mounted upside down. Shoutout to 980 for letting us use their field on weekends 🤖 #FRC #robotics

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Mar 3

Whoa, this one hit hard and quick in Pasadena, not the rumble I'm used to. I thought a car hit the apartment building or something

Bluesky USGS Quakebot @usgs-quakebot.bsky.social · Mar 3

M3.9 #earthquake detected 2 km ESE of North Hollywood, CA at 3/2/2025 10:13:45 PM PST

This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information

M3.9 - 2 km ESE of North Hollywood, CA

A magnitude 3.9 earthquake located 2 km ESE of North Hollywood, CA was detected at 3/2/2025 10:13:45 PM PST. This information is subject to change. Please visit the USGS event page for up-to-date details.

earthquake.usgs.gov

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Feb 12

Re: Asteroid
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHbJ...

About that Giant Asteroid...

YouTube video by hankschannel

www.youtube.com

Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Feb 12

there's a lot of things going on in the world right now (from asteroids to... more existential threats), but we're working really hard on getting some papers out ASAP just in case, and our FRC team is building a kick-ass robot, so I just have to keep going.

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Reposted by Jake Lee

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · Feb 2

Feeling like supporting accurate, compelling science content that reaches an audience beyond the manufactured binaries of our fucked up world?

Today is the last day you can get a SciShow Postcard.
complexly.store/collections/...

SciShow Postcard

SciShow is asking you for help to fund another year of 5-times-a-week, backed-by-research and designed-for-fun science videos. We’ve always relied on your support to keep SciShow going, and that’s tru...

complexly.store

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Reposted by Jake Lee

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · Jan 30

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

Ben Stone @benstemon.bsky.social · Jan 30

It’s official: all funding requests made on Tuesday by postdocs for their salaries have been unilaterally rejected by NSF.

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Reposted by Jake Lee

A. Suárez Mascareño @asuarezmascareno.com · Jan 28

I'm very proud of presenting today the first article of my PhD student Nicola Nari, the confirmation of the existence of a Super-Earth in the habitable zone of the nearby Sun-like star 82 Eridani (HD 20794), originally proposed by Michael Cretignier a few years ago 🔭🪐

The IAC confirms the existence of a Super-earth in the habitable zone of a Sun-like Star

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) has confirmed the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of HD 20794, a nearby Sun-like star. T...

www.iac.es

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Reposted by Jake Lee

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · Jan 24

You fuckers are sleeping on Jupiter’s moons. I don’t want to ever hear one more person whine about Pluto if they can’t tell me a single fact about the in-every-way-superior Ganymede.

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Jan 16

High-resolution airborne AVIRIS-3 L1b radiance is publicly available for the #LAwildfire via Earthdata, and visualized on MMGIS. Incredible imagery of burn extent. #remotesensing 🌎🛰️

popo.jpl.nasa.gov/mmgis-aviris...
www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/alerts-...

Screenshot of a web portal visualizing airborne instrument imagery of the Eaton Fire. JPL located on the upper left. Burned areas cover the right half, and is outlined in red.

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Reposted by Jake Lee

Jonathan McDowell @planet4589.bsky.social · Jan 16

LAUNCH at 0703 UTC Jan 16 of New Glenn from Canaveral,
with successful parking orbit insertion of stage 2. Stage 1 made its reentry burn but did not successfully complete landing on the barge. Stage 2 is due to restart to go to higher orbit. Congrats Blue Origin!

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Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Jan 14

Fun fact: this project is how I, a "data scientist", learned SQL. Never took a databases course in college. Oops!

Jake Lee @jakehlee.com · Jan 14

Valorie's been my side project for about a year now, it's a #Discord bot that sends notifications for #Valorant #VCT #Esports. I just added a Pick'Ems feature so you can compete with your friends, check it out!

www.reddit.com/r/ValorantCo...

From the ValorantCompetitive community on Reddit: Valorie Discord Bot: Introducing VCT Pick'Ems!

Explore this post and more from the ValorantCompetitive community

www.reddit.com

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