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Reposted by Will Thomas

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 5h

Thirty years after the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the Chinese government is once again calling on women to serve the nation, this time in science and technology. In this essay, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social revisits a century of women in science in China, tracing their struggles and achievements.

Beyond Representation: On Being a Woman in Science in China | Made in China Journal

In the autumn of 1995, Ye Shuhua made a speech. During the NGO Forum at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the 68-year-old astronomer took to the microphone and cal...

madeinchinajournal.com

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 2h

Glad you asked! www.aip.org/research/pol...

Policy primer: A new $100,000 fee on H-1B Visas

President Trump has issued a proclamation requiring a $100,000 payment for each new H-1B petition. We examine what it does and does not do, how it is being justified, and what developments to look out...

www.aip.org

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 17h

And Martinis? His dad was a refugee from Yugoslavia. repository.aip.org/node/129661

My dad was born in Croatia. As it happened, his father left for the United States shortly
before the war. And the family left behind were kind of by themselves over the war and
thirteen to seventeen. So, he had a very difficult childhood, and especially the teenage
years, and actually never talked about it much. I think he did quite well for having such a
difficult time growing up. After the war, his family was trying to get to the United States.
Yugoslavia was beginning to close up at the time because of the communist government.
In the end, escaped from Yugoslavia and had security people chasing him to make an
example of him. In the old country his family fished. So, when he went to Washington
state that is what he did with his father and brother. During the off season he came
down to San Pedro in California, where he had relatives, and met my mom.

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 19h

Ooh, nice one! Reminds me of @airminded.org

ArtButMakeItSports @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social · 20h

Incursione aerea, by Tullio Crali, 1932, 📸 by @sdgreatphotos

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Physics Today @physicstoday.bsky.social · 22h

John Martinis on the advising style of fellow Nobel laureate John Clarke:

"He came into the lab and talked with you every day. At the time it was sometimes annoying, but looking back this was probably the single most important thing he did to train me as an experimentalist."

#NobelPrize

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Physics Today @physicstoday.bsky.social · 22h

Michel Devoret also recalled John Clarke's "strict and intense training" in his 2021 @aip.bsky.social oral history interview:

"Basically, John Clarke was coming to see us every day in the lab and was asking, 'What is new today?'" He was both jovial and respectful, besides being demanding."

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 1d

Congratulations to this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Be sure to check out our oral histories with:

John Martinis: repository.aip.org/node/129661

Michel Devoret: repository.aip.org/node/129778

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 1d

Remarkable stats here. Big year-over-year dropoff in international student arrivals, including a 44% dropoff from India. Smaller dropoff from China, but those numbers were already way down post-pandemic.

Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August

The data shows the steepest decline in August international student arrivals since the pandemic.

www.nytimes.com

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 4d

Adams, by the way, is fascinating. Not only did he not have a PhD, he had no university education whatsoever. Yet, he rose to become director of the UK's fusion research lab at Culham and a co-leader of CERN. 📷 © CERN #histsci #HPS royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 4d

In this week's AIP History Weekly Edition, we look at Barbara Hof's new article in BJHS on an unsuccessful push by British engineer John Adams to move @cern.bsky.social into fusion research. A footnote in CERN's history, the episode had lasting effects on the fusion landscape.

October 3, 2025

Article spotlight: Barbara Hof on CERN’s dalliance with fusion

www.aip.org

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 6d

This is fun, Jay Gambetta is the new head of IBM Research. He did his PhD on quantum interpretations and got into quantum computing because he thought it was a good way to figure out which interpretation is right! From my oral history with him: repository.aip.org/gambetta-jay...

IBM Names New Director of IBM Research

Arvind Krishna is pleased to share that Jay Gambetta will become Director of IBM Research effective October 1, 2025.

newsroom.ibm.com

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 6d

My hot take on the Turing Test: it's pretty wild how computers' ability to at-least-sort-of pass it seems to have had a huge effect on the psychology of human relations with their machines. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" and all that.

Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 6d

1/2 I'm looking forward to taking part in a panel on AGI and the Turing Test, tomorrow afternoon (Thurs 2nd Oct) at the @royalsociety.org, w/ Dame Wendy Hall, Shannon Vallor, William Isaac, & Sir Nigel Shadbolt. royalsociety.org/science-even...

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test | Royal Society

An event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test, held at the Royal Society on 2 October 2025.

royalsociety.org

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 6d

An icon

Jane Goodall, primatologist and friend to chimpanzees, dies at 91

She used her global fame to draw attention to the plight of dwindling chimpanzee populations and, more broadly, to the perils of environmental destruction.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 6d

I like how the impression here is of the hurricanes approaching the US and basically taking a look and saying, "woah, let's get outta here" www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Jon Lewis @jonlewis.bsky.social · 6d

Book comes out tomorrow! I'm terrified and excited.

LFG.

www.bloomsbury.com/us/contempor...

Contemporary Science Fiction and The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

This book seeks to create a new means of interrogating the direction in which contemporary science fiction is progressing.In the late 1950s, Hugh Everett III su…

www.bloomsbury.com

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 7d

After a long hiatus, AIP's postdoc position for historians of the physical sciences is back!

3 years, $77,500 per year + benefits. Work in the Washington, DC area, close to Univ of Maryland. Open to US citizens/permanent residents. Apply by Nov. 15! #histsci

workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

A green space with bushes and trees and a helix sculpture next to a beige building.

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 7d

This is the list I've always wanted.

Physics World @physicsworld.bsky.social · 7d

We're starting our countdown to next week's #nobelprize by looking at Nobel prizes you've definitely never heard of - starting with a curious from of colour photography that won in 1908. @drmlharris.bsky.social reveals all. ⚛️🧪

physicsworld.com/a/nobel-priz...

Nobel prizes you’ve never heard of: how an obscure version of colour photography beat quantum theory to the most prestigious prize in physics – Physics World

Gabriel Lippmann received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908 for an interference-based method of colour photography that was never commercially successful. Margaret Harris finds out why

physicsworld.com

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Trevor Owens @tjowens.bsky.social · 7d

Lots of updates and opportunities in this month's @aip.bsky.social history monthly newsletter! Learn about some new photo collections, grants for archives and historians of science, and articles on a number of major history of science exhibitions and programs www.aip.org/history/aip-...

September 2025

AIP History September Update

www.aip.org

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 7d

After a long hiatus, AIP's postdoc position for historians of the physical sciences is back!

3 years, $77,500 per year + benefits. Work in the Washington, DC area, close to Univ of Maryland. Open to US citizens/permanent residents. Apply by Nov. 15! #histsci

workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

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Reposted by Will Thomas

Patrick McCray @patrickmccray.bsky.social · 8d

My former student wrote a history of the SOFIA airborne observatory...check out her work :)

www.nasa.gov/history/sofia/

SOFIA: A NASA History Office Report - NASA

This report by Lois R. Rosson is the first retrospective look at SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, since the mission’s conclusion in 2022.

www.nasa.gov

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 10d

Sudden policy change from NSF, saying only 1st year PhD students, or earlier, can apply to the GRFP. Second years are out of luck. (I got a GRF as a 2nd-year applicant, and it very much turbocharged my dissertation work; much more valuable than if I'd had it while still doing my coursework.)

Katie Langin @klangin.bsky.social · 11d

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP

www.science.org/content/arti...

‘Completely shattered.’ Changes to NSF’s graduate student fellowship spur outcry

The announcement comes months later than usual, leaving many would-be applicants stranded

www.science.org

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 11d

Good for FYI to point this out, from the latest OSTP/OMB R&D priorities memo. I think it's important to retain the memory that five years ago DEI wasn't even controversial. www.aip.org/fyi/ai-and-q...

Text clip: "The memo appears to reflect the Trump administration’s hard turn against certain STEM education programs and diversity initiatives. An earlier memo published during Trump’s first term overtly called for agencies to prioritize “activities that advance innovation in STEM education and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM.” This objective is ridiculed in the latest memo, and the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive campaign to eliminate grants, programs, and policies that have even passing connections to DEI."

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 11d

Just caught Michael Riordan's @cerncourier.bsky.social piece on the year 1964 in particle physics. Sometimes physics takes eons to progress, and sometimes it trips ahead with dizzying speed.

Nineteen sixty-four – CERN Courier

Michael Riordan chronicles 1964, the year that saw the birth of the quark model, the Higgs mechanism, and the discovery of CP violation and the cosmic microwave background.

cerncourier.com

Reposted by Will Thomas

Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein.bsky.social · 11d

Here's a post I've wanted to write up for awhile, tracing the history of the idea of a "Doomsday Machine," from fact to fiction (or maybe it was always, to some degree, fiction): doomsdaymachines.net/p/inventing-...

Inventing the Doomsday Machine

Tracing the idea of a weapon to automatically destroy the world

doomsdaymachines.net

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Will Thomas @williamthomas.bsky.social · 11d

In the current century, such processes have come to seem like a natural, permanent feature of the science policy landscape. Yet, with the recent assertion of aggressive political control over agency decision-making, the fate of such processes may again be up for grabs.