YAY SPACE

New blog post: perspectives on diffusion, or how diffusion models are autoencoders, deep latent variable models, score function predictors, reverse SDE solvers, flow-based models, RNNs, and autoregressive models, all at once!

sander.ai/2023/07/20/per…

Apropos nothing…

🆕 For the first time, Webb has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust only a billion years after the birth of the Universe. Read more: esawebb.org/news/weic2317/ or 🧵👇

Obviously what’s most concerning about Google returning the wrong age of the universe is that it’s an incredible demo of misinfo easily replacing well-known consensus. Also, Google already lost billions in market cap for being wrong about astro & you’d think they’d learn.

Keeping the vibe positive today: thanks to fellow theorists willing to confront their models with the data, and +1 to all the science writers who read the articles they report on and talk with the community about their topics for a range of expert viewpoints.

Over the last year, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has allowed us to see deeper into space – with stunning clarity.

Here are a few of my favorite images from this exciting new phase of scientific discovery.

One year ago, NASA released an image from the James Webb Space Telescope that reminded us America can do big things.

Today, they’ve done it again.

This spectacular photo reaffirms that the James Webb Space Telescope is truly one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements.

I can’t get over these images from the James Webb Space Telescope! They’re igniting curiosity and wonder in a whole new generation.

Wonderful article in The Washington Post about the first year of NASA Webb Telescope, including some of my thoughts on why we explore the distant universe. Here’s a link to a mobile-friendly, zoomable version of the Rho Ophiuchi image featured in the story:

slate.ucsc.edu/~brant/jwst/Rh…

We're launching Keras Core, a new library that brings the Keras API to JAX and PyTorch in addition to TensorFlow.

It enables you to write cross-framework deep learning components and to benefit from the best that each framework has to offer.

Read more: keras.io/keras_core/ann…

I think it’s important to take an assessment of the impact people have had on our field & continually ask ourselves if we are an agent for good. We are all regarded differently by those we touch in our professional lives, and it’s important (to me) that the good outweigh the bad.

For UC Santa Cruz locals: Anyone else notice a rapid decline of B Cycle for getting to/from campus?:

1) broken seats make riding impossible
2) nearly flat tires
3) v. few bikes on campus at end of day
4) scarce open docks at bay&high
5) only 1 set of docks w/in 15 min walk of bay&high

Re-up from AAS Press Office , thanks!!

Thanks to the OLCF for highlighting work from the UCSC Comp Astro Research Group, performed on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers!

What's it like test-driving the fastest computer in the world? Eight research teams received early access to Frontier OLCF to help get the computer ready for broader usage. Their research ranged from simulations of galaxies to fluid flows in oceans: ornl.gov/news/exascale-…

Researchers from UC Santa Cruz used the Summit supercomputer to probe the properties of #darkmatter . Their findings indicate we may be living in a universe of warm dark matter rather than the long-theorized cold dark matter. What does that mean? ⬇️ bit.ly/44xidcZ

Read this @nature Briefing about our research!

This is a stunning image of Saturn!