Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in UK science cuts
Short-sighted, stupid cuts to the UKRI budget include shutting down Jodrell Bank, the icon of British astronomy. (Many other cuts too, including 20% to our brand new @vrubinobs.bsky.social). Interesting politically to shut down a major facility in...um..Manchester 🔭 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Mike Byrne8It doesn’t make rich people richer therefore it obviously serves no purpose. This makes me so angry
mecha-sheep.bsky.social7The war on science is raging, along the war on women and the war on poor. That's the price to pay so that a few billionaires can become trillionaires.
Astropotamus 🔭🦛4100% agree. It’s pure national self-harm. Closing Jodrell Bank doesn't just put jobs at risk, it strips the UK of world-class deep space imaging and locks future astronomers out of the field just as a new golden age of radio astronomy begins. Where's my "angry podcaster" emoji? 📡🔭🎙️🦛
jed-murphy.bsky.social3Honestly. What the hell are we doing…
Pablo Allelli1Something has to go to pay for the £10m a week that the Scunthorpe steel works is costing us so that we can independently make our own steel using imported iron ore and imported coke, as in, not exactly British steel. Maybe the big dish should be kept as a memorial to proper British steel.
Cooper Hamilton1I guess we will leave our future exploration to AI and allow it to create a fictional universe for us without the need for any real science or scientific expertise.
Erica2Reminder that gutting the HE sector is also going to completely destroy our research power but it'll all be worth it to reduce the number of international students, right? 🙄
Red PZ2It's not nice to see politicians valuing science just as little as they did when I was doing my PhD in Physics at Manchester 15 years ago. But sadly predictable. 😔
Terrible news. Aside from learning more about the universe, we're not going to get much economic growth by cutting science funding. (If only we had a Prime Minister who was interested in supporting the north, and Manchester in particular, who could stop this.) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
ianVisits3As a kid I was desperate to visit, and wrote to Jim'll Fix It. Never heard back, which in hindsight, I am very happy about. But many years later finally visited as an adult, and while the science is amazing, candidly, the visitor centre was a huge disapointment. Decades of expectation destroyed.
Alison Gordon 🇺🇦1This is a dreadful decision and looks a bit puppy over the well from UKRI
James Ball97This is *insane* and I suspect might get reversed given it's both less than 20 miles away from the new Number 10 North and a very conspicuous symbol of UK science and discovery.
James O'Malley41What's grim about this is that the numbers involved are almost comically small – it needs £2.8m! (Can we just cap bus fares at £2.01 instead?)
Garvan Walshe5A Manchester PM can surely not allow this !
LeithMotive3Everybody upset about this, but cutting funding for scientific infrastructure has been policy for a decade now. They'll fund new ideas, but won't fund the costs of maintaining the infrastructure to support them.
The UK's whole science, research and universities 'strategy' is basically 'drive the country off a cliff'. Not even worth arguing about any more. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Moose Malloy5Lmao we are such a fucking circus
Charlie Radclyffe4I mean, seriously, what is the UK becoming? There aren't many telescopes of global significance (one less this week after Spanish fires) and it closing will affect the Square Kilometre Array, Event Horizon Telescope, and e-MERLIN. I hope this story is just trying to drum up interest and action
Sam Wilson3This would be deeply sad for a Prime Minister who talks so often about restoring hope to oversee. Burnham needs to step in at the budget and sort out research funding
The Jodrell Bank news this morning confirms two things: Firstly, the UK continues to live in cloud cuckoo land wrt to taxation and secondly, every one of these people should resign www.ukri.org/who-we-are/h...
Mark O’Neill 🐻6I am baffled and furious at the failure of NEDs as a core part of corporate governance in the UK. As a non-executive director it is your job to be an honest broker, to challenge the executive and to say the unsayable as necessary. And to resign if all else fails. It should not be a sinecure.
Scott Mackie2If this funding is being cut to fund AI research, I’m going to lose my fucking shit.
Ann (she/her)1They junked the atmospheric science aeroplane based out of Cranfield too.
