How Berkeley shaped NASA’s newest space telescope - University of California, Berkeley

NASA's latest triumph, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will be unique in dumping 1.4 terabytes of data onto the internet every day with a clear message to astronomers and citizen scientists alike: Have at it! That's where UC Berkeley's Jessica Lu comes in. She and David Weinberg of Ohio State University have created a collaboration of scientists - nearly a thousand and growing - that has been meeting regularly for the past 18 months to determine the most efficient way to digest this daily deluge and mine it for new science. "Roman is very different from all of our previous space telescopes," said Lu, a Berkeley associate professor of astronomy. "The telescope takes the data, and within 48 hours it's available to the entire world. As a result, we're planning to do science differently as well. The Roman Science Collaboration is a group of 900 astronomers that are interested in working together collectively to get out the highest-impact discoveries from the survey data.

Four scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have received Early Career Research Program (ECRP) awards from the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE). Established in 2010 to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce, the ECRP program supports exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work. Recipients use the funding to pursue projects that have the potential to solve scientific challenges and advance the country’s STEM capabilities. To be eligible for the program, a researcher must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant or associate professor at a U. S. academic institution, or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility, who is within 10 years of having earned their doctorate. Awards to an institution of higher education will be approximately $875,000 over five years, and awards to a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility will be approximately $2,750,000 over five years.

Summary: In this guest post, Prof. Matthew Schwartz returns to describe a new approach to AI-accelerated science. In Vibe Physics, Schwartz discussed similarities in capability between Claude and a physics graduate student. Here, he describes what happened when he stopped fighting Claude and allowed Claude to find “Claude-shaped” problems: ones best suited to the capabilities of the current generation of LLM tools. This led him to build BootLoops, a toolkit for exact calculations in quantitative science. Because similar calculations often turn up across very disparate areas of science, Claude found connections to ecology, population genetics, and a dozen other fields. These connections were often technically correct but scientifically unremarkable at first, so Schwartz worked with domain experts to steer BootLoops toward questions those fields care about. Below, we share more about these projects and how BootLoops came about. Agentic AI is improving rapidly. Everyone notices the models seem smarter: they know more, make fewer mistakes, and have better ideas. If you follow the trend lines, it is easy to speak confidently about the potential of AI to revolutionize science.