The Crochet Tim

Crocheted astronaut. Unofficially supporting @astro_timpeake on #Principia mission. Usually found in the company of @mrsdenyer. Taller in real life! #STEM insta

[Dailyscienceinfo @NatureScienceA1]

Extremely rare 'White Auroras' spotted over Norway.

The sky over Norway just did something it almost never does.
Photographers chasing the northern lights got the shock of their lives.

Instead of the usual greens and purples dancing overhead, the auroras turned ghostly white.

Pure. Pale. Almost glowing.

It's one of the rarest aurora displays on Earth.

Scientists say white auroras happen when multiple aurora colors overload the human eye at once, blending together until they appear colorless. The brain simply can't process all the wavelengths firing at the same time, so it surrenders and sees white.

Most aurora chasers go their entire careers without witnessing it.
Norway just delivered the impossible.

Cameras across the Arctic captured the eerie phenomenon lighting up the night like frozen lightning, leaving even seasoned skywatchers speechless.

Some called it otherworldly.
Others said it looked like the sky was bleeding light.

And for a few unforgettable minutes, the heavens above Norway turned into something nobody had ever seen before.

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@itsastroniks Happy Birthday? Xx

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@FortyII Huge thunderstorm here!

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@AbbiPulling Congratulations!

[Hunter Weiss @Hunter_Weiss]

sorry it blew up, but for explosion fanatics, this is an all-time explosion caught on camera https://t.co/nt12WgCwc3

[Mark Stewart @pendragonmist]

If you are under 25, this is a wonderful opportunity to join the oldest society dedicated to promoting all things "space" - the history of space exploration, current missions and milestones, and the cultural impact of the human desire to reach beyond the confines of the Earth.

[CambridgeMathematics @CambridgeMaths]

AIMED, as in ‘Artificial Intelligence & Mathematics Education’, is our new creative hub that captures all the #research activities and projects of Cambridge #Mathematics in the field. #ai

Find out more
👉 https://t.co/PWhX3ry0GS

[Holiness @F1BigData]

Today marks 30 years since the 1996 Monaco GP, and there is only one way to describe this race: Absolute Chaos
The winner was Olivier Panis starting from P14, in a race in which only 3 cars finished

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

O.M.G! Happy 40th Birthday Top Gun - a treat tonight watching my favourite film in 4DX @cineworld
Seriously @astro_timpeake I want to know if it’s anything like flying a real fighter plane?!✈️
I sat in my car afterwards and it felt like I was still moving! #needforspeed

[Nick Deakin @astronautevent]

Celebrating the day Helen Sharman made history. 🚀 Britain’s first astronaut, first woman to visit Mir, and a trailblazer who showed an entire generation what’s possible when ambition meets opportunity. Her 1991 mission still inspires explorers across the UK and beyond. 🚀🇬🇧

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@FortyII @sciencesummedup this was 8 years ago!!

[NASA Watch @NASAWatch]

Science communicator Hank Green launched a specialized website that organizes every publicly released photo from the #ArtemisII mission into an interactive, live timeline. Located at artemistimeline(dot)com, the site syncs each image with the crew's official mission schedule and the real-time position of the Orion spacecraft during its 10 day journey around the Moon. By utilizing EXIF metadata from NASA's Flickr archives and trajectory data from public APIs, the platform allows users to see exactly where the crew was when a specific photograph was captured. Green utilized AI tools to assist with the massive data correlation required to align thousands of images with the spacecraft's orbital path.

Source: https://t.co/lO1LT7UnQ4

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@FortyII Hobbycraft had a similar issue at Christmas!

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@FortyII Something to make A smile - she
Would have loved my assembly!

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

Assembly today!
Fullness of life/Bluebells/ Artemis/Project Hail Mary ✅✅✅✅
(And I got a shout out too!)

Lots of amazing photos to share.
@NASAArtemis @astro_timpeake @projecthailmary

The students loved @Astro_Christina talking about #CrewEarth 😍

[Jessica Meir @Astro_Jessica]

Did you know that the Milky Way is even milkier when viewed from the Southern Hemisphere? This is because from the southern side of our planet, we get a clearer, more direct view of the dense galactic core.

Here’s a look at the Milky Way starting over the Southern Ocean (between Australia and Antarctica) from our @SpaceX Dragon window, complete with some aurora (Southern Lights) and fleeting Starlink satellites. Enjoy the view!

[Jasmine 🌌🔭 @astro_jaz]

HERES THE LINK:
https://t.co/AXSSw1GMXB

[The Crochet Tim @Crochet_Tim]

@FortyII Woohoo!🙌

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

PS- it’s hard not to love this little guy. I cant let Rise out of my sight…currently tethered to my water bottle.