Tootfinder

A Virgo Environmental Survey Tracing Ionised Gas Emission (VESTIGE). XIX. The discovery of a spectacular 230 kpc Halpha tail following NGC 4569 in the Virgo cluster
M. Sun, H. Le, B. Epinat, A. Boselli, R. Luo, K. Hosogi, N. Pichette, W. Forman, C. Sarazin, M. Fossati, H. Chen, E. Sarpa, J. Braine, J. C. Cuillandre, S. Gwyn, G. Hensler, S. Martocchia, B. Vollmer

A Virgo Environmental Survey Tracing Ionised Gas Emission (VESTIGE). XIX. The discovery of a spectacular 230 kpc Halpha tail following NGC 4569 in the Virgo cluster
Context. Galaxies fly inside galaxy clusters and ram pressure by the ICM can remove a large amount of the ISM from the galaxy, and deposit the gas in the ICM. The ISM decoupled from the host galaxy leaves a long trail following the moving galaxy. Such long trails track the galaxy motion and can be detected with sensitive data in Halpha. Aims. We study the Halpha tail trailing NGC 4569 in the Virgo cluster. Methods. The initial discovery was made with the deep Halpha imaging data with CFHT, …

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective
Yifan Zhong, Fengshuo Bai, Shaofei Cai, Xuchuan Huang, Zhang Chen, Xiaowei Zhang, Yuanfei Wang, Shaoyang Guo, Tianrui Guan, Ka Nam Lui, Zhiquan Qi, Yitao Liang, Yuanpei Chen, Yaodong Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01925

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective
The remarkable advancements of vision and language foundation models in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation has sparked growing efforts to extend such intelligence to the physical world, fueling the flourishing of vision-language-action (VLA) models. Despite seemingly diverse approaches, we observe that current VLA models can be unified under a single framework: vision and language inputs are processed by a series of VLA modules, producing a chain of \textit{action tokens} that …

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

Sittich-Strolch mittels mobiler Gewahrsamszelle verhaftet
https://www.polizei.bremerhaven.de/blog-leser/sittich-strolch-in-geestemuende-polizei-nimmt-schraegen-vogel-in-gewahrsam-2.html

Sittich-Strolch in Geestemünde: Polizei nimmt schrägen Vogel in Gewahrsam
Mit viel Freude und einem Sinn für leichte Prosa hat unser Kontaktpolizist aus Bremerhaven-Geestemünde einen Einsatzbericht verfasst, der zeigt: Polizeiarbeit macht Spaß – auch wenn man es bisweilen mit schrägen Vögeln zu tun hat.

The radio flare and multi-wavelength afterglow of the short GRB 231117A: energy injection from a violent shell collision
G. E. Anderson, G. P. Lamb, B. P. Gompertz, L. Rhodes, A. Martin-Carrillo, A. J. van der Horst, A. Rowlinson, M. E. Bell, T. -W. Chen, H. M. Fausey, M. Ferro, P. J. Hancock, S. R. Oates, S. Schulze, R. L. C. Starling, S. Yang, K. Ackley, J. P. Anderson, A. Andersson, J. F. Ag\"u\'i Fern\'andez, R. Brivio, E. Burns, K. C. Chambers, T. de Boer, V. D'El…

The radio flare and multi-wavelength afterglow of the short GRB 231117A: energy injection from a violent shell collision
We present the early radio detection and multi-wavelength modeling of the short gamma-ray burst (GRB) 231117A at redshift $z=0.257$. The Australia Telescope Compact Array automatically triggered a 9-hour observation of GRB 231117A at 5.5 and 9 GHz following its detection by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory just 1.3 hours post-burst. Splitting this observation into 1-hour time bins, the early radio afterglow exhibited flaring, scintillating and plateau phases. The scintillation allowed us to p…