Brain drain rocks US science community; Impact on our ability to innovate will be felt for decades. More US-trained PhDs are fleeing after graduation than any time in past 30 years. This does not bode well. We not just passing the torch; We’re yeeting it. 🧪🔭 doi.org/10.1063/sr.2...

Neil Armstrong was born Aug. 5, 1930. Using manual control, he landed Apollo 11 with only seconds to spare. Buzz then broke switch that fired ascent engine. Had to jam a pen into breaker to leave the Moon. I had the honor of working with Neil on this speech. 🧪🔭 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aQl...

Neil Armstrong on Being a Nerd

YouTube video by Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics)

youtube.com

You want to fly a rotorcraft on Titan? Break the sound barrier with a sonic "thump" rather than sonic boom? To paraphrase Chief Brody, "You're gonna need a bigger wind tunnel." NASA just got a 25,000 ft2 one. It dices! It slices! It makes a great hair dryer! 🧪 www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Radio astronomy tag team! 🧪🔭 VLA (famed in film and music videos) and ALMA (famed for being ALMA) looked back when universe was 5% current age to find ginormous ocean of raw star-formation fuel (CO gas). Location? A reionization-era galaxy dubbed REBELS-25. public.nrao.edu/news/vla-fue...

The Arctic is roasting. In northern Russia, temps this week have topped 90F. (That's 32C to the rest of the world.) The Arctic Circle is warming faster than the rest of the planet; A feedback loop will accelerate increase. 🧪 If only we had known... www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-...

It’s 90 degrees in the Arctic right now

The Arctic is heating faster than the rest of the planet. New data illustrate how dire that is

scientificamerican.com

Got my schedule for #DragonCon! I'll be on lots of exciting panels in both the Science and Space tracks! If you're there, pop in and say "Hey Science Dude!" www.dragoncon.org

Dragon Con - Largest Multi-genre and Pop Culture Convention

Dragon Con is an annual multi-media and pop culture event held on the Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, Georgia. Hosting the parade, gaming, art show, awards, and other events.

dragoncon.org

Top science stories of the week you may have missed! 🧪 @newswise.bsky.social #headlines #diarrhea #brainhealth medium.com/@ceblue65/to...

Top Science Stories of the Week

Hiding identities at work, meal time and brain health, embrace your uncertainty, and parasitic diarrhea

medium.com

ESO's VLT found it! The long-suspected but previously unobserved companion star to Betelgeuse! (I always have to double check the spelling.) B is a red supergiant star in Orion. Its changing brightness suggested it had a sibling; now we have the picture to prove it! 🧪🔭 www.eso.org/public/news/...

Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away, our closest large galactic neighbor (getting closer every year). New Hubble findings show a sharp decline in star formation, about 1/5 less than our Milky Way. Culprit? Nearby M32 seems sinisterly suspicious.🔭🧪 #hubble science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

Most of my career was dedicated to supporting NSF's ground-based observatories: the famed VLA in New Mexico, the 110-meter GBT in West Virginia, ALMA at 5000 meters elevation in Chile, and Gemini on Maunakea. Experience the wonder at the Air and Space Museum!🧪🔭 airandspace.si.edu/whats-on/exh...

The first short SF story I bashed into existence centered on life below the icy crust of Enceladus. My plan to reach its subsurface ocean was ballistically creative but naive, according to new research on its cosmic cousin Europa. 🧪🔭 www.newswise.com/articles/why... @newswise.bsky.social

The aurora australis imaged May 30 from 441 kilometers above the southern Indian Ocean. It is created by charged particles from the Sun colliding with Earth's magnetic field. My mother thought the northern lights were caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere. The truth is SO MUCH COOLER! 🧪🔭

50 years ago today. Viking 1 landed on Mars to search for signs of life.🦠 Its Labeled Release (LR) experiment famously yielded positive results for metabolism on Mars. Other on-board experiments and later analyses refute that finding. I am among those who think LR detected life, then killed it.🧪🔭

It’s on! Imagine ‘Comic Con’ in a transporter accident with a science & engineering conference @first-light-con.bsky.social! Official program moving forward. Make science frickin’ cool again. Follow to stay in the loop for 2027. 🔭🧪 www.firstlightcon.org

High atop Cerro Tololo in Chile, the Blanco Telescope has an AMAZING view of the cosmos, thanks to the Dark Energy Camera, which was part of the discovery of dark energy. It recently imaged the Southern Crown, a blazing star factory about 430 light-years away. 🧪🔭 @noirlabastro.bsky.social

A new approach in search for 'technosignatures'. Compare the metal make up of planetary debris around white dwarf stars (future fate of the Earth and Sun) with what would naturally be expected. Evidence of doomed aliens was lacking, but some intriguing targets. 🧪🔭👽 doi.org/10.3847/1538...

Today is the birthday of Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made the Nobel-Prize-winning discovery of radio pulsars in 1967! Jokingly first called LGM (little green men).🔭🧪 She didn’t receive the award. Her supervisor, who discouraged her research, did.

A star’s explosive death triggered the birth of stellar twins. 🔭🧪 In the aftermath of a supernova @almaobservatory.bsky.social discover two ‘hot cores,’ the cradles of infant stars. The massive star exploded about 1,600 years ago. doi.org/10.3847/1538...

Allergies can be unpleasant, even deadly. One weirdly nasty allergy to red meat, dubbed alpha-gal syndrome, is spreading across the US thanks lone star tick bites. Just when you need the CDC. SciAm reports details of a recent conference on the illness. 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/dead...

On July 10, 1962, the US launched Telstar 1, world’s 1st active communications satellite engineered by John Pierce. It was directly inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s story “Islands in the Sky.” Harold Rosen later engineered Syncom 1, 1st geostationary satellite. Had pleasure of working with all 3. 🧪🔭

Earth’s climate is in a perpetual state of tenuous balance. Atmospheric chemistry, polar and alpine ice, forests, albedo, ocean circulation, etc. Fiddle with one nob and everything else responds. Actions have consequences. So does inaction. 🧪

Buckle up. “El Nino - Nature's thermostat releasing ocean heat to supercharge weather extremes and global temperatures -- powers up further. An 81% chance to be top of the chart level, likely historic strength.” -Seth Borenstein, AP apnews.com/article/el-n... 🧪

There's a reason modern bands are still compared to the Beatles. They changed how we appreciate music. Similarly, Hubble changed how we appreciate the cosmos. Consider M88. 63 million light-years away w/ an active black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

Blue's Science Communication Rule #1 "Precision is the enemy of understanding." You can be balls-on accurate without being pedantically precise. 🧪 In the words of former Hubble spokesperson Ray Villard, "It doesn't matter how precise you are if no one bothers to read your story." #sciencecomms

Merging black holes and I have something in common; we both settle into the most "disordered" possible state. Oscar Madison Conjecture: the final state of merging black holes follows one simple rule. *Nature tends toward the state with the highest entropy.* 🧪🔭 #blackholes doi.org/10.1103/hvp6...

HIV has taken so much from so many. Treatments have improved, but mitigation is not prevention. A breakthrough? Maybe. A new vaccine harnesses 'broadly neutralizing' antibodies to outsmart HIV's formidable defenses. Human trials have started.🧪 #HIV #AID #Vaccines www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How do black holes become so massive? 🧪🔭 ⚫️ ➡️ 🎆 ⬅️ ⚫️ Gravitational wave data reveal black holes can pack on weight (above 45 solar masses) through a series of collisions (mergers) between other black holes in dense star clusters. go.aps.org/4yd4KXA

Signatures of a Subpopulation of Hierarchical Mergers in the GWTC-4 Gravitational-Wave Dataset

Different analyses of gravitational-wave observations are converging on evidence for a distinct population of massive black hole binaries produced through repeated mergers.

go.aps.org

As I prepare for @dragoncon.org science fair, I was reminded of a story I wrote about the discovery of leftover building blocks of galaxy formation - hydrogen gas clouds - swarming around Andromeda, which are only visible in radio light (orange). 🧪🔭 #dragoncon www.nrao.edu/pr/2004/m31H...

This is one of those astronomy results that bakes my noodle. Announced in 2023, the Gemini Observatory traced a gamma-ray burst to nucleus of ancient galaxy, suggesting stars can undergo demolition-derby-like collisions! Cosmic car crash on a stellar scale!🔭🧪 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Mosquitos, blood-sucking buggers, can fly in the rain! 🧪🦟 How?! Each weighs 50 times less than a raindrop yet aren’t battered by falling drops. It’s all fluid dynamics! Mosquitos’ low mass and slow speed means raindrops are unaffected by the collisions. share.google/PJ0UIrvJfaRb...