Druid Loving This Cloak Weather https://theonion.com/druid-loving-this-cloak-weather/

many congrats to my wife, Jordan Dedrick, for successfully defending her Ed.D. (remotely) at ASU today! it's a doctor-and-doctor household now. well, doctor and doctor and dog. the dog would never survive a doctoral program. he doesn't have the work ethic.

Now is the time to care about everyone, not “once we win” The time to care about everyone is always always always now

“Our investigation of a remote atoll in the area where Earhart’s plane vanished in 1937 has led us to believe she ended up assimilating into a colony of coconut crabs who welcomed her with open claws.” — Sheryl Thompkins, researcher

New Evidence Suggests Amelia Earhart Was Accepted Into Crab Society

NIKUMARORO, KIRIBATI—Claiming to have finally solved the longstanding mystery surrounding the missing aviator’s ultimate fate, a team of Purdue University researchers announced Friday they had found n...

theonion.com

made my students watch "The Thing" for my gen-ed class about aliens this semester (just like last year) and a surprising number of them this time have come to the conclusion that Charles Darwin would have loved the movie had he not died like 100 years too early

Australopithecus 3 million years ago:

josh (oldfriend99)@oldfriend99.bsky.social · 2w ago

You guys should check out Tool

gave my students a little in-class assignment to try to explain how asteroid and comet impacts affect life on earth after talking about chicxulub. one student offered, "I'm not an expert or anything but... I feel like they're a pretty bad time?"

carl sagan's demon haunted world mandatory reading at ages 15, 35, 55, and 75. no driver's license if you don't pass the test

genuinely one of the most important people of the 20th century -- not just pioneer, not just moon landing programmer, but also a programmer on the project that first discovered chaos in the 1950s

bryan newbold@bnewbold.net · 2w ago

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

OTD in 1959, The Luna 3 spacecraft was the first to photograph and downlink images of the far side of the Moon.

@nepetro.bsky.social · 2w ago

Happy Lunar Farside Day to those who celebrate.

doing some final copy-edits on a book chapter about comets and asteroids that I'm co-leading: it seems that in the past several months of writing we have found easily four completely different ways to completely misspell the word "mineralogy"

just saw a student carrying double shot espressos from Starbucks in both of his hands and holding his phone in his teeth like a soldier with a knife. must be midterms week.

spending the first saturday with nice weather in ages thrifting and record shopping with the wife. the world? whacky, warming, and lousy. but affordable corduroy pants and 70s jazz records? that's the good stuff.

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴@wamsleylab.bsky.social · 3w ago

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

a volcano eruption that lowers global temperatures by about 1.5 degrees would hit like crazy right now

You're gonna need a bigger chart

NASA has ignored recommended funding levels for planetary research & analysis for 15 years, according to a new investigative report by Mark Sykes (@coop.planetary-research.org). And for FY2025, it hasn’t even spent 50% of what it budgeted for R&A. 🧪🪐🔭 eos.org/research-and...

NASA has Underspent on Research and Analysis for 15 Years - Eos

Spending for NASA’s research and analysis programs has remained relatively flat for 15 years, ignoring recommendations from community-led decadal surveys and directives by Congress.

eos.org

New paper day! The Ōtautahi-Oxford view on the chemistry of interstellar objects, now with added sulphur. arxiv.org/abs/2609.30827 🔭 🧪

On the Compositions of Interstellar Objects

As physical samples of distant planetary systems, the compositions of interstellar objects (ISOs) should correlate with the properties of their diverse parent stars. We combine a chemical partition mo...

arxiv.org

another day, another bit of evidence that the scientists who willingly hand over proprietary information to AI firms may experience some consequences

Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 4w ago

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

has never seen official release afaik but the tape has circulated among heads since forever

Live Tapes@livetapes.heads.social.ap.brid.gy · last mo.

John Coltrane Quartet - Schwab Auditorium, Pennsylvania State University, January 19, 1963 https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/828557962481172480

I said I'd do a thread about my new Space Science Reviews paper, so here it is! This is part of a collection of papers arising from a meeting at the International Space Science Institute in Bern in 2024: a workshop to better understand rocky extrasolar planets. A 🧵:

got to do the most basic, qualitative, pictures-and-analogies introduction to General Relativity today in our department's "Cosmology" class and, just like when I took a similar class a decade ago, everyone walked out looking like their brains had melted

the whole thing of being open-minded isn’t saying all viewpoints are equally valid, it’s subjecting them all to equal scrutiny then rejecting the ones that are evil or backwards or stupid

does anyone remember what the climate is supposed to be like

ska priest, somberly: pick it up pick it up (ska pall bearers hoist up coffin)

found out that one of the hudson river school painters -- frederic edwin church -- painted what is probably one of the best depictions of a meteor precession because he saw it from his yard in 1860. this is the same thing that Walt Whitman wrote "Year of Meteors, 1859-1860" about, probably.

“Stop Making Sense” turns 42 today. Of his performance, David Byrne said: “You see this person in the beginning [of the film] who's kind of angsty, stumbling around .. And then, by the end, he's surrendered to the music and is fairly joyful .. He’s found a kind of community." 🙏🏼 “Slippery People”

When we do outreach or education, astronomers frequently claim that public and student interest in astronomy is greater than in other sciences, making it an ideal entry way for science. My article analyzing Wikipedia page views which (somewhat) supports this claim is out in the CAP Journal. 🔭⚛️🧪🎢