Finding good information is hard. A study done on 2.5M pregnant women who took Tylenol during pregnancy showed no adverse fetal effects. However, pregnant women with untreated fevers had increased fetal risk of: Neural tube, Heart, And abdominal wall, Defects. Plus cleft palate and more!

I look forward to Bobby Jr. and Trump's resolution of the Hubble constant tension.

I just love posting this image now and then. I know it was taken at the dedication of one of the Bush's libraries, and that no one ever figured out what they were reacting to.

JFC!

So many movies that Robert Redford brought life to. My fave is "Three Days of the Condor," a sharp cat&mouse spy thriller. Can Redford escape with the whole CIA and a hit team after him just by his wits and intelligence? A great tight script with an all-star cast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQJD...

Pythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.

This is a fantastic piece of work! Zoom in and have a look. The Arp Atlas was sort of of sly reply to the too neat Hubble atlas. But we have learned an immense amount from studying these galaxies. Bravo Zulu JD!

From me, a list of Trump supporters who killed, or tried to kill, Democrats and opponents of Trump in recent years (since the right are now claiming all the political violence is from the left!) Receipts: zeteo.com/p/charlie-ki...

LIGO is Galileo's telescope, or the Hubble, or the CERN accelerator, or a Saturn V to the Moon, or a canvas in the hands of Da Vinci, or a blank score in the hands of Mozart. It's an expression of imagination that takes us to places we've never gone before. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/s...

This makes my head spin - Fawn Hall has just married Oliver North (if you weren't around in the 80s, don't worry about it). www.cnn.com/2025/09/09/p...

Exclusive: Bill Pulte accused Fed Governor Lisa Cook of fraud. His relatives filed housing claims similar to hers. Via Reuters

The relevant scale here is a measure of how sensational the release is, and how likely to garner attention for he scientist involved, regardless of the rigor of the science. We refer to this as Likelihood of Ego Boost, or the LOEB scale.

Yesterday, I reposted this with a bit of sarcasm, but the gross ignorance of Duffy with regards to the very basics of how we do space exploration keeps gnawing at me. JFK in starting Apollo said, "...landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in a single sentence. (continued)

Yes, everyone agrees that NASA's safety culture has always held it back. Sure, just for starters they lost 3 crews over the years, but what's that compared to progress?

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

And that's that for the CDC... wapo.st/4n7Dkfm

Yep, 3I/Atlas is really a comet.

May this portion of the dissent by Ketanji Brown Jackson haunt John Roberts forever and be the final word on his tenure as Chief Justice.

Trump says that DC having a week with no homicides was something that happened "for the first time in memory." The last time that happened was March, where there was a 16-day streak without a homicide.

Very clever of Trump to gut the NSA cause his little feelings were hurt. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/u...

This too

Before the Borg made Wolf 359 famous, there was a deeply lonely and scary "Outer Limits" episode about it. Wolf 359 has always given me the creeps. Aliens there can see Earth transiting our Sun. We looked at it with New Horizons to see the whopping Earth/NH parallax. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTMQ...

Of course I love the old "Outer Limits." How many TV shows start with an image processing demo? www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCcd...

Speaking of comets - here's a snapshot of Halley I took on March 21, 1986 south of Kona, Hawaii. About a 30s exposure with a 35mm camera on a tripod, using an f/1.4 70mm lens and ASA 3600 film. The famed Sagittarius teapot is in the center. Center of the MW in the dark area above Baade's window.

A wonderful article. Not through it yet but I already love it for its discussion of how the author thinks of generating good ideas. This is especially true: "Sometimes it's a good idea but not a good idea for you." journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

A little blog entry posted on the NOIRLab site today that discusses the New Horizons Interstellar navigation demo. This was first written in 2020 when we obtained the observations, but reflects the navigation solution that we published a month ago. noirlab.edu/public/blog/...

Nice demonstration of the admin's respect for the first amendment.

Brilliant, and Steve can write (although he has yet to turn a phrase as lovely as Loeb’s “a dirty race horse in need of washing”)

Extortion of Nobel Prize is Hall of Fame level abuse of office. Every single Democrat should be mocking this clown for being so fragile, so insecure, so weak, and so openly corrupt.

For the curious - a list of astronomical eponyms that I complied several years ago (with the help of several contributors). We always checked to see if they were used in the literature when the nominations were novel to us. staff.noirlab.edu/tod.lauer/ep...

Now Loeb introduces the "Loeb Scale" for interstellar objects. Without exception eponyms are bestowed by usage in the community, not by the author of the damn thing. Love 8-10 for confirmed ETI origin. Don't wanna read the definitions - my own imagined scale will be better. arxiv.org/abs/2508.09167

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

Lisa Kudrow nailed it! This was the best Republican impersonation I have ever seen, I was even getting upset thinking this was real. Love it!

I have a complaint about Avi Loeb's latest work and I want to speak to management. medium.com/@steve.desch...

Love this group picture of the "Original 7" + "Next 9" astronauts. 4 would walk on the moon. 3 more would orbit it. 2 went there twice. With the passing of Jame Lovell, they are now all gone.

Some real numbers on Juno. After its insertion into its initial Jovian orbit, the estimated remaining propellant mass was 785 kg. Loeb et al. assumed they had 2032 kg to work with to get their needed Del V of 2.7 km/s. www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_k...

Avi Loeb has gotten US Rep Luna to write NASA admin Duffy with a demand to repurpose Juno to rendezvous with 3I/Atlas. This is so far out of line I don't know where to start.

A nice featured summary of our interstellar navigation demo by the AAS Journals: aasnova.org/2025/07/30/m...

Well this is a spectacular paper. A Del V of 3 km/s gets Juno out from Jupiter to 3i/Atlas. Of course, you need at least the total fuel load that the mission was launched with, which was probably used for other things along the way. Details, details... arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21402

On occasion the internet provides some amusement.

Just what's needed to liven up those dull departmental parties. publishorperish.games?utm_medium=p...

Can we change the name of the damn company?

Great article about Lia Medeiros, who spearheaded the development of PRIMO and its application to EHT interferometric observations of the M87 supermassive black hole. www.jsonline.com/story/news/2...

Bluelittlegoose

Yes, the coma of 3I/Atlas is quite real, not just because planetary astronomers have somehow forgotten to do accurate non-sidereal tracking.

Betelgeuse has a companion - a pre main-sequence B/A star with a semimajor axis of only 8 au. Required speckle observations to dig it out. noirlab.edu/public/news/...

What a way to kick off Rubin Observatory research - with a paper on 3I/Atlas! arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13409

Inspired by a post by @markmarley.bsky.social, I thought I would post an old segment on NPR's ATC that provided a wonderful description of George Gershwin's genius as evidenced in "Summertime," which I always turn to during the Tucson Monsoon. www.npr.org/2008/10/23/9...

Once again after attending a week long conference, WTF is the deal with speakers’ need for spasmodic gesturing with laser pointers? Don’t need to have words you just said indicated, nor circling axis labels 10x. Trying to read your slides while a luminous house fly buzzes in and out of my vision.