#Christmas 🎄 Art Walk on the first Thursday of December at #Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Galleries flung open to the cold night, music echoing off old brick, and Seattle’s oldest neighborhood feeling like a winter festival.

Meditating on #deeptime and the length of human institutions. Founded in 1096, Oxford was teaching logic and theology while Aotearoa (New Zealand) was still thousands of miles of untouched forest, volcano, glacier, and sea. The Māori arrival cutting into a pristine horizon centuries later.

Eight spacecraft with tight timelines, threading into one orbital “Grand Central.”

Thank you @davidguettamusic.bsky.social. Loved the honesty and perspective on the art, the value fans expect from festivals. Personally, I love novelty - give me the undiscovered underground. 🔊 🎧 💿

The Connection Machine, designed in the mid-1980s by Danny Hillis at Thinking Machines Corporation. It was an early massively parallel supercomputer with up to 65,536 processors working together.

Life’s small rituals, a $25 USD tiny of ceremonial matcha green tea and bamboo whisk, chasen, to aerate and foam the drink. Eisai, the Rinzai monk, carried Zen and powdered tea to #Japan like spores across an ocean, seeding a ritual that would branch through centuries as quietly.

If #2024YR4 strikes the Moon in 2032, it won’t shatter our satellite (like in #seveneves) but a blast that big would fling dust and rock outward, spiking Earth’s micrometeoroids for days, hammering satellites and spacecraft with a storm of tiny, violent debris. 4.3% impact probability.

A new simulation lets the Milky Way blossom star-by-star, 100 billion points of light weaving themselves through time with the help of an AI surrogate. Computational mycelium, able to grow whole galaxies in silico, revealing patterns we could never see by hand across deep time.

Rocket Lab logo, the company’s motto (“Non Sufficit Hic Orbis” or “This World Is Not Enough”)

The decline and fall of stars in the Universe The cosmic star-formation rate rose and rose for billions of years, peaking about 10-11 billion years ago. Today, it's slowed to a trickle, and someday, will cease altogether. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #astronomy #stars

I was reading that after 48 years, the Z80 microprocessor finally ended production in 2024. An 8-bit superstar that powered arcade cabinets, homebrew dreams, and whole eras of computing. Hard to believe a chip from 1976 outlived so many of its successors. 🤯 #trs80

An observatory detected the first radio signal from the interstellar object 3I/Atlas. Here’s what it means.

3I/ATLAS is the first interstellar object bright enough for amateurs to image: so fabulous to see the delight ☄️😍

Derided today, BASIC’s strange, free-form jumping system helped inspire the movement to remove GOTO from most languages > a kind of mythic serpent whose chaos taught civilization to build walls.

Japan once dreamed of a winged craft called HOPE, a spaceplane meant to slip from orbit and land like a thought returning to Earth. But the Cold War thawed, budgets cooled, and the vision dissolved like spores in sunlight.

Europe once built a mockup for a 3-seat spaceplane called Hermes. It could’ve launched on Ariane 5 and glided home like a mini-Shuttle. Then politics killed it.

Randall’s idea is that a thin, unseen disk of dark matter periodically tugs the Solar System as we oscillate through the Galaxy, shaking loose comets from the Oort Cloud and sending extinction-level barrages toward Earth like a cosmic metronome of catastrophe.

Teaser for film about #SETI from #AppleTV! Love it! Pluribus means ‘many’ in Latin. …Filmed at the storied #VLA in New Mexico. Also, where opening scene of 2010: Year We Made Contact was also filmed. #europa

The Nostromo model was eventually purchased by a private collector, improperly stored. During restoration in 2020, two opossum skeletons were found inside! #alien

About how the acclaimed, fun, and very first hacker film “Wars Games” (1983) influenced US national cybersecurity policy and hacker culture.

Exquisitely crafted home computers of the 80s that failed to gain uplift with consumers. #retrocomputing

The Allen Telescope Array in Northern California has 42 dishes that look randomly scattered across Hat Creek Valley, but their placement is carefully designed to mimic randomness, optimizing how the array combines signals to make crisp radio images and hunt for extraterrestrial life. #seti

A company based in Kent, Washington (US) developing a fully reusable rocket; its 2nd stage is an innovative, aerospike LH2/LOX engine with regenerative cooling.

🛰️ The new ESA deep space dish features a cryogenically cooled signal amplifier chilled to around -260 °C (≈ 13 K noise temp) to slash thermal noise and boost sensitivity. With that ultra-cold LNA, the station can pick up signals far weaker than a cellphone transmission from Mars.

How does the Very Large Telescope in Chile keeps its vision razor-sharp? Each 8.2-m slowly loses reflectivity to Atacama dust. Engineers clean them with CO₂ “snow,” but every 18 months the 23-tonne mirror is trucked to a facility, stripped of old aluminium, and given a fresh 80-nanometre coating.

An exagram (Eg) is a unit of mass in the metric system. 1 exagram = 10¹⁸ grams. The biomass of all life on Earth is estimated at about 550 exagrams of carbon.

From ‘The Book of Circles’ #data #dataviz

In Mozambique, Mount Lico rises like a fortress, its summit sealed off by sheer cliffs that protected a hidden rainforest no human had ever entered. 🌿 A team led by Dr. Julian Bayliss scaled the 100-meter rock wall in 2018 to explore this untouched ecosystem that can shed light on climate change. 🌍🧗

so happy to see Peter Blanchard, Yuxin (Vic) Dong, & Wen-fai Fong featured in this article on the RBFLOAT (radio-brightest flash of all time) !! 🧪🔭☄️ www.cnn.com/2025/08/26/s...

A young planet plows through gas and dust, funneled into a circumplanetary disk, where infalling debris and gas heat the disk and the planet’s upper atmosphere. That extra energy keeps the planet bloated, glowing in infrared, and helps shape its moons and chemistry.

Direct images from the James Webb Space Telescope show what could be a Saturn-mass planet around Alpha Centauri. skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne... . . #astronomy #exoplanets #planetaryscience #cosmology #alphacentauri #jwst #newplanet

Amateurs + pros just revealed the first-ever “Ghost Planetary Nebula” - a supersonic stellar remnant blazing through the Milky Way at Mach 7 - hiding in plain sight near Andromeda (M31). Science + art + 555h exposure = 🔥 📸 app.astrobin.com?i=ns2x09 #astronomy #astrophotography #space #science

The Vatican Observatory Looks to the Heavens

Avi Loeb was the longest serving chair of astronomy at Harvard. Lately, he’s taken an interest in UFOs. This is in part in order to force the scientific community to think more broadly, be a little more courageous. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I like his intent.

“…These debris clouds are in LEO, so as you can imagine, as those debris clouds go around the Earth every 90 minutes, we're dealing with conjunctions. There are some parts of orbits that are just unusable as a result of that unsafe ASAT test.”

Did you know we're likley hit EVERY DAY by tiny meteors *from interstellar space*? The problem is detecting these wee alien rocks. www.scientificamerican.com/article/inte... 🔭 🧪 👽

Even wonder Markov chains and why this technique touches so many aspects of our lives? #math #computerscience #history

Varda’s capsule reenters at 17,000+ mph, enduring 3,000°F+ as glowing shreds of phenolic heat shield peel away like a burning chrysalis. It’s ~3ft wide, built to return materials made in orbit. Named for the Tolkien goddess of stars - fitting for a vessel born in space, blazing home.🔥🌌 #varda

“The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry's legendary battle against industrial automation, Dębiak's victory represents a human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits…”

It's paper day! We use our Ōtautahi-Oxford model of the Galaxy's interstellar object population to understand the origins of 3I/ATLAS, from only its velocity @astrohopkins.bsky.social, Dorsey, @redshiftless.bsky.social, @astrokiwi.bsky.social, @chrislintott.bsky.social & Leicester, submitted A 🧵🔭