My new paper with Nate Kaib explores what triggered the dynamical instability that took place among the giant planets in the young Solar System. We show that the flyby of a low-mass brown dwarf or free-floating planet could have done it (probability ~5%). ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXi...

Betty Reid Soskin, the National Park Service’s oldest ranger, has died. She was 104.

Current issue of @theonion.com nails it again.

Here’s a gift link to this stunner Washpost story, quoting the 60 Minutes correspondent on the CECOT story, who accuses Bari Weiss of spiking the piece all because the Trump Administration wouldn’t comment. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO.” wapo.st/3YL4T3D

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Kerry Kennedy has announced a very DIY solution to the addition of Trump’s name to her uncle’s memorial center. “Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax and pull those letters off that building, www.thedailybeast.com/jfks-infuria...

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of

Y'all, I just got out of the NSF-BIO webinar where they explained changes to peer review. It's not good. 🧪 scienceforeveryone.science/changes-to-n...

🚨 Calling all geoscientists 🚨 If you or anyone you know is attending #AGU25, please join us and spread the word to #SaveNCAR. More info at: wclivestream.com/ncar_at_agu/

With over 9,000 Starlinks, how can you miss?

McDonald’s USA — Employee: $15/hr, no benefits — Big Mac: $5.79 McDonald’s Denmark — Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension — Big Mac: $5.49 Tell us more about how raising the minimum wage would affect the cost of hamburgers.

wow that was stupid but i guess at least he didn’t declare war with venezuela

i wonder what this totally brave soul is doing right now

House Republicans are going on vacation and letting your health care subsidies lapse.

Because it came up the other day, Indie writers can fix errors you find in our books and out out updated editions. Reach out when you find something, please?

And guess what? The FCC immediately changed the website to state that the agency is not independent right after Carr's comments!

A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that cutting back on saturated fats reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke. A roadkill-eating, whale-decapitating heroin addict says Americans should eat more saturated fats. For busy eaters, it can be hard to know who to trust.

I cannot comment on Trump’s Rob Reiner post because I didn’t read it. And when reporters read it aloud to me, I couldn’t hear it because I was plugging my ears. by Mike Johnson

100,000 hi-res views of the Martian terrain! For your viewing, science, and landing-site-selection pleasure. go.nasa.gov/4oXJQpu

This could be your dream job: working full time at the Friday Harbor Labs on marine invertebrate organismal biology. Nine month salary from an endowment, teaching and research faculty position. apply.interfolio.com/178804

Worth a read. AI isn’t a real technical term; it’s a marketing term that refers to many different things. Some are more useful than others, and it’s important to wade through the sea of hype around it all.

If you can believe it, January 1, 2026 marks ten years since the armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. For Portland Monthly, I wrote about how the ensuing decade was dominated by anxious men and a culture of lawlessness. www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-cit...

American policy has made it pretty clear that if you want to do harm to or kill a person, use your vehicle and then claim it was an accident. Most likely, you'll only get a ticket. We are a sick and twisted society under the influence of forced car culture and its inherent violence.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-regularly-happens-3/

Now the story can be told: Impulse Space let Starfish Space's software take autonomous control of its Mira satellite to execute a rendezvous with another satellite - demonstrating new capabilities in orbit. www.geekwire.com/2025/starfis...

A fun retrospective on Raiders of the Lost Ark by @scalzi.com

They used to "laugh and call him names." Now they're all dead

You don't get to murder us because Israel did terrible things. You don't get to murder us and call it pro-Palestinian. You don't get to murder us.

This week’s absolute highlight was a tour of @scrippsocean.bsky.social’s RV Sally Ride - with @astrodocscott.bsky.social who operated Sally Ride’s KidSat payload on STS-86. This research vessel is a scientific & technological marvel, enabling tremendous ocean & seafloor measurements and sampling!

The future of transportation isn’t the #Hyperloop* or self-driving cars. It’s the bus, the bike and the elevator. Via @slate.com. AND it’s better land-use & infrastructure decisions, reprioritizing space & budgets, accessible streets, & smart pricing mechanisms. *hyperloop was always a distraction

Sharks and rays get a major win with new international trade limits for 70+ species

Top: Sunset on Mars (Curiosity rover, April 2015) Bottom: Sunset on LV-426 (Alien, 1979)

lol AI walker photo hits the top of Reddit. I hope he sees it.

There’s a lot of talk about the Hitler youth types who are turning in their professors and not enough discussion about the ones who are feeling intense despair because they're going to school with the Hitler youth types and immigrants are being kidnapped and trans people are facing genocide &etc

Eight months ago vs today. 🤡 @atrupar.com @cnbc.com @cbsnews.com

ICE detain U.S. citizen for looking Somali—use illegal chokehold to tackle him to ground. Man repeatedly begs agents to look at his digital passport ID—they refuse. Drove him 7 miles away before releasing him alone into Minnesota snow storm—told him to "walk home" in freezing weather advisory.

If you see this, post a Comics cover you love.

The next Democratic administration should expand the court. There’s no other way to redeem SCOTUS at this point.

“listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go” - E. E. Cummings 47 years ago today: the Pioneer Venus probes reached Venus, descending through the swirling global clouds and scorching, crushing air to send back word of the unknown gasses and mysterious conditions below… (1/3) 🧪

And yet an actual narcotics boat off of Miami -- to the tune $28 million in cocaine -- didn't get blown out of the water. Weird, that. www.miamiherald.com/news/local/c...

This is the kind of thing you say if literally no one you’re around will tell you you’re being a numpty www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/o...

40 papers to be retracted? This got past an editor 40 times, and was not caught by a single one of the many reviewers.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett announces her campaign for U.S. Senate for Texas with an ad that uses Trump’s own words against her.

The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.

It appears that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, within the past week, scrubbed a large amount of climate change content from its official website, as well as *removed human-caused warming* from the discussion on its "causes of climate change" page.

♥️ “ICE looked at that school, saw a community standing up for families, and decided it wasn’t worth it.”

Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud. 🤔

Climate injustice: “…in the aftermath of extreme weather events, lower-income neighbourhoods are less likely to rebuild and do not return to their pre-disaster state, whereas higher-income areas rebuild and tend to improve compared with their pre-disaster state…”