I greatly enjoyed this book

What an honour to speak at an event for the Earth Rover Program last week alongside some incredible people, almost none of whom seem to be on BlueSky except for @georgemonbiot.bsky.social I spoke on soil health in ancient Mesopotamia, and here are some snippets of what I learned along the way

News from the edge of the visible universe: JWST has confirmed this galaxy, MoM-z14, as the most distant one yet studied. We're seeing it as it was 13.5 billion years ago, 98% of the way back to the beginning of time. (MoM stands for "miracle or mirage.") 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Thief (1981)

The ring below is a historical mashup. It's a chunky Anglo-Saxon gold filigree finger ring set with an ancient Roman intaglio featuring the god Bonus Eventus, aka "good outcome." He personifies the successful results of labor, particularly agriculture. 🏺 1/ 6th c. CE ring, 1st-5th c. intaglio. 📸 me

Ha Ha! My father (Bob Collins) is credited as an editor on this ( and probably did camera work as well). I have memories from childhood of a shooting day at the beach and rubber fish with bite marks in them. Thank you. I will keep this tab open forever.

This is hands down my favourite #SolarFlare in recent years, an event from September 2024. The flare persisted for several hours, giving us a jaw-dropping view of ‘coronal rain’ (seen in the yellow structure) and ‘supra-arcade downflows’ (seen in the cyan structure). A beauty!

Epic.

Launch of @rocketlabcorp.com #Electron rocket with four #DiskSat satellites on #STPS30 mission imminent. Watch live! #DontBeSuchASquare

Here's a giant isopod from a Okeanos dive in 2019 swimming away with a meal since someone on my isopod post yesterday complained that it was boring and not doing anything. Is this up to your standards? youtu.be/7P8S1OwLpME?...

Now this is cool. Or rather hot. Well, you know what I mean. 😉 With fire-cracked #flint handaxes alongside two fragments of iron #pyrite, new research at Barnham, UK, seems to suggest deliberate #fire making … 400,000 years ago! 🔥🏺 R. Davis et al. in @nature.com 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Accessibility continues to expand its reach.

Check out this new #JWST image. It's another stunning view of the deep universe, but in the box at right is a small, red blob. That's a galaxy in which a supernova was detected in March. That galaxy is thirteen BILLION lightyears away. It's the oldest supernova found so far.

Introduce yourself with four spaceships.

The amazing ladybug wings. @Rainmaker1973 #globalmuseum #insects

#ICYMI: On our latest #SETILive, @planetarypan.bsky.social discovered that steam worlds transitioned from theoretical to confirmed in an interview with Dr. Artem Aguichine (UCSC). Watch the full interview: youtube.com/live/nBpyGdX... 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬

If you have a very low-latitude aurora observation from tonight, please record your exact time and rough location and DO NOT DELETE your photo. These observations will be important for scientific research of this event. Comment below if you have a low-latitude aurora sighting.

The shutdown will hit Altadena hard, cutting off not only SNAP but also SBA loans and FEMA programs that disaster victims have spent months applying for. I will donate 10% of the funds from this Kickstarter to the ACTS food pantry in my neighborhood. www.kickstarter.com/projects/2019846827/hop-shirt

Anything that DID happen, CAN happen.

Don't they switch to PKs at some point?

Announcing ISS in Real Time, a new multimedia project where you can play back every day of the past 25 years aboard the International Space Station. issinrealtime.org

My 5th graders played The Royal Game of Ur last week! They were blown away by the idea that people had been playing this 1000s of years ago - and that the rules seem a lot like Trouble. 🤔😆 #archaeology4kids 🏺

Are you interested in working on astronomical transients/ radio astronomy, all while exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest on your weekends? I'm hiring a postdoc! Come work for me! aas.org/jobregister/... Please get in touch if you have any questions! 🔭🧪🎢

Your friend who delights you with a way better Halloween costume than you thought they could pull off

Yesterday Curiosity took pix of jagged peaks in the distance with its ChemCam. I stitched them together, did some work on them, and... just look at that view... I've been doing this since Sojourner landed & this is one of my fave images ever... Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/S Atkinson

Spectacular octopus from the floor of the women’s changing room at the Central Baths in ancient Herculaneum. This magnificent #Roman monochrome mosaic makes quite an impact! 📷 by me #MosaicMonday #Archaeology

I'm absolutely THRILLED to hear my Mars colleague, Dr. Lauren Edgar was selected for the 2025 ASCAN Class. She will be an unbelievable addition to the Astronaut Corps- representing our Mars geology community well- and joining our current Mars geology NASA Astronaut, Dr. Jessica Watkins. AD ASTRA 💫

"Landmark Black Hole Test Marks Decade of Gravitational-Wave Discoveries" Chiara Mingarelli writes for APS Physics Magazine about #GW250114 physics.aps.org/articles/v18... #O4IsHere #EinsteinWasRight #HawkingWasRight #KerrWasRight 🧪🔭⚛️

A ghostly image of a woman with ‘Botticelli’ hair and a rather revealing outfit appears from the depths of this Roman sardonyx intaglio. She may be Livia, wife of Augustus, or the emperor’s sister, Octavia, perhaps posed as the goddess Venus or Diana. 🏺 30 BCE-20 CE. #BritishMuseum 📸 me

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

Really nice summation of how to think about the possible biosignatures in Jezero crater.

Here's the video if you have not seen it youtu.be/UinRq_29jPk?...

oh this made me cry

The evening passes Tiangong and the ISS are heading towards a bi-weekly ‘sync up’ this weekend. This means that observers have a rare chance to see all the humans in space at once, on a single pass. This double pass on the evening of the 14th for the eastern U.S. looks to be particularly favorable.

NASA #Perseverance is one step closer in its mission to find signs of fossilised microbial life on Mars with an analysis of the "Poppy seed & Leopard spot" features seen in Mars mudstone from an ancient river valley. Mineral formations like these on Earth are created by marine microbes. 🔭🧪🧵

Hat tip to @genejm1017.bsky.social for pointing out a @science.esa.int page on Comet 3I/ATLAS. It linked in turn to an FAQ page with a bit more info about observing the comet with spacecraft. I will quote the juicy part. Thread: 1/n

As we recover from the Eaton Fire, my Etsy shop is still my only source of income. These poppy shirts are all screen printed by hand in the closet of our temporary apartment! www.etsy.com/listing/4312...

Sea Level xkcd.com/3135/

shoutout to this iNaturalist user who appears to be an ROV pilot in the gulf of mexico and posts occasional biological observations, including A GODDAMN TANINGIA ATTACKING THE ROBOT ARM OF THE ROV www.inaturalist.org/observations...

🔭🧪❤️

Today on interstellar comet ☄️ 3I/ATLAS, this time from our team with ESO's VLT: the coma shows rich atomic nickel! This entirely natural metal emission from grains was only recently (last 4 yrs) identified in Solar System comets, was in 2I/Borisov, & now in 3I. 🔭🧪 Rahatgaonkar et al, ApJL submitted

Proud supervisor moment: #LeidenObservatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen led one of two papers on our discovery of WISPIT 2b#LeidenObservatory a 5 Jupiter mass exoplanet clearing a path in a circumstellar disk. Laird Close and his team saw it in H-alpha, indicating gas accretion #astrodon 🔭 🧪

Visualisations of the data from our most significant new detections. These show time vs frequency: a binary signal sweeps up from low frequency to high making a chirp. The frequency evolution tells us about the masses. Can you spot the signals? (The second version shows a track for each) #GWTC4 🔭🧪

I am such a sucker for pics of Earth and the Moon taken from deep space missions. This one from Psyche, when it was *290 million km* from our planet, really puts things in perspective. Here's my take on it 👇 badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-portrait... 🧪🔭

Astronomers who use the image display program SAOImageDS9: you may be interested in our new in-depth description of the DS9 interface: planet4589.org/sci/sds/ds9/... The complete collection of DS9 documentation is at sites.google.com/cfa.harvard....

Wow, very cool! It's starting to look more like our locally sourced comets. I should start a pool with guesses when Loeb gives up on it being a spaceship. I would immediately buy the square that says, "never".

This image from India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter from 7 March 2025 shows Intuitive Machines' IM-2 lunar lander lying on its side in a crater. On the left rim is the shadow of one of the legs sticking up into space. Long gouges at right show how the lander dragged across the surface before tipping.