What's the best piece of music of all time, and why is it Beethoven's Choral Fantasy? 🎶

Regular reminder 🔭👽 #ItsNotAliens

A Skeptical Guide to UFO Cases and Claims With Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster film "Disclosure Day" about to debut, scientists and educators will face a new barrage of student and public questions about UFOs (or, as they have been rebranded, UAPs). 🧪 👽️

The longer I look at the Doomsday Argument, the less sense it makes. You can't calculate probabilities from an unknown, non-normalizable distribution. That's it. 🧪

Important health advice. 🚬🌭

Holy cow! Feast your eyes a while, on this gorgeous solar spectrum by the Sol'Ex instrument (assembled by Váradi Nagy Pál). It extends to UV and IR as well as the visible band. Marvel at the F lines, the fine structure, the IR doublets and repeating lines, and the molecular bands. Wonderful! ☀️🧪⚛️🔭

"After years of painstaking research in ancient grimoires and microcontroller logic, I have perfected it!" the professor exclaimed. "What?" "All printers are possessed. I've made a PDF which performs an exorcism." "So you print it, and then the printer works?" "Yes!" "What if it won't print?"

Not good. 🧪🔭🛰️🚀

Handover of Tiangong from one crew to the next. Even in space you cannot escape paperwork 😄🔭🛰️ 📸 CMSA / @chinaspace.bsky.social

Beautiful popular science writing by Rachel Carson in 1937 (!) 🧪🐠

Mr. Gauld obviously read the EHTC DAAPP document.

Wanted to try out @qwant.bsky.social. Turns out they are geofenced. Why would anyone do that?? 🤖

I post on Bsky. Right after that, an unrelated, 18 months old post of mine gets multiple new likes. I don't understand social media.

Just edited the entry of a co-author who has to list five affiliations in papers. This is getting out of hand. 🧪🔭

NASA's Psyche spacecraft captured this stunning view of Mars on Friday, while approaching the planet from the night side for a flyby. #Psyche 🔭🧪 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Simeon Schmauß flic.kr/p/2sdBDyw

New image of Mars from NASA Psyche Full size: flic.kr/p/2sdCLCM 🧪🔭 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Andrea Luck CC BY May 15, 2026 10:05:53 AM (UTC) IR+GR+BL

The 5 yo insisted on going to the neighborhood Mega Coffee to get some "unicorn pee". I was unable to convince her that there must be some misunderstanding. So we went, and, well, what should I say? 🦄

Meet the Sad Wives of Radio Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with radio? I’m so, so sorry sorry. (1929)

Signal adds additional phishing warnings that even German cabinet members should understand 🙃 #SignalPhishing

"If disclosure is going to have real teeth for anyone besides true believers, then show us some real alien teeth, or skin, or tentacles. Until then the whole story is just that—a story." My The Atlantic piece on the Disclosure Disappointment www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...

Spring 🌸

"SMS blasters ... mimic cell towers and trick phones into connecting by broadcasting a fake signal, and then use that opening to send out hundreds, or even thousands, of phishing texts." Luckily, a lot of our online infrastructure does not rely on SMS verification any more, right?

Korea's mid-sized Earth observation satellite has made its first contact with a ground station on home soil, the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) said on Sunday. koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-05...

Tell me that you don't know how science works without telling me that you don't know how science works. 🧪

Got up early in hopes of catching this photo before work this morning. There's only a few days each year where it's cool enough in the morning to make this shot possible. Thankfully, today was one of those days! #wildlife #birds

Dear Pluto, I once was called a planet, too. But else than you, I don't keep whining about it. Love, Ceres 🔭

A response to recent reporting in Germany, in service of clarity and accountability: First, it’s important to be precise when it comes to critical infrastructure like Signal. Signal was not “hacked” — in that our encryption, infrastructure, & the integrity of the app’s code was not compromised. 1/

Regular reminder: don't give others your password. Seriously.

Satellites around Earth regularly take pictures of each other. No room for alien ships to hide 😉🔭

One of my all-time favorites. #WorldBookDay 🧪

And just to be abundantly clear: NASA AND SCIENCE IN GENERAL HAVE MASSIVE RETURN ON INVESTMENT. Cutting this budget is a net financial LOSS in the medium- to long-term. It undermines our future -- intellectually, technologically, and economically.

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Can confirm, being a bookworm never ends. 📚

🧪⚛️

I hadn't realized until today how much X/Twitter has become a safe haven for crackpots who are willing to pay 🤨🧪

Air pollution this morning. Always amazed how people here are not talking about this any more. 😷

Headline from hell (by @spiegel.de) #Orban #ArtemisII

Spring 🌸

"For NASA, for its international partners, and for all of humanity the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission marked a return to deep space by our species after more than half a century." Well, not really. Our robotic spacecraft have been all over the solar system since the 1960s. 🧪🛰️🔭🚀

Sad. 🛰️

The #Artemis II crew capsule Integrity’s side hatch is open and recovery crew are going in to assess the astronauts and (hopefully soon) pull them out

Radio astronomy doing cosmology! 🔭🧪📡 #KAS2026a

Ayan Bhattacharjee, my postdoc at SNU, talking about simulations of jet formation at neutron stars during the KAS Spring Meeting in Suwon, Korea. #KAS2026a 🔭🧪

✅ #Artemis II update: 'Earthset', 6 April 2026, and 'totality', 7 April, seen from lunar orbit, the Moon eclipses the Sun, a view few humans have ever witnessed (pics: NASA) 🔗 www.nasa.gov/gallery/jour... @exploration.esa.int l

The catch is, as with practically all "healthy food", that you need to squint at a certain way at very carefully selected data and interpretations to make it look beneficial. The moment you look for evidence for actual health benefits under realistic conditions it all turns into marketing smoke. 🧪

Today's calculation: how long does a satellite in a circular orbit stay up when it stops all reboost burns? Depends on a lot of things, especially solar activity, but let's average over all of that and do a Kaplan-Meier analysis in 50 km height bins on 69 years of actual data.

Meet the German state switching to open source software. 🧪🤖

Happy Easter!

#Artemis II update: our European Service Module's main engine performed the translunar injection so precisely that flight controllers in Houston decided to cancel the first of three outbound trajectory correction burns on the way to the Moon 🥳

The Australian Academy of Science posted this reaction to the government's decision to withdraw Australia from ESO (which I had not heard about?!) 🔭 science.org.au/news-events/...