Having just closed The Story of CO2 I'm dazzled by how profoundly Copernican it is. You could say this of the "deep time" genre generally, but to me what Pete offers here is perspective; a disorienting re-centering of the familiar world to the reference frames of thermodynamics and the carbon cycle.

"It’s a study in the perils of relying on the ultrarich to fund science: when the guy with the billions is ready to move on, the whole project is off." Remember Breakthrough Starshot, which was supposed to send a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri? By @sarahscoles.bsky.social in SciAm 🧪🛰️

I'm so goddamn excited to read this book. @peterbrannen.bsky.social's first book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD is one of my favorite books on natural history, & I'm sure this new one is at least as good. @jaimealyse.bsky.social's review is (unsurprisingly) excellent. Go read it, and then get Peter's book!

In one week my book about carbon comes out, and here's some nice things some nice people have said about it. If you feel moved to do so, the link below provides a means of purchase. Thank you, that is all. www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

Aussie folks! 🔭🧪 Please consider signing this petition being put forward to the Australian Govt. to legislate / regulate light pollution and dark sky preservation. Not only are we being robbed of the glorious night sky, other beings (see below) use the stars too! www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

Impressed that this is a national piece but it captures what feel like fundamentally NC and Chapel Hill vibes -- the little mentions of ambient nature, the "esse quam videri"-ish interest in earnestness and authenticity, a patrician but public-minded fussiness, the worldbuilding around basketball.

Okay so White House now saying spaceports+ rocket launches+ reentries don't need environmental review, while FCC is saying that spacecraft in space don't either, so yeah I guess officially all physical stages of space stuff just occur...nowhere? In a hidden "frontier" dimension? Terra nullius?

Refreshing this space enviro news: Trump admin is "modernizing" rules to make clear that licensing new satellites (by the hundreds/thousands; with bus-sized dimensions) is not a "major federal action" that requires environmental review because any effects, they claim, are outside of US territory.

News: Trump’s FCC wants to widen the (already huge) loophole that companies like SpaceX use when they want to launch tens of thousands of satellites while dodging environmental review studies. I’m busy with book revisions, but would happily chat with interested journalist friends. Thoughts below.

News: Trump’s FCC wants to widen the (already huge) loophole that companies like SpaceX use when they want to launch tens of thousands of satellites while dodging environmental review studies. I’m busy with book revisions, but would happily chat with interested journalist friends. Thoughts below.

Unappreciated downside of working from home with a cat is that on rainy days especially, or just days in general, your coworker is constantly rearranging themselves into new advertisements of how cozy it would be to quit everything and curl up into yourself.

Interesting to me how Happy Gilmore is powered by the fun of a blue-collar guy sticking it to entitled country clubbers who play a silly exclusive sport, but then Sandler, in his own entitled, coasting phase but still halfheartedly playing blue-collar, made Happy Gilmore 2 so pro-establishment.

STRATA is officially out in the world today! Very grateful to @wwnorton.com for publishing this book, and to @sarahmgilman.bsky.social for gracing the pages with her beautiful illustrations. So looking forward to sharing this with readers! Find upcoming events here: laurapoppick.com

Thrilled to have an excerpt from STRATA in Rolling Stone today! Fulfilling my dreams of casting geologists as the rockstars of the scientific world: www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult... Two more weeks til we launch the book! Preorder here: wwnorton.com/books/978132...

I'm getting a fun lesson in Western epistemology in that I, white guy, covered a study that cited the location of a star, a subjective fact confirmed by Indigenous Elders, and now white guys are emailing me to dispute that fact. Fascinating. Sorry, rest of the world over the past few centuries.

"In Northern Dene traditions, children learn through personal responses to challenges, riddles and experiences. Not through questions. Certainly not by being spoon-fed information. And in these matters, Dr. Cannon was functionally a child."

This is so very good.

For anyone else like me who can't get enough of this stuff, a pairing suggestion: you may also enjoy my earlier piece on the *other* known stargazing critters. (Also you will like my book).

“The amazing astronomical abilities of this little creature,” Warrant told me, “are uniquely tied to an entire alpine world.” I wrote in Science about a new study on bogong moths, which have neurons in their brains that seem to recognize the Milky Way and infer due south from its orientation.

I wrote about an ancient whole-sky constellation, the worldview behind it, and the decision of Elders to share it with an outsider. Genuinely some of the most powerful work to come from the discipline of cultural astronomy in recent years. Gift link:

"Astronomers eager to use the Rubin Observatory frequently talk about the value of just looking at the universe. Basic research is a public good...that can provide new insight into our history while improving our shared future." @rboyle31.bsky.social 🔭🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/bloc...

" Embracing a vision of the future that counts on the worst version of ourselves, doing the worst things we can imagine, lets us off the hook of doing the hard work of dreaming up and working toward the futures we want." slate.com/technology/2...

After its recent Pulitzer win, I just read Every Living Thing, a biography of rivals: Linnaeus and Buffon. The scope seems small, if masterful. Then you realize it's not small. Linnaeus "winning" had huge (and bad) consequences for 1) race science, 2) evolution, 3) Western relationships with nature.

Just got a chance to cozy up with Lizzie Wade's APOCALYPSE, a jaunt through archeology and history that bundles up cool discoveries into a convincing argument that apocalypses are more than just the end of the world.

Having spent much of my science journalism career emailing astronomers has given me totally unreasonable standards of response speed and generosity.

I love this 13th century manuscript illustration so much, because whoever did it is trying to show how ostriches (which they've clearly never seen) care for their eggs by watching the Pleiades (ditto). digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/ecf9...

NEW: Behind closed doors, the Trump administration has mounted a “maximum pressure” campaign on a poor African democracy. The objective: push the country to help Elon Musk's Starlink business. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

"Paving over every paradise is just the side effect of building the universal parking lot, where nothing bad can ever happen again." Such a good "punchline" sentence on space expansion in @adambecker.bsky.social's great, timely More Everything Forever. More such zingers to come as I reach them.

Obsessed with this study that saw old trees anticipated a solar eclipse 14 hours early. Astronomer trees? They handwave that maybe trees can learn the periodicity of eclipses, or maybe they use gravitational sensing to know lunar orbit and phase info. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

A good news update to an old story! Years ago I covered Alejandra Ramos, who was trying to see if it was feasible to reintroduce axolotls into the wild. Her results are now in: a new study shows these amazing critters can thrive *if* they are put back into clean habitats. www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ar...

Not a big crier but that one sequence in Sinners had tears silently running down my cheeks. At the artistry of somehow showing-not-telling what was depicted. Then in a gasp of recognition that the feeling shown is a cousin, weirdly enough, to something I am tunneling toward in the book I'm writing.

sometimes it seems like the ultimate plan is to have two jobs left: landlords (or equity holders more generally, whether in real estate or computational infrastructure) and then gig workers that an app uses as interchangeable robots

Fantastic piece by Brandon Keim @brandonkeim.bsky.social writing @nautil.us on how animals understand death. I'm pleased to be included alongside @fieryangelsfell.bsky.social @susanamonso.com and others! #animals #nature #death #grief #anthropology #philosophy

Alewives running past Stony Brook Gristmill in Brewster, MA — perhaps the most storied river herring population in New England. Love how these animals and their epic migrations connect us to the passage of time, the change of seasons, and the innate rhythms of our planet.

'Hubble’s measurements were affected by serious errors...on the other hand, Leavitt’s first measurements...were already extremely accurate and agree very well with modern data." Turns out an under-heralded woman's 1912 study that helped reveal the vast, growing cosmos around us aged pretty well.

Huge congrats to @rboyle31.bsky.social whose OUR MOON won the LA Times Book Prize in the science and technology category! www.latimes.com/about/pressr...

this is niche but after getting caught up on Maniac and When We Cease to Understand the World I do love the Benjamin Labatut arc of semi-fictional mathematicians and physicists going insane after stumbling on some vile, infected abscess in the architecture of reality

This @nytimes.com review of #MoreEverythingForever, by @jenszalai.bsky.social, is so amazing that I'm having trouble believing it. "Smart and wonderfully readable...Amid his sharp criticisms of the tech figures he writes about is a resolute call for compassion." 😱😭😍 www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/b...

must start writing book reviews, not least so I have more excuses to read books

I've been waiting for @adambecker.bsky.social's book "More Everything Forever" to come out for YEARS. Unfortunately its release has the best/worst possible timing. Go read it, be horrified, get motivated. www.sciencenews.org/article/more...

Reading John McPhee's The Control of Nature, where he describes the Mississippi River changing course over geologic time "like a pianist playing with one hand," and I think that might be the best science writing simile I have *ever* read?

THREAD: For over two millennia, a star catalog defining an imperial court in the sky and spherical coordinates of where to find it was passed down through Chinese mathematical astronomy. My latest story focused on its provenance, but here's some fun bonus content. www.science.org/content/arti...

New study claims humanity's oldest star catalog was made in China, a debate with historical stakes + clear political subtext. Fun that my 1st story in a while also illustrates how ppl might be discussing what govt-funded science was or wasn't done MILLENNIA later. www.science.org/content/arti...

We need to regain the ability to peel apart the natural sublime (wow the universe) from technological sublime (wow big machine rumble bright loud) before the latter eats the first and the world.

"I imagine people 1,000 years from now ... who want to know about this critical moment in history when, for the first time, we were stepping into space." - space historian @planet4589.bsky.social, in a great Q&A with @katrinamillerphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/s...

they claim to worship the future but defunding the humbling, awesome work of grappling with the cosmos as it really is and replacing that with tech demos for their own sake, profiteering, and petty rivalries between countries and demigod figures is a pre-Copernican fantasy if I've ever heard one

The cuts "would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory seen as on par with [Hubble & JWST] that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years." Would also apparently close NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Huge, HUGE loss for science.

SpaceX has had a near monopoly in the space industry, but as I write in my new piece for Tech Review magazine, that dominance could be ending soon. That matters, partly because SpaceX is now Elon Musk's top asset, as Tesla's value declines. www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/03/1...

I read Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy a few months back in a research foray and while I didn't end up using it for anything it's wild to me how much his characterization of orality explains stuff from current media trends to the speech patterns of the current president.

Been working on this story and paintings for months, and following this industrial road proposal for years. At last, here's a brief tale of tribes' generations-long fight to preserve the integrity and connectivity of their ancestral lands and waters, and the wild foods that they sustain.