February 2026

This seems like a wonderful idea, please support if you agree: beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

Ganymede Flyby - Nasa’s Juno PJ 34 - From Andrea Luck (andrealuck.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/2mUN9EP

Coffee-growing countries becoming too hot to cultivate beans, analysis finds. Five countries responsible for 75% of world’s coffee supply record average of 57 extra days of coffee-harming heat a year www.theguardian.com/environment/...

80% of agricultural land is used for livestock (and textiles), yet this huge land use provides only 17% of our calories and 38% of our protein. 16% of the land used for crops provides 83% of our calories and 62% of our protein. It's past time we rethink what we eat.

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

In Kopenhagen gibt es die Vorschrift, dass alle wichtigen Radwege bei Schneefall bis spätestens 08:00 Uhr morgens geräumt sein müssen, damit die Menschen sicher mit dem Fahrrad zur Arbeit fahren können. So sieht dass dann aus❤️😀

The full list of science activities paused is here. Includes stuff like Chandra, future missions to Venus, Habitable Worlds… nasawatch.com/space-scienc...

I like being able to see if my JWST observations succeeded by checking bluesky. 🔭,

White House Withholds Funding for NASA Science Missions Despite Recent Budget Bill gizmodo.com/white-house-...

Had a blast speaking to curler and geologist Derek Leung about the geology of curling rocks. 🥌 🧪

Mondays are better with an octopus squid 🦑💫⁠ ⁠ The octopus squid (Octopoteuthis deletron) is unusual among squids. Most squids have eight arms and two long tentacles, making a total of 10 appendages. As young Octopoteuthis mature, their two feeding tentacles are reabsorbed into their bodies.

EVs now represent more than 10% of new car sales in 39 countries, including Vietnam at 38% and Indonesia at 15%. In the U.S., that figure is less than 10%. The gap signals a competitive problem that goes far beyond climate – it's about who controls the future of automotive jobs. buff.ly/H5ETTBQ

One MILLION satellites www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-...

Enjoy a Medieval Cover of R.E.M.‘s “Losing My Religion” www.openculture.com/2026/01/enjo...

Dragonfly 😍 dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/Gallery/file...

The US government lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs last year, according to an analysis by Science of newly released OPM data, with 11 departures for every hire. And many OPM calls "voluntary" separations were probably pushed. www.science.org/content/arti...

If you need some extra distraction from *gestures broadly at everything,* Kilauea is here to help. The next eruptive episode, episode 41, looks to be kicking off right now! Fountains are starting to grow in height. USGS LIVE stream here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXKu...

The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

OTD five yrs ago, thanks to the dedication and hard work of @nuclearban.bsky.social, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force, making the development, testing, production, possession, stockpiling, and use—or threatened use—of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world illegal.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

On the 25th anniversary of the Wikipedia, I wanted to express my gratitude to the writers of the Hydrogen Spectral Series page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroge...). Great resource for me and the students I work with, and a great example of a useful and concise wikipedia page.

I tried to create a small video showing the orbit of the #AlphaCentauri binary star, the closest star system to our sun (without Proxima). Here is #Spitzer IRAC 4.5 Microns (infrared) with quite a gap between 2006 and 2016. The orbit between the two stars has i=79° (seeing the orbit on its side).

People will get sicker. More people will have heart attacks and lung disease and other health challenges because of pollution. People’s lives will get worse, and shorter. People you know. Maybe me. Maybe you.

Born on this day, January 9, 1944: Jimmy Page, legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, here showing off his antique cargo trike. Happy #bicyclebirthday, Jimmy!

Even the UW Madison Libraries (which are great!) can't keep up with the ever-proliferating Springer Nature journals. Sorry, not going to pay $39.95 per article.

Watch tonight on PBS (9 PM eastern, 8 PM central) and PBS Passport:

Since posting this 2025 year-long keogram, there have been quite a few questions asking how it was created and what is visible. In this thread I'll try to explain how it all works.

This is one of my favourite space pictures. Crescent Earth, photographed by the crew of Apollo 15.

Very good news for NASA Science in the compromise 2026 funding bill released by Congress today:

#PPOD: Team members working with NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover created this “postcard” by commanding the rover to take images at two times of day on Nov. 18, 2025, spanning the 4,722nd and 4,723rd Martian days, or sols, of the mission. 🧪 🔭 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's SPHEREx has completed its first multispectral map of the infrared sky. It sees the sky in 102 infrared "colors," which lets it do things like this: One image highlights mature stars; the other focuses on carbon soot & gas clouds where new stars form. 🧪🔭 www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26...

The twelfth installment in the @nytimes.com Lost Science series is up: an entomologist who helped protect people from malaria. Story by @alexaroblesgil.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/4pBdYbk

The @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14

"I don’t know why my fellowship was terminated. I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary of what we expect to see in nature, with completely different males and females." @carlzimmer.com profiles my wonderful coauthor @jjinsing.bsky.social Gift link.

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis! Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

The last bombshell paleontology discovery of a year of bombshell discoveries: Ammonites survived the K-PG extinction! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney recently published a global temperature record covering almost the past half-billion years. According to her model, 50 million years ago, inland temperatures approached 122 degrees Fahrenheit. www.quantamagazine.org/climate-extr...

Brittle star vs. Squid! Ophiuroids only appear dainty & harmless. Another cool moment from #OkeanosExplorer #MarineLife youtu.be/oHN4sWAuBVc?...

Today in 1964, Rod Serling’s “Carol for Another Christmas,” one of the most unusual versions of Charles Dickens’ classic story ever shown on television, was broadcast for the first and only time on ABC, the first in a series of programs fully underwritten by Xerox to support the United Nations.

A little 3I/ATLAS update building on @marshall-eubanks.bsky.social's nice RNAAS from last week. Given its non-grav acceleration and the rate at which it's losing mass, you can work out its size. The answer: a diameter around 1 km, very typical for comets. arxiv.org/abs/2512.18341 🔭 🧪

In honor of the winter solstice, here is IC 1848, the Soul Nebula. It may be the darkest day of the year (for those of us in the N. hemisphere), but the light is still here and now it begins to grow. 10.7hrs, #Seestar S50 🔭 🧪 Siril, GraXpert, Starnet, GIMP

1/n 2 NEW epic images of Phobos over Mars just released by @esa.int Mars Express This view is especially striking, with Phobos between the Tharsis volcanoes and Noctis Labyrinthus–Valles Marineris Full resolution 300MP(!) & info on: flic.kr/p/2rMW4so Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY 🧪🔭

On the 5th day of fossils, my true love gave to me... 5 GOLD TRILOBITES! Beecher's Bed is a special Ordovician site in New York that preserves trilobite soft tissue with pyrite replacement. Legs, antenna and even trilobite eggs are found here. 1/x #12DaysofFossils

On the 1st day of fossils, my true love gave to me... A Clarkeocrinus troosti. I only have 1 in my collection. Despite my online handle, it is not named after me. This Devonian crinoid was named after the first New York State Museum Director, John M. Clarke. #12DaysofFossils

Submitting a grant you’re not eligible to get

#1 movie when you were ten years is how your 2026 is going to go.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

I wanted to do a quick thread about this paper led by a great postdoc here at JPL, Flavio Petricca, which suggests that Titan may not have a global ocean after all. www.nasa.gov/solar-system...

Some plants generate their own heat to attract warmth-seeking pollinators. Heat-guided pollination may be an ancient trick that predates scent & color as a way to help plants reproduce. Amazing what you see when you look at the world in thermal vision. 🧪 news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...