Happy 120th birthday, special relativity! Albert Einstein introduced special relativity in the paper "On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies," published in Annalen der Physik #OTD in 1905. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭 Manuscript: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... English: www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einst...

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities.

Here's my first permanent public artwork, "Periscopes." When you look through its bulbous lenses, you see scenes that might seem faraway, such as heron stalking their prey; but all of the footage was filmed (by me) within 10mi of its site at Buzzard Point in southwest Washington, D.C., USA.

Mars First Logistics, our open world physics game about building rovers and delivering stuff is coming out of Steam Early Access in 2 days with a big update! Tag your favourite influencial person who you think might enjoy it!

🌍 2025 🗓 24th - 25th September 🕘 09:00Z 🛰 Meteosat-9

The rise and fall of the internal combustion engine, China edition. robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/

Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Excellent minute physics explainer.

"Nearly one in four scientists and one in five computer programmers are college-educated people from other countries." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Here is a look of #Helene and the Predecessor Rainfall Event, which began setting up around this time a year ago. I updated this to incorporate the @nws.noaa.gov flash flood warnings and flash flood emergencies. #FLwx #GAwx #ALwx #SCwx #NCwx #TNwx @spann.bsky.social @wxbrad.bsky.social

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Happy September Equinox! Today the dividing line between day and night runs exactly from the North pole to the South pole, and the sun is directly over the equator. This is an actual image of the Earth today, taken from the Himawari-8 satellite.

"We're here on Earth to fart around." ♥️

Cosmic Octavia

Today is the last day of Summer. Don't worry though, tomorrow is Autumn and that's really nice too. 🍁🌰🍂🐿️

Don't apologise for your dog showing up during the Zoom, apologise for hiding him all this time

Very nice piece about a professor fighting to save one of the darkest night skies on the planet www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/w...

Reading Galileo, and learning that he had surprisingly high standards for the astronomical knowledge of his readers!

doom scroll interlude!! please enjoy this fantastic visual explainer about earth's wobbles and whether your star sign is even really star sign 💫

I always love those lists of "35 under 35," but as I get older, I find that I would love to know about innovations/art from people over 65. "65 over 65" please. Elders have incredible ideas that are the result of having seen the full lifecycle of previous ideas and learned from it.

I wrote about how Earth's wobble causes our view of the skies to shift over time. Here's a paywall-free gift link. With @fparis.bsky.social and @iamrumz.bsky.social

Come for your (astronomically accurate) zodiac sign, stay for our visuals explaining Earth's wobble and our shifting view of the stars! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This was really well done and unexpectedly moving pudding.cool/2025/06/hell...

The square root of 2025 is the sum of 20 and 25 you're welcome

Wow, this video is a work of genius. This feels like what a god's eye view of a puzzle might look like, while we mortals struggle to get from one node to the next.

we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light

Wow, this video is a work of genius. This feels like what a god's eye view of a puzzle might look like, while we mortals struggle to get from one node to the next.

Aurora so bright that the ground turned green before my eyes… March 2025

Unbelievable footage from NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters inside the eye of Hurricane Erin. Simply incredible.

"Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater"

Got this really cool, ghostly picture by accident the other day in Dillon Beach, CA. It is a Heermann's gull with both it's shadow and reflection. #birds

I have been experimenting with different ways of visualizing the curvature of meandering rivers. Plotting curvature in the context of the meanders themselves helps QC-ing the curvature data ⚒️🧪

this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it

2:00am twilight in the Arctic. A photo can’t possibly do it justice and there are seals poking their heads out of the water.

Reading history of physics one thing that's hard to recover is just how captivating Bohr seems to have been. Other people were impressive, but somehow Bohr seems to have commanded devotion in his students, for reasons I still don't fully understand.

What AI-based "vibe coding" feels like:

Welcome to Jurassic Pork 🦕🥟🦖 #Delicious #Dinosaur #Dumplings

David Byrne came to my band’s show at a gay bar in Bed-Stuy and sang This Must Be The Place with us and I still haven’t processed it

Do feel like 'ice on Svalbard so soft you can scoop it out with a spoon' is maybe a bad sign.

Tundra therapy

For the anniversary of the moon landing - can’t recommend highly enough this gripping podcast from the @bbc 13 Minutes to the Moon - this & season 2 on Apollo 13, were amazingly informative & edge of your seat listening (even if you know how it turns out)! www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Really cool video that made me understand sound harmony and dissonance at a more fundamental level: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl...

If you're into math and music, you'll probably love this in-depth video by my friend Henry! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl... And it features an interactive about dissonance that I put together years ago: aatishb.com/dissonance/

New: I teamed up with @elenashao.bsky.social and nytgraphics to map more than 100 public TV and radio stations that are at risk of closing as a result of tonight's vote: www.nytimes.com/interactive/... This is a time bomb that will go off in the fall, when the last federal grants run out.

Watch the seismic waves from today's magnitude 7.3 Alaska earthquake ripple across seismic stations in North America. More ➡️ loom.ly/kaJp5I0

"Flamingos use their beaks and feet to create miniature, tornado-like vortices that trap their agile, fast-swimming prey. "It's not just quirky and weird that they're doing this," said Felicity Arengo" defector.com/why-do-flami...

"You could describe a loon as a black-and-white bird the same way you might describe a rainbow as stripes in the sky. It does not capture the pure majesty of glimpsing the loon on the lake and seeing that wild checkerboard pattern erupting from the water."

Really like this combination of rainfall info and hydrologic context (geology, wildfire burn scars, impervious surface) ⚒️🧪 🎁 There’s a Flash Flood Season, and This Is It www.nytimes.com/interactive/...