The ‘golden’ rule of the deep-sea: if you want to survive near hydrothermal vents, be prepared to fight poison with poison! My latest for @nytimes.com about an incredible worm that uses biomineralization as a detox strategy! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/s...

those damned outdoor pigs can't keep getting away with this

YOU ARE BUGS www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/s...

I can finally reveal why this account has been on hiatus for the summer... I've been working on a piece for the New York Times on the 1980s cola space race! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/s... Its been a great experience working with the Times editors on this. #nasa #space #coke #pepsi

I've had a lot of questions about fission surface power this week. The delightful Ken Chang @kchang.bsky.social summed it up well in this piece: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/s... . On moon reactors, I'm bullish. On setting unrealistic timelines in a race to moon reactors, not so much. [1/2]

Check out my piece in the @nytimes.com about the 1980s cola space race. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/s... Worked with some great editors and a spoke with interesting people while I was working on this. Really pleased to see this published. #space #nasa #spaceshuttle #challenger

Skunks aren't the only ones with a distinkt advantage over the competition. 🧪🐍 Also, I'm always here for a @michaelroston.bsky.social headline. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/s...

Fantastic article about Rubin (both the person and the shiny new observatory) in the @nytimes.com today. Unlike many (not all!) of the male scientists with household names, she was a profoundly good and caring human. ALL of the women in #astrophysics today are standing on her shoulders. 🔭🧪✨

This is a great article. Sounds like a fascinating book. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/s...

fascinating - so much Native American knowledge we refuse to believe or acknowledge - why wouldn't natives see things in the stars the way the Greeks did? www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/s...

Nice feature this morning by Bill Broad on Dick Garwin, which draws on some of our resources www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/s...

Got an early start today to catch up on the business and finance news that broke overnight but instead I'm reading a journal article on Barbie's foot posture plos.altmetric.com/details/1770... h/t: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/s...

Love how 70-year-old Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronaut, seems like a big kid up in space playing with his camera gear and science experiments, injecting food coloring or dissolving an antacid tablet inside water spheres in zero gravity. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/s...

Over nearly 18 years, Tim Friede, injected himself with escalating doses of venom from 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times. His daredevilry may help solve a dire problem. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/h...

Niamos! is the song of the summer and also the song of financing a rebellion by giving away your daughter in an arranged marriage that gives you the ick while fleeing storm troopers in a stolen TIE fighter prototype

"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...

During the middle ages, manuscripts were fashioned from animal skins. This is especially clear in a set of medieval manuscripts from France that are covered in hair. Recently, researchers confirmed that these 'shaggy' books were made of 🦭 Latest for @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/s...

When your the size of a sharpened pencil tip, water can feel as viscous as jelly. To get out of this jam, unicellular stentors team up to vacuum in more prey. These 'Family Style' meals may have been a key early step towards multicellularity Latest for @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/s...

the nice thing about blogs is you can just do things

It's not fair that the astronauts got to sleep longer than me

I got to write about the mysterious orange snowy owl spotted in Michigan's thumb for @nytimes.com! Was it a genetic mutation? Did it get drenched in de-icer at a local airport? I talked to some experts! (A big thanks to my editor @michaelroston.bsky.social) www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/s...

The groundhog really nailed the weather prediction, shout out to that guy

ohhhh my god is neo-tokyo about to explode? should we tell everyone? should we throw a party? should we invite tetsuo?

I would like it noted in the grand karmic ledger that I just opted against pointing out to someone who was attempting to correct another someone's "grammar" that they were actually correcting that person's diction.

Did no one raise their hand at the vesper martini brainstorming meeting and say “actually maybe the message of the show is that you DON’T want to escape to The White Lotus?”

"Her Discovery Wasn’t Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same" "The internet erupted in controversy over Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues’ claim of a microbe thriving on arsenic. " www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/s... a blast from the past, some reporting war stories in this 'un

Just encountered the modern Manhattan parent version of "For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn" which was two near mint condition SHSAT test prep books sitting on the "up for grabs" table in the children's room of my local library.

Marco Inaros is up to his old tricks www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/s...

Flower mites, found throughout blooms in the tropics, can sense modulated electric fields emanating from hummingbirds, which they employ to hitchhike to other flowers. Very fun story to write! www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/s...

More yellow journalism by The New York Times

Wordle streak massacre today according to the bot! Don’t think I ever seen that many misses on the 6th turn

Who says a humanities degree will get you nowhere?? www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/s...

You, politely talking about how you want to visit Scandinavia Me, spending way too much time on Wikipedia: YOU MEAN FENNOSCANDIA

It has to be said

Not the parent coordinator at my daughter’s middle school writing “at least we didn’t have any fires” in an email marking the end of a busy week

Does anyone else think it was totally weird that for years we were just like "cell phones are called BlackBerries now, we're all just going to say the word 'blackberry' all the time"

How many halo numbers do you think Elton John owns

Every so often I like to throw a reference to Battletech Clan combat into conversations with my wife to remind her that I used to be a 13yo tabletop gamer

When you’re 15 listening to “Broken” on repeat put you outside of the mainstream and led to parents worrying about you and then in your mid-40s you see a woman carrying a Gucci bag wearing a NIN dress on the street and Trent Reznor co-composed a great soundtrack for a movie about tennis

seasons greasons everyone

Some of them say they like visiting but can't understand why anyone would choose to live here. Fool you enjoy visiting because we choose to live here www.natesilver.net/p/nobody-goe...

Health insurance co-pays are so weird. “Hey we’re going to pay your doctor $2800 for these routine exams and tests but would you mind giving his secretary $25 in walking around money first?”

The cases of High Noon wielded on the streets before noon are the first omens of Santacon

I've seen some tweets in the past 48 hours about using LLMs to enhance book reading and I'm like "what you really want is a book club"

My child annotated my junk mail

Just thinking about how in a few years there will be some new users of X who will have no idea it was ever called Twitter

When you put me in the assisted living they better have ramen night

Pondering Chinas orb

An incredible story about the mpox epidemic by @stephanienolen.bsky.social from a remarkable reporting trip www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/h...

Just thinking back to earlier in the week when I misunderstood what a reporter said to me and thought for a moment that Elon Musk’s biographer was set to be nominated as the head of NASA