Every parallelogram that you draw around an ellipse whose sides are tangent to the ellipse at their midpoints has the same area for a given ellipse: 4 a b, where a and b are the semi-axes of the ellipse.

Think Weirder: the Year’s Best Science Fiction Ideas, Volume 1, is now on sale. It’s billed as the year’s “sixteen best concept-driven, near-future ideas about people interacting with technology.” thinkweirder.com 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🛸 #thinkweirder #sciencefiction #shortstories

Astounding stream of stars caught escaping from nearby galaxy The Vera Rubin Observatory's "First Look" observations weren't meant for science. And yet, it revealed a surprising new stellar stream, 160,000 light-years long, escaping from a nearby galaxy. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro

My latest — this was a collective effort with colleagues Xiaoying You, @marilenharo.bsky.social, MohanaBasu, Jeff Tollefson, and @celestebiever.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It’s old news that most screenwriters are clueless about scientists and mathematicians, but you’d hope they'd be a *little* more familiar with what makes a good humanities student. “Down Cemetery Road”: “She was brilliant! She memorised The Wasteland, including the footnotes!”

“It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.” www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

It’s nice that an expert on aerosols has won the 2025 Prime Minister's Prize for Science … but the govt still can’t be bothered acting on her expertise. "The reality is that there are no regulations for indoor air quality," she said. www.abc.net.au/news/science...

Most people know how to draw an ellipse by pinning two ends of a string to a board and sweeping a pencil around inside the string, keeping it taut. But what about the 3D equivalent? Start with an ellipse and a hyperbola in orthogonal planes, with each curve’s vertices being the other’s foci.

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

Come and listen to me blabber for a few hours about light scattering!

Today in PASA we published a new image of our Milky Way at low radio frequencies, in unprecedented colour and detail. Here's just a tiny piece of it -- the whole thing is ten times bigger! We're seeing high energy electrons whirl around cosmic magnetic fields from exploded stars, and more!

Sometimes you just need to escape for a little while. Short stories are great for that. Visitors welcome. Subscriptions are good too. clarkesworldmagazine.com

Just a timely reminder of this great paper from @profabelmendez.bsky.social : “We report the detection of narrowband signals (10 kHz) near the hydrogen line similar to the Wow! Signal [...] these signals are easily identifiable as small interstellar clouds of cold hydrogen (HI) in the galaxy.”

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

“The grand mental panorama that was thus created was so intoxicating that those who followed Poincaré were not to recover from its pursuit.” — S. Chandrasekhar, in “Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium”, on the “fission theory” of double stars that turned out to be misconceived.

Weirdly ~15 years ago @gregegansf.bsky.social wrote a novel where one of the characters (working in the same building at MIT where @jmrko.bsky.social was a postdoc) solves the zebra finch connectome only to have their funding cut by congress… luckily we are in an ever so slightly different timeline

This story reminded me of the magazine Quantum, a godsend for me, rural high school hick who loved math and physics. It turns out the issues are all online www.nsta.org/quantum-maga...

The NO JUNK MAIL sign on my letter box is mostly respected, so I don’t get much paper advertising these days, but I was amused when a parcel from an American 2nd-hand bookseller arrived with my purchases … plus a Doordash coupon and a flyer from a U.S. burial insurance company.

Screensnapshot of our times. Corporate pressure to use AI creates bad outcomes with real-life consequences; seeking to unpack the problem yields more pressure to indulge in the very thing causing the problem.

Oh, just a caterpillar that keeps all the husks it shed from its head when it was smaller as a kind of elaborate hat … because why wouldn’t you? Congratulations to Georgina Steytler, who just won a wildlife photography award for this extraordinary image! www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

We need an episode of “Mad Men” where Don Draper is still working in 2025, and tops his career with the slogan: “LLMs, baby! For when you really don’t give a fuck what’s true.”

“House of Dynamite” is a tense and effective reminder that we’re still living with the same insanity as when “Dr. Strangelove” hit the screens 61 years ago, this time with no dark humour to soften the blow.

My story “Death and the Gorgon” was voted best novella of 2024 by the readers of Asimov’s SF. You can read it online at the link below. I also have a new novella in the Nov 2025 issue of Asimov’s, “Spare Parts for the Mind”, and they have an excerpt from that on their web site.

Belgian AI scientists are advocating *against* the use of AI in academia. “If independent thinking is no longer encouraged at university, where would it?” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

Just so you know: this claimed proof of P≠NP is a bunch of baloney. Written with help of an LLM, it's internally inconsistent and at least one step is clearly wrong. arxiv.org/abs/2510.17829

“The Correspondent” was worthy but rather flat. I have no problem with Peter Greste writing a memoir of his own experience as a journalist subject to arbitrary imprisonment, but there must be many more powerful stories about the same issue that would have made better films.

Atlas didn’t shrug, it just sucked. www.anildash.com/2025/10/22/a...

👀 www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

I’m not a particular fan, but I’m still finding “Mr. Scorsese” fascinating. Among other things, it would never have crossed my mind that he was involved in the Woodstock documentary, let alone that he’d hoped to be co-director and was bummed to be demoted to just one of several editors.

According to the astrology column in my local newspaper, this month the moon is planning an Oberth manoeuvre, Mars is thinking of taking a Hohmann transfer to Jupiter, Venus will unfurl its solar sails to tour the asteroid belt, but Mercury will just hunker down with a good book.

Checking in on my recent ebook sales ... at least someone at Amazon has a sense of humour about what to display when there’s an outage.

To enrich their culture, every country should develop a tradition of intriguing, elaborate, strictly non-violent art thefts that are resolved ten years later with the safe return of the stolen artwork, with books, movies and other spinoffs starting five years after that.

Somewhat disappointed to find that this is *not* a single word in German: Die Genugtuung, festzustellen, dass das schwierigere Integral als Ableitung in Bezug auf einen Parameter des einfacheren Integrals gefunden werden kann.

“About 2:00pm on Saturday, mine workers found the object burning near a remote access road and alerted emergency services. Police said it may be "a composite-overwrapped pressure vessel or rocket tank", from a space vessel.” www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...

I am fascinated by how viruses evolve - and not just since #SARSCoV2 has shown us at the global stage how consequential virus evolution can be for us. In my new story in @science.org I got to explore how researchers are probing deeper into the past with old RNA virus genome. So a 🧪 thread…

Competitor enters a major AI competition (RNA folding) GPU poor so can't train an AI Builds a "classic" eng pipeline instead. (90s tech) Wins and beat everyone using DL 💀 Their winning "hybrid" model had an AI in it. Their original one did not and had a higher score So they won despite the AI 😂

Gordon had been lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s, but then a new drug halts the progress of the disease, and a kind of neural pacemaker restores his ability to access memories & skills that seemed to have slipped away forever. But no new cure is perfect. “Spare Parts for the Mind”

The true cost of “solar power at night” with Reflect Orbital If you played SimCity 2000, you might've loved the idea of "beaming power from space" down to Earth. Reflect Orbital took that idea, tech-bro'd it, and now could end "night" as we know it. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro

“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers. www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

WANTED: 10,000 toenails (for science!) In non-smokers, radon gas (which naturally rises out of the ground and can accumulate in enclosed spaces) is a leading cause of lung cancer. However, most people don't know their exposure history, making it difficult to determine who is at higher risk. 🧪

Gordon had been lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s, but then a new drug halts the progress of the disease, and a kind of neural pacemaker restores his ability to access memories & skills that seemed to have slipped away forever. But no new cure is perfect. “Spare Parts for the Mind”

@rowanwalrath.bsky.social tried this herself back in March. It didn't go well then either cen.acs.org/physical-che...

Yeah, sure Amazon, whatever you say.

Thrilled to have two years' of work out, in a pair of papers led by @gradientrider.bsky.social and @maxecharles.bsky.social. We've built a data-driven calibration of the James Webb Interferometer to near its fundamental limits for high-res imaging - explainer at @aunz.theconversation.com!

Dear TV writers Yeah, sure, after the Prime Minister’s husband was kidnapped, there would absolutely be no extra security for any other members of her family. I’m totally sold on that!

IMHO, LLMs will be an economic negative for years. They'll do a worse job than humans, but will still replace humans because they're cheaper for employers, but really they're costlier, it's just that lots of costs get externalized to society by our horrible energy/tax policies. Lose-lose-lose.

St. Peter: So ... you claim you studied Applied Mathematics at university? Me: [Starting to sweat] Sure. St. Peter: So, remind me ... which one is Neumann boundary conditions, and which one is Dirichlet? Me: I am so screwed.

Just received author’s copies of this translation of “The Clockwork Rocket” [Book One of the Orthogonal Trilogy] from Explorer Books, a Russian-language publisher in the Netherlands. Explorer Books: explorerbooks.org/product/cloc... About the Orthogonal Trilogy: www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/O...

An astonishing result, beautifully described in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: the mathematics linking scattering amplitudes in particle physics to a geometric object called the amplituhedron can be better understood by also mapping the amplituhedron to the mathematics of origami.