Ever wonder what happened to that $100 million interstellar spaceship program? Me too. www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

An absolute banger of a story from @sarahscoles.bsky.social about Breakthrough Starshot and its dreams of interstellar travel, a decade after the big-deal project was announced, including what happened to that dazzling $100 million promise: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

HiPOD: Frosty Sand Dunes of Mars A field of sand dunes occupies this frosty 5-kilometer diameter crater in the high-latitudes of the northern plains of Mars. Some dunes appear to be climbing up the crater slope along a gully-like form. uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_06... #Mars #science #NASA

TIL that there's aluminum recovered from the Twin Towers on Mars: One piece on the Spirit rover, and another on Opportunity (both spacecraft are no longer operational) www.nasa.gov/image-articl...

Scientists just shared their best look to date at what might be the most tantalizing rock on Mars: 🧪 🛰️ www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-t...

What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and ultraviolet light of nearby, massive, infant stars. What else did #NASAWebb find in Pismis 24? https://bit.ly/4mr3cmt

And as the New York Times editorialized in response to the scientific reports, this marked “the beginning of the end of Mankind’s grand romantic dreams.”

FEMA staff who signed their name to the recent Katrina Declaration were placed on administrative leave. The notice says the move is not punitive, but others call it illegal retaliation against whistleblowers. 🧪 eos.org/research-and...

Did a dive into the saga to transport a retired Space Shuttle to Houston. The story could have easily been twice as long, it's got so many wild parts www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

"Live, laugh, launch" is pretty damn good www.space.com/space-explor...

I'm looking away from our world for a moment. I'm looking at the little dot in this image. It's a newborn planet, 5 times the mass of Jupiter, carving a path through the disk of dust around its star. This is the first time we've seen the process clearly. 🧪🔭 www.eso.org/public/image...

After a series of failures during recent test flights, SpaceX's massive Starship had a smooth ride for Tuesday's blast-off, and successfully deployed some fake satellites.

Love that we're still finding new moons in our own solar system www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/s...

I watched way too many "5 to 9 after 9 to 5" videos and became convinced that whether you "make the most" of your free time by being super productive or just try to relax and recover from your job, the ghost of work haunts most of our leisure www.theatlantic.com/family/archi...

"Not since the Red Scare .. has American science been so beholden to political ideology." I'm late to this brilliant @rossandersen.bsky.social piece, but it's a must-read (gift link): www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Another milestone in the era of space tourism: casually asking wealthy celebrities if they're thinking about going to space www.thecut.com/article/mari...

Fun little freelance thing: I have a website now! Please be gentle, I haven't built a website since the MySpace era marinakoren.com

NEW: A magnitude 8.8 megaquake blasted tsunami waves across the Pacific today. Here's everything you need to know about it, including: -Why it happened -Why it generated a widespread tsunami -Why the timing of this megaquake is a bit weird Me, for NatGeo www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

Saturnrise. This video sequence was taken in 2007 by astronomer Jan Koet, and shows Saturn seeming to emerge as the Moon moves out of the way. The video is at twice actual speed. Source: bit.ly/3fCWTci

Yes I AM blaming every still-packed box and undone chore on these quirks of Earth's rotation and no I am not open to feedback about that decision. (Come on Earth's wild ride with me!): 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has sent his first communique to the agency's workforce

This is a lovely piece about, among other things, why obituaries matter. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

In 2022, Elon Musk ordered staff to shut off Starlink service in parts of Ukraine where troops were pushing into during a critical counteroffensive against Russia. Our story today examines this order, and Starlink's relationship with governments around the world since www.reuters.com/investigatio...

I wrote about Rubin again, this time about the telescope's capacity to find potentially dozens of interstellar objects. It's going to be wild, as one astronomer put it, "like old-fashioned astronomy: Find the thing, point telescopes at it, argue about it." www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

NEW: Betelgeuse, a big red star, will eventually explode. But despite its self-destructive proclivities, the irritable giant has managed to make, and keep, a friend: a companion star that Betelgeuse will, eventually and rudely, eat up. Me @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/s...

gift link is above, but here's a taste:

You can tell a lot about how Trump feels about his own power and influence by the way he’s posting. In that context, I wrote about Trump's addled social media crashout over the weekend and how it's different from a few months ago when he had more juice www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

A group of 287 scientists and current and former NASA employees has issued a declaration lambasting budget cuts, grant cancellations and a “culture of organizational silence” that they say could pose a risk to astronauts’ safety.

Beyond thrilled to share that I'm writing my next book, AT HOME IN THE STARS. It's about the human expansion into space and space as a human environment. Think Carl Sagan meets Robert Macfarlane. 🪐✨🧑‍🚀🌱 If you want updates / news when the book is (someday) out: jaimealyse.behiiv.com

So surreal to see the sun—our star!—like this

"Take the perspective ‘Mars is a failed Earth’. What if, instead, we took the view that Mars didn’t fail at becoming Earth, but, succeeded at becoming Mars? This latter view means that we would recognize the planet’s morally relevant attributes and respect it on its own terms." - I love this.

hell of a quote, when you think about it

Fascinating images released at this briefing showing the potential of Rubin. But when I submitted a question (via Zoom) asking about impact on Rubin of potential NSF budget cuts, it was rejected: "Only science questions." A reporter in the room was also similarly rejected. 🤔

And @katrinamillerphd.bsky.social has a tour-de-force @nytimes.com piece on the shameful landscape of organizations downplaying and erasing diversity initiatives, just as Vera Rubin finally gets her recognition. 🧪🔭🏳️‍🌈

@rboyle31.bsky.social in @sciam.bsky.social on the telescope's promise: "The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will do something revolutionary, rare and relatively old-fashioned: it will just look out at the universe and see what there is to see." 🧪🔭

Big news from the new #VeraRubin Observatory in Chile, which is dropping its first images today. There's a public webinar in an hour (11 a.m. ET) at youtube.com/@nsfscience, but here's some early coverage. @meprillaman.bsky.social in @sciencenews.bsky.social on the first images: 🧪🔭

The photos of the inside and all the wires and workings are quite beautiful too. Excited to see the new space photos today

Tag yourself, I'm the dense clump of dark matter

Rubin's debut pictures are out today, and they're just gorgeous. This one, of nebulas, combines 678 images taken over seven hours—quick work for a telescope like this. My story on what we might find over the next 10 years of glittering views: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

"Welcome to a mind-blowing new era of astronomy." 🧪 (by @meghanbartels.bsky.social)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just released some of its first images. Its powerful new telescope will be able to quickly spot previously unseen astronomical objects. https://n.pr/405DN8P

🤩 First images Monday morning, 11 am EDT!

🧪🔭

🥲

My first story for National Geographic is out, and it's about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will spend the next decade scanning the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere, revealing all kinds of cosmic wonders: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

Really hope whoever they pick for NASA administrator knows a bit more about the American space program than this guy

Umm

"You’re punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You don’t just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.” www.scientificamerican.com/article/prop...

Look I know everyone's probably watching multiple meltdowns at the moment, but a Japanese company is gonna try to land on the moon this afternoon if you want a Zen break www.youtube.com/live/B682Yox...

Clownfish in Papua New Guinea are temporarily shrinking in response to heat stress caused by climate change, a new study found. Here's how that might help them deal with warmer water temps.