Earth’s climate is in a perpetual state of tenuous balance. Atmospheric chemistry, polar and alpine ice, forests, albedo, ocean circulation, etc. Fiddle with one nob and everything else responds. Actions have consequences. So does inaction. 🧪

Buckle up. “El Nino - Nature's thermostat releasing ocean heat to supercharge weather extremes and global temperatures -- powers up further. An 81% chance to be top of the chart level, likely historic strength.” -Seth Borenstein, AP apnews.com/article/el-n... 🧪

There's a reason modern bands are still compared to the Beatles. They changed how we appreciate music. Similarly, Hubble changed how we appreciate the cosmos. Consider M88. 63 million light-years away w/ an active black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

Blue's Science Communication Rule #1 "Precision is the enemy of understanding." You can be balls-on accurate without being pedantically precise. 🧪 In the words of former Hubble spokesperson Ray Villard, "It doesn't matter how precise you are if no one bothers to read your story." #sciencecomms

Merging black holes and I have something in common; we both settle into the most "disordered" possible state. Oscar Madison Conjecture: the final state of merging black holes follows one simple rule. *Nature tends toward the state with the highest entropy.* 🧪🔭 #blackholes doi.org/10.1103/hvp6...

HIV has taken so much from so many. Treatments have improved, but mitigation is not prevention. A breakthrough? Maybe. A new vaccine harnesses 'broadly neutralizing' antibodies to outsmart HIV's formidable defenses. Human trials have started.🧪 #HIV #AID #Vaccines www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How do black holes become so massive? 🧪🔭 ⚫️ ➡️ 🎆 ⬅️ ⚫️ Gravitational wave data reveal black holes can pack on weight (above 45 solar masses) through a series of collisions (mergers) between other black holes in dense star clusters. go.aps.org/4yd4KXA

As I prepare for @dragoncon.org science fair, I was reminded of a story I wrote about the discovery of leftover building blocks of galaxy formation - hydrogen gas clouds - swarming around Andromeda, which are only visible in radio light (orange). 🧪🔭 #dragoncon www.nrao.edu/pr/2004/m31H...

This is one of those astronomy results that bakes my noodle. Announced in 2023, the Gemini Observatory traced a gamma-ray burst to nucleus of ancient galaxy, suggesting stars can undergo demolition-derby-like collisions! Cosmic car crash on a stellar scale!🔭🧪 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Mosquitos, blood-sucking buggers, can fly in the rain! 🧪🦟 How?! Each weighs 50 times less than a raindrop yet aren’t battered by falling drops. It’s all fluid dynamics! Mosquitos’ low mass and slow speed means raindrops are unaffected by the collisions. share.google/PJ0UIrvJfaRb...

Cosmic fireworks! 🎆🎇 Two protostars (mere 100,000 years old) in Orion got perilously close, flinging their material into space! @almaobservatory.bsky.social captured aftermath! 🧪🔭 I loved writing this! share.google/u1kS6UO8RAl6...

While a 'wet behind the ears' PIO for @agu.org in the 1990s, I organized the press conference announcing the "smoking gun" of CFCs and ozone depletion -- revealing the step-by-step processes and the role of polar stratospheric clouds. 30 odd years later and still much to learn. 🧪

Mind the gap! Or the gaps in the protostar outflows. New @stsci.edu image is a cracker to be sure but the IR data from JWST also tells a story about star formation: protostars gather matter in episodes, seen as gaps (left). But I still think Hubble is cooler. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

Mind-blowing, to put it mildly. Synthetic cells: simple cells stripped of stuff to the point taking one more gene out and you get only goo, till now. New research went the other way: building simple cells from goo. 🧪🦠🔬 But "Manmade" NYT? w/ female study lead? 🙄 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The Rubin Observatory is a game changer! Unique. Powerful. It will create a "movie" of the universe as it evolves! It's true mission begins today, a 10-year survey of space and time. I visited the site during construction and once got a "butt dial" from Vera Rubin herself. 🧪🔭 brnw.ch/21x3LB1

Dark matter is the hide-and-seek champion of the cosmos! We know it's out there, but we've never been able to say "Tag! You're it!"🧪🔭 New idea: Halos of self-annihilating dark matter could be faintly glowing around gas-giant planets like Jupiter. Olly olly oxen free! doi.org/10.1103/g53c...

I just published "Thinking About Cosmology." This is why non-physicists should never hypothesize about the hardest problems in physics, and why I'm never invited to parties.🧪🔭 medium.com/p/thinking-a...

Ghostly neutrinos. Billions pass through you each second. A light-year of lead has only a 50% chance of stopping one. ALMA found that a burst of mega-energetic neutrinos came from a star-forming galaxy rather than supermassive black hole. VERY unexpected!🧪🔭 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two merging black holes (1.3 billion light-years away) scrunched & yanked the fabric of space itself before merging in a burst of gravitational waves detected by LIGO, Jan. 2025.🌀 The telltale fingerprint of 'frame dragging' was found hiding in the signal.🔭🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Past Podcast: Violence in Videogames... the research is dubious at best. Here's one of my favorite podcasts on the topic.🧪 If you are worried about violent video games triggering aggressive behavior in children, new research may help to alleviate your concerns. www.podbean.com/ep/pb-caxa5-...

June 24, 2017. 16,500' elevation on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile, taking in the ALMA telescope! Amazing engineering, transformative science. High and dry to enable submillimeter wavelenght radio astronomy. (Fact: ALMA was most sensitive part of Event Horizon Telescope's image of SgrA*)🧪🔭

The solar wind helps protect Earth from ultra-nasty cosmic rays. The precise desitance to the solar wind's termination shock (where it drops from hypersonic to subsonic) is hard to pin down. New model helps forecast when NASA's New Horizons will cross that threshold.🧪🔭 doi.org/10.1016/j.as...

Saying NASA's Perseverance rover is “car size” doesn’t do it justice! The scale model at NASA HQ is shockingly huge up close! Launched in 2020, it’s still searching for signs of past life on the Red Planet! 🧪🔭 Model shown here w/ café & donuts in the background.

Prions are odd infectious agents. Not a bacteria or virus. Rather a normal protein folded in funky, fatal fashion. But wait, docs+AI are testing prion bits (peptides) to see if they can fight germs rather than turn brain tissue into Swiss cheese. 🧀 www.newswise.com/articles/ai-... 🧪⚕️

Europa, the icy moon that could... be hospitable to life. 🧪🔭 Europa Clipper will arrive in 2030. Before then, astronomers are using radar to delve below its frozen exterior. The technique, bistatic radar, helps study objects in the solar system. 100m GBT Rocks! public.nrao.edu/news/gbt-eur...

Chilling. The story behing the decimation and the unrepairable damage left in its wake. Quotes: “...research has been shut off...because some people find the words ‘structural racism’ offensive.” “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”🧪🔭 www.scientificamerican.com/article/amer...

I 💙 AAS meetings! Breaking astronomy news every day, like JWST finding a “hot mess” exoplanet! 🔥 This mega “hot Jupiter” has an orbit that brings it WAY too close to its Sun-like star, turning temp up 1,100°, mucking up its chemistry & clouds. Data galore! 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

The universe was just 5% its current age - a toddler in cosmic terms.🧪🔭 It was there/then astronomers using ALMA+VLA spotted REBELS-25, a priomordial galaxy chock-a-block with CO gas, the 1st detection of an infant galaxy brimming with the fuel for star formation. public.nrao.edu/news/vla-fue...

Freakin' Amazing Radio Camera!! 📡 Caltech's DSA. 1,650 dishes. Data rate = entire US internt traffic! Camera aspect will use GPUs to turn data tsunami into pictures in real time! World's most sensitive radio telescope: The "PhotoMart" of the radio universe!🧪🔭 www.caltech.edu/about/news/c...

A Black Hole Star? Supporting evidence is growing! iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... 1.8 billions years post big bang (a toddler on the cosmic scale), a black hole is gobbling up fuel and growing fast! Light from near the BH gets tweeked by a cocoon of gas, the hallmark of the monster within.🧪🔭

Where there’s clay, there was water. And life is rather fond of water. 💧 @esa.int ExoMars (launching 2028) will have a ginormous swathe of the Red Planet’s surface (300x600 km) to ‘play in the clay’ & search for signs of past (?) life! #astrobiology 🧪🔭 doi.org/10.1016/j.ic...

Spewing supermassive black hole (SBH) in the Milky Way! As cold gas spirals inward, some of it get superhot and 'spews' out in jets.💦 Till now, the SBH in our galaxy showed no signs of spewing. (Ewww). HT to ALMA & Chandra for finding 1st signs of gentle jets. 🔭🧪 www.newswise.com/articles/mil...

Mosquitos love me! 🦟 A lot, and the welts last for days. One frontline defense, DEET, may lose efficacy if mosquitos learn to associate the smell with a tasty meal. #science They can learn?! We’re doomed. 🧪⚕️ www.newswise.com/articles/thi...

How do blobs of cosmic dust and gas flatten into planet-forming disks? The ALMA telescope and ‘maths’ reveal that a tenuous transition zone gradually shepherds matter into the familiar disk-like (Keplerian) motion of our & other solar systems. 🔭🧪 #science #space alma-telescope.jp/en/news/pdfo...

'Little Red Dots' underwhelming name for overwhelming cosmic critter! #JWST lurching toward cosmic dawn 'weighs' ginormous black hole, adding evidence that primordial black holes 'collapsed' into existance rather than assembled from lesser objects.🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/web... #science

I take this personally! (And so should you.) I've seen my shadow by the light of the Milky Way, the LMC over San Pedro de Atacama, Venus shadow at Kitt Peak... Have you ever looked up to see the Milky Way and said "WOW?" No? It may be now or never. 🔭🧪 medium.com/starts-with-...

The cleverly named 😏 "Very Long Baseline Array" (VLBA) is freakin' amazing but seldom ballyhooed. 10 radio dishes spanning Hawai'i to St. Croix. Resolution akin to spotting penny in Paris from NYC. Latest? Using quasar 10 bly away to map interstellar weather.🔭🧪 public.nrao.edu/news/vlba-ma...

First light! The moment a new astronomical instrument collects its first photons from the cosmos. The Next Generation VLA, when complete, will peel back billions of years of history to document the evolution of the deep, dark, cold depths of space.🔭🧪 public.nrao.edu/news/nsf-nra...

In space... bacterial infections can be more severe and tend to be more resistant to antibiotics. Researchers aboard ISS are studying how cardiac stem cells respond to bacteria infections. The hope is to find new ways to protect the heart from pneumonia. 🧪⚕️ www.nasa.gov/mission/stat...

Phyllo-cellular ice? Ice croissants?🥐 Water erupting on the surface of ocean moons, like Jupiter's Europa, can freeze into fluffy, croissant-like ice. These H20 pasteries could be a hazard for future lander missions to distant moons. 🧪🔭 www.science.org/content/arti...

ESO releases another cosmic image to 'chew on.' Dubbed Gum 15, this region (3000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vela) shows the striking contrast between dark interstellar dust clouds and glowing hydrogen gas ionized by ultraviolet starlight. 🔭🧪 www.eso.org/public/image...

Thanks to @jomega22.bsky.social for being a kind and congenial host for the Rabbit Hole of Research podcast! Was happy to chat about asteroids, comets, and planetary defense! #asteroids #science 🔭☄️📡 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Normally shy adolescent planets were given a rare spotlight thanks to ALMA and @thenrao.bsky.social ALMA can image the particles of planet forming disks, showing us the universe is Cool!! 🧪🔭 public.nrao.edu/news/alma-te...

2 metal hips, fused SI joint, lumbar disk, eye muscle, tendon release, etc. I had a LOT surgeries! Faster recovery? Walk, my sedentary friends! Can confirm. Yup, that’s me…🧪🩺⚕️🩻 www.newswise.com/articles/one...

41,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) found! Those larger than 140 meters? Roughly 14,000 remain undiscovered. Welcome in NASA's NEO Surveyor! The first IR space telescope dedicated soley to finding potentially hazardous NEOs will launch 2027. Keep looking up! 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/blogs/neo-su...

What happens when galaxies go through a mid-life crisis? It may depend on neighbors and neighborhoods. Unlike their younger counterparts, galaxies past their prime (not quite 'red and dead,' but getting there) are less resilient to changes in their cosmic surroundings.🧪🔭 doi.org/10.3847/1538...

Stars are weird. From birth to stellar ember, even relatively placid stars like the Sun evolve in complex ways. New research from Kyoto Univ. helps explain how stars "spin down" as they age ~ interactions betwixt magnetic fields and plasma flow.🧪🔭 www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/research-...

Fair winds and following seas Artemis II! I’ll be on site at KSC today and am doubly proud to include information about @thenrao.bsky.social as I talk about space, rockets, science and the Moon! PS, the GBT is my favorite telescope. 🧪🔭

I have nothing to add. The data is/are clear and compelling. They have been for more than 3 decades. Continuing to fetishize fossil fuels will have catastrophic results. 🧪

Pithy fact about science?! None needed. Just savor this dizzying, dazzling image of star-forming regions in M33, the Triangulum Galaxy - one of our cosmic neighbors. The universe is strange, but I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. 🧪🔭 www.eso.org/public/image...