The cringe weirdo contingent of the right likes fantasizing about going back to the glory days of ancient Greece or whatever. But they never make the one argument I could actually get behind: Make wearing blankets as clothes in public acceptable again! Bring back the chiton!

I feel like no matter what I have maybe 4 productive hours on ~average~ available to me to distribute throughout the day, and any other time spent "working" is just spinning my wheels and making me cranky... (...and since I sit at a desk, probably also contributing to back pain and other issues)

Distributed acoustic sensing or DAS is a truly AMAZING seismology technique that uses laser pulses to turn a fiber optic cable into a string of tiny seismometers. DAS doesn't just pick up vibrations in the Earth, though. Exposed coils of cables can easily pick up human speech within 5 meters!

If you have anyone in your life that uses voice-to-text on their phone a lot, I highly recommend requesting that they say "captain's log" each time before doing so.

Sometimes, when I wanted to be reminded to not assume goodwill and media literacy on the behalf of people online, I read the comments on posts by accounts with lots of followers.

Put on your evil genius hats everyone 😈 I have a question: If humans actually wanted to sterilize the Earth — 100% of all life dead, no recovery ever unless biology 2.0 started from scratch — how would we do it?

You know how Reviewer 2 always says "you forgot to cite my paper?" A scientist just did that to me for a news story 😂 You can leave academia but academia will never leave you lol

"What’s kind of striking is, in general in paleoscience, every time we have improved reconstructions of CO2, we find out that it’s playing the major role in climate.” - @mudwaterclimate.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Was a real pleasure speaking to @elisecutts.bsky.social for Science on the beautiful new CO2 results over the MPT from Beyond EPICA presented by Florian Krauss at EGU. (And also nice to see them line up nicely with our CO2 reconstruction from boron!)

Big news out of #EGU26 by @elisecutts.bsky.social for @science.org: Measures of the record-setting 1.2-million-year-old continuous ice core drilled by Beyond EPICA show that CO2 swings likely did help cause the mysterious transition to 100,000-year-long ice ages.

Hot take maybe but leaving without the PhD is an option. A year of your life (or more) is worth a lot. You can do a lot in a year. (They do mention the sunk cost fallacy in this piece so maybe this is not such a hot take after all)

Long shot but I follow lots of planetary people here so let's try: I'm looking for an expert on icy moons to comment for a news story about an experiment showing some awesome phyllo-dough like ice might form through cryovolcanism. Anyone up to comment? DM or email if so. Reposts appreciated.

Because the timeline of edits and invoicing for freelance writing is so chaotic, I find it much easier to know if I'm working "enough" by tracking the rate at which I finish stories worth a certain amount. Does anyone else do this? Or do you track invoice dates or payment dates instead?

I'm an optimist about technology and believe in innovation as the driver of long-term human progress. But sitting in on a panel on AI in the geosciences at EGU today, I did have a tough time with one point a panelist made: That AI is making it easier to collaborate across disciplines.

When, exactly, did "interdisciplinary" become a buzzword and lose all meaning?

Remember that company that Trump paid a billion dollars so that they *wouldn't* build offshore wind farms in the US? They're doing amazing shit over in Europe. Floating turbines are so cool!

I'm starting a newsletter! I'll be sharing "dispatches" or "field notes" about AI, language, and culture, drawn from my research, reading, and traveling. Short, frequent, informal!

Wild that the era of exoplanet geology is beginning before our eyes

This is not even the first time Isaacman has floated the Pluto thing. The right has been Pluto-baiting for YEARS. Because it is anti-science populist gold: popular, taps nostalgia, plays "the people" against huffy no-fun scientists with their stupid rules, and makes science look arbitrary.

Ah yes, it's just LinkedIn casually suggesting to apply to this job training a machine to replace me. Uh. I mean: Thrilled to see the incredible disruption of my field! 🚀✨ So grateful for the chance for personal growth offered by this incredible opportunity to disrupt my own career trajectory. 🙏

I'm a naturally pessimistic person, but I'm maybe weirdly optimistic about the long-term human future. I say weirdly because most people I interact with seem to think we're going to literally destroy the world sometime soon. I guess it is easier to believe in progress I won't live to see?

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

It began, as so many of us do, with a collision... I hope you'll read my latest Terra Affirma, about the wildly biodiverse Klamath region in northern California and southern Oregon. sarahmgilman.substack.com/p/chaos-crea...

This morning I saw a kid (maybe 10?) who was scootering ahead of me stop to carefully coax a caterpillar off the pathway and onto a twig, then over to a patch of vegetation out of harms way. 🐛🌱

Ink 10/13/2019 Rotring Artpen EF 6" X 8" [15.2 X 20.3 cm] #sciart #gawoski #plankton

Sometimes the writer's block is bad enough that you have to just go to sleep and hope the god of caffeine and deadline pressure will save you on the next morning.

The bill would allow NSF funds to be siphoned off for AI-in-schools initiatives... Great news for the already ~thriving~ NSF! /s

Me: hm maybe I finally learned how to be organized Also me, if even 1 thing is atypical about my day: wow I was late to literally every meeting that I didn't forget entirely

Happy Bank Holiday to all the self-employed people for whom those words have precisely zero meaning. 🙃 Signed, Someone who was up at 6am.

Question for anyone who actually knows things about child psychology: Does it help or harm kids that we hide death from them for so long in modern rich societies?

I get that it is fun to be cute in your Bluesky bio but dear lord it would be helpful if people would just... say who they are. Unpopular opinion but you earn the right to have a nonsensical cutesy bio only once you're so famous that the audience you want to reach knows who you are already anyways.

It feels a bit surreal to have just had to send this message to an august US scientific body. But here we are.

Looking at this list of most network-central accounts in the Bluesky science network is so bizarre. Some are big accounts run by scientists Others are not-so-big Others are semi-anonymous cartoon avatar accounts And yet others are labeled as spam accounts? lol

With the news that the US wants to have five years of your social media history allow me to remind you of the tool I built to scrub your skeets

That GPT would end up ranting about goblins mostly thanks to its "Nerdy" personality 100% checks out. Fellow nerds, correct me, but I do feel like we talk about goblins more than average.

@hankgreen.bsky.social raging over manipulative chart tactics is great and I wish I had seen more content like this when I was younger — I feel like teaching kids to read and understand charts should be right up there with teaching them to read and understand texts.

My journalism residency at a research institution is the 1st time I've spent sustained time w/ people in a work environment since Feb 2020: 2020-2022: mostly-online grad school 2022+ : freelance science journalism I was not prepared for the degree to which my brain is melting out of my ears lol 🫠

By weakening Voting Rights Act protections against racial discrimination in redistricting, the Supreme Court has paved the way for the largest-ever drop in representation by Black members of Congress. n.pr/4edJ5XA

NASA Administrator Isaacman's "Make Pluto A Planet Again" push didn't come from nowhere. The right has been Pluto-baiting for over a year. Why? Because it is anti-science populist gold. And now it's also a distraction from the White House trying to slash NASA's science budget in half.

As a Pluto scientist, it's wild to "make Pluto a planet again" while decimating the careers of those of us that study it! The idea of dominance in space and planetary science supersedes the actual practice of planetary science.

“Our findings suggest that training LLMs to be warm may come at a cost to accuracy. As these systems are deployed at unprecedented scale & take on intimate roles in people’s lives, the tradeoff warrants attention from developers, policymakers & users alike.” @lujain.bsky.social, Hafner & @rocher.lc🧪

I wasn't planning on writing a newsletter post until summer but I couldn't stop raging over the "Make Pluto a Planet Again" thing. And the more I picked at it, the more it was clear that it *not* come out of nowhere. The right has been yearning for Pluto planethood for a while now. 🧪🔭

My book BEYOND BELIEF is out today! It says: in a world flooded with questionable claims and misinformation, evidence from science can help show what’s nonsense – and what’s not. In other words: "Essential reading for the rational-minded". Please repost! 1/🧵 @princetonupress.bsky.social

As part of my newsletter re-launch I wanted to write an AI policy to be clear about how I'm using AI and maybe open a conversation with other science journalists about how best to use these tools (no, I do not let it write for me, chill). Would be genuinely grateful for ✨constructive✨ feedback.

What areas of science do you feel have the most immediate and urgent consequences for human life and society *right now* ?

This is science populism. Lots of people like Pluto and saying it should still be a planet is a nostalgia meme. Calling it planet again is saying “hey everyone, you do actually know better than those fun-hating scientists” … with a bonus of making science seem arbitrary 🙃😵‍💫

You cannot write something everyone will like. Nobody ever has. Trying to please everyone will have you revising the same story forever. Writing for a specific audience gives you clarity of what to focus on. It can be attorneys, or 30-something lesbians, or an imaginary rubber duck. Write for them.

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

I get the feeling scientists often think scicomm means sharing their own current research with the public. But I suspect that it'd be more effective and productive for most audiences to share stuff that isn't on the unstable shifting frontier of knowledge and instead focus on Your Field 101.