BIG story out now from @science.org on SR-1 Freedom, a highly ambitious nuclear Mars mission that NASA wants to launch in 2028. @hannah-richter.bsky.social has scoops on how the mission came together—and where its reactor is probably being built. www.science.org/content/arti...

Watching Artemis II has been bittersweet. I have done a huge amount of reporting on the program, including attending Artemis I and previewing Artemis II. But by coincidence, Artemis is also tied up in a deeply traumatizing experience—and those feelings have rushed back with surprising intensity.

To keep myself honest, here's the Google Trends data for US searches for "Artemis" November 2022 to today. Data for this week are incomplete, but we're looking at at least a ~12.5x bump over the Artemis I launch in November 2022. trends.google.com/trends/explo...

Artemis II launches at 6:24pm ET. Watch live here: www.youtube.com/live/Tf_UjBM... Artemis II will provide a key test of how the human body responds to radiation in deep space, a major concern for future human space exploration. Read more in @science.org: www.science.org/content/arti...

The #ArtemisII crew includes the first person of color, the first woman, and the first non-American to (hopefully) fly beyond Earth orbit. You won't hear much on this from NASA, which has rolled back DEI initiatives over the past year. www.npr.org/2026/03/31/n...

Today is the launch of Artemis II. It's a mission defined by expanding possibilities, including sending the first Black person, the first woman, and the first non-U.S. citizen beyond low Earth orbit. It also comes at a challenging time back on terra firma. I wrote about this tension back in 2023:

One neat thing about publishing research is seeing other people build on your work. If you want to play with the Naibbe cipher — my attempt at building a cipher benchmark for the #VoynichManuscript — someone has made a site where you can encrypt and decrypt with it. voynich.science?vw_panel=nai...

My latest: in an interview with @science.org, new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman promises a big uptick in lunar robotic missions, another potential Mars 2028 mission beyond comms, and continued support for earth science observation. (Sorry astro and helio folks, time went fast.)

A historian has discovered that a 16th century printing of The Almagest—a highly influential ancient astronomy text—contains extensive annotations from Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who later overthrew that text’s conception of a geocentric cosmos. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aMAwRm

This is fascinating. open.substack.com/pub/theicema...

This is a nice contrast to all the awful behavior confirmed through the Epstein files. Proud of @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social & @seanmcarroll.bsky.social for picking up on the sexism & charlatanism right away.

After endless revelations about people in the Epstein files, it's refreshing to see one about three people who were invited to something by Epstein and were like "nope" ... including Bluesky elder @seanmcarroll.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

As always, it was a blast working with @joshuasokol.bsky.social on this story. What a cool find: a young Galileo taking notes in the margins of the ancient astronomy text he'd make obsolete two decades later.

Now more than ever, independent journalism is vital. Please consider supporting the work of @science.org's journalists: 1. Sign up for @nerdychristie.bsky.social's *excellent* ScienceAdviser newsletter: www.science.org/content/page... 2. Subscribe for $25/year. www.science.org/content/page...

Writing is thinking. You can't possibly set up early-career journalists for long-term success if you systematically deny them the experience of thinking through their own reporting and structuring it as stories.

Call me a romantic, but one of the things I love about print news versus online is the editorial ability to use layout and size to communicate priority. On an algorithmic social feed, every post renders as the same size, with the same character limits, and there is no curatorial guiding of the eye.

What do Seahawks QB Sam Darnold and a snapping shrimp have in common? They both protect their brains from injury with headgear (though only 1 of them is up against a supersonic shockwave). My latest for @science.org: www.science.org/content/arti.... Thanks as always @michaelgreshko.bsky.social :-)

One of the reasons why media is in the mess it's in is that a shockingly high number of media executives are simply awful at their jobs. Will Lewis inherited a bad hand from Fred Ryan and played it horrendously. What an ignominious legacy.

It was a pleasure to edit Claudia's story about this remarkable bonobo—and a remarkable study done with him shortly before he passed away. 🧪https://www.science.org/content/article/imagination-isn-t-just-humans-famous-ape-shows

A newspaper is not 1,000 substacks in a trenchcoat. You can't do alone what you can do in a big news organization. The capacity for deep, long-term reporting is lost. Find somewhere that still does this, whether it's public media, a newspaper or a website, and subscribe to them today.

What a terrible day for the Washington Post. My thoughts are with the paper's talented, hardworking staff, who do not deserve this.

Don't call it an "Earth twin": it could just as easily be a broiling Venus twin. But the smart money will follow @elisecutts.bsky.social's bet that this planet is going to become a darling of follow-up observations. Earth-size planet, with an almost exactly Earth-size orbit? 🧪

(rushes to be the first to make the THERE'S ALREADY A STARBUCKS THERE joke)

New planet just dropped and it 1) is almost exactly Earth-sized 2) has a year that's almost exactly 1 Earth year. 3) orbits a star that is not a 💢temperamental little shit M-dwarf 💢but is instead a 🧡 good orange boi 🧡 Me for @science.org based on results presented at #RockyWorlds4: 🔭🧪

I had the distinct pleasure of top-editing @hannah-richter.bsky.social's story on the new quietest place on Earth. This is a fun read! 🧪

This was a good essay www.megangreenwell.com/the-adults-i...

The Post’s current strategy fascinates me. What is the plan here?

I edited @humbertobasilio.bsky.social’s recent story on how Venezuela’s scientists are faring after the US capture of Maduro. A few of them made an important observation: Science is downstream of basic human needs and freedoms. Research cannot thrive when fundamental rights are under attack.

@humbertobasilio.bsky.social did a terrific job reporting out how scientists in Venezuela are responding to the chaos over the past few weeks. One constant refrain: The oil industry once funded a lot of research in related sectors, and researchers in the country are now wondering what comes next.

@longreads.com this story might be of interest to you!

Many thanks to Garry Shaw and @theartnewspaper.bsky.social for their coverage of my research on the Voynich Manuscript: www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/01/07/c... You can check out my full, open-access paper here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🧪 EXCLUSIVE 🧪 from @science.org: Scientists have swabbed a 500-year-old drawing attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—and may have found a piece of his DNA. www.science.org/content/arti... Yes, really. A quick thread:

Many thanks to Tom Metcalfe and @livescience.com for their coverage of my recent paper on the Voynich Manuscript: www.livescience.com/archaeology/... You can read the full open-access paper describing the Naibbe cipher here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2025 was hectic. My son turned 2. I started a new editor job at the fabulous @science.org. I wrote and published an academic article on the Voynich Manuscript (wacky, I know). My family saw family and friends as often as we could. Let’s hope for more joy and less stress in 2026. Happy New Year!

Super cool story. Research a couple years ago by folks including me, @ernie.tedium.co, and @404media.co on the new owners of Deadspin helped bring about a good-news story on the ownership of a local California newspaper.

Many thanks to @tommyhale.bsky.social for a nice story about my Voynich Manuscript paper in @iflscience.com: www.iflscience.com/is-this-how-... The open-access paper can be read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🧪 🌠 @danclery.bsky.social did a terrific job reporting this out. A pretty eye-popping stat in here: If satellite launches thru the 2030s happen as planned, there'll be HALF A MILLION satellites orbiting Earth by 2040—enough to contaminate many space telescopes' images with the occasional streak.

This is the remarkable work of Michael (partly inspired by my Polygraphia III hypothesis) I gave a sneak preview of here in September – texperimentales.hypotheses.org/5898 🎉

🧪🧵: For years, the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript (VMS) has puzzled medievalists, linguists & codebreakers. Today, I’m publishing a peer-reviewed paper describing a new model for how it may have been written. Presenting the Naibbe cipher: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408

🧪 ✏️ Apply for the 2026 Diverse Voices in Science Journalism Internship with @science.org! 🧪 ✏️ This could be for you if you're a student from a community historically underrepresented in #journalism who's interested in in covering science for general audiences: recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/...

EXCLUSIVE: CDC to end all monkey studies. Decision handed down by recent college grad and former DOGE employee who is now deputy chief of staff at the agency. Animals were being used in studies of HIV prevention. Some may be euthanized. My latest for @science.org

Jeffrey Epstein funded and hobnobbed with elite scientists, and he fancied himself an inquiring scientific mind. These are two pieces of his "radical breakthrough": - "nose test. telepathy." - "music [...] can it be looked at to reengineer the brain. harmony FFT. symphonic learning."

🧪🧵 In the Epstein documents released today, there's a "radical breakthrough" email Epstein sent himself in 2018, containing musings such as the idea that beards "are meant to catch and hold smells." Then he replied to himself with an unusual list of people including Donald Trump ("donalad trup").

McGraths Flat is an incredible fossil site in New South Wales that reveals Australia’s rich tropical past. In a new study, scientists discover what caused the area’s exceptional fossilization—and where similar fossil sites might be unearthed. #Paleontology #Lagerstatte 🧪🏺 New for @science.org

Thank you @spinfocl.bsky.social for the kind words about my research on the Voynich Manuscript, which I’m pleased to announce has been accepted for publication in Cryptologia following peer review. Read more about my work and the previous research that motivated it in Hermes’s blog post:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this company's AI podcast on the Gilded Age has a thumbnail misspelling it "Guilded Age." Somewhat ironic. www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-... www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

Personal news: I wrote ~3/8 of a book, and that book is out today! If you want a visually rich, historically grounded look at magic though the millennia, this book's for you. The National Geographic Book of Magic and the Occult is available wherever books are sold: bookshop.org/p/books/nati...

Personal news: As an unusual hobby, I study the weird 15th-century text known as the Voynich Manuscript. I am giving a talk on some of my research on August 3: www.voynich.ninja/thread-4827.... I haven’t cracked it. Rather, I have devised a reference model for how the text may have been generated.

Well, this makes it real: I'm retiring in September and this is the just-posted job listing for my replacement. @Science.org is a fabulous place to work, so @sciencewriters.org, apply here! recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/...

Do you ever stop and think about how there used to be pterosaurs? A fun new study shows that pterosaurs used to eat plants (they'd been expected to be carnivores) & like modern birds, they had stones in their gullets called gastroliths that help break down plants 🧪 @science.org