The latest edition of #PeriodicGraphics explains the history of the #WorldCup trophy and its chemical composition: cen.acs.org/materials/in... #FIFAWorldCup #chemsky 🧪

You've döne your last hüsker

Kīlauea's doing its thing again. Watch live: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz5t...

While Artemis II astronauts looped the Moon, the PUNCH satellites monitored the Sun for dangerous radiation. This time, levels of solar protons were modest--but PUNCH will be increasingly important as more astronauts venture outside Earth's magnetic field. 🧪🔭 punch.space.swri.edu/punch_news.p...

What did the early Universe *sound* like. With nice work by Stephane Pigeon who runs mynoise.net, we now have this nice "sonification" of the acoustic noise at the time of recombination. Have a listen! (and use headphone with the "wide" stereo setting. mynoise.net/NoiseMachine...

Scientific American was my first home in the science journalism world, and one of the most inspiring places I've ever worked. So sad to see the end of an era. I hope it survives in an updated form, but it will certainly not be the same. 🧪

Comet 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor that blew through our solar system, might have been a truly ancient relic. A new analysis of its unusual composition suggests the comet could be up to 12 billion years old, dating from the earliest era of our galaxy. 🧪🔭 esawebb.org/news/weic2613/

"Gort: klaatu barada nikto" #iykyk

For the first time, scientists have detected the wind from a black hole. New images show the supermassive one at the center of our galaxy is puffing away, clearing out a void about 20 trillion miles wide. 🧪🔭 www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-rel...

Our modern picture of the universe is strange, but the evidence keeps supporting it. A new study refutes an earlier claim questioning our ideas about dark energy. As far as we can tell, hidden energy is still making the universe expand faster & faster. 🔭🧪 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

David Hockney used his art to experiment with our perception of space and time. In 1994 he delivered a beautiful lecture at Caltech describing his process. [PDF link] 🧪 calteches.library.caltech.edu/3762/1/Hockn...

We've got the Artemis III crew members! Now we just need a working Moon lander for them to rendezvous with in Earth orbit during their test run next year. 🧪 www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Just look at this gorgeous portrait of celestial creation. JWST trained its infrared vision on one tiny patch in the Orion Nebula. There, it saw a wild collage of collapsing clouds, protostars, jets, shockwaves, and dark disks where new planets are forming. 🔭🧪 esawebb.org/images/potm2...

'Purple Rain' Earth's atmosphere revealed by a Himawari satellite study of water vapor in the infrared, an extended look at the turmoil in the water-filled skies of planet Earth. Each minute covers one day. Each shot covers one month. The 7h15m40s 4K video is not looped. youtu.be/bjvmUL_A20A

Planets form in swirling disks of gas and dust around newborn stars. It's not just a theory--we can watch it happening! These images show the rotating disk around young star AB Aurigae, 520 light years from Earth. They were taking over 4 years at Paranal Observatory. 🧪🔭 www.eso.org/public/video...

This is important.

This is, by far, the most detailed map of magnetic fields in the universe. Red shows fields pointed toward us; blue shows fields pointed away. We can't see these fields directly, but we know they influence structures across the cosmos. 🧪🔭 theconversation.com/see-a-new-ma...

Galaxies, like people, are strongly influence by the environment in which they grew up. For 1000s of years people have wondered where the universe came from. Now, in this generation, we're getting answers. We live at a remarkable time in science history. 🧪🔭 subarutelescope.org/en/results/2...

A new study of "hot Jupiter" planets around other stars found some of the fastest winds ever measured -- up to 15,000 mph (25,000 kilometers per hour)! The research also found the best evidence yet that exopolanets have protective magnetic fields. 🔭🧪 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

This is the lava fountain I was looking for. "Strands of Pele’s hair were reported at the Uēkahuna overlook in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park." 🧪 www.bigislandvideonews.com/2026/06/01/r...

I'm in the late stages of book writing, and my present self is having a testy relationship with my past self. So many times, Past Self threw together some lazy notes and thought, "Future self will fix this." Now Future Self is Present Self, and Present Self is in a rage. Calvin understands.

This is the kind of incendiary explosion I can fully endorse.

This is a 1661 letter from John Evelyn to King Charles II complaining about burning coal: "Whilst they are belching it forth their sooty jaws, the City of London resembles the face rather of Mount Etna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli or the Suburbs of Hell than an assembly of rational creatures..."

The scale of the New Glenn explosion is a reminder of the staggering amount of energy locked up within a rocket, and the extreme engineering it takes to release that energy in a precisely controlled way. 🧪

The explosion of the New Glenn rocket seriously damaged the launch site as well. The cadence of lunar missions that NASA just announced will be completely scrambled.

Amazing: JWST spotted a naked black hole, 50 million times as massive as the Sun, in the very early universe. This is strong evidence that some black-hole "seeds" formed before their galaxies--a big shift in our view of how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang. 🧪🔭 esawebb.org/news/weic2609/

At the beginning of 2015, nobody had ever detected a burst of gravitational waves. Now we've detected 390 of them, recording a diverse population of colliding black holes and neutron stars across the universe. It's like developing an entirely new human sense. 🧪🔭 www.virgo-gw.eu/news/the-new...

I'm flat-out amazed that we can monitor the currents of molten metal in Earth's outer core, 2200 kilometers underground--but we can. Lately, part of that flow has reversed direction, for reasons unknown. There's a whole other dynamic world inside the world we see. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Applications...

The word "telescope" was coined at the Lincean Academy in Rome on April 14, 1611, at a dinner party honoring Galileo. But Galileo did not name it! The telescope was named by Greek poet/priest/mathematician Giovanni Demisiani. He called it "teleskopos"--far-seeing. 🧪🔭 www.jstor.org/stable/24009...

Using novel computing techniques, researchers have managed to simulate complex quantum systems on a classical computer. It's an advance in quantum modeling, and a refutation of claims that only quantum computers could perform such simulations. 🧪🔭 www.simonsfoundation.org/2026/05/21/q...

STARSHIP FLIGHT 12 Ship 39 successfully performs a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, before exploding upon splashdown as expected, bringing Flight 12 to a successful end. youtube.com/watch?v=UfQH...

NASA's Swift gamma-ray space telescope is in a fast-decaying orbit. Next month, NASA & Katalyst will attempt to save it. If successful, this will be the first mission to grab a satellite that wasn't designed to be serviced & move it into a new orbit. 🔭🧪 spaceflightnow.com/2026/05/08/r...

It looks like an enormous shark swimming through the clouds. The beauty of Von Karman vortices: www.wunderground.com/cat6/Whirls-...

Billions of years ago, a rogue, Pluto-like body nearly slammed into Neptune. Most of Neptune's satellites were shattered or scattered in the melee. But a new study indicates there was one survivor: a wayward moon named Nereid. 🔭🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The VLA is the most iconic radio observatory (Contact to Pluribus). Here's its successor: a next-gen prototype antenna just started scanning the radio sky. If its funding survives (far from certain, sadly), the ngVLA will be 10x as sensitive and 10x as sharp. 🧪🔭 public.nrao.edu/news/nsf-nra...

Every blue dot here is a star with known planets. Every orange dot, one with suspected planets. Nearly 6,000 total. Dot by dot, NASA’s TESS mission is filling in our picture of the Milky Way's strange new worlds. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/missions/tes...

This is a composite of the Moon, Mars, and Earth I made. The Moon and Earth are from Artemis II, and Mars is from the Psyche mission. Each image was taken *in the last six weeks*

The growth curve of space debris leveled off for a while. Now it's on a steep upward trajectory: There are 33,269 tracked objects, and counting. It's still a manageable problem. But we need to manage it. 🧪 www.accu.co.uk/p/525-the-sp...

Some magical new images of Mars just in from our interplanetary robots. The Psyche probe, en route to a metal asteroid, got an unusual view of crescent Mars during its flyby. (Processing by Kevin Gill.) 🧪🔭 www.flickr.com/photos/kevin...

We live at an extraordinary moment in science history: We're the first generation able to see a meaningful map of the entire visible universe. This view across billions of light years is based on JWST data, as part of the COSMOS-Web survey. 🧪🔭 news.ucr.edu/articles/202...

A lot of discoveries begin with "huh, that's weird." Astronomers noticed a weird dark patch at the center of this galaxy. Now it seems the void is caused by a record-breaking pair of ultramassive black holes that cleared out all the surrounding stars. 🧪🔭 www.sciencenews.org/article/larg...

It is ON! Japan & Europe are collaborating on Ramses, a mission to study asteroid Apophis as it makes a rare, unusually close pass by the Earth in April 2029. The Ramses spacecraft will study Apophis & see how it changes under the pull of Earth's gravity. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Space_Safety...

This is good fun for grabbing attention and generating clicks, but it's a path toward bottomless confusion. If every strange smudge and flare is a UFO, then my camera roll is full of UFOs. When I stand quickly I sometimes see squiggles in my vision. I don't know why. Are those UFOs, too? 🧪

Folks, amazing things are happening on the other side. Seamless pivot from "the Moon landings were fake and they hid it from us" to "the Moon landings were real and they hid it from us."

Today's big "UFO files" release consists entirely of old, familiar public documents. How old? One of the alleged just-declassified documents is an Apollo 17 transcript that was incorporated into a Daft Punk song 13 years ago. 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbbT...

NASA has combined data from the greatest optical and x-ray observatories in space. The results are predictably spectacular. This is NGC 346, a cloud where newborn stars are bursting to life & shocking the nearby gas, creating a shimmer of x-rays (pink). 🔭🧪 chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/s...

From 2006-2024, the USMTArray project placed 1,700 sensors on a grid stretching across the U.S. Now we have the results of this exhaustive effort: a 3D map of the electrical architecture of the underlying crust, down to a depth of 60 kilometers. 🧪 agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

That's surprising: Astronomers discovered an atmosphere on 2002 XV93, a small world in the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Pluto Maybe the atmosphere comes from ice volcanoes or from a recent impact? Either way, it points to dynamic events in the cold outer solar system. 🧪🔭 www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/scie...

This is a valid perma link (the URL will change once it opens in your browser): eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...

The Artemis II photo archive is amazing...but most of the links being passed around are broken. Here's a perma-link to the photos: eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos...