Fireworks? That's cute. For the #FourthofJuly, our volcanologists exploded a trash can. For science.💥 🦅 Liquid nitrogen + soda bottle + a truly patriotic number of ping-pong balls = one surprisingly accurate model of a volcanic eruption. 🌋 📖: https://bit.ly/3SDnGhL 🎥 bit.ly/4wqHSSI

Step right up! In the 1920s and 30s, our Annual Exhibition brought D.C. face-to-face with the frontier of research: half-million-volt sparks, blood cells under the microscope, fossil leaves fresh from the rock. Explore Object No. 14 in our #Carnegie125 series: https://bit.ly/4xSq83Y

We're proud to announce that, after 14 years as a Trustee, Cristián Samper (@bezosearthfund.org) has been elected Chair of our Board of Trustees. The Board also elected quantum physicist Mark Jackson (@quantinuum.bsky.social) as a new Trustee. Read More: https://bit.ly/4vJpx3e

Some #WWII artifacts sit behind glass; this one still sits under coats. An #OSRD label ties this unassuming coat rack back to when our D.C. office became the command center for American science under Carnegie President Vannevar Bush. #Carnegie125 🔗 carnegiescience.edu/object-13-osrd-coat-rack

If you've ever had to memorize the chemical intricacies of photosynthesis, imagine trying to map it out from scratch. bit.ly/4e5wsNP Object No. 12 in our #Carnegie125 series. 🌿

This oil painting of Herman Spoehr watched over Carnegie's Plant Biology library at Stanford for decades—a fitting post for the man who spent 40 years watching over American #photosynthesis research. Object No. 12 in our #Carnegie125 series: https://bit.ly/4e5wsNP

To learn what distant 🌟or 🪐 are made of, astronomers read hidden signals in their light. From IR to UV, every molecule leaves a signature. It takes the whole range to read the universe. This month, let's celebrate the full spectrum—in our cosmos & community! 🌈 carnegiescience.edu/universe-color

Meet a scientist who treats the ocean like a giant, slow bioreactor. 🌊🦠 This #WorldOceansDay, learn how Carnegie's Emily Zakem studies the invisible marine microbes that help drive the ocean's carbon cycle and shape Earth's climate. 👉 carnegiescience.edu/meet-emily-zakem

🌊 Happy #WorldOceansDay! The ocean shapes our weather, our climate, and nearly all life on Earth. But here's a question the experts can't agree on: where did all this water come from?👇 https://carnegiescience.edu/where-did-earth-get-its-water

For Jeffrey Dukes, fieldwork looks like a 30-year conversation with a thousand-acre preserve in the California foothills. #Fieldwork #Ecology Read the story: carnegiescience.edu/what-place-remembers

Today in #AstronomyNews, a team led by Carnegie's Andrew Newman used #JWST and gravitational lensing 🔍 to peer into the heart of an early-universe galaxy and directly measure its dormant black hole—a cosmic first! Full Press Release: bit.ly/3S4TbAR

🧭 In 1907, a Carnegie "magnetician" named Harlan Wilbur Fisk boarded a ship for Bermuda with a magnetometer, an observing tent, and a mystery to solve. #Carnegie125 🔗 carnegiescience.edu/object-11-bermuda-cahiers

Next week, we'll be listening to #Bermuda in stereo for the first time! Follow along on the @CarnegiePlanets Instagram for behind-the-scenes looks at the fieldwork, science, and story of this mysterious volcanic island. #CarnegieBEST Learn more 👇 carnegiescience.edu/bermuda-under-surface

Magic happens when geographers get together with astrophysicists!! Thank you so much to @carnegiescience.bsky.social for visiting us during our Geodesign Summit and discussing ways that "geospatial" + "digital twins" can apply to "cities of stars" and the telescopes that discover them! #GISchat 🧪

POV: Jeff Rich is about to fit the universe into your classroom 🌌✨ Happy #InternationalDayOfPlanetariums! Inside our portable planetarium, kids explore the Solar System, go stargazing in Chile, and travel in time—all from their own classroom. 🔭✨ Learn more: https://bit.ly/3PqHHGY #Carnegie125

One of our most beloved of our educational initiatives fits inside the trunk of a car! The Inflatable Planetarium is the ninth object in the #Carnegie125 series. We sat down with Outreach Coordinator Jeff Rich to learn more. Read the full Q&A👇 carnegiescience.edu/object-9-inflatable-planetarium

🤯 🏝️ Want to know the REAL mystery of Bermuda? At a recent #NeighborhoodLecture, #CarnegiePostdoc William Frazer took us beyond the triangle to one of the strangest puzzles in modern geology: Why does Bermuda even exist to begin with? Good news, we recorded it for you: bit.ly/4tUuhlK

Object 10 of our #Carnegie125 series: a Washington Post clipping and a worn grey notebook. These two objects are windows into Lunch Club, the oldest surviving tradition at our Earth and Planets Laboratory's Broad Branch Road campus. Full story + Cookcook Download:bit.ly/4ef5aFb

So, you want to buy a telescope? Carnegie experts share advice for stargazers who are ready to graduate to being amateur astronomers with their own telescopes. 🔭 carnegiescience.edu/so-you-want-buy-telescope #BackyardAstronomers #CitizenScienceMonth #Stargazers #Telescope

So you want to be a stargazer, but you don't know how to get started? Carnegie Science Observatories astronomers are here to help—no telescope required. Step one? Look up! 👁️ 👁️ carnegiescience.edu/stargazing-without-telescope

We know we tend to spend a lot of time talking about the "planets" part of the Earth & Planets Laboratory. But our hands-down favorite planet of all time is still the one we live on. Happy #EarthDay! Learn how we study our home among the stars. 👇 carnegiescience.edu/our-research/earth-science

A seismic mystery lurks beneath Bermuda. Join us for a special #NeighborhoodLecture as Carnegie postdoc William Frazer goes beyond the triangle to uncover the truth! 🔺🏝️🕵️🪨🤯 🗓️ April 30 @ 6:30 PM ET 📍 Earth & Planets Laboratory | Washington, D.C. 🔗 bit.ly/geo-mystery

Object 8 of #Carnegie125 is an embosser from the early 1900s that once stamped our official seal. For more than a century, that mark appeared on publications, the Year Book, swag, and even a ceramic core used to cast a Magellan telescope mirror. 👉 https://bit.ly/48aBIMN

This #EarthMonth, let's celebrate the planet we call home—from the inside out! What do you love most about Earth? Is it the magnetic field that shields us from radiation? The plants that oxygenate our air? The microbes that cycle nutrients? The volcanoes that reshape the crust?

How far back can one star take us? Carnegie astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier helped identify the most pristine known star, a record-setting relic that offers a rare window into the dawn of stars and galaxies. Full story 👉 bit.ly/3QkewW0

TOI-5205 b is a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star less than half the mass of our Sun. A planet so unlikely that astronomers call it "forbidden." Now, a team including Carnegie's Shubham Kanodia has found that it's even weirder than we thought. 👉 https://bit.ly/4dKaX5x #JWST #Exoplanets

On the last day of #WomensHistoryMonth, we're sharing the story of a female first! Object 7 in our #Carnegie125 series is the first known spectrographic plate taken by a woman at Mount Wilson Observatory. Meet Jennie Belle Lasby: https://bit.ly/4s5yFfI #WomensHistoryMonth

Great science begins with great questions. We spoke with some of the researchers at Carnegie Science who are working to make sure more people get the chance to ask them! Read the full Q&A 👇 bit.ly/4sTbSoL

For the first time, astronomers, including Carnegie's Jeff Rich, used galactic archaeology techniques to trace the chemical "fossil record" of a galaxy outside our own Milky Way. 🔗 https://bit.ly/4tczfJz #CarnegieAstronomy #CarnegieObservatories

#ICYMI: Carnegie astrobiologist @Miquai visited our friends at @SciFri to talk about the biology of @ProjectHailMary. 🪨 #Amaze “Things like body plans, what kind of symmetry you have, those could be locked in early on due to a chance mutation." https://bit.ly/4s3aWwO

Start your week off w/ one of the biggest mysteries in our universe! Join us as Carnegie's Andrew Robertson shines a light on #DarkMatter. 📅 3/30 @ 7pm PT 📍@TheHuntington—San Marino, CA #AstronomyLectureSeries Can't make it? Follow along online👇 carnegiescience.edu/shining-light-dark-matter

Some of us doodle cubes & daisies. Vera Rubin, unsurprisingly, doodled galaxies. Object 6 in our #Carnegie125 series is a page of spiral doodles from the Carnegie astronomer who showed dark matter exists—w/ clues about her day hidden in the margins. #WomensHistory More details 👉 bit.ly/3NLEAIL

Object 5 | Carnegie's Dr. Elizabeth Ramsey spent nearly 60 years becoming one of the world's foremost authorities on the human placenta. This diagram of placental circulation by Ranice W. Crosby captures her work. 👇 bit.ly/4cQp4pl

Pi shows up anywhere nature curves, rotates, or radiates. When you study everything from Earth's core to exoplanets to how plants grow, it's basically everywhere. Happy #PiDay from Carnegie Science. 🥧

🚀 The Earth & Planets Laboratory is headed to #AwesomeCon2026, and this year, YOU'RE in the captain's chair! Ask smart questions. Read the clues. Trust your gut. Then commit to a space mission…without knowing where you're going. 🗓 Friday, March 13 | 🕑 1:30–2:15 PM | 📍 Room 206 | bit.ly/4bfHpcW

Meet Henrietta Swope—the Carnegie astronomer whose science and quiet generosity are still shaping discoveries today. 🔗 https://bit.ly/4sELyOI #WomensHistoryMonth #WomeninSTEM

🤯 Water may be more common than we ever imagined! Tune in next Monday as Carnegie's Anat Shahar walks us through her groundbreaking research showing how water could form naturally in a planet's early years. 📅 March 16 | 7:00 PM PT 📍 The Huntington, San Marino, CA 🔗 https://bit.ly/4s1wPxp

Every time we point #JWST at something, the universe surprises us. Here are six of the wildest discoveries so far—from teenage galaxies to diamond rain. 🔭 👉 carnegiescience.edu/six-wild-discoveries-jwst

What are distant worlds made of? Carnegie’s new Henrietta Infrared Spectrograph will help answer that—bringing alien planets into sharper focus than ever before. Read the story ↓ https://carnegiescience.edu/unveiling-atmospheres-distant-worlds

It's #WomensHistoryMonth, and we're kicking it off with object No. 3 in our #Carnegie125 series: a $1,000 grant application that helped change biology forever. 🔗 carnegiescience.edu/nettie-steve...

This Monday (3/2), we're kicking off our #AstronomyLectureSeries at The Huntington w/ ULTRAVIOLET SUSPECTS. Go back in time with #CarnegieObservatories' Tony Pahl, who uses UV light from early galaxies to uncover the universe's dramatic beginnings. Learn more 👉 bit.ly/4qZEZow #HuntingtonLecture

"Yes, I'm always a fan of drama." - Shreyas Vissapragada, Hale Scholar, Carnegie Science Vissapragada's research aims to uncover the complex life stories of exoplanets—and he has a particular interest in worlds with dramatic backstories. Q&A: carnegiescience.edu/wanted-exopl...

🤯 What if there's a missing law of nature? Join @CarnegiePlanets' Bob Hazen & Mike Wong as they unveil their new book Time's Second Arrow—moderated by NPR Short Wave's Regina Barber. 🏆 Win a signed copy! 📅 3/18 | 6:30 PM ET 📍Washington, D.C. 🎟️ https://bit.ly/4cELw4w

💘 Mission Matchmaker puts YOU in charge of designing a space mission...before you know where it's going! Ask smart questions, read the signs, and try not to catch feelings for the wrong asteroid. 📅 Mon, March 23 | Caveat NYC 🎟️ carnegiescience.edu/mission-matchmaker

Four free lectures. Four of astronomy's biggest mysteries. One science-packed spring! The 24th season of our popular #AstronomyLectureSeries starts March 2—and you won't want to miss a single one! 📍 The Huntington | San Marino, CA 🔗 Reserve your spot (they go fast!)—bit.ly/3ZMPDUD

Object 2 | The Yale Embryo In 1932, Elizabeth Ramsey discovered a 14-day-old embryo so tiny (2.75 mm) it was mistaken for an insect. The embryo became a cornerstone of our Carnegie Collection & launched Ramsey's 60-year career. #Carnegie125 👉 https://bit.ly/4agmaZh

💕Science + Valentine's Day = the perfect equation! Download our collection of #ScienceValentines and share the love (of discovery) with your statistically significant other. From lava puns to dark matter romance, we've got you covered. 🌋✨ https://bit.ly/3MxAByV

Introducing our new monthly roundup showcasing groundbreaking research from Carnegie Science! This month: coral heat tolerance, CRISPR in symbiotic worms, hidden magma beneath Oregon volcanoes, pristine organics from asteroid Bennu, and galaxies from cosmic dawn. https://bit.ly/3Mq3ux6

World-class science depends on world-class tools—and the world-class people who keep them running! Meet Lori Willhite, who recently led a major renovation of the geochemistry & mass spectrometry lab at Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory. 🔗 bit.ly/4rf8KTy

“We contend that evolution is a universal phenomenon, in play since the Big Bang.” In Time’s Second Arrow, Carnegie's Robert Hazen and Michael Wong argue that complex systems—from atoms to life—evolve toward greater functional information. 🔗 Learn more: bit.ly/3Oe9U2M #TimesSecondArrow