Michael Greshko

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution

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

A New Spy Radio Signal Has Appeared. It's Broadcasting in Farsi. A new shortwave numbers station appeared the day the bombs fell. Nobody knows who's running it.

This is fascinating.

open.substack.com/pub/theicema...

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

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.

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

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.

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Divorced from authorial intent and curation, we risk the vast streams of "content" merging into a river of algorithmically personalized actionable intelligence. Sports media collapsed to betting advice. Business news collapsed to stock tips. Health coverage collapsed to diet and exercise tips.

To be clear: I'm not looking forward to this version of the future! But someone somewhere will try it.

I sometimes wonder whether we are heading for a future where journalism becomes a series of 10-second clips made by hype houses with Vtuber avatar host-mascots. The New York Times as a Hatsune Miku-ified "Gray Lady," a thousand times over.

Chart showing total annual US Google search volume related to Survivor TV series in the US from 2004 to 2025. Interest is at its highest in 2004 and then declines by about half. After bottoming out in 2014-2015 at about a third of the 2004 search volume, interest has risen again over the past decade to about 55% of the 2004 search volume.

A random aside: This is borne out quite well in the actual data, specifically the annual Google search volume in the US related to Survivor. trends.google.com/explore?q=%2...

My two cents: This would have gone down much more smoothly with readers if the disclaimer had been up top, explicit about the "hypothetical"/fictional nature, and more specific about methods (## hours of interviews with ## physicians from TKplaces). There's an artful way to do that kind of preamble.

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.

Snapping shrimp use headgear to protect their brains from shock waves Unusual “hood” is the first known biological armor that protects against traumatic brain injury

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 :-)

Zhongkai Tao, Junior Professor at IHES and Recipient of a Choose France for Science Grant - IHES - Zhongkai Tao, Junior Professor at IHES, is among the first recipients of the Choose France for Science program.

Not sure about that: the article mentions Berkeley mathematician Zhongkai Tao, who is a different mathematician. www.ihes.fr/en/choose-fr...

The most generous alternative interpretation: Media is not unique in its percentage of awful executives, but the fundamentals of the business are so challenged, there is practically no way to insulate a media business from the consequences of bad leadership.

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

The work you and others are doing in this space is essential. Thank you for giving it a go!

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.

It's a great, if unfortunate, point: The Times did a good job of diversifying revenue and onramps for new subscribers through smart product investments and acquisitions—and the strategy was obvious in real time. WaPo's newsroom is being punished for strategic missteps it didn't make.

Yup! All of this underscores just how important advertising revenue was to propping up the media as we once knew it. Many of those dollars are never coming back.

Correct. The other problem here is that newly jettisoned writers who try entering the paid newsletter game will be forced to compete with...every laid-off journalist who has made that same move in the past 4-5 years. It's increasingly saturated among the audiences who are likeliest to sign up.

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

Thinking of you and your colleagues.

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)

Earth-size planet spotted with yearlong orbit Long-overlooked Kepler signal discovered by citizen scientists reveals promising world worth a closer look

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'm guessing they made staffing decisions based on what turned out to be faulty, overly rosy revenue projections for Arc and the advertising/sponsorship business. Hence the lack of desire to revisit: Much of the decline had little to do with the newsroom's effort or output.