Riding With Robots

Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves

Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars

Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.

New orbit movie just dropped. This one is for the newly discovered circumbinary planet HD 143811 AB b. This 9-year timelapse was made through an international collaboration with me, Nathalie Jones (Northwestern graduate student), and Vito Squicciarini (Exeter postdoc)

Great article about NASA's next planetary defense mission. Planetary defense has a lot of interlocking parts, and all the DARTs we can build won't help if we don't have the Rubin Observatories and NEO Surveyors (and their predecessors and successors) to find problem objects before they find us.

<chef's kiss>

Boxing up the NSF at Eisenhower Av for the forced relocation. Boxes have “Details Matter” signage.

NSF

- Forced reorg

- POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements)

- Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …)

I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing.
“Details matter” 🙃

Black-and-white view of material streaming outward from the surface of the sun in long filaments.

I should clarify that the image above is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Parker images look like this.

InSight Mars lander silhouette on red/orange painted ceramic pendant hanging on a sterling silver chain on a black background. Photo taken from a front facing angle

InSight Mars lander silhouette on red/orange painted ceramic pendant hanging on a sterling silver chain on a black background. Photo taken from a perspective angle

InSight Mars lander silhouette on red/orange painted ceramic pendant hanging on a sterling silver chain on a black background. Photo taken from a slightly tilted angle vs a straight front angle.

3D render of InSight Mars lander on the surface of Mars showing the spacecraft, the solar array and the seismometer.

NASA's #InSight mission studied Mars' interior.

Amy captured the silhouette of the spacecraft perfectly and, of course, included the seismometer!

If you know someone who worked on this mission, please share this one-of-a-kind piece of wearable art with them!

sciencesocks.co/collections/...

🧪🐡🎨

YouTube video by European Space Agency, ESA Turning up the heat | The journey of Juice (episode 2)

From a scorching closest approach to the Sun, to a flight past Venus for a gravity boost – 2025 has been quite a year for our #ESAJuice!

Tune in to the latest episode of 'The journey of Juice' to go behind the scenes with the people working on the mission 👇

🔭 🧪

Still from video showing the limb of the sun, with large loops of material erupting from its surface

From NASA:
Images captured as the Parker Solar Probe made its record-breaking approach to the Sun in 2024 have revealed details about how the Sun can recycle some of its magnetic energy — potentially influencing whether storms impact Earth
go.nasa.gov/3MGtuE5
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iC5...

Well, it sounds like Musk has thought this through as much as he has for living on Mars.

I’ve worked in public libraries for 20 years, today was the first time we’ve had to tell someone they couldn’t bring their chainsaw in the library.

Calling the press “fake news” is harmful. Calling them “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” for publishing reporting is something else entirely. Treason is a capital crime. Suggesting journalists should face it for exercising their First Amendment rights and doing their jobs is dangerous.

Well, I’m glad *someone* will continue exploring

Source: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/Mercury_s_shadowy_north_pole_revealed_by_M-CAM_1 This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. Flying over Mercury's north pole gave the spacecraft's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters. M-CAM 1 took this long-exposure photograph of Mercury's north pole at 07:07 CET, when the spacecraft was about 787 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet's night side at 06:59 CET. In this view, Mercury’s terminator, the boundary between day and night, divides the planet in two. Along the terminator, just to the left of the solar array, the sunlit rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer can be seen, including some of their central peaks. The left of the image shows the vast volcanic plains known as Borealis Planitia. These are Mercury’s largest expanse of ‘smooth plains' and were formed by the widespread eruption of runny lava 3.7 billion years ago. This lava flooded existing craters, as is clearly visible in the lower left Henri and Lismer craters. The ‘wrinkles’ seen in the centre-left were formed over billions of years following the solidification of the lava, probably in response to global contraction as Mercury’s interior cooled down. The foreground of the image shows BepiColombo's solar array (centre right), and a part of the Mercury Transfer Module (lower left). Click here for the annotated version of this image [Image description: Planet Mercury in the background with its grey, cratered, pockmarked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.] CREDIT ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

@esa.int's BepiColombo will arrive at Mercury in Nov. 2026. During a fly-by this year, the spacecraft saw these vast volcanic plains.

This image is also up for the planetary science image of 2026: bsky.app/profile/spac...

Credit: @esa.int/BepiColombo/MTM
#SciComm 🧪

are we still on about em dashes and ai. imo human writers should just use the em dashes even harder. we should be out here pummeling out those em dashes like we're emily dickinson

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)

The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used

> neal.fun/size-of-life/

Owl eyes. Wow

You will be visited by three spirits

It's actually happened several times since — and it's still like witnessing a choir of angels every time.

chalk drawing on a cement pad featuring the Mars Curiosity lander hagning from the decent stage

For Day 9 #ArtAdventCalendar evening. Some anamorphic chalk art of the Mars Curiosity rover (the 3d doesn't translate as well in an image)

It's about 30 feet long

#sciart

It's little box work in the box works. Box works all the way down.

A black and white photo of Grace Hopper standing in front of a computer bank. She is wearing a dark knee-length dress and has glasses. She is holding a piece of paper that says "COBOL" in her right hand, and flipping a switch on the computer with her left.

Computer science pioneer and United States Navy rear admiral Grace Hopper was born #OTD in 1906. 🧪 👩‍🔬

As far as I am aware, she is the only person who has both a supercomputer and a US Navy destroyer named after her. (1/n)

Image: Computer History Museum

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

A starry night sky crossed by the Milky Way above a large sand dune. Just above the horizon, Venus, Mars, and the Moon appear as a trio of bright stars. Photo: Bill Dunford

You will be visited by three spirits

Venus, Mars, and the Moon in Death Valley

Image of the Martian landscape as seen by the Curiosity rover exploring Mt Sharp in Gale Crater on Mars... Some gorgeous new images came back from Curiosity on Mars... I don't have the geology knowledge to describe what we're seeing here, or the right words to describe just how beautiful this landscape is... NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk/S Atkinson

Image of the Martian landscape as seen by the Curiosity rover exploring Mt Sharp in Gale Crater on Mars... I don't have the geology knowledge to describe what we're seeing here, or the right words to describe just how beautiful this landscape is... NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk/S Atkinson

Some gorgeous new images came back from Curiosity on Mars... Just going to have to post these because I don't have the geology knowledge to describe what we're seeing here, or the right words to describe just how beautiful this landscape is... NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk/S Atkinson

The top 10 people of 2025 @nature.com who shaped science.
Recognizes Dr. Susan Monarez, the CDC Director who was "fired for holding the line on scientific integrity"
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

NASA Analysis Shows Sun’s Activity Ramping Up It looked like the Sun was heading toward a historic lull in activity. That trend flipped in 2008, according to new research.

From NASA: A new NASA study shows that the Sun has been waking up from a period of low activity. ☀️

Scientists track solar activity because it can affect spacecraft, astronaut safety, radio communications, GPS, and even power grids on Earth. go.nasa.gov/4gnZQyc

I watched the Nov. 11 auroras from the shores of a remote lake in Wyoming. I was alone on the beach, with the exception of dozens of little white rabbits. Their fur glowed green in the light. They just quietly watched the lights with me.

Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah

Snags, Stars, and Earthshine - From Bill (ridingrobots.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/2rofg4d

I'm still shocked that there are people who oppose birthright citizenship and consider themselves Americans, let alone a member of any particular political ideology. To be against the idea that if you're born here, you're a citizen is one of the most anti-american ideas I can conceive of.