Tom Megeath

SpaceX Eyes 1 Million Satellites For Orbital Data Center Push Not just thousands. In an FCC filing, the company mentions deploying up to a staggering 'one million satellites' in orbits ranging from 500 kilometers to 2,000km.

One MILLION satellites

www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-...

I remember Challenger as well. But my mother as a girl survived concentration camps in Indonesia, while both her parents perished. That is a whole different type of trauma. Only as an adult I realized how that trauma permeated her entire life, and in some form, passed down to her children.

Enjoy a Medieval Cover of R.E.M.‘s “Losing My Religion” During her lifetime, the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) composed roughly 77 songs and hymns. She remains the earliest known woman composer in Western classical music and one of the m...

Enjoy a Medieval Cover of R.E.M.‘s “Losing My Religion” www.openculture.com/2026/01/enjo...

Dragonfly 😍 dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/Gallery/file...

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

The US government lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs last year, according to an analysis by Science of newly released OPM data, with 11 departures for every hire. And many OPM calls "voluntary" separations were probably pushed. www.science.org/content/arti...

If you need some extra distraction from *gestures broadly at everything,* Kilauea is here to help. The next eruptive episode, episode 41, looks to be kicking off right now! Fountains are starting to grow in height.

USGS LIVE stream here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXKu...

These images explore a 'utopic' village built for teaching maths The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

A nighttime, street-level, almost impressionistic color photograph of the United Nations headquarters building in New York City showing it and surrounding buildings illuminated from the inside as a few cars stream north on 1st Avenue. In addition, projected near the top of the south side of the building, in large, bright letters, are the words, "NUCLEAR WEAPONS NOW ILLEGAL 22 JAN 2021."

OTD five yrs ago, thanks to the dedication and hard work of @nuclearban.bsky.social, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force, making the development, testing, production, possession, stockpiling, and use—or threatened use—of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world illegal.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Hydrogen spectral series - Wikipedia

On the 25th anniversary of the Wikipedia, I wanted to express my gratitude to the writers of the Hydrogen Spectral Series page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroge...). Great resource for me and the students I work with, and a great example of a useful and concise wikipedia page.

I tried to create a small video showing the orbit of the #AlphaCentauri binary star, the closest star system to our sun (without Proxima).
Here is #Spitzer IRAC 4.5 Microns (infrared) with quite a gap between 2006 and 2016. The orbit between the two stars has i=79° (seeing the orbit on its side).

People will get sicker. More people will have heart attacks and lung disease and other health challenges because of pollution. People’s lives will get worse, and shorter. People you know. Maybe me. Maybe you.

A man laughs while sitting on a cargo tricycle with a long flatbed in the back.

Born on this day, January 9, 1944:
Jimmy Page, legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, here showing off his antique cargo trike.
Happy #bicyclebirthday, Jimmy!

Even the UW Madison Libraries (which are great!) can't keep up with the ever-proliferating Springer Nature journals. Sorry, not going to pay $39.95 per article.

agreed.

Watch tonight on PBS (9 PM eastern, 8 PM central) and PBS Passport:

The image shows the hourglass shape of the length of the day and night over the 365 days in 2025. Diagonal bands indicate when the Moon was up in the night sky.

Since posting this 2025 year-long keogram, there have been quite a few questions asking how it was created and what is visible. In this thread I'll try to explain how it all works.

A thin crescent of illuminated Earth, the Sun shining off to the top left and casting reflections and lens flares across the scene. This is Apollo image AS15-99-13487, taken by the Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden with a Hasselblad 70 mm camera during the return coast from the Moon in August 1971. Credit: NASA/Apollo 15 crew/A. Worden (minor processing by me)

This is one of my favourite space pictures.

Crescent Earth, photographed by the crew of Apollo 15.

Very good news for NASA Science in the compromise 2026 funding bill released by Congress today:

A panorama stitched together of two different photos, showing a yellow sky above the surface of Mars on the left and a pale blue sky on the right. At the bottom of the image is part of the Curiosity rover, which took the photos. The martian surface is covered in grey rocks and tan sediment, looking out between two mounds.

#PPOD: Team members working with NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover created this “postcard” by commanding the rover to take images at two times of day on Nov. 18, 2025, spanning the 4,722nd and 4,723rd Martian days, or sols, of the mission. 🧪 🔭

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

While visiting DAO (where some of it was filmed), a friend summarized the plot with extensive eye-rolling.

NASA's SPHEREx has completed its first multispectral map of the infrared sky.

It sees the sky in 102 infrared "colors," which lets it do things like this: One image highlights mature stars; the other focuses on carbon soot & gas clouds where new stars form. 🧪🔭

www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26...

She Studied Mosquitoes to Prevent Malaria

The twelfth installment in the @nytimes.com Lost Science series is up: an entomologist who helped protect people from malaria. Story by @alexaroblesgil.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/4pBdYbk

Portrait of Marina Vance, a scientist, sitting in a Colorado grassland.

The @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14

He Studied Why Some Female Birds Look Like Males

"I don’t know why my fellowship was terminated. I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary of what we expect to see in nature, with completely different males and females."

@carlzimmer.com profiles my wonderful coauthor @jjinsing.bsky.social Gift link.

‘Every Single Dollar Mattered’: Donations Save Museum of the Earth From Foreclosure Just days before a year-end foreclosure deadline, the Museum of the Earth has paid off its mortgage following a wide fundraising campaign that rescued the Ithaca area landmark.

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: The Paleontological Research Institution and the Museum of the Earth have made it through the crisis!

Thanks to everyone who shared or donated-every donation mattered! Please share the good news just as widely!⚒️🧪🦑 Together we did #savePRI

www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/...

Ammonite survival across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary confirmed by new data from Denmark - Scientific Reports We provide a reassessment of the hypothesis of ammonite survival across the Cretaceous–Paleogene (Maastrichtian–Danian) boundary, based on new data from the lower Danian Cerithium Limestone Member at ...

The last bombshell paleontology discovery of a year of bombshell discoveries: Ammonites survived the K-PG extinction! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

**aardman classic.

YouTube video by Peter Gabriel Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer (HD version)

this aardman must be among one of the responses?!: youtu.be/OJWJE0x7T4Q?...

It held up well - especially considering the variety of surfaces I biked on. Maybe the wheels are a bit more worn but they still function normally.