Alexandra Witze

Move over, Pluto: The @rubinobservatory.org turns up a new prospect for dwarf planethood, and the telescope is virtually certain to spot still more candidates in the decade ahead. www.geekwire.com/2026/a-new-p... #Space #2026ED138 #DwarfPlanets #DPS

October 23, has become famous as the "birthday of Earth" - thanks to the brief mention in many textbooks of Irish Archbishop James Ussher and his chronology 🌍🎂 The exact date given by the Ussher-Lightfoot-Chronology for the creation of Earth is October 23, 4004 B.C. in the early morning hours ...

Boy howdy, this is a wild read

Some great investigative reporting here, from @woolsox.bsky.social. Really worth a read.

Climate journos reporting for local or regional outlets 👇 www.solutionsjournalism.org/program/sjn-...

Wired: Maren Hunsberger of @nature.com explaining chiral molecules (today's chemistry Nobel) on TikTok in 60 seconds with Kermit and Evil Kermit Tired: No women winning science Nobels this year, yet again Expired: Nobel fetishism 🧪

None of this year's science Nobel Prizes have gone to women. The number of these prizes to go to women remains at 27 out of more than 600. See how many you can name in our quiz: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Today, on the anniversary of the 1st photo of the Moon's far side (in 1959 from the USSR's Luna 3 probe), NASA released the preliminary science report and data from the #ArtemisII mission in April. Re-live the #Moon joy: science.nasa.gov/feature/arte... 🧪🔭🌘

Science journalism FTW

ICYMI, the biggest science story this week isn’t the Nobels—it’s OpenAI’s new release that includes multiple Fields Medal-worthy results. The intelligence explosion is sweeping thru math like a wildfire. And it’s probably coming for most everything else, too. What will next week/month/year bring?

In this piece for @prospectmagazine.co.uk I argue that it is time we stopped letting the AI/tech industry dictate the narrative, and I attempt to dismantle the self-serving terminology and myths it has created. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

It's NOBELS week next week! To whet your appetite, here's a challenge: how many of the women who've won a science #Nobel can you name? www.nature.com/immersive/d4... @nature.com | @nobelprize.org

Researchers are resurfacing allegations concerning the vote to reject the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch, saying they have reviewed internal documents that show the vote should have been stopped due to procedural violations. New in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Quartz, people, quartz! #MinCup26

A scammer impersonated a science journalist. It worked. www.reviewertoo.com/2026-09-21-s... AI fraud is going to make it harder for new voices to break into science journalism

Friends! If you're attending #sciwri26 this weekend, stop through our Saturday panel: how to report on science with a policy lens. With the great @aniloza.bsky.social @dangaristo.bsky.social @alexwitze.bsky.social -- gonna be a 🔥 session, y'all sciencewriters2026.org/schedule/

The National Science Foundation has not had a director since April 2025, but is undertaking very significant structural changes in how it funds US science. No permanent leadership appears anywhere in sight.

Scoop: This afternoon NSF will formally announce its four 'Frontier Initiatives', and a suite of other changes in a public letter. These Frontier Initiatives (left) are identical to OSTP's 'Grand Research Challenges' that we have been reporting on (right). www.nature.com/articles/d41...

MATH DRAMA

🚨 The NIH is moving to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in infectious-disease research projects to the DOD under a secret 10-year pact. Here’s what’s happening inside “Operation Prevailing Edge” 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Swords into plowshares: the under-told backstory of NGRST, the space telescope that began its life as a spy satellite! www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

Nancy Grace Roman was paid 60% of her male colleague's wages. 'the Nobel prize-winning physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ... told her: “We don’t discriminate against women. We can just get them for less.”' #WomenInSTEM 🧪 🔭

⬇️ Adventures with the Seestar, calibration problems, video compression, etc. But we got data on a glorious night. Someone was playing Dolly Parton songs on the piano during the eclipse in our neighborhood. #moonjoy 🧪🌒💖

Liddle bit of moon joy back with tonight’s eclipse 🌗

Dolly Parton donated to medical centres, vaccine research and disaster relief. And had Dolly the cloned sheep named after her! Here are some scientist tributes and a reminder of how she contributed to research. www.nature.com/articles/d41... by @lizziegibney.bsky.social & Dhruv Shenai @nature.com

😱 What do Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the fall of the Mongol Empire, and the Black Death have in common? 🌋 Volcanoes! Scientists are finding links between these events and works of art and huge volcanic eruptions that happened hundreds—sometimes thousands—of miles away. ✍️ @alexwitze.bsky.social

Do you want to write a story about volcanoes that changed history? the editor asked. Why yes. Yes, I do. My piece in @knowablemag.bsky.social on the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days that can transpire after an eruption: knowablemagazine.org/content/arti... 🧪🌋

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

NSF is touting a dozen new solicitations announced this week as evidence that basic research still rules. But that's not what's really going on. www.science.org/content/arti...

brb moving to washington

The Swift re-boost mission has failed. www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Now that the eclipse is over, if you are bored tonight, don't forget the Perseid showers are peaking tonight...

Big day for colanders, though

Wednesday night = Perseid meteors! Plus maybe a few nights before and after. Be sure to look up this week, even if you’re not in the path of Wednesday’s total solar eclipse. There is lots to see above us.

There's a solar eclipse coming up this week. Here's a photo of a solar eclipse from last year. Taken from the surface of the Moon. Yep, that black circle is Earth.

The #ArtemisII crew seems legitimately overwhelmed to be in the Red Rocks venue.

Colorado governor Jared Polis rolls out his favorite line about how here in Colorado we’re a mile closer to space

#ArtemisII crew speaks to reporters at Red Rocks - saying they are here to celebrate Rocky Mountain contributions to the historic mission.

Just in case you've seen climate sceptics posting highly misleading charts on social media about wildfires, here's our new factcheck...

New from James: how fire danger is changing across Europe 🧪

The mission to rescue the Swift Observatory is experiencing technical problems. They may be solvable, but it's a nail-biter. Unclear if the observatory will survive. 🧪🔭 arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

I went to college, I even went to MIT, but I'm damned if I can solve a captcha on the first try

Firefighters in Oregon, Spain, and now France (?!) are battling wildfires big enough to generate pyrocumulonimbus clouds. These fire storms are treacherous on the ground. But scientists are concerned about the *planetary* consequences of injecting so much smoke into the upper atmosphere...🌍🔥🧵

We've got a gorgeous story this week in @nature.com, in which Anne Pichon talks with experts in scientific illustration. 🧪 www.nature.com/immersive/d4... Also see our super-cool issue cover! www.nature.com/nature/volum... #science #art #scicomm

Excited to have LOST IN CURIOSITY, the new book from @robertakwok.bsky.social, now in hand! #BookSky

What do you do after you've been to the Moon and back? For the #ArtemisII astronauts, it means public speaking until the heat death of the universe. Oh, and training the Artemis III crew. I took a look at post-spaceflight astronaut careers for @nature.com (free to read, just provide your email)🧪🛰️