icarus62.bsky.social

Here's a story about the first three fast-rotating asteroids Vavilov and his team discovered in first-look Rubin data. He announced four more ultrafast rotators today at #DPS2026 skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...

Never forget, a 13-year study found that protected bike-lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all road users. ALL ROAD USERS. What about painted bike-lanes? No safety improvement at all. For sharrows, it’s actually safer to NOT have them. Via @usa.streetsblog.org @nyc.streetsblog.org

At H=3.2 The newly discovered world is similar in absolute brightness to Ceres and Vesta. It’s unlikely to be as reflective as Vesta; Ceres’ 9% albedo is much likelier to be the kind of reflectivity that ED138 has.

We don’t need certainty about an AMOC collapse to plan for its consequences. A weakening AMOC could trigger profound shifts in regional temperatures and rainfall, raise coastal sea levels and disrupt marine ecosystems, threatening stability across continents. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You can’t prepare for what you can’t see coming. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Listening to a report about Google chopping down a quarter of a million trees in Finland to build a data centre while washing out yoghurt pots for the recycling

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

Models that say we can overshoot 1.5°C & come back down assume: - we will transform our food systems from carbon source to sink - forests and soils keep absorbing 25% of our emissions - oceans keep absorbing another 25% - we enact a vast build-out of tech to pull CO2 back out of the air

Again, this doesn’t mean +2.8°C everywhere. Land warms faster than ocean; the Arctic much faster than the global mean. Some regions will see far greater shifts than others. One global number....with radically different local realities. www.independent.co.uk/climate-chan...

The warming will continue until we reach net zero emissions. At which point, we will need to live with whatever climate we’ve ended up in. The sooner we reach net zero, the less extreme that climate will be, and the easier and less costly it will be to adapt to it.

The greatest challenge of our time isn’t to figure out how to get to Mars or become interstellar, but to figure out how to live sustainably on Earth.

Something that I think is important to stress about this comment is that we are still very much interested in learning about, for example, how much fossil fueled climate change influenced an event. BUT.. we are starting from the assumption that there is influence to some extent. Period.

Yesterday I provided my immune system with the latest enemy intel and let me tell you it is working VERY hard on those cellular combat drills right now 🫠

🌍 “This is no longer a warning for the future; it is a diagnosis of the present.” Our 2026 State of the Climate report finds 7 of 16 planetary vital signs at record extremes. The planetary emergency is already here. doi.org/10.1093/bios...

At what point are governments going to turn round to these companies and say "We will apply an instant fine of 100% of the value of your company the minute this happens. Payable immediately. We will shut down all your offices and data centres and sequester all your assets."?

When I posted saying that AI is no longer in data centres, and I suggested to Sarah Hanson Young that she should look at her phone... or maybe her toaster, people thought I was kidding. #auspol www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"[We] identify a statistically significant doubling of the global warming rate during 2011–2025 (0.40 °C per dec) compared to 1971–2025 (0.20 °C per dec)... The ensemble mean of 26 #climate models fails to capture the observed doubling of the warming rate, simulating a rate of only 0.29 °C per dec"

In the journals of Cumbrian shipbuilder Kelsick Wood (1771-1840), details of his shipyard contracts and inventories share the pages with his own idiosyncratic watercolour paintings. Here’s just a few, including his self-portrait simonfrancisbrown.com/kelsick-wood...

We visited all 6 France4Naturism locations over the last two summers.. Here’s our thoughts: nudebeachmap.com/review-franc... #naturism #nudism #france

My laptop is set up to take a picture after 3 incorrect password attempts and I just got a text alert on my phone with this image attached

Let's kill everything A debate to kill all sharks in #Greenland , because "they eat fish" caught by local fishermen Humans are a nightmare ... Let's ask AGI to fix this #WarOnNature #Metacrisis www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I often see people claim that because clean energy sources like solar, wind, or nuclear are manufactured using fossil fuels their emissions are high. But thats absolutely not the case: even accounting for full lifecycle emissions they are vastly better than burning coal or gas:

Another season of tracking freezing degree days in the high Arctic has ended. This is a simple measure of relative cold integrated with time. This past year was quite anomalous again, consistent with a rapidly warming Arctic system. ☑️ Follow temperatures along daily at: zacklabe.com/arctic-tempe...

As climate scientists, it sucks to be defunded. But it adds insult to injury to be defunded by this moron who has access to the best climate science and data in the world and still says asinine things like this.

Parents of boys - please make sure they’re speaking up now, not just doing the right thing in the future 🙏 #cornell

🚨NASA CERES satellite data shows another 4-year average record for global Absorbed Solar Radiation. Earth's Energy Imbalance has more than doubled over the past 20 years. We've been trying to warn about this and the impacts for years, but few seem to care.

Another "need to extend the y-axis" moment... Average temperature in Central England for Jan-Sep for each year since 1772. It is 0.8°C higher in 2026 than any other previous year.

Not only are the flat earthers wrong, they are getting wronger by the day.

Henry Thomas’ audition for E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) remains one of the greatest auditions ever captured on film. Spielberg: “Okay, kid, you got the job.”

23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. That’s the amount of heat the oceans absorbed in 2025. A number so huge it’s almost meaningless…until you realise it’s roughly 40× humanity’s annual energy use. The ocean is buying us time. We’re running out of it. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

New Commentary out in Nature Climate Action: we now live in a fundamentally different climate system due to the burning of fossil fuels. Because of this, any extreme weather event now occurs in a changed climate and is influenced by fossil fuel-driven climate change to some degree.

So this is the future, huh? An AI Agent emailed me (independently?) to share the results of their research.

Every bit of this 👇

I still maintain that this is the coolest spacecraft photo ever. This was taken by Rosetta during its gravity assist flyby of Mars in 2007. You can see exactly how it would look to be on a spacecraft in orbit at Mars, looking down at the surface through your window.

We invite everyone (nonscientists) to endorse the Declaration of a Planetary Emergency, part of the upcoming World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Third Notice. Add your name and share widely. Endorsement helps show public concern about the future of our planet. forms.gle/vAARd7mv2yS7...

I know there is a hell of a lot going on right now. But not all of it is bad. Some is astonishingly good - like the results of this study from June. Cervical cancer is a terribly cruel thing. This might, at long last, be the beginning of the end of it. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This year's record setting El Niño will impact many different parts of the world, with some experiencing severe drought and others flooding. In a new analysis at The Climate Brink, I explore what impacts happened during past events and which are most likely to occur this year

The last three months are the warmest on record globally, relative to every other June-July-August period since 1850. Data from NOAA/NCEI's NOAAGlobalTempv6.1.0.

#tdih 1962, "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson published, exposed impact of pesticides on environment. Carson was vilified: called a Communist, disloyal, unscientific, and hysterical. Sound familiar? Attacks on truth tellers, with media complicity. See⬇️🧵 www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/si...

Just saw someone zoom by on a Solar powered recumbent e-bike, clearly homemade. I barely got a photo before he was away. Just commuting to work in Chippenham I think? Legend.

Despite being a famous Hollywood star if you want to know what sort of person DAVID NIVEN was, the largest wreath at his funeral was from the Porters at Heathrow Airport. It read: “To the finest gentleman who ever walked through these halls. He made a Porter feel like a King.”

I miss David MacKay. In his no-nonsense way he showed that one long-haul return flight a year uses more energy than a 1 kW heater on all year. "A 10% improvement? Yes, possible. A doubling of efficiency? I'd eat my complimentary socks." If only more people were pro-arithmetic. We have to fly less

Jet fuel: 12,000 Wh/kg. Modern batteries: ~300 Wh/kg. Even with motor efficiency, jet fuel holds 20x the power per kg. Worse: planes rely on getting lighter as they burn fuel. Electric planes spend energy hauling dead battery weight all the way to landing. It's a physics wall.