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For the first time in 34 years, a cassowary laid an egg at Australia's Adelaide Zoo.
10-year-old Martha has been mating with 13-year-old Jeffrey. Dad will takeover incubating the neon green egg and, hopefully, it will hatch.
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The Orionid meteor shower, created by tiny pieces of debris from Halley's Comet, peaks on the night of Oct. 21 - 22. Your best chance to see them comes a few hours before dawn, after the bright Moon sets. Find a dark location, give your eyes time to adjust, and look up.
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Still making tracks and doing science!
Since breaking the all-time off-world driving distance record on Oct. 11, Perseverance has continued work on the Red Planet. ½
ALT Tracks made by the rover on the reddish desert Martian surface, with two of the rover’s wheels and one of its weather instruments visible at the bottom of the frame.
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Exercise, the low cost way to "reverse aging"
science.org/doi/10.1126/scit…
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Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer whose work helped make Apollo and humanity’s first journeys to the Moon possible. The best way to honor her legacy is to finally pick up where her generation left off and never stop going.
We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
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Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, has died. nyti.ms/3U9IrTj
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CERN congratulates the winner of the 2026 @NobelPrize in #Physics 👏
Francis Halzen was awarded the #NobelPrize in Physics for his outstanding contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and to the discovery of high-energy neutrinos originating from astrophysical sources.
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physics to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”
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Congratulations to Karl Deisseroth, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The @StanfordMed & @StanfordEng professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences is a pioneering developer of optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control the behavior of cells.
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Senator Cotton is right. Permanent Daylight Savings has been tried and Americans didn’t like it. The better way is permanent Standard Time because it’s based on science. No dark mornings, it keeps our time in sync with the Sun, and no more changing the clocks. Arizona has been on Standard Time year round since 1968 without issue.
No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter. Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.
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The White House is "monitoring" reports of a suspected plague outbreak in the Russian city of Irkutsk after a worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute died Friday -Axios
Multiple hospitals in the area have been quarantined, with local censorship reported.
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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:
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Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USSR maintained an extensive bioweapons capability. Ken Alibek (aka Alibekov) defected to the U.S., debriefed the CIA and wrote a book about it called Biohazard. But it was never clear what was dismantled with Russia under Putin. I don’t have any inside baseball on this, but it was a reason I became concerned when DHHS under RFK Jr dismantled our pandemic preparedness and cut off vaccine development. It was tone deaf to the bioweapons from our enemies. People forget that it was both flu and the threat of bioterrorism that led DA Henderson and PK Russell to build BARDA for new countermeasures. Guessing this will be contained but it’s a wake up call that our national biosecurity is being dismantled and we’re vulnerable
Russian authorities are responding to an incident in which a suspected dangerous infection was released as a result of a laboratory accident in Siberia and a researcher died. cnn.it/3Ubwb4F
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BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
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In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
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The most powerful new technology in the world is being developed by an insular group of fanatics suffering from a pseudo-religious saviour complex
xitter.cf/ChristopherHale/status…
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
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Trump is more unpopular now than he was right after January 6. Let that sink in.
xitter.cf/honestpollster/status/…
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Honky Chonk Beardonkadonk
ALT A large bear sitting in water fishing for salmon.
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Today, NASA announced PRIMA, a new space telescope that will explore long-standing mysteries around the formation of planets, stars, black holes, and even how water on Earth came to be. go.nasa.gov/3TgGh3W
ALT An illustration of a telescope spacecraft with a parabolic mirror floating in deep space.
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People with tattoos bigger than the palm of their hand had more than double the risk of skin cancer and lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, in a Danish twin study. The lymphoma number that went viral rests on 32 cancer cases, and only 7 of them had tattoos.
Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark used the Danish Twin Registry for two studies. One followed 2,367 randomly chosen twins. The other looked at 316 twins born between 1960 and 1996, from pairs where at least one twin got cancer. Cancer diagnoses came from national records, tattoo details came from a 2021 survey, and BMC Public Health published the results in 2025.
Ink from a tattoo travels from the skin into the blood and builds up in nearby lymph nodes, the small immune filters in places like your armpits and neck. The researchers worry the ink causes long-lasting inflammation there. Over years, that could push cells to grow out of control.
Tattooed people in the second study had a 62 percent higher risk of skin cancer. For tattoos larger than a palm, skin cancer risk was 2.4 times higher and lymphoma risk was 2.7 times higher. In the group of 2,367 twins, tattooed people had about 4 times the risk of skin cancer.
Once tattoo size was ignored, tattoos showed no clear link to lymphoma. Comparing each tattooed twin with their own untattooed sibling, the strongest test a twin study can run, wasn't possible for lymphoma because there were too few pairs. For skin cancer, that twin-versus-twin test used just 14 pairs and found a much smaller link that could easily be chance.
Sun exposure wasn't measured either, and the authors note that tattoos can make skin cancers harder to spot. The concern about ink is serious enough to study further. The headline lymphoma risk, though, comes from 7 tattooed patients. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3981…
