Man and Atom

(Via @luxomancer over at Bluesky, who's also looking for the person to credit for the image)

ETA for confused folks from other sides of the Atlantic: There are some people on this side of the water (and indeed, even some in North America) who're currently claiming loudly that air conditioning is "a waste of valuable resources"... even when people, in the new hotter world we're living in, are (particularly in some more easterly parts of Europe) dying for the lack of it.

Funny that such folks don't make such claims for heating in the winter, which routinely uses more energy than cooling.

We'll see how long this BS lasts as these two islands get hotter in years to come... and when people are forced to live on in housing stock that was purposefully built to hold heat in, not let it out.

We see no good in the hair shirt asceticism that despises air conditioning (or space cooling if we want to be clearer) as “merely a matter of comfort”. Comfort is not something to be despised! In fact, however, artificial temperature regulation has a host of benefits. Setting to one side the prevention of heat exhaustion among vulnerable people, it helps hold back mold and mildew, and insect infestations, which can be very costly as well as injurious to human health.

In cities served by large thermal power stations, a great savings in energy can be made by the use of “absorption–cycle” chillers fed from a district–heating network. In some climates, this warm–weather load may be the economic difference that makes district heating viable. We have some information about this somewhat mind–bending technology (patented by Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard) here and here.

these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"

Many people today would like to say, “they should have taken guidance from indigenous practices!” But those practices succeeded in supporting perhaps four million people in the entire vast land area we now refer to as the USA and Canada [out of perhaps 50 millions in the Americas as a whole, emphasis for the person calling me abusive names because they lack reading comprehension], one per cent of the current figure. Worse still, the native peoples were constantly engaged in brutal and often genocidal warfare, which served to keep their populations down to the level that could be supported by their food supplies. Even people with no pre–conceived notions of their own superiority would have questioned the value of such examples.

2026 June 13

Interplanetary Earth Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA & NASA / JHU Applied Physics Lab / Carnegie Inst. Washington

Explanation: In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013 Earth was photographed on the same day from two other worlds of the Solar System, innermost planet Mercury and ringed gas giant Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting the outermost gas giant. On that same day people across planet Earth snapped many of their own pictures of Saturn. On the right, the Earth-Moon system is seen against the dark background of space as captured by the sunward MESSENGER spacecraft, then in Mercury orbit. MESSENGER took its image as part of a search for small natural satellites of Mercury, moons that would be expected to be quite dim. In the MESSENGER image, the brighter Earth and Moon are both overexposed and shine brightly with reflected sunlight. Destined not to return to their home world, both Cassini and MESSENGER have since retired from their missions of Solar System exploration.

Sunspot with Light Bridge

Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and is still the only person to this day who has her awards in two different fields.

On July 4, 1934, she passed away from aplastic anemia, or the lack of production of red blood cells, directly caused by her long-term exposure to radiation. Today we remember her for her contributions to humanity.

Both Becquerel and Pierre Curie had to threaten to refuse the prize for discovery of radioactivity and radioelements, before the Nobel Committee would agree to include Marie in it. Both of them were quite insistent that her contributions were of central importance to the overall work. It was her insight as a chemist which re–directed their attention from fluorescent substances (a line of inquiry initially suggested by Röntgen’s discovery of X–rays) to the heavy elements, leading to the discovery of the radioactivity of thorium, which none of the physicists who had been inspired by Becquerel’s initial publication had bothered to check.

In this film (Italian language, apparently produced in multiple language versions in Germany in the 1960s) you can see dramatizations of the research and experiments by the Curies and others which led to the discovery and understanding of radioactivity, radioactive elements, the modes of decay, and ultimately the atomic nucleus itself. This work, which began less than 130 years ago, is fundamental to our modern understanding of the world on all scales — without knowledge of the nucleus, astronomy and cosmology as we know them would be impossible, because we would not understand the energy source and evolution of stars.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

2026 May 24

A Martian Eclipse: Phobos Crosses the Sun Video Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, ASU MSSS, SSI

Explanation: What’s that passing in front of the Sun? It looks like a moon, but it can’t be Earth’s Moon, because it isn’t round. It’s the Martian moon Phobos. The featured video was taken from the surface of Mars in 2022 by the Perseverance rover. Phobos, at 11.5 kilometers across, is 150 times smaller than Luna (our moon) in diameter, but also 50 times closer to its parent planet. In fact, Phobos is so close to Mars that it is expected to break up and crash into Mars within the next 50 million years. In the near term, the low orbit of Phobos results in more rapid solar eclipses than seen from Earth. The featured video is shown in real time – the transit really took about 40 seconds, as shown. The videographer – the robotic rover Perseverance (Percy) – continues to explore Jezero Crater on Mars, searching not only for clues to the watery history of the now dry world, but evidence of ancient microbial life.