I was writing long-form posts about depression, the trials of life, science, technology, and where humanity is headed. Then X indefinitely suspended me for “inauthentic behavior.” Maybe the town square isn’t as open as advertised.

Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon It is the only known moon capable of generating its own magnetic field. In terms of size, it is larger than the planet Mercury

About ONE IN FIVE pregnancies in the U.S. ended in abortion in 2000. Roughly 1.31 million in a single year. That is staggering. I’m not fully pro-life. I support abortion in cases of rape, incest, threats to the mother’s life, and other excruciating circumstances. But supporting those exceptions does not mean accepting abortion on this scale. You cannot invoke the most extreme circumstances as if they justify every other abortion. We socially condemn cheating because personal choices can seriously harm someone else. I believe knowingly reckless behavior that leads to an unwanted pregnancy and abortion deserves moral condemnation too. That responsibility belongs to both people involved. Our sexual freedom does not absolve us of responsibility for the lives we create. I’m talking about genuinely preventable situations involving conscious irresponsibility, not assuming every unintended pregnancy fits that description. Supporting access in extreme circumstances does not require treating every abortion as morally acceptable or beyond criticism.

Webb just caught star birth in a fistfight. NGC 7129 is a stellar nursery 3,300 light-years away, and this image from Oct 6 is the deepest infrared view of it ever taken. Newborn stars are shredding their own nursery with jets and winds. The central star LkH-alpha 234, 5 to 8 times the Sun's mass, carved a 3.5-light-year golden cavity while its light keeps eroding the cloud around it. Swipe through: the full nursery, the star tearing its own cavity, the red outflows from baby protostars.

A cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice just won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Francis Halzen, 82, of UW-Madison took the 2026 prize this morning for IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from deep space. He pitched it in 1988: freeze 5,160 light sensors into a cubic kilometer of South Pole ice to catch ghost particles from cosmic accelerators. In 2013 IceCube saw the first ones. Swipe through: the lab under the Milky Way, a neutrino lighting up the detector, the laureate himself.

Earth’s axial tilt, written in a year of sky. This 2025 keogram stacks daily rows from sky images sampled every 15 seconds. The dark hourglass traces seasonal changes in night length; bright bands reveal the Moon’s roughly 29.5-day phase cycle. 📷 Cees Bassa

Scientists built a sensor that reads the handedness of single molecules. The Osaka device is a gap between gold nanowires 0.56 nanometers wide. Amino acids passing through make distinct electrical blips; AI reads each to tell left from right at over 80% accuracy, a single-molecule first. Life uses almost only left-handed amino acids, so the ratio is a potential biosignature. Tested on Murchison meteorite and Atacama soil. Swipe through: the sensor, the left vs right readout, the meteorite test.

Italy just finished building a 24-satellite Earth-watching constellation in under a year. On Oct 1, SpaceX's Transporter-18 carried the final eight Eaglet II satellites to orbit from Vandenberg, completing the constellation and bringing Italy's IRIDE program to 39 satellites. Each microwave-oven-sized satellite has multispectral sensors and ship-tracking AIS, watching ground motion, fires, coasts and air quality. Swipe through: the launch stack, the constellation at work, the hardware up close.

Animals may be 200 million years older than their oldest fossils. An Oxford-led study in Science Advances surveyed 140+ samples from Mongolia's Kheseen Biota: exquisite microfossils, zero animals, though animals existed then. That breaks the logic capping animal origins at 590 million years. Older calibrations push the molecular-clock origin of animals to 800 to 700 million years ago, before Snowball Earth. Swipe through: the ancient seafloor, the microfossils, the new timeline.

A sea of stars in just one small patch of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) Hubble’s full panorama reveals over 100 million individual stars, yet Andromeda contains an estimated trillion. The dark ribbons weaving through this view are dust blocking the starlight.

Webb completed the largest ever survey of planet-shattering collisions: 21 extreme debris discs where Moon to Mars sized bodies are actively colliding. The wreckage comes in two flavors. Silica rich dust means violent Mars sized smash ups around stars younger than 300 million years. Silica poor means slower Moon sized grazes, at any age. Our solar system probably went through this phase. Swipe through: the collision, the two flavors across time, a real smash up Spitzer caught at HD 172555.

🌩 Two large storms raging in the atmosphere of Jupiter in a detailed image from the “Juno” spacecraft.

An aurora so intense it lit up the space station itself. ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot captured this from the ISS on day 127 of her mission, orbit 1968, and it was far too bright for her usual aurora camera settings: Nikon Z9, 1/4 sec, f/1.4, ISO 8000. The green ribbons are oxygen glowing around 100 km up, the red veil is the same gas excited far higher, and the stowed Canadarm2 catches the glow across the top while the whole crew fought for window space.

Roman’s planet-hunting eye just opened. Announced Sept. 30, its first coronagraph image captured a faint star in the Large Magellanic Cloud on Sept. 22. Coronagraphs block stellar glare to reveal hidden planets. Roman’s is the first in space with actively adjusting mirrors, testing technology that could help future telescopes photograph another Earth. Swipe to see the target field, first-light watch, and instrument.

There’s a fitting play on “United States” here. From helping establish the UN to building NATO and leading international scientific partnerships, America has repeatedly brought nations together around shared goals. At its best, the United States unites states.

A starry night in 2026, captured by astronaut Jessica Meir aboard the ISS during a 180-second exposure, with the station’s rotation turning starlight into sweeping circular trails. ✨

The space shuttle ‘Atlantis’, shrouded in the pitch-black darkness of space. Photographed from the ISS

Webb's September Picture of the Month is cosmic house of mirrors. Galaxy cluster MACS J0454.1-0300 sits five billion light years out, and its gravity bends the light of galaxies far behind it into stretched arcs and multiple images. Twice in this frame, astronomers spotted the same galaxy appearing four times, a first for a single cluster. One lensed galaxy dates to 800 million years after the Big Bang. Swipe: the Webb view, Hubble's 2014 view of the same cluster, then a close-up of the arcs.

Didn’t bro give up on his team mid game to become a stripper? Is he really talking 😅