I searched the Epstein files for astronomy and astronomers, and consistent with Sean Carroll's posts about why his name is listed, it seems like Epstein was trying to rope in scientists they perceived as smart, and scientists tried to get financial backing from him. 🔭 Some examples:
Fellow academics and others who have personal websites for their work: what hosting platforms do you use that are user friendly, affordable, and not US-based? EU or Canadian company + servers preferred.
Cartoon by Mike Luckovich
Distraught woman says ICE killed her wife in video after deadly Minneapolis shooting "They killed my wife," the distraught woman says, adding, "They shot her in the head." An ICE agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman who was driving an SUV in Minneapolis on Wednesday. / Screenshot/@Breaking911
"They killed my wife. I don't know what to do," the woman says through sobs in the footage, with a damaged SUV visible in the distance behind her. "We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head," the woman cries. "We have a six-year-old at school," she says, almost unable to breathe, as a chaotic scene in which federal officers prevented at least one doctor who was on the scene from assisting the shot victim unfolds. "We're new here," the distraught woman says in despair.
You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today.
This could be you.
My mid-afternoon was spent on an outing with @everybodybirding.bsky.social , which included my first golden-crowned kinglets of the year.
I did an impromptu Big Day today to keep my mind off (gestures vaguely at everything) and ended up having a really lucky #birding 🪶 day. Saw a merlin, peregrine falcon, Wilson's snipes, greater white-fronted geese, and short-eared and eastern screech owls, among 45 species total.
It’s 1990, I’m 1 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state
It’s 2004, I’m 15 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state
It’s 2026, I’m 37 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state
Just woke up even angrier. Impeach, convict, remove. Draft articles now. Either we have a representative government or we don’t. Do not shut up about this until there’s a vote.
Headline from NY Times about NASA closing its largest library.
Ring out the old and…
…that’s it?
This is not OK.
🧪🔭
A picture of a black, white and red woodpecker perched on a wooden railing. Its head is cocked to the side and it is using its beak to punch a hole in the ice covering a shallow tray of water.
Year-end #birding 🪶 roundup for 2025: 364 species observed, a new record for me! 🎉 60 lifers, the first being the Mexican jay and the last the sage thrasher, ending the year with 569 species on my life list. I don't do much photography, but here's a hairy woodpecker using its beak to get through ice
In not-very-good news, extreme winds (114 mph gusts) on the early morning of the 25th caused significant damage to the 36" Great Refractor at Lick Observatory. Half of the main shutter broke off and landed on the main building.
24 Ohio State University attendees (undergrads, grads, staff, and faculty) of the 2022 SACNAS annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We stand in three rows in front of a green backdrop that says SACNAS. I am at the bottom right in the image.
OSU limiting participation in SACNAS is heartbreaking. I have attended SACNAS since 2003 as an undergrad, & it was the first scientific space where I felt welcome. I always bring students (pic is OSU participants at 2022 SACNAS), & now it is in our city & OSU doesn't want us to go? So disappointing.
Very successful #globalbigday 🪶 today on a short trip to the San Francisco Bay Area -- 48 species including 8 lifers! Particularly proud that 5 of the lifers were notoriously difficult shorebirds (willet, least sandpiper, black oystercatcher, wandering tattler, and black turnstone).
Ohio State just advised all staff and students not to attend the SACNAS (Society for the advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) annual meeting of 6000+ scientists -- which is in Columbus, OH this year! -- saying it may be exclusionary, even though it is open to all.
We *absolutely* should celebrate it. Do your part by enjoying the 200+ page masterpiece in its entirety on ADS! ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1925PhDT... 🔭
Special shoutout to Figure 2, an incredible piece of art that I want on my wall (and suspect could even make an excellent tattoo if executed well?)
A black and white photograph of a clean-shaven older white man with white hair. He is facing away from the viewer, and his face is reflected in a computer screen. The computer is a model from the early 1980s, and its screen displays text including genetic sequences. The man's hand rests on one corner of the monitor, and his hand holds a pair of reading glasses.
Today would have been the 100th birthday of my grandfather, physicist and bioinformatician Walter Goad, who was born #otd in 1925. A 🧵 on his life and work... He was born in Marlow, GA, but by the time he was in high school his family had settled in Kinston, NC. (1/n) 🧪
Walter Goad died on November 2, 2000, when I was 11. I wish I could have talked with him about the morality of nuclear weapons work, about having a career in science, about other things I was too young to understand. But I am proud to be his grandson and I hope that he would be proud of me ❤️ (15/15)
In 1999, Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist, was arrested and accused of selling the crown jewels of America's nuclear secrets to China. Goad filed an affidavit with the court that the government's accusations were overblown. Lee pled guilty to 1 count and the judge apologized (14/n)
A picture of a poster advertising a scientific conference. Text at the top and one side reads "theoretical & computational biology: in honor of George Bell and Walter Goad and their establishment of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos twenty years ago." This is followed by a list of the names and affiliations of the invited speakers, and contact info of the organizers. The meeting was held 12-13 September 1994 at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The other half of the poster shows twelve small pictures. Two of these are portraits of elderly white men with white hair. The other ten are a collection of scientific images, including illustrations of molecules, genetic code, equations, and graphs.
By the time he retired in 1990, Walter was serving as an early advisor to the Human Genome Project, and had been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society, AAAS, and LANL. He spent time every summer sailing in British Columbia. It was during this time that he was a big part of my life (13/n)
In 1982, Walter led the funding proposal that led to the foundation of GenBank, one of the world's first nucleotide sequence databases which is now the US national database. He ensured that the database was based outside of the secure area at LANL, giving open access that is maintained today (12/n)
Although he remained at Los Alamos for the rest of his career, by the 60s Walter's interests had turned to biochemistry. Sabbaticals at Colorado and Cambridge (the latter working with Francis Crick) helped this move, and by the 70s he was working on the then-new field of DNA sequencing (11/n)
The stories that I grew up hearing about this time were mostly about the family's wilderness adventures - rafting the Colorado River down Glen Canyon before the dam was built, sailing the Gulf of California in a tiny sailboat. He eventually started building his own sailboat. (10/n)
By 1953, with a baby on the way, Walter rushed to finish his much delayed thesis. The final product was entitled "A Theoretical Study of Extensive Cosmic Ray Air Showers." He spent much of the next decade working on nuclear weapon design while raising three children and building an adobe house (9/n)
Earlier in '52, Walter had met a Stanford grad student named Maxine Steineke who was in a summer program at Los Alamos. They hit it off with a mutual love of climbing and the outdoors, & were married 6 months later. My grandmother had her own fascinating life story, but that's for another time (8/n)
A photograph of a nuclear explosion, a red-orange fireball framed by clouds and reflected in water in the foreground. Image credit: US Atomic Energy Commission, via Wikipedia.
On November 1, 1952, my grandfather was one of only two members of the design team present for Ivy Mike, the first detonation of a hydrogen bomb. (7/n)
Walter's next move would be a fateful one for his career and life. In 1950 Nordheim joined the crash program at Los Alamos to develop the hydrogen bomb, and Goad accompanied him west. He soon joined the H-bomb effort himself, solving some problems in neutron transport. (6/n)
After his short naval career, Walter enrolled in the Ph.D. program in physics at UC Berkeley, but after Oppenheimer left he transferred to Duke. He worked with Lothar Nordheim, which made his grand-advisor Max Born. His doctoral project was on the theory of cosmic ray particle showers. (5/n)
He graduated in 1945 just as the war was ending. Deployed on a minesweeper to the Philippines, his military service was most notable for a run-in with a rabid monkey where his ship depleted the Navy's entire stock of rabies vaccines in Manila. Still, this lead to a lifelong interest in sailing (4/n)
At Union, Walter excelled in his physics classes. This being during World War II, he was selected for the V-12 officer training program, which allowed him to remain at college while still receiving naval training. He also roomed with future Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg. (3/n)
During this time he developed an interest in radio technology. He earned a radio licence, which ended up being his ticket out of the South as at the age of 17 he got a job at a radio station in Schenectady, NY. At his employer's suggestion, he enrolled at nearby Union College. (2/n)
