Absolutely. Every word you say.
10.03.2026 21:02
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Absolutely. Every word you say.
![Comic. [Person with shoulder-length hair talking to a second person. She is gesturing at a dinosaur skeleton with a machine mounted on its back.] PERSON 1: Although Bazookasaurus’s distinctive structure was long assumed to be a weapon, vascularization studies show that it was very fragile and could only have been used for display.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreidp3zjc4e2d44eanl64r6gctwkqlzkg2lvwl4gik7eyn4kownucxy)
Comic. [Person with shoulder-length hair talking to a second person. She is gesturing at a dinosaur skeleton with a machine mounted on its back.] PERSON 1: Although Bazookasaurus’s distinctive structure was long assumed to be a weapon, vascularization studies show that it was very fragile and could only have been used for display.
Bazookasaurus
xkcd.com/3216/
Holy shit - this would be very, very bad:
"The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names."
I blew it. I mainly didn't like the human writing and when I looked at the writers, I saw why.
Yours in everlasting pickiness,
Ann
Marco Rubio's BFF is an accused foreign agent and money launderer. His trial is about to start — and Rubio is on the witness list.
My @vanityfair.com story on the legal bomb that's poised to go off in Trumpland.
www.vanityfair.com/news/story/m...
That Dem consultants told Gov. Walz to stop calling them “weird” still has me miffed.
"Researchers have devised a new tool for discerning between naturally occurring viral outbreaks and those resulting from lab accidents."
📝: Carl Zimmer
I'll give one guess on what they found for SARS-CoV-2 🙂...
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/s...
This is how our government has been corrupted:
1) Donors give huge sums to elect politicians
2) Elected officials rewrite rules in donors' favor
3) Donors make huge profit
4) Repeat
We must get big money out of politics. It’s the root of all evil in Washington.
Gonna drop this in here : Canada recently changed the rules on citizenship by descendence, opening it up from one generation to pretty much "whenever". For folks who have **any** Canadian ancestry (which is a lot of the US), there is a path to citizenship in Canada. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
🌫️🌈 A beautiful, rare sight!
A fog bow appeared Monday near Ridge, Maryland, in St. Mary's County & CWG reader John Gasper captured this stunning photo.
Fog bows are cousins of rainbows and form when sunlight interacts with the tiny droplets in fog, producing a wide, pale rainbow with little color.
A long-used medical test underestimated the severity of kidney disease in Black patients. New study says with the bias removed, transplant rates are up. www.statnews.com/2026/03/10/k...
Having the Ig Nobels leave the US for safety reasons is a pretty on point example of the situation here apnews.com/article/ig-n...
Does anyone here know any historians or political scientists who study wartime propaganda? Bonus points if they specialize in the American context specifically, but not necessary
"While there is no current consensus, we do not advocate for a single definition and contend that a lack of unanimity is not inherently problematic ... [R]egardless of scientific debates, no biological definition of sex should be used to dictate human rights."
#science #biology #trans #transgender
Imagine the reaction in the US if ~175 schoolgirls had been killed by a targeted Iranian missile. (Or anyone's missile.)
This is an atrocity.
Satellite company @planet.com has announced a *14 day delay* to the release of imagery in the MidEast.
This will be a huge setback for those trying to verify events in the region.
Finds that @aclu.org showed 23 instances of unconstitutional stops from mid-Dec to mid-Jan, including 11 people who were unconstitutionally arrested. But petitioners can’t show it will happen again, so can’t show standing or irreparable harm, esp in light of drawdown of Operation Metro Surge.
2/2
Judge Eric Tostrud (Trump apptee) issues remarkable ruling in MN. Finds “compelling & troubling” evidence that DHS had policy of illegally stopping people based solely on race or ethnicity & of arresting without probable cause. But denies relief ...
1/2
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
A look at how Jeffrey Epstein’s network reached from Silicon Valley to the halls of Harvard and Buckingham Palace. on.wsj.com/40ohJpz
He's been spinning this stupid lie for a while now.
oh my god
while I was disappointed that AXIS was selected over STROBE-X, I would not have ever wanted their concept study not to proceed and this is a loss for the entire field and a sign of how much Donald Trump and his goons have damaged science in the United States and NASA in particular 🔭🧪
This represents wasting an astronomical (no pun intended) amount of work. IIRC Dragonfly’s CSR was almost 1000 pages and represented years of work from many people.
The gutting of NASA Goddard has had a devastating effect on high energy astrophysics. The AXIS probe mission proposal was rejected without review. (The Goddard X-ray mirror lab was significantly impacted by shutdowns and pressured retirements, against the congress approved budget for NASA.)
Just awful. AXIS would have provided the next step in the study of the high-energy universe. How stupid of NASA management to actively implement Trump's insane NASA budget cuts, which were eventually forestalled anyway in a burst of sanity by congress. Lots of eggs broken for no reason
'How convenient.' Lawmakers' surprise visit to previously cramped Baltimore ICE holding facility finds no detainees and just abandoned mattresses www.baltimoresun.com/2026/03/09/b...
NBC’s Richard Engel: “The White House meme campaign is outraging many former US military commanders… they say only someone who has never really seen combat would think it’s a joke and put out material like this.”
A federal grand jury in Arizona has subpoenaed records from a GOP-led review of the 2020 election results that confirmed President Trump lost.
Election officials and Democrats fear it could be used to interference in this year’s elections.
Fun fact: people googling ‘Solar Flare’ is a great measure of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle!
Just killed a man's whole family and accidentally installed him as leader of Iran. We created Super Vengeance Boy and are just assuming he'll leave us alone.
Email from Chris Reynolds to the AXIS Team. Subject is disappointing AXIS news. Text of e-mail reads: Dear AXIS Friends, The AXIS team has received some very disappointing news – we have been informed by NASA HQ that AXIS is not eligible for selection and hence the Concept Study Report (CSR) will not be subjected to the full review process. AXIS represents the scientific aspirations of a large international community. As a member of one of the AXIS science working groups, you deserve a candid explanation from the PI of what happened and why. That is the purpose of this note. NASA’s decision was programmatic and not based on a review of the technology or science; the mission profile described in the submitted CSR was over the allowed budget and schedule. How was such a thing possible? In short, with NASA-GSFC as the AXIS managing center, the mission formulation process was critically compromised by the seismic shifts occurring in NASA and the Federal government. The AXIS study team was hit hard by three unprecedented challenges: NASA’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and the pressure at GSFC to resign/retire created a rapid and uncontrolled loss of over 20 personnel with key expertise during a critical mission formulation period, including the main GSFC Project Manager (Jimmy Marsh) and the X-ray mirror lead (Will Zhang) and many discipline engineers.
GSFC priorities rapidly realigned to the FY2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR) that eliminated the Probe program, further reducing the availability of GSFC engineering and mission formulation personnel (incl. cost analysts and schedulers) over the critical Summer and Fall months. Key work was halted for almost seven weeks when the core GSFC AXIS study team, dominated by NASA civil servants, was furloughed during the government shutdown. NASA HQ’s extension to the CSR submission deadline (from 18-Dec-2025 to 29-Jan-2026) was inadequate compensation for the disruption and lost time. Taken together, these factors disrupted the basic grass-roots costing process (which requires extensive “reach back” to the discipline engineers to assess labor requirements) as well as the cost-design iteration process that is central to the formulation of a cost-capped and schedule-constrained mission. While the mission design was finalized in April, our initial grass-roots costing (which was ~10% over budget) could only be completed in September due to the lack of assigned resources. With the subsequent government shutdown and then “pens down” in early-December forced by the GSFC Executive Review process, there was no opportunity to work through the set of cost/schedule savings that had already been identified by the AXIS team. Ultimately, the GSFC executive council gave AXIS leadership the choice of submitting a CSR with a non-compliant schedule and cost, or not submitting a CSR at all. We of course proceeded with the submission, including a narrative that we understood the path to a cost-compliant profile (that we would have discussed with the review panels during the Site Visit). NASA HQ has ruled this stance to be unacceptable. It is important to stress that NASA’s programmatic decision was before any technical review had been conducted. The decision was NOT due to any concerns about AXIS technology. Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering
Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering the key technologies. GSFC’s Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) team successfully demonstrated iridium-coated, stress-compensated mirror segments that meet AXIS baseline requirements (i.e. segment-level performance at sub-arcsecond level). NGXO also built the first AXIS demonstrator mirror module, learning critical lessons about mirror alignment, mounting and bonding. On the detector side, MIT quickly moved to fabricate AXIS-like CCDs and, working with our colleagues at Stanford, recently demonstrated that they achieve the required readout rate and spectral resolution. Similarly, NASA’s decision was NOT a judgment of the importance of AXIS science. The AXIS science case was rated excellent in the Step 1 review, and it only became stronger during our Phase A study. The AXIS Community Science Book, which many of you contributed to, is an extremely powerful demonstration of the relevance and importance of high-resolution X-ray observations to all areas of astrophysics. The Science Book is one of the most important legacies of the AXIS Phase A study and, I believe, will help define future mission concepts for many years to come. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all of your work on this. AXIS has been a long journey; we started under the leadership of Richard Mushotzky more than nine years ago. During that time, it’s been an enormous privilege to work with amazing people; the AXIS science team, the incredible/brilliant GSFC and Northrop Grumman engineers, and the wider astrophysics community. I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope that NASA leadership, especially at GSFC and HQ, can have an honest discussion about how to better support and protect programs during extraordinary times.
For now, as a community, we must look forward. There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA, and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight. In X-ray astronomy, the SMEX and MidEX programs represent concrete pathways for focused, high-impact missions, and the scientific case we built for AXIS provides a strong foundation for those concepts. The technologies we advanced in Step 1 and Phase A, particularly the NGXO mirror work and the MIT/Stanford detector demonstrations, can anchor the next generation of proposals. Most importantly, the AXIS Community Science Book, representing more than 500 scientists across, is a living document and a powerful signal to NASA leadership that this community is organized, serious, and not going anywhere. I encourage everyone to use it actively, as a resource for future concept development, for Astro2030 engagement, and for building the next mission that will deliver high angular resolution X-ray imaging to address the fundamental questions about black hole growth, galaxy evolution, and the hot universe that motivated AXIS from the beginning. This community built something remarkable over nine years and that doesn't end here. Thank you again for your support of AXIS over these times. Best Chris and the AXIS leadership team
The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.
