Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment - Nature Communications Curiosity detected over 20 organic molecules in 3.5-billion-year-old Martian rocks using a wet chemistry experiment, showing complex carbon compounds can survive for billions of years and may preserve...

Finding possible evidence of life elsewhere in the universe has turned out way more confusing and boring than movies made me think it'd be. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Subscribe to Planetary Perspectives Planetary Perspectives is brought to you by Blue Marble Space. We are a global community and nonprofit research institute, united by a shared commitment to understanding life as a universal phenomenon,...

Blue Marble Space is proud to announce a new Substack venture for sharing the voices and ideas of our global community.

planetaryperspectives.substack.com

What the death of Direct File tells us about state capacity We CAN have nice things - if we want them

New, from me: American taxpayers will spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars — not to pay their taxes, but to report them to the government.
Thank Trump, who killed Direct File, a free tax high-quality reporting tool that IRS had built. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-the-d...

Why We Fly | Defector It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn’t die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of…

"I think we as a species need largely symbolic and inspirational projects like this from time to time, to keep us sane and optimistic and in touch with our humanity." defector.com/artemis-moon...

From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth - NASA A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth

One of the problems with people not sharing things with attribution, AI etc is that we (rightly) don’t trust things that are real. This picture is making the rounds today and I’ve seen multiple ppl say it is fake. It isn’t!!!!

www.nasa.gov/solar-system...

Opinion | What’s the Point of Sending People Into Space? An Astronaut, Scientist and Journalist Debate.

Searching for those missing pieces of our origin story that are waiting for us up there…

I did a thing in Today’s NYTimes.
🧪🔭

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/o...

An excerpt from my book (with some newly reported material) is out in The New Yorker today!

History may soon repeat itself in the Gulf of Mexico, and deep-sea researchers have a foreboding sense of what's to come...

More such stories in The Dark Frontier --> www.amazon.com/Dark-Frontie...

Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk

Another example of refusing to collect data whose results you don’t like:

Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/c...

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

If you're wondering what's happening with the US Forest Service and why it matters, read this:

GitHub - apcamargo/prodigal-gv: A fork of Prodigal meant to improve gene calling for giant viruses and viruses that use alternative genetic codes A fork of Prodigal meant to improve gene calling for giant viruses and viruses that use alternative genetic codes - apcamargo/prodigal-gv

There is a variant of prodigal that can recognize alternative genetic codes
github.com/apcamargo/pr...

Converting Relative Amplicon Abundances to Absolute Abundances via Flow Cytometry: Metagenomic Validation and Application to Long Ocean Transects Abstract. With microbes critical for ocean ecological and biogeochemical processes, we need to understand their abundance and diversity distributions. Whil

Want to convert old relative abundance ocean amplicon data into absolute abundances? Williams et al. show a flow cytometry "anchor" can provide reasonable absolute abundances, validated by internal-standard corrected metagenomics with single copy genes, and amplicons academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

the trump administration is selling this country wholesale to rapacious, extractive industries that will destroy our collective resources for private profit morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

jesus christ

Boldly going where no toilet has gone before

Unreal.

Summer School: "Biosignatures and the Search For Life on Mars" - Astrobiology "Biosignatures and the Search For Life on Mars", will be held in Iceland from 18 to 26 July 2026

Summer School: "Biosignatures and the Search For Life on Mars"
astrobiology.com/2026/03/summ... #astrobiology #biosignatures #Mars

Yep, a mom's COVID shot during pregnancy protects her baby, a large study finds A 3-year study published in Pediatrics examined newborns in Norway. It found a clear benefit for the baby when mom gets a COVID vaccination during pregnancy.

Wow, turns out vaccines during pregnancy are... safe and effective, even protecting babies!
Incredible! Truly shocking!
It's almost like science works?!💉🛡️👶

This admin keeps peddling COVID-19 antivax nonsense, but science prevails.💪

Science: 2,978,547
🧠🪱: -785

it's incredible that as long as you do the right amount of bigotry you can just rob the country blind and enough people will not care, even though those same people will be filled with incandescent rage if someone uses food stamps to buy a 12 pack of diet coke

The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications. No denials. No refunds. Just silence. This is the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system. Here's what's happening. 🧵

Administration Targeted Climate Lab in Effort to Free Trump Ally, Lawsuit Claims

Trump is trying to shut down one of the world's premier climate & weather research labs. Why?

A petty beef with a Colorado official who didn't support his effort to steal the election. That's it.

This one little episode is such a horrendous tragedy, such an absolute body blow to our knowledge & reputation, for such petty, grossly corrupt reasons, it deserves weeks of coverage, investigations, & outrage.

It will get nothing. There are a dozen others just as bad happening at the same time.

They have made it SUPER easy to email your Sentaors to vote no on Jim O'Neill, who is massively unqualified to run NSF - in fact, he's likely being nominated ot help destory it, as usual per Trump.

This took me literally one minute. Add your voice. Please.

Efficiency!

Having a hard time keeping up with the fast-moving field of origin of eukaryotes/Asgards archaea? Our new perspective article can help, we review the status of research over the last decade and where it's going.

The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Read about what “DOGE” did to the NEH and remember that we really have no idea how much crime and damage they did at other agencies.
Someone needs to thoroughly investigate what they did at NASA.

A thread.
(1/n)
🧪🔭

Which people are doing the murders?

Remind me: when you bomb an elementary school, lure the survivors into a false sense of safety, and then bomb the survivors, leaving behind dozens and dozens of dead school children... are you the good guys?

US at one end, Canada at the other

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

New: Despite Congress' rejection of the Trump administration's cuts, OMB has been throttling funding to agencies like NIH and NASA. These restrictions, on top of the 6-week government shutdown, have stopped projects and slowed new grants.

Story w/ @alexwitze.bsky.social and @maxkozlov.bsky.social

Sedgwick’s prescription is “reparative reading,” a theory of more flexible sense-making that can hold truth and provide an antidote to the overwhelming paranoia of our times. While the conventional wisdom states, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you don’t have enemies,” Sedgwick turns this formula on its head: “Just because you have enemies doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid.” Or to put it another way, having a direct understanding of systemic oppression (the healthcare system, police violence, the fascist state) does not condemn a person to a categorically paranoid point of view. To practice a worldview more expansive and more open to possibilities than paranoia does not mean you have to deny the reality or gravity of oppression.

Feeling paranoid about stochastic violence and weaponized media? Me too. That's why I can't stop thinking about this incredibly helpful essay by @littlewow.online in @flaminghydra.com about the idea of "reparative reading" as a corrective to the "paranoid style." flaminghydra.com/issue-511/