now I'm fucking grieving and crying 🙁
— Stephen Petrey (@stephen.nyc) 2026-08-12T14:03:32.176Z
Category: Science
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Astronaut Victor Glover spotted taking a photo with iPhone in Orion spacecraft on the way to the moon
It’s the little things! I tuned in to the livestream of the mission and thought it was culturally important to share. In the stream, it’s hard to tell but I believe Glover was taking a photo of Hansen posing for a photo. I think they were preparing for press interviews.
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Artemis II launches today
It’s been 54 years since we last visited the Moon. It’s an exciting day for science, for NASA and for mankind. The Artemis II launch gives me a lot hope (and anxiety). The rocket will be piloted by 3 americans and 1 canadian. Truly a historic day.
This mission is considered a test flight which consists of two phases:
- testing in orbit for 48 hours
- a lunar flyby and return
Nice little graphic from the Times:
Tune in live to NASA’s youtube channel for live coverage here:
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William Anders, Earthrise photographer, Apollo astronaut and pilot has died
Anders sadly perished a few days ago at the age of 90 in a terrible plane crash. Anders was a man of many talents. Running General Dynamics was probably not one of them. I’ll leave that story out of this post, but leave that to you look up. Instead, I want to share something else about William Anders. One of his greatest shining achievements, was probably this unscheduled photograph he took during the Apollo 8 mission.
First, for the uninitiated, Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to leave Earth’s orbit completely to reach the moon. The crew then orbited the moon some 10 times before returning back to Earth. It was a landmark historical mission.
A transcript from NASA’s program Earthrise: The 45th Anniversary:
On December 24, 1968, a few minutes after 10:30 am Houston time, Apollo 8 was coming around from the far side of the Moon for the fourth time. Mission Commander Frank Borman was in the left-hand seat, preparing to turn the spacecraft to a new orientation according to the flight plan. Navigator Jim Lovell was in the spacecraft’s lower equipment bay, about to make sightings on lunar landmarks with the onboard sextant, and Bill Anders was in the right-hand seat, observing the Moon through his side window, and taking pictures with a Hasselblad still camera, fitted with a 250-mm telephoto lens. Meanwhile, a second Hasselblad with an 80-mm lens was mounted in Borman’s front-facing window, the so-called rendezvous window, photographing the Moon on an automatic timer: a new picture every twenty seconds. These photographs, matched with LRO’s high-resolution terrain maps, show that Borman was still turning Apollo 8 when the Earth appeared. It was only because of the timing of this rotation that the Earthrise, which had happened on Apollo 8’s three previous orbits, but was unseen by the astronauts, now came into view in Bill Anders’s side window. Here’s what it looked like, as recreated from LRO data by Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio. You’ll hear the astronauts’ voices as captured by Apollo 8’s onboard tape recorder, beginning with Frank Borman announcing the start of the roll maneuver, and you’ll see the rising Earth move from one window to another as Apollo 8 turns.
Borman: All right, we’re gonna roll. Ready… Set…
Anders: The impact crater with uh – at uh – just prior to the subsolar point on the south side, in the floor of it, uh, [unintelligible], there is one dark hole. But I couldn’t get a quick enough look at it to see if it might be anything volcanic.
Anders: Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!
Borman: Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.
[shutter click]
Anders: You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?
Lovell: Oh man, that’s great.
Anders: Hurry.
Lovell: Where is it?
Anders: Quick
Lovell: Down here?
Anders: Just grab me a color. A color exterior. Hurry up. Got one?
Lovell: Yeah, I’m looking’ for one. C 368.
Anders: Anything. Quick.
Lovell: Here.
Anders: Well, I think we missed it.
Lovell: Hey, I got it right here [in the hatch window].
Anders: Let me get it out this one, it’s a lot clearer.
Lovell: Bill, I got it framed, it’s very clear right here!
[shutter click]
Lovell: Got it?
Anders: Yep.
Lovell: Take several, take several of ’em! Here, give it to me!
Anders: Wait a minute, just let me get the right setting here now, just calm down.
Lovell: Take –
Anders: Calm down, Lovell!
Lovell: Well, I got it right – aw, that’s a beautiful shot…Two-fifty at f/11.
[shutter click]
Anders: Okay.
[…]
Source: Transcripts of Earthrise: The 45th AnniversaryI love this interaction. It highlights just how much a team effort it took to take these photographs, and just how astounding the visage of Earth rising up out of the darkness as they orbited out of the dark side of the moon. Truly captivating.
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True Detective: Night Country is finally here
In many ways, Night Country sings a different tune than the previous seasons of True Detective. Previously, follow up seasons reception was less than favorable. Fans are salivating for a follow-up that can meet or exceed the original grit and pull of the debut season. In season three, Mahershala Ali delivered a refreshing saga that was draped in nods to the first season, but didn’t thread the needle completely. Season four however takes the core of what made season one so fantastic: murder and mysticism.
Theology and mysticism have long treaded a thin line which Carl Sagan has touched on. Understanding our natural world is the only thing that can aid us from steering toward superstition:
“Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.”
Carl SaganNight Country gives us many opposing parallels to consider within its narrative walls: Native Americans and white men. Cultures and conquests. Science and mysticism. Light and dark. Order and disorder. Environmentalism and exploitation. Machine and organic.
The twilight of the long arctic night is a frightening backdrop. The severe darkness beckons for relief. I can hardly fathom enduring more than a few days of darkness myself. Isolation in a such a harsh dark world ratchets up those anxieties even further. The arctic night is a brief pause in an otherwise mundane cycle: daybreak is always followed by the night.
But, not in Night Country. A chilling start, capped off with a dizzying end. SO much more is yet to come and I couldn’t be more happy with where this is headed.
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brr.fyi
Brr.fyi – an anonymous blogger documenting their life on a research station in Antarctica. Easily one of the coolest and most interesting blogs I’ve come across in a while. They document the processes, systems and ind-and-outs at the southernmost point under jurisdiction of the United States, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
An anonymous blogger documenting their life on a research station in Antarctica. Easily one of the coolest and most interesting blogs I’ve come across in a while. They document the processes, systems and ind-and-outs at the southernmost point under jurisdiction of the United States, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
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Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll 
[…] At the same time, his use of double images and the search for hidden images which characterise his Surrealist experimentation are persistent aspects of his work during the 1940s, when Dalí moved to the United States, where he lived between 1940 and 1948. The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 shocked Dalí, who depicted the bombings in many of his landscapes from that year, including Idilio atómico y uránico melancólico (Atomic and Uranic Melancholic Idyll, 1945). In this work, Dalí uses his characteristic figurative style inhabited by soft shapes, represented within a black image whose hollows illuminate another reality outside that which is identified by the aeroplane, explosion and bombs. Beginning in the late 1940s, Dalí’s work moves into a new mystical/nuclear phase, in which he makes a number of works that depict the disintegration of the atom in paintings with religious subject matter.
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Australia’s catastrophic bushfires are generating severe thunderstorm systems
It was only two days ago that the New South Wales Rural Fire Service warned the developing bushfires were growing in intensity and would generate its own weather system. Unfortunately, these bushfires were growing far too quick to be contained. In turn, these sorts of weather patterns become a repeating cycle: fires, wind, thunderstorm, lighting, and repeat.
The Amazon fires had roughly 2.2M hectares burned, the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfire has burned 5.9M hectares so far. It’s a bit mind-blowing to draw a comparison between two very large numbers. The destruction of wildlife alone is enough to make your stomach churn, and the video really communicates the devastation:
Most of the pictures of these bushfires and the pyro-cumulonimbus (sometimes referred to as cumulonimbus flammagenitus) cloud formations are really intense:
According to Quartz, this is only the beginning. Climate change has radically altered meteorology on Earth, and we can expect these sorts of weather patterns more frequently in arid regions:
As global temperatures rise, pyrocumulus clouds may become more common. A similar fire-induced weather system took place during California’s wildfire season in 2018. The state’s hilly terrain created perfect conditions for not only thunderstorms, but fire tornadoes. An unprecedented number of wildfires in north Russia and the Arctic Circle in the summer of 2019, as captured by satellite images, contributed to an increase in lightning strikes in the North Pole.
To make matters worse, the smoke and carbon dioxide is stuffing the air downstream in Auckland, New Zealand and turning the sky orange. This is getting really bad, really quickly.
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Can Bee Venom Treat Lyme Disease?
Katy Vine for Texas Monthly writes:
Perhaps, instead of destroying the bacteria directly, the venom’s effect is indirect, kick-starting the immune system. Bee venom studies have shown promise in combating symptoms for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. According to Justin Schmidt, an insect venom expert at the Southwestern Biological Institute, in Tucson, it’s possible that when the immune system begins attacking itself, an injection of bee venom may help by providing an alternate target—“something to chew on,” he said, “and this tends to regulate the immune system so it does what it’s supposed to be doing, which is attack toxins that are getting into your body.” While Lyme is a bacterial infection, it sometimes mimics autoimmune disorders, and so maybe, somehow, similar rules apply.
It’s also possible that the pain of the stings plays a role. “Maybe the venom is doing something to kick off pain receptors,” he said. Anecdotal evidence suggests that other types of venom may also work this way. A brief article in the Lancet, from 1983, described a 43-year-old woman in Arizona who had MS and went into remission for two months following a scorpion sting on her right foot. An immunologist in Houston told me she was contacted by a physician experiencing progressive MS who said he’d been stung by a sea anemone and went into temporary remission.
This piece from Texas Monthly was mind-blowing. For one I had no idea that bee venom had a use for treating Lyme disease. The viability of the treatment is still unknown. The entire ritual of using bee-stingers has an Eastern-medicine quality to it (never mind the fact it kills our precious bee friends in the process). But, whatever works for treating the pain of Lyme is a win in my book. Even if it is a placebo, pain management is hard.
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A Lab-made Primordial Soup Yields RNA Bases
Looks like Stanley Miller and Harold Urey were onto something with their experiments back in 1952. Their classic abiogenesis research continues to be refined in a new experiment spearheaded by Thomas Carrell. From Nature:
Carell, an organic chemist, and his collaborators have now demonstrated a chemical pathway that — in principle — could have made A, U, C and G (adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine, respectively) from basic ingredients such as water and nitrogen under conditions that would have been plausible on the early Earth. The reactions produce so much of these nucleobases that, millennium after millennium, they could have accumulated in thick crusts, Carell says. His team describes the results in Science on 3 October1.
The results add credence to the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, says Carell, who is at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. This idea suggests that life arose from self-replicating, RNA-based genes — and that only later did organisms develop the ability to store genetic information in the molecule’s close relative, DNA. The chemistry is also a “strong indication” that the appearance of RNA-based life was not an exceedingly lucky event, but one that is likely to happen on many other planets, he adds.
The results, are essential to the Hot Spring Hypothesis and the origin of complex life on Earth. Pretty awesome!
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Skateboarders Are Saving Your City
It’s fun. It’s cathartic. It’s great for team-building, self-esteem, your mental health and frequently, a decent workout. I’m talking of course about skateboarding. It has even passively impacted other areas of life previously unbeknownst to the common urban dweller. There’s so many beautiful urban spaces in cities like like Tokyo, New York City, Dallas, Berlin, Los Angeles and I could go on and on for days. Simply put, the best cities to skate in, are also the best cities to live in — CityLab reports:
After-school skate programs in Colorado and Dayton, Ohio, are proving to be therapeutic for young people with challenges such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Skateboarding’s informal, non-competitive nature normalizes failure—skaters practice a trick hundreds of times, building resilience and perseverance. In Dayton, which has seen the worst effects of the U.S. opioid crisis, these programs can disrupt the toxic peer groups that can lead to substance misuse, and establish good role models instead.
Cities that aren’t the most walkable (look at you L.A.) gets a bad rapport, but the citizens certainly know how to assemble and appeal. There’s a lot to learn from Los Angeles. The same ethos that keeps Los Angeles locked into an ever-evolving urban jungle, is also the engine that keeps urban development in check. Upsetting that balance can mean the difference between a highway dividing a neighborhood, or a brand new bus station. Skateboarding can teach us a lot about DIY and teamwork. The skateboarding communities positive and often progressive ethos could be adopted in communities as a model for fighting for inclusivity and preservation of neighborhoods:
Academics Sharon Dickinson and Chris Giamarino have critically reviewed the tactics skateboarders use to protect the spaces they practice in from being shut down or redeveloped, to understand why some campaigns have been successful while others have failed. DIY or guerrilla regeneration can be applied, alongside more conventional approaches. In Los Angeles, for example, skaters succeeded by appealing to municipal priorities relating to creativity and entrepreneurialism, and presenting their use of the space as convivial and inclusive.
Next time you see a (laughably impossible to enforce) no skateboarding sign in a public square, know you’re in a good place.
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Balance Biking
I learned something interesting the other day.
Learning to ride a bike with training wheels are apparently, a bad idea. Learning to ride a bike with balance bikes, are a better idea. Personally, I like to call it a butt-scooter, but I digress. (Note to reader: I’m not an expert on this whatsoever, links to real experts are below)
The general hypothesis is, learning to a ride a bike is all about splitting up the problem into parts. You really only have two issues any newcomer has to iron out:
- Balancing
- Pedaling
Which really comes down to two different learning models:
- Learn to balance on a balance bike (playing with a butt-scooter)
- Then one learns to pedal on a real bike (multi-tasking pedaling and balancing)
Breaking the problem into two steps seems easy… too easy.
Basically, step one is: trick kids into learning how to balance (it’s a butt-scooter for christ’s sake) on their own before he/she learns how to pedal. A child falling over on a balance is less likely to happen as well. Their feet always hang off the side, ready to catch themselves. There’s no pedals, so you they can only ride as fast as they can waddle with the butt-scooter in hand.
Balancing on any bike is basically all about inertia and movement. So just leave that up the children to decide what feels comfortable.
If you throw training-wheels on a bike and hand it off, a child immediately loses the ability to feel the inertia of the bike and more importantly — they lose the ability to correct. Which could be dangerous when it comes time to remove the training wheels. While they’re learning all about pedaling and multi-tasking with training-wheels on, it becomes super apparent why it’s not ideal to take those training wheels off. Because, well… gravity.
The poor kids that had training wheels have never experienced it before! No wonder kids fall down when you take them off!
A typical balance bike Balance bikes are an absolutely brilliant idea. The additional upshot with these little inventions (apart from saving your kids knees and elbows from certain duress) is kids can begin playing with balance bikes at a much younger age bicycles with training wheels. That’s just my opinion. The example above is very tiny. Designed for children of 2 years aged, at the earliest. Given its construction, it could even be used indoors on carpet. Because, I mean — c’mon lets be honest. Balance bikes are basically just butt scooters for kids.
Again, I’m not a parent (yet) and nor am I an expert on how to raise kids. But there are seasoned authors out there who are. Such as CyclingUK, which has a great blog post on where to start with balance bikes and when to transition to pedals.