China's first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket has a few problems, but the video is quite dynamic. (Space is hard. So is the ground.)

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/a-little-known-chinese-company-nearly-landed-a-rocket-from-space-on-its-first-try/

☄️ 🎯 https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00492

The "Best of 2025" is something to be done in January 2026, not in March 2025. Or December 2025.

@troublewithwords We need to keep on adding wax because otherwise it'll just wane away.

#gävlebocken

@octothorpe Depending on which kind of rice I have, it may explicitly say *not* to wash it.

Recent cool things on astro-ph:

PUNCH data of 3I/ATLAS: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20810

A distant giant planet in a brown dwarf/red dwarf binary system: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20923

A jovian planet orbiting a white dwarf(!): https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21611

Hi #fediverse. We need to talk about something.

While talking to a colleague it came up that they have never sat on a cow. Like, not even once in their childhood.

Another colleague listening in admitted they also have never sat on a cow.

My hypothesis is that most people have at one point in their life sat on a cow.

🐃 🐄 🐮

Have you sat on a cow?

Please boost for scientific accuracy.

@morel I feel like there's an irony in that advisors are way more involved at the grad student level.

@brooke ISO standard deviants

Gaia DR4 is expected to be released in December 2026, so today is a good day to start the countdown!

Why is Gaia DR4 going to be so exciting? Here are several reasons.

https://kevinjardine.dev/blog/post-13/

One place to check research papers is this:
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/top-10-most-highly-cited-retracted-papers/

And now of course, we have AI slop to deal with, as if there weren't enough problems.

#BadResearch #AISlop

sieverts per bitmap

3I ATLAS: Tails of an Interstellar Comet

Image Credit & Copyright: Victor Sabet & Julien De Winter

Explanation: How typical is our Solar System? Studying 3I/ATLAS, a comet just passing through, is providing clues. Confirmed previous interstellar visitors include an asteroid, a comet, a meteor, and a gas wind dominated by hydrogen and helium. Comet 3I/ATLAS appears relatively normal when compared to Solar System comets, therefore providing more evidence that our Solar System is a somewhat typical star system. For example, Comet 3I/ATLAS has a broadly similar chemical composition and ejected dust. The featured image was captured last week from Texas and shows a green coma, a wandering blue-tinted ion tail likely deflected by our Sun's wind, and a slight anti-tail, all typical cometary attributes. The comet, visible with a telescope, passed its closest to the Sun in late October and will pass its closest to the Earth in mid-December, after which it will return to interstellar space and never return.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251201.html #apod

@morel Ack, why did I say Saturday when it's Sunday?

Final high score.

@morel We live-tweet monster (usually) movies, starting on ~~saturday~~ Sunday at 20:00 Central Time (UT-6 or UT-5, depending on DST). There's voting every week on #MonsterdonAlert

This has to be one of the movies that I disliked most for plot reasons. This is an interesting premise, though balancing Men of Science(tm) vs tragedies of family and love can be hard. And this movie didn't manage it.

#Monsterdon #TheAsphyx1972

What strange motivations in that movie. The main guy (at no point did I learn his name) was shown to be especially kind and loving at the beginning: was that so his pursuit of immortality would strip away that kindness? Nah, he was a dick as soon as he saw a ghost photo

Was Giles reluctantly drawn into this pursuit so he could marry Christina, eventually descending into the same madness? Nah, he was on board right away for no apparent reason

#Monsterdon