As you may be aware, I am no fan of RFK Jr. He is a quack, a con artist, a science-denying crackpot who should be nowhere near a keyboard or microphone, but in this year of 2025 he is in charge of the nation’s health. He has already done vast damage to our country — replaced a vaccine advisory with fellow anti-vaxxers, canceled half a billion dollars in vaccine research, and much more — and will continue to do so for many years. The ground he has salted will take generations to fix.

That’s why I fully support my friends at Stand Up For Science, who are calling for his impeachment. They lay out the very clear case for why RFK Jr. needs to go, now, and have a petition anyone can sign that they will present to Congress in September. I signed it, and I ask that you do too, please.

I know that signing petitions may not seem like it will help, but the more noise we make the more likely something will happen, and if we make no noise, well. RFK’s decisions will literally kill thousands if not millions of people, not just in the US but around the world, since many other countries rely on us to provide vaccines and funding for their own health. He was appointed by a single vote in the Senate. Imagine if we could swayed one more Senator (cough cough Bill Cassidy) before that vote! 

So please sign it, and ask others to as well. Make some noise.

P.S. Stand Up For Science has made August a 31 Days of Action month, with something you can do each and every day to help defend science from the government bent on destroying it. The tasks are easy, and they have simple guidelines to help.

My other main writing gig (other than this newsletter, of course!) is for Scientific American magazine, about which I am ridiculously proud. I started in late 2022, and I’m now up to over 170 articles for them. My column, called “The Universe”, is published every Friday. 

As it happens, this month is the 180th anniversary of the first issue of the magazine published — it’s the longest running continuously published magazine in the country. To help celebrate, my editor Lee Billings and I decided I would write about the discovery of the planet Neptune, which, in September 1846, occurred just a year and change after that first issue. The article, which published last Friday, covers the weird circumstances under which the planet was found — it was a race between two teams of people, with a near photo finish and lots of ironies to go around. There’s even more info in another SciAm article written in 2004 that’s a pretty fun read; search for “The Case of the Pilfered Planet” at that link.

Researching my article was fun. I knew a lot about the discovery, but needed to know a lot more to get into some of the details. My first thought is that it would be fun to write about how the magazine covered the discovery — after all, it was a huge scientific event and it happened 13 months after the magazine got started!

That’s when an odd thing happened. I couldn’t find anything.

SciAm has every issue scanned and archived. I searched the articles from 1846 and 1847 (just in case there might be a few weeks lag in printing an article), and, bizarrely, I found nothing about the actual discovery of Neptune.

The first mention I see of the new planet in the magazine is in the December 12, 1846 issue (volume 2 number 12), with a short note nestled among other news: “It is ascertained that Leverrier's new planet is two hundred and thirty times as large as the earth, being the largeet [sic] planet of the system. Its position is exactly that assigned to him by his calculations.” I’m not sure what is meant there by “large”; if they mean “volume” then that would correspond to a planet about six times Earth’s diameter (volume increases as the cube of the radius). We now know Neptune to be about 3.9 times wider than Earth, so given uncertainties in 1846 “volume” is probably what they meant.

And that’s it. No fanfare, no big record of how it happened. I’m not sure how this got passed over by the editors at the time, given the importance of this news. I know the magazine would cover it extensively today, and that includes me being all over it. 

Going through the old archives I did find some other mentions of the discovery, though, but they’re, well, weird. 

Of course the magazine was different back then, but the writing style was closer to that of Dickens than I would’ve thought. One article, “The Discovery of the Planet Neptune”, from the November 6, 1847 issue (scroll down to the third page), waxes on (and on and on) about the human aspects of the discovery in a manner I suppose could be described as poetic. There’s no section name to put this in context, though perhaps it’s akin to an OpEd page; it’s clearly not a scientific essay.

It’s more a dive into what a lone astronomer’s task is when trying to find a planet or any new orb in the heavens, and you just have to read it. My favorite line, I think, is the last one:

Imagine trying to get that published today!

I’m glad to see the magazine is a bit more progressive these days, more clearly discussing scientific advances and other issues impacting science. As I wrote when I first started up writing for them, Scientific American was a big part of my youth, reading my dad’s copies one by one on a shelf in our laundry room, and it’s a pleasure and a privilege for it to be a big part of my life now all these decades later. It’s encouraging, especially in these times now, to realize that span is just a fraction of how long it’s been around, and hopefully, how long it will continue.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!