Just a quick note: Stand Up For Science is a great organization that is fighting the egregious and terrible attacks on science being made by the current administration. They held nationwide rallies in 2025, and I gave a talk at the inaugural Washington DC event.

I’m happy to announce I’ll be doing it again, this time at the rally in Richmond, Virginia on Saturday, March 7. I’m the last talk, and so I’ll be giving extra effort to fire people up. I’m pretty angry, and I’m not afraid to show it.

If you’re in the RVA area come join us! And check the SUfS site to see if there’s a rally near you.

I have some fantastic news: Dianna Cowern has made a science video, her first in three years!

Dianna is a friend of mine. She’s a great science communicator; engaging and enthusiastic, looking at fun questions in fun ways. Her videos are really great.

However, she got Long COVID a few years back, and it was severe. She could barely move, and was bedridden for a long time. She made some progress but then relapsed a bit, but has now been doing better for a few months. And she finally got well enough to make a new video! Here it is:

 I enjoyed this one. Solar neutrinos are really interesting, and I remember when that image of the sun came out. It’s amazing that we can not only detect neutrinos at all, but also get an idea of the direction they came from. They very seriously don’t like to interact with normal matter, but if you have enough of them, even extraordinarily rare events can happen, enough to get some good data.

Anyway, obviously Dianna still has a way to go here, but seeing her smiling and laughing and enjoying physics made my heart sing. Subscribe to her YouTube channel and keep watching!

I love ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre. I’ve written about it many times; they have a terrific newsletter with info on recent advances and interesting tidbits dealing with asteroids and comets that get close to Earth, and I always learn something when I read it.

They just posted an article about how important it is to get observations of near-Earth asteroids (or NEAs) when they get close to Earth. Most of these rocks are small and very faint, and we can’t see them at all until they’re encroaching on the Earth-moon region. Once they pass us they fade to invisibility again, so the only chance we have to characterize their orbits is when they fly by us. Even then, it can be hard to predict just when they’ll pass by again because it takes a lot of measurements of the asteroid’s position over time to nail down the orbit, as I’ve described before. 

But sometimes a picture is worth a kiloword, as they say (kinda). They posted this graph, which took me a second to grasp, but when I did I realized how clever it is:

The graph shows close passes of near-Earth asteroids over time. The vertical axis is the distance, measured in units of distance to the moon (about 384,000 km). The horizontal axis is time. The size of the circle represents the size of the asteroid (the key is to the lower right), and the color is how quickly the rock is moving relative to Earth (red is slow, blue fast; the legend is on the right). It’s a lot of info packed into a simple plot! 

Now look again at the time axis. It starts in 2024, two years ago, and runs into the future, listing predicted passes by asteroids previously observed well enough to determine their future positions.

Become a paying subscriber of Premium to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Already a paying subscriber? Sign In.

A subscription gets you:

• • Three (3!) issues per week, not just one
• • Full access to the BAN archives
• • Leave comment on articles (ask questions, talk to other subscribers, etc.)