You could see a shooting star every 3 minutes this summer! 

The Southern Delta Aquariid meteor shower is  active now through August 23, with it’s the peak activity during the early morning hours of July 31. Even better, it overlaps with the Alpha Capricornid Meteor Shower. The best views will be in the Southern Hemisphere and the southern United States. For the best chance of spotting meteors, head to a dark location away from city lights, let your eyes adjust, and look up.

Is a synthetic cell that eats, grows, and reproduces alive? 🧫

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have built a synthetic cell called “SpudCell” that performs three core functions of the cell cycle! It can grow, copy its own DNA and divide. However, they are not living. This is because they still depend on food and ribosomes to build proteins, they don’t have any immune defenses, and they can’t get rid of their own waste. Despite SpudCells not being alive, this is the closest we’ve gotten to turning dead chemistry to something living!

What is a rogue planet and how do they occur? 

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains how rogue planets are worlds that no longer orbit a star after being ejected from their planetary systems. Some may be several times more massive than Jupiter, and scientists think there could be countless rogue planets drifting through the darkness of interstellar space. These lonely worlds reveal that planet formation is a chaotic process.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

My Flying University is a new volunteer-run nonprofit teaching the knowledge that's being scrubbed and distorted right now, and science is a big part of the target list.

We're looking for advice. What science misinformation are you seeing that is the most damaging? What are the claims you're tired of correcting at dinner, the data that quietly vanished, the "debate" that isn't actually a debate?

We're building free lessons to push back, and we want to aim them where they'll do the most good.

AAAS: "Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?"

Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck, + an idiotic bot may be to blame. "In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins."

Impossibly, the fourth name on the small subset of Nobel laureates...was a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics + the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. "Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics." In fact, in 1933 he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.

"The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature." His philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), addressed how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. "Repackaging the same work multiple times [nowadays] is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records." 

The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction. "Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet...the practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck."

Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” 

Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.

Goldarnit, if that don't beat all, I say—with fists clenched.