Be Afraid

We are not ready for this. 

Lab-grown brain-spinal cord model shows 'irreversible' nerve damage may be reversed

May 2026, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-lab-grown-brain-spinal-cord.html

It's a miniature lab-grown brain and spinal cord, but they simply call it "miniature circuits".

via University of Cambridge: George M. Gibbons et al, A human corticospinal organoid-slice connectoid model informs enhancer strategies for post-injury axon regrowth, Cell Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117399

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117399

Post Script for those who believe we ARE ready for this:

New bioreactor turns stem cells into an immune-cell factory, producing 40 million human macrophages per week

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-bioreactor-stem-cells-immune-cell.html

Researchers at Hannover Medical School (MHH) have developed a method for the efficient production of human immune cells, such as macrophages, in medium-sized bioreactors. 

"Medium-sized", for now

via Hannover Medical School: Fawaz Saleh et al, Harnessing intermediate-scale bioreactors for next-generation macrophage production and application, Nature Protocols (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41596-025-01313-x

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41596-025-01313-x

The Pencil - A History of Design and Circumstance

Written by Henry Petroski, 1989

It's hard to believe that this is pretty much the only book written on the pencil.

I have a lot of notes; it's all over the place, but that's never stopped me before from posting it all up here.

• The original pencils were made with lead, but they were literally a lump held in the hand; later the lump was put in holders, and later still graphite was discovered (1560's England), although it was called black lead, plumbago, or English antimony at the time, though Germans called it white lead or bismuth, and others still called it Flemish stone, and it didn't get it's name graphite until two hundred years later (1779) when they had good microscopes to see the chemical structure and realize it wasn't lead at all; the word graphite means graph - to write - in Latin, with -ite at the end to denote it's a mineral.
• Thoreau doesn't include pencils on his list of items for going into the Muir Woods.
• The origin of the word pencil is penis, which means tail in Latin; the original use of the word pencil was more like a paint brush. Also, codex is Latin for tree trunk, on which a codex would have been written.
• Early writing used a stylus on wax tablets backed with ivory.
• Much later, guidelines or blind lines as they were called were put on paper in lead, but the words were written in ink 
• Homemade quill pencils circa 1800s America 
• The pencil as we know it today is called the "cedar and graphite" pencil.

• 1560s Borrowdale England - graphite mine is discovered (but called black lead, plumbago, etc.)
• 1675 Nuremburg - Staedtler was making pencils exclusively, and as a joiner (wood cabinet maker), so he was making his own leads
• 1760 Germany? - Faber
• 1790 France? - Conte instigates the revolution in pencil making when a restriction in supply from a war in 1790 made him turn the graphite into powder and add it to "potter's clay and water", which was shaped and fired like clay; Conte had experience making ceramic graphite crucibles for lead cannon balls; today it's called the Conte crayon, but then it was called ceramic lead. Germany never took up this method, and fell behind.
• 1800s American - they're using quill pencils made with a goose quill, a lead bullet, a melting ladle, and a turnip - the quill was cut to length of a couple inches, the end thrust into a turnip and held upright, the bullet melted and poured into the quill ready for use (and the quill was whittled away at increments to reveal the lead?)
• 1810 America - William Munroe a cabinetmaker who makes pencils uses a slurry but not exactly Conte style because it wasn't baked. 
• 1821 Briton New Hampshire - a graphite mine is discovered
• 1830s Concord Mass - Henry David Thoreau's dad John ran one of America's first pencil companies making graphite and clay pencils, but by 1853 they were making more money selling their ground graphite for electrotyping and gave up on pencils.
• 1843 - a Thomas Telford grounds graphite, mixes with water, and pressurized to reform as natural graphite, but it was too expensive.
• 1857 Jersey City Dixon Crucible Co. - Dixon was at it since 1820, but the crucibles made to melt and mold cannonballs for the Mexican America War were of graphite, and Dixon had so much because his dad owned a shipping company that called in Ceylon, where a graphite mine was, and where they straight used the graphite as ballast in the ship, so he set up shop for the War; at this time, some Dixon advertising materials compare their product against fraudulent Germans pretending to make their pencils in America said Dixon used "purely American principles" where "every manipulation is by machinery instead of by hand labor; producing perfection and absolute conformity." (Makes me think of the American food system though.)
• 1851 World's Fair Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London - this changed a lot of things
• 1856 Siberia - AW Faber, who was failing by 1850s due to lack of good graphite, finds a graphite mine in Siberia, and by 1896 a Faber granddaughter marries a Castell and the company becomes Faber-Castell; note that by 1849 Faber was represented in the US, w a factory by 1861, which caught fire, moved to Brooklyn 1872, then to Wilkes-Barre PA 1956.
• 1870 Germany - JS Staedtler's red conte crayon pencil made since 1851 gets popular, but by 1912 Staedtler is sold by a grandson named Kreutzer
• 1873 Ticonderoga New York - Dixon buys the American Graphite Company in Ticonderoga New York, and is making real and good pencils; and continues to do so until 1980 when the buildings are sold to developers; the business remains, headquartered in Florida and w facilities all over.
• 1900s Japan - They have an entire pencil industry by then.

• ***There is a great passage here, "Where Did the Graphite from Borrowdale Go?" AKA "Black Entropy" - The plumbago from Borrowdale had certainly been absorbed into the universe at large over the three centuries since it had been discovered: being blown in dust from all the sawing and rubbing, being deposited on the furniture of pencil factories and on the hands and clothes of their workers, being carried in fabricated veins of lead in millions upon millions of wood-cased pencils made and exported around the world, being buried with the stubs of pencils no one wanted to hold onto, being laid down in notes in the margin of books like trail markers through forests of thought, being redeposited in thin lines of thoughts and images on countless sheets of paper, being twisted and crushed in the lines of crumpled manuscripts and sketches, being burned with the thoughts and images no one wanted, or no one wanted to remember or build. So by the mid-1800s what had once been the world's purest source of plumbago was essentially worked out and had been diffused throughout the world in a three-centuries long fit of black entropy. (p140)

• ***1860s - Erasers are already on pencils, but it was used, and named, by the 1770s, for "rubbing" out black lead (graphite); and by 1900s erasers got so popular that people got paranoid about their marks on paper being erased either accidentally or intentionally, that there were recipes for fixing the graphite, one with skim milk; further: a Dixon catalog early 1900s has a paragraph about erasing in schools, called "The Philosophy of Rubber", about how having an eraser changes the way students think [perhaps a perennial example of our initial interfaces with new technology]. 

• Erasers on pencils were and are not popular in Europe
• Until 1880, European pencils had square lead. 
• There's a war between whittling and rotary sharpeners, and square and round leads; of course we see the rounds win. But people were real into their whittling; the paper wrapped pencil, an alternative to using wood, never took off because people wanted to whittle. 
• 1890 - The yellow pencil is made to match the Austria-Hungary flag, but also in reference to the Orient where the Siberian graphite was coming from; by 1950s America, yellow and pencil go so well together, there's an apocryphal story of a manager distributing half green and half yellow pencils to his thousands of employees, and getting far more complaints about the green pencils ... because we are basically brainwashed at this point, and he, Petroski, poetically calls it psychosomatic (p163)

• Pine was used for the cheapest pencils, then Red Cedar, then Florida Keys Cedar for the finest; wood was chosen for its strength, freedom from warpage, and smooth cutting qualities.
• English closet chest makers in 1700 got red cedar from Virginia and Florida
• Incense red cedar from California works, but it's white not red, so it's dyed, and impregnated with cedar oil for fragrance, and a wax for better handling in production.
• There is also a wood from India that is dyed violet. 

• There's a good illustration on p223 with the author saying the pencil drawings are so wrong they couldn't be produced "by a drunken machinist on a rubber lathe".

• BOPPS - Broken off pencil points
• The diameter of the leads are thinner as they get harder to adjust for breakage at the point.
• A 1600s teacher was whittling goose quills for their students before class.
• People saved their pencil shavings to drive a way moths.
• There's a Sherlock Holmes bit where he used his knowledge of pencils to deduce a suspect. 
• Colored leads have more wax and less clay, and so aren't baked as hard, and break easily; and colored leads, which often were broken in the wooden shaft, tended to leave loose pieces in the machine to revolve with the cutters and prevent another pencil from being sharpened (bane of my existence as an art teacher).
• There was a pencil made from the wood of a preserved tree near a mastadon in a marl bed in Orange County, the pencil's knob made from the mastadon's tooth. 
• Some novelty pencils were made with companion toothpicks or earspoons
• Mechanical pencil names circa 1930s and 40s - Eversharp, Scripto, Autopoint
• The first Russian pencil was the Diamond by Hammer
• By the 1900s the British call pencil leads pencil strips
• There is a standard for pencil manufacturing - R-151-34
• On Dec 8 1941, the Eagle Mikado became the Mirado.
• They spun a drum of paper against a pencil to see how "far" it goes (35 miles)
• There's Blackfoot Indian made pencils, by hand, in 1971
• Pencil workers could reach into a pile and grab exactly 12 pencils, every time, and that's something a machine can't do in one motion.
• Hemmingway "wearing down sever number 2 pencils is a good day's work"
• Pencils are general word processors, Byte magazine
• "The very commonness of the pencil, the characteristic of it that renders it all but invisible, and seemingly valueless, is really the first feature of successful engineering." p343
• The die for extruding graphite is made of sapphire.
• Author says he's tried, and it's hard finding old pencils, but pencil collector societies do exist. 
• Butchers used ribbed pencils in their slippery hands, and Kosher butchers pig-free pencil products. 

• [Personal thoughts] Every industry is secretive. And because trees are so integral to so many industries, they too are secretive, and a young student first learning about trees would notice it strange how little people know about trees, including experts. But after reading this book it makes more sense. From pencil makers to cabinet makers, to the wood for ships, or for buildings, or basically anything, suppliers know how to get the wood you wanted but they would not tell you how they grow, or where they grow. One way they kept secrets, in pencil making at least, was to keep the process in subdivisions, but so no subdivision knew more than its part, and only family knew "the whole" put together. p281

Image credit: Christopher Payne - Christopher Aparicio unpacking crucibles after heating graphite cores in an oven General Pencil Jersey City NJ - 2017

https://chrispaynephoto.com

Larnier on Tech as People

There's still some interesting people out there worth listening to. Jaron Lanier is interesting, and he came out to give a talk to the graduating class at Brown. This is the same year a lot of tech bros got booed for their fellating ai onstage in front of a bunch of young people. Some might consider Lanier a tech bro, but that would be mostly wrong. He's tech for sure, but bro less. Maybe a bro whisperer. So when he gives talk about AI, you're likely to hear some out-there sh**.

Key Points from Jaron Lanier's "AI and Theory" at Brown University Graduation, April 2026:

• AI isn't a thing, it's a collaboration of people; if it's revolutionary, it's because it allows people to collaborate in a new way; he says the history of science is about new ways for people to collaborate (printing press, royal societies, peer review)
• Every piece of data in the training set is also a person; because a person made it. Actually he didn't explicitly say this, he glossed right past it, but I think it needs more emphasis to make his bigger point, and I think it's one of the more important ideas in general when talking about AI. 
• Information is not some intangible non-physical ethereal thing. Information is physical. It requires energy and dissipates heat.
• It sounds like the main technical idea he's offering is Counterfactual Cluster Generation (aka "data dignity"), and it's how another layer can monitor and evaluate output. He gives an example of a person looking for a bomb recipe, and how an LLM should be able to identify that providing bomb recipes isn't cool.
• Things I wish he said: Science is about predicting the future, but facts require a past; he was answering a question from the audience on the difference, and I wish he said this because it's the easiest way to say it.
• Tunes at 1:30 btw, he's a musician and plays rare and ancient instruments.

Image credit: The Memex by Vannevar Bush 1945 - via Tommaso Venturini talk on the Memeplex for Oxford Internet Institute - 2025

Larnier uses this image in his talk, during a passage about Norbert Wiener's Human Use of Human Beings 1950, and how it's a difficult but interesting read. He mentions that Weiner talks about how terrible it would be if we had a radio we carried with us everywhere we go that beeped and zapped us based on our behavior and how such a machine would destroy humanity, but how that mind-controlling machine sure sounds like social media to the early 21st century reader. I forget exactly why this image came up, but it must have been making its rounds, because I had just recently saw it in a different talk at the Oxford Internet Institute

Chances Are It's Not Majorana Fermions

Mentions of Majorana fermions don't happen often. They're exceptional, but elusive. In fact, they're so exceptional, that anyone who says they found one gets insta-hype. But they're so elusive that most people who say they found one are in fact lying.

For example, IBM says they found them. That was a lie. In fairness, the scientists are not lying in the absolute sense, they're excited and thus biased, because they think they found the holy grail of quantum computing. Companies, on the other hand, don't care so much about scientific integrity, and will make announcements with no intent to vet their veracity. The bigger the potential stock price increase, the less vetting. And so every few years, we get an announcement, usually by IBM, that they found the Majorana fermion, followed by a stock price increase, and then followed, usually much later, like years later, by a retraction, as in this case: Zhang, H., Liu, CX., Gazibegovic, S. et al. Retraction Note: Quantized Majorana conductance. Nature 591, E30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03373-x

In this (unrelated?) case below, not from a starry-eyed tech company, the news goes like this:

They created a classical, room-temperature liquid-crystal system, opening the door to a brand-new field that the scientists call time liquid crystallinity, where fluid-like materials can be organized over time rather than just in space, and that invokes the Majorana spirits. 

Scientists catch classical space-time crystals moving like Majorana quasiparticles

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-scientists-classical-space-crystals-majorana.html

To achieve this, the team took a liquid-crystal material—similar to the fluid used in smartphones and television screens—and doped it with ionic substances. They then applied a rhythmic, repeating electrical signal to the fluid. But that caused period doubling, driven by the motion of tiny, localized structures in the fluid called topological solitons and disclinations. 

These shifting states behave exactly like the particle-antiparticle pairs of Majorana particles, a famous, elusive class of quantum particles that are their own antiparticles. In this system, they serve as a classical, real-world analog of these quantum objects.

Time Liquid Crystallinity - where fluid-like materials can be organized over time rather than just in space

via Hiroshima University and University of Colorado: Hanqing Zhao et al, Emergent discrete space-time crystal of Majorana-like quasiparticles in chiral liquid crystals, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-70880-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70880-8

Totally Unrelated Image credit: Anomalous Galaxy Grid

--Source: Identifying astrophysical anomalies in 99.6 million source cutouts from the Hubble legacy archive using AnomalyMatch. David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez. A&A, 704 (2025) A227. DOI: 

https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202555512

Musical Intermentality

Starting off here with an article that might not be about music proper, but it is about sounds and perception. Some people are hyperperceptive, some dull as a rock - anesthetic you could call it. Everyone else just thinks their house is haunted. 

You can't hear it, yet this sound may explain paranormal experiences

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-paranormal.html

Infrasound is very low-frequency sound, below 20 Hertz (Hz), which humans typically can't hear. It can come from natural sources like storms, or from anthropogenic sources like traffic.

The scientists recruited 36 participants and invited them to sit alone in a room while either calming or unsettling music was played. For half the participants, hidden subwoofers played infrasound at 18 Hz. After listening, they were asked to report their feelings, their emotional rating of the music, and whether they thought the infrasound was present. They also gave saliva samples before and after listening.

The scientists found that participants' salivary cortisol levels were higher if they had been listening to infrasound. These participants also reported feeling more irritable and less interested, and thinking the music was sadder. But they couldn't tell they were listening to infrasound.

via MacEwan University: Infrasound Exposure is Linked to Aversive Responding, Negative Appraisal, and Elevated Salivary Cortisol in Humans, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2026). DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876

https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876

Image credit: Photographer Christopher Payne - Jelly Belly Fairfield CA - 2021

https://chrispaynephoto.com

Popular song lyrics have become more negative since 1973, analysis reveals

Dec 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-popular-song-lyrics-negative-analysis.html

Researchers analyzed the lyrics of the top 100 most popular English-language songs in the United States each week between 1973 and 2023 (20,186 songs), according to the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The authors found that, in general, the lyrics of popular songs have become simpler and more negative over time and contain more stress-related words.

However, they also found that the popularity of songs with more complex lyrics began to increase from 2016 onward and suggest that further research is needed to investigate the reasons for this.

When assessing potential factors influencing changes in listener lyric preferences, the authors did not identify associations with changes in median household income since 1973, but did identify some associations with major stressful events — such as the September 11, 2001, attacks and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These events were associated with lyrics becoming more complex and positive and containing fewer stress-related words, or with no significant changes in lyrics. The authors suggest that this could be due to more positive and complex music being used as a form of escapism during stressful periods.

via University of Vienna: Maurício Martins, Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5

Why some tunes stick: Mathematical symmetry helps explain catchy melodies

Feb 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-secret-math-catchy-melodies.html

They simplified melodies into their essential note groups and examined how common musical changes affect 2 kinds structure - tonal and positional structure. These changes include transposition, which shifts a melody up or down; inversion, which flips it; retrograde, which reverses it; and translation, which moves it through time.

Their analysis revealed symmetrical relationships in many melodies that help explain why certain musical phrases feel cohesive and complete.

via University of Waterloo: Olga Ibragimova et al, Algebraic Applications in Investigation of Musical Symmetry, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-84869-8_5

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-84869-8_5

From virtue to vice: How the morality of popular music lyrics has changed since the 1960s

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-virtue-vice-morality-popular-music.html

The study examined two large popular music data sets spanning more than 60 years, making it the first study to chart moral content in song lyrics at this scale: more than 377,000 English-language songs covering 1960 to 2010 were filtered from the WASABI data set and complemented with 5,500 songs that made Billboard's year-end charts between 1960 and 2023.

Their analysis revealed a rise in expressions associated with moral vices such as harm, cheating, subversion and degradation, alongside increasing levels of negative sentiment, anger and disgust. At the same time, expressions linked to moral virtues such as care and decency became less prominent.

via Queen Mary University of London Center for Digital Music: Vjosa Preniqi et al, Evolution of moral expression in song lyrics, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-53778-9

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-53778-9

Pop song lyrics grew more self-focused in the US and Germany over 50 years, research reveals

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-song-lyrics-grew-focused-germany.html

Researchers have examined the possibility that global society may be becoming more self-centric by measuring how often different pronouns appear in cultural products such as books, movie scripts and lyrics. Compared with first-person plural pronouns, such as "we" and "us," a higher proportion of first-person singular pronouns, such as "I" and "me," can indicate greater self-focus.

(Shouldn't be a surprise to those familiar w the Hofstede's cultural dimensions model)

They found that self-focused language rose significantly between 1970 and 2019 in the U.S. and Germany—two more individualistic countries. Meanwhile, the use of self-focused language was relatively stable over time in the two more collectivist countries, Japan and Hong Kong.

via United Arab Emirates University and U of Aberdeen Scotland: Golubickis M, et al. Are societies becoming more self-centric? Evidence from five decades of popular music spanning three continents, PLOS One (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0349765

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349765

*We are not a fan of academic collaborations with the UAE, because they're buying themselves a culture instead of growing it the old fashioned way, and we are old fashioned. 

Fake Snake Oil Makes About Face

If I sell my snake oil as "fake snake oil", does that make it less deceptive? Or to a lesser degree, if my snake oil is so obviously fake that no normal person would misinterpret it as having any value whatsoever, does that make it less deceptive?

Watching the detectors: Researchers probe efficacy — and danger — of AI detection tools

May 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-detectors-probe-efficacy-danger-ai.html

• I wonder if ai wrote that title (not one but two em dashes)
• This is pretty damning on a whole industry that doesn't really work yet but is being forced into the market regardless.
• The writeup doesn't provide a link to the original article, and I suspect we're all being misled, and I don't mean by this article, I mean by the whole business. 

Image credit: AI Art - Snake Oil - 2025

It only takes one fake web page to fool AI shopping bots, study finds

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-fake-web-page-ai-bots.html

The researchers built a simulation tool called FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments) to test 12 to evaluate web content pollution in AI models. They identified the main brand being discussed on selected pages and swapped it for a fake one. They did this for 225 products spanning 15 categories. After rewriting these pages, they tested whether LLMs would fall for the deception and include a fake brand in their recommendations.

"Across 12 commercial and open-weight LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%"

via UC Santa Cruz: Minghao Luo et al, One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2606.13610

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2606.13610

The consequences of relying on AI for accurate news

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-consequences-ai-accurate-news.html

Participants who relied on AI systems to verify facts actually got worse at detecting misinformation on their own when their chatbots were taken away.

The authors also point out that the original human-created news content used to train the AI models is increasingly unreliable and/or biased, further exacerbating the problem.

Jesus we are f*cked 

via MIT Media Lab: Anku Rani et al, Dialogues with AI Reduce Beliefs in Misinformation but Build No Lasting Discernment Skills, Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2026). DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3790656

https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790656

Polymarket's viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake

Jun 2026, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/polymarkets-viral-videos-showed-people-winning-big-but-the-bets-were-fake/

“In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.”

Makihara, a college student, posted a video in January “that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word ‘McDonald’s’ that month.” But trade data showed that no one on Polymarket won such a bet in January, according to the Journal. This was one of 145 bets that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket between January and May, but all of those bets were fake, the article said.

“Many of the videos share a template: The creators open Polymarket, place a bet, and frequently refer to their winnings as ‘free money.’ Dozens of social-media creators have posted videos with almost identical formats. Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website.”

via Wall Street Journal investigaiton (of all places)

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5

Multigenerational Sociological Programming via Acceptance of and Enthusiasm for the Arts and its Propagation Through the Population

Last night I heard Jaron Larnier speculate that had Star Trek been on the air for ten more years, we'd be living in a different world much less akin to the inside of William Gibson's brain. Alas, the campaign below is reminiscent of, actually modeled after, attempts by a much younger America to not only communicate to its people about the possibilities of the new nation, but to support worthwhile enterprise and exploration. 

Image credit: Kepler 16b - NASA Exoplanet Travel Bureau - 2015

"Like Luke Skywalker's planet "Tatooine" in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Kepler-16b is a gas giant, like Saturn, so it would have no solid surface to stand on. The view here is of and from an imagined nearby moon. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren't good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie's iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction." Credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech science.nasa.gov/resource/where-your-shadow-always-has-company/

'Greetings from 51 Pegasi b': How NASA made exoplanets into tourist destinations

Aug 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-08-pegasi-nasa-exoplanets-tourist-destinations.html

In 2015, NASA launched an unusual and brilliant exoplanet outreach campaign, offering retro-style posters, virtual guided tours, and even coloring books. The project quickly went viral worldwide. What explains the success of a campaign about a relatively young field of science that — unlike other areas of space research — lacks spectacular imagery?

Ceridwen Dovey, science communicator, writer, filmmaker, and researcher, has just published in the Journal of Science Communication a Practice Insight paper that presents a case study focusing on the Exoplanet Travel Bureau's poster campaign. Dovey describes the productive working relationships between scientists and artists that produced this standout work and shows how, in contexts like this, artists are not merely in service to science but can also inspire research itself and help scientists clarify their own thinking.

First, the available visuals: "We live in an age of extraordinary astronomical imagery — the Hubble telescope's stunning images, for instance — that everybody knows well for their beauty, color and precision," explains Dovey. "But with exoplanet science imagery, at the moment there's really not very much to see — and this is a known challenge for the communication of exoplanetary science to the general public."

"The team at the Exoplanet Travel Bureau chose to use 1930s retro-nostalgic image styles inspired by the lovely posters of National Parks like Yosemite created by the Works Progress Administration. Those campaigns sought in part to provide work after the Depression and to attract tourists to iconic national parks like Yellowstone. These posters aimed to evoke the romance of visiting these places and the kinds of nature encounters that would be possible there," explains Dovey.

Joby Harris and his team decided to create a series of posters imagining exoplanets as if they were just around the corner—your next vacation destination. A playful way to encourage the public to imagine them as real places, drawing on the aesthetics and imagery of the historic series of U.S. national park posters. However, an important issue immediately arose during the discussions between artists and scientists.