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Stars, planets, and even our bodies come and go, since permanence is the one thing that nature seems unable to create. The only thing that is enduring is: repetition. Tune in to hear what is repetitious in our galaxy.

Texas and oil have been an inexorable combination for well over a century. The oil and gas industry is the state’s largest economic engine, generating billions of dollars and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs. But these days, Texas is meeting much of its rising electricity demand with renewable energy.

There has much coverage of the plight of sunflower sea stars, the large starfishes with 16 to 24 arms that inhabit the Pacific Coast of North America. A wasting disease that hit the population starting in 2013 killed off more than 90% of the population from Mexico to Alaska. Only recently has the underlying cause of the disease been identified: a specific bacterium of the Vibrio genus. But sunflower sea stars aren’t the only species that have fallen victim to the wasting disease. In fact, it has killed billions of sea stars in up to 20 species.

(Airs 12/05/25 @ 10 p.m.) The Legislative Gazette is a weekly program about New York State Government and politics. On this week’s Gazette: we’ll speak with the Commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services about the impact of federal cuts and how the state is filling the gap for those in need, the Executive Director of the New York Council on Problem Gambling will tell us about how expanded gambling has impacted gambling addiction, and we’ll introduce you to the Republican candidate for state attorney general.

To understand climate change, we can look to Venus and Mars, both surrounded by carbon dioxide—the main greenhouse gas. On Venus, CO₂ traps enough heat to keep the surface at 850°F, while on Mars, a much thinner layer still warms the planet by about 40 degrees. Greenhouse gases work by trapping infrared energy: when the Sun heats Earth’s surface, most infrared escapes through simple gases like oxygen and nitrogen, but CO₂ and water vapor absorb and re-radiate it, sending some back toward the ground. This process keeps Earth warmer and explains why cloudy nights are warmer than clear ones—the same physics behind climate change.

Data centers consume large amounts of energy. In 2023, they consumed 4.4% of the nation’s electricity and that percentage is projected to double or triple by 2028, in part due to the proliferation of AI. Much of that power is used to operate computing equipment like servers but nearly half of it is used for cooling systems for the equipment.

In 1978, green sea turtles were placed on the endangered species list primarily due to human activities like bycatch in fisheries, habitat loss from coastal development, pollution, commercial hunting for their meat, and harvesting of their eggs. Other threats include entanglement in marine debris, being struck by boats, and climate change. For more than 40 years, they teetered on the brink of extinction around the world.

The universe is shaped by four fundamental forces, including gravity and electromagnetism. The latter’s strength is described by the dimensionless constant alpha (about 0.008), a value long puzzling to scientists such as Wolfgang Pauli. In 2010, astrophysicists analyzing quasar light found that alpha appeared slightly larger in one direction of the sky and smaller in the opposite, suggesting this supposedly unchanging constant might vary across the cosmos. Tune in to hear how such a directional shift would challenge Einstein’s relativity, hint at an even larger — possibly infinite — universe with fundamentally different cosmic “neighborhoods,” and suggest that life exists here partly because our region of the universe is unusually suited to it.

On December 7 we get the year’s earliest sunset, followed by the shortest day on December 21 and the darkest morning in early January. This timing doesn’t match the solstice because Earth’s tilt and elliptical orbit make our solar day slightly longer than 24 hours as we move fastest near early January. That small shift moves sunrise and sunset milestones off the solstice, meaning the darkest-feeling afternoon of winter arrives now.

My autograph collection includes a handwritten note from Aldous Huxley saying “Gratitude is heaven itself,” a fitting thought with Thanksgiving approaching. I’m thankful for many things, including resisting the urge to play mood music at my observatories, since tastes differ and silence still best suits the Orion Nebula in Ulster County. The holiday also prompts a modern cosmological question: whether the universe is an interconnected whole with some underlying intelligence rather than a product of randomness. This idea has scientific grounding, since the laws of physics and the four forces are astonishingly fine-tuned for life—small changes to the strong force or gravity would make stars, water, and life impossible. So we’re left to wonder whether such precision needs an explanation, and whether Nature itself might hold some unseen intelligence, as scientists continue trying to make sense of a cosmos that seems improbably well-suited to us.