“The White House directed health and science agencies to make federally funded studies immediately available to the public after publication, a move that open-access advocates have long pressed for but one that threatens to upend the business models of scientific journals,” Stat News reports.

Live Science: “Solar winds from the snapping of a gigantic ‘canyon of fire’ filament on the sun are set to slam into the Earth today (July 20) or tomorrow (July 21), triggering a weak G1 geomagnetic storm.”

President Biden released one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images.

It’s absolutely stunning.

Los Angeles Times: “Billions of years ago, long before a swirling cloud of gas and dust coalesced to form the sun, light left the earliest stars and began a long journey through space.”

“The light has been traveling ever since, covering trillions upon trillions of miles. It hurtled by galaxies and their nascent stars, some of which were accompanied by planets. And on one of these, a species evolved with the ability not only to question what might be out there, but to build tools to see what its own eyes could not.”

“On Monday, the world got its first glimpse of that ancient light courtesy of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the most sophisticated and ambitious deep-space viewing tool yet assembled.”

“NASA is set to release its first full-color scientific images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope Monday and Tuesday,” Axios reports.

“This long-awaited milestone will set the stage for the rest of the $10 billion telescope’s mission to rework our understanding of how the universe evolved from the earliest galaxies to today.”

“A University College London scientist has accused lawyers in the US of misusing his groundbreaking work on the brain to justify the dismantling of Roe v Wade,” The Guardian reports.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told a group of Covid vaccine critics that he’s in a “guerrilla war” against the medical establishment, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Said Johnson: “I need every guerrilla fighting this guerrilla war right now. Don’t get out ahead of what the public is willing to accept as truth.”

“An invasive species of spider the size of a child’s hand is expected to ‘colonize’ the entire East Coast this spring by parachuting down from the sky,” Axios reports.

“Initial observations of an asteroid dubbed ‘2022 AE1’ showed a potential Earth impact on July 4, 2023—not enough time to attempt deflection and large enough to do real damage to a local area should it strike,” Phys.org reports.

“It has since been confirmed that 2022 AE1 will not impact Earth.”

As John Ellis noted: Finally, some really good news.

David Leonhardt: “The misery of the Covid-19 pandemic — with its death, illness, isolation and frustration — has left many Americans desperate for clear guidance on how to live safely. People want to protect themselves, their family and their communities, especially the most medically vulnerable members of it. This instinct is both understandable and profoundly decent.”

“But it has led to a widespread misunderstanding. Many people have come to believe that expert opinion is a unitary, omniscient force. That’s the assumption behind the phrases ‘follow the science’ and ‘what the science says.’ It imagines science almost as a god — Science — who could solve our dilemmas if we only listened.”

Scientific American: “The relief was as deep as the stakes were high. At 7:20 A.M. (ET), the rocket carrying the largest, most ambitious space telescope in history cleared the launchpad in French Guiana, and the members of mission control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore roared their elation.”

“The suspense was not quite over. Half an hour postlaunch, the telescope still needed to decouple from its host rocket, after which had to deploy solar panels to partly power its journey. Only after that first deployment proved successful, said a NASA spokesperson in a statement to Scientific American, would ‘we know we have a mission.’ When the announcement of a successful rocket separation and solar-array deployment finally came, it was almost drowned out by cheers.”

New York Times: “When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months — and there’s no end in sight.”

“Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans don’t need to wear masks. Wait, they do.”

“At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain.”

“A plan to protect the confidentiality of Americans’ responses to the 2020 census by injecting small, calculated distortions into the results is raising concerns that it will erode their usability for research and distribution of state and federal funds,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Census Bureau is due to release the first major results of the decennial count in mid-August… The bureau will adjust most of those statistics to prevent someone from recombining them in a way that would disclose information about an individual respondent. Testing by the bureau shows that improvements in data science, computing power and commercial databases make that feasible.”