Cool profile of astrophysicist extraordinaire Neil deGrasse Tyson in Playboy by Carl Zimmer (not linked to Playboy). One thing I didn’t know about Tyson was he was the first to say Pluto was not a planet.

Tyson’s demotion of Pluto only came to the public’s attention when Kenneth Chang, a New York Times reporter, noticed there were only eight planets featured at the Rose Center. When Chang asked other astronomers to comment, they called the decision absurd. Letters of protest poured into the museum. But Tyson held firm, and in the years that followed, astronomers discovered other icy bodies at the edge of the solar system that were even bigger than Pluto. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to classify it as a dwarf planet.