Laura Lopez

LOL. Conversely, I also found Hegseth calling MIT "woke" hilarious as someone who went there for undergrad and postdoc and saw my academic advisor and my hiring committee chair in the Epstein e-mails. 🫠

Thank you, Randall!! Glad you got to hear the ACX shout-out! 😀 I want people to appreciate how much it changes temperature and metallicity estimates!

YouTube video by CfA Colloquium Laura Lopez: A Multiwavelength View of Feedback and Outflows from Nearby Galaxies

Check out @ohdearz.bsky.social great talk at the CfA colloquium on feedback and outflows from nearby galaxies at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Nh.... And thanks for the shout-out for the AtomDB CX model!

Astrobites is partnering with @blackinastro.bsky.social this year for Black Space Week! If you’d like to register to participate as a writer or interviewee you can fill out the Google Form below or in the QR code in the flyer! The deadline is Friday March 6th.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Harvard just announced they will be remote tomorrow, so I may do my colloquium remotely... from my hotel room in Porter Square? 🤣

View out a window of a red house, fence, and snow drifts during the blizzard in Boston.

View of houses, fences, trees, and snow drifts from a window during a blizzard in Boston.

Here's the views outside my hotel room window in Cambridge, MA. The roof/balcony ledge (and snow) are above my knee!

That picture looks even more apocalyptic than Boston in "Last of Us"! 😂

LOLZ. This is going to be one of my "walking uphill in the snow to work both ways" stories in my life.

Me too, and I live in Columbus, so these kinds of people were the pickings! 🫣

Central State University is one of two historically-black colleges & universities (and the only public HBCU) in Ohio, and alumni include the Columbus US congressperson Joyce Beatty. CSU will have lost 38 faculty in the last 3 years, which this Dispatch article says is 1/4 of their total faculty.

I hope they make it! Flights out of Boston were still leaving when I arrived at ~10am, but flights coming into Boston/NYC/EWR this afternoon were cancelled, so they may not have planes to get out depending on their departure time.

Cool cool. Just in time for my colloquium at Harvard this week! 🫠 Got the last flight out of Columbus this morning! All flights to the Northeast are cancelled the rest of today and all of tomorrow.

Got to celebrate the promotion of two colleagues today, always awesome to see great people leveling up. Congratulations to Keely Finkelstein (@astrokeely.bsky.social) and Danielle Berg! 🎉🔥🍾🫡🧪

Woohoo!!!! 🎉🎈🥳

I hope this means Danielle got tenure? 🎉

One of my grad advisees worked with him as a postbac at IPAC. She said he was patient and kind. Very sad. 😞

One of our Republican Senators from Ohio, Bernardo Moreno, was born in Bogotá and immigrated from Colombia and became a US citizen at 18. He's pro-ICE and pro-tariffs and mispronounces his last name so conservative voters don't recognize he's a Latino immigrant.

The Dept of Ed isn't restricting DEI activities anymore, but does that apply to the 31 universities who signed agreements in the Fall saying they wouldn't participate in anything that may consider race? 🤔

Reframing: 31 out of 45 universities including Ohio State signed agreements saying they would limit any activities that MAY consider race (even the activities are open to everyone). This agreement was what led OSU to limit participation in scientific affinity group conferences like SACNAS.

I will celebrate when schools re-open all the offices, programs, scholarships, and groups they closed.

Downtown shot of a street and buildings in Columbus, Ohio, with Nick Lachey saying "Welcome to my home state, Ohio"!

Picture of Love is Blind contestant Vic, age 33, assistant professor of public policy at Ohio State, saying "I've been waiting to be married for some time".

I thought I was done with #loveisblind, but this Columbus season roped me in with all its "O-H" "I-O!"s, a participant who is an OSU professor of public policy, and their apartments near German Village!

I'm trying to make dinner but I cannot stop laughing at this

I'm not sure this helps, but I don't think astronomy or physics are worse than other fields. I think Epstein had an interest in these topics, so he surrounded himself with powerful people in these fields. Many of them are at MIT and Harvard (where I did undergrad & postdocs), so I know them. ☹️

Looking through the e-mails, I was disappointed how many astronomers/physicists were in contact w Epstein. People who interviewed me for faculty jobs, were friends' PhD advisors, selected professional prize winners, were in charge of promotion & tenure. I felt like the tree is rotten to the roots.

Text pasted from Ohio's SB1: "(1) "Controversial belief or policy" means any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion."

It is deliberately open ended as to what "controversial" includes (actual bill screenshot below), e.g. evolution? climate? Big Bang? spherical Earth? age of the Earth? Biogenesis? Personally, I teach "Life in the Universe", and all these topics are part of that class.

Yes, besides banning DEI programs, Ohio's SB1 prohibits discussion of "controversial topics" in the classroom and bans all faculty strikes.

Astronomer Eric Wilcots to become interim chancellor of UW-Madison! 🔭

It seems like Isaacman is either unaware of what OMB is doing or OMB is backtracking.

Black holes are not red,
But their accretion disks are blue.
As a consequence,
The optical and UV dominate in the plot of nu F_nu 🔭

Here were the 15 projects/missions told to pause, including the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Habitable Worlds Observatory, and astrophysics probe missions, contrary to the budget passed by Congress. 🔭