Heidi B. Hammel

For more information about the Friday night massacre at CDC, I wrote up an analysis of who got terminated and what that means for public health.

Grateful to @saveamericamvmt.bsky.social for supporting and amplifying. We are in really terrible trouble.

rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

😂

Harvard Professor proposes that he be named Director-General of a special new UN Committee to tell us planetary astronomers how to study interstellar objects, using a special characterization scale named after Harvard Professor (of course!). Srsly. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01405

what Tod said

That's so cool, on so many levels! Congrats!

From gas to ice giants: A unified mechanism for equatorial jets A bifurcation in equatorial jet formation can explain the differences between the gas and ice giants.

New unified model of equatorial winds on giant planets helps to explain some of the zonal wind observations 🔭 I and my colleagues have made for Neptune and Uranus over the past few decades - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Vera C. Rubin Observatory: The Best Inventions of 2025 Find out why Vera C. Rubin Observatory is on TIME's list of 2025's best inventions.

🔭 Kudos to the Rubin team time.com/collections/...

Donation site for @mit.edu if you are so inclined: www.mit.edu/building-a-b... - I usually donate specifically to the fund for grad students named in honor of my mentor when I was an undergraduate there: the fund number for the James L. Elliot (1965) Graduate Student Support Fund is 3297565.

Gemini Data Critical to Revealing that Hayabusa2 Target is Tinier and Faster than Thought - Gemini South paves the way for characterizing small asteroids from the ground with new data on spacecraft Ha... Astronomers using observatories around the world, including the Gemini South telescope, the SOAR telescope and the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope funded in part by the U.S. National Science Founda...

Gemini South finds Hayabusa2’s target asteroid is 3x tinier and spinning 2x faster than previously thought! #astronomy noirlab.edu/public/news/...

Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Santana-Ros
ESO/M. Kornmesser. Asteroid: T. Santana-Ros et al. Hayabusa2 model: SuperTKG (CC-BY-SA)

chonky and chonkier somehow makes me think there are oodles of delightfully large cats inhabiting the subsurface ocean of Enceladus 😸

The Problem with Inadequately Reviewed Fringe Science | Skeptical Inquirer Skeptics usually recognize pseudoscience when we see it. Our heuristics include an assessment of the qualifications and reputations of an idea’s proponents ...

My opinion piece on the pseudoscience of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis was published today by Skeptical Inquirer.

skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/th...

NASA’s First-Ever Alien-Hunting Space Telescope Could Enlighten Our New Dark Age The Habitable Worlds Observatory is poised to tell us whether Earthlike planets are common—if it can get off the ground

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: NASA’s next-gen Habitable Worlds Observatory may be our best chance to find alien life. But can a nation busy ripping itself apart unite to launch a mission to solve life’s cosmic mysteries? By @nadiadrake.bsky.social (and me).

www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-...

This mosaic of two wide angle photos from the Perseverance rover shows the Martian surface stretching into the distance beyond two foreground hills. The rover tracks can just be seen winding into the distance. In this view clouds are unusually well defined as they float well above the tan dust that eternally colors the Martian skies. In the original photos the area near the Sun is 'burned out' by the limitations of the camera sensor. I have addressed this by manually painting over the overexposed areas to reconstruct something of the brightness contours as they probably would have appeared to a human observer. I have also 'warped' the lower corners to fill the rectangular format. Artist's prerogative :-)

A recent vista from Mars obtained by the Perseverance Rover on its 1635th Martian day, or 'Sol', Clouds far above the eternal dust pall are unusually well shown in this afternoon view. This is a mosaic of two wide angle color Navcam images.

ACMT Position Statement: ACMT affirms the safety of acetaminophen in pregnancy and calls for an evidence-based approach to the search for causes and treatment of autism.

Position Statement: ACMT Supports the Safe Use of #Acetaminophen in Pregnancy.

Read our full statement here➡️ bit.ly/3VxbKw8

Artemis II: Nasa plans crewed Moon mission for February The mission around the Moon will pave the way for a lunar landing as soon as 2027.

"All that remained was to complete the crew capsule, called Orion, connected to SLS and to complete ground tests." 👀 Oh, that's "all"? Um . . . www.bbc.com/news/article...

If you think Tylenol is bad for children’s health what until you see what guns do.

I'll admit that Mars is not one of my favorite planets, but even I can't get enough Martian dune images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera, like this one colorized to look like the planet Uranus 😉 More stunning HiRISE pix at www.uahirise.org/catalog/

Oh my! That is weird!

Thx - I did encounter that graphic already but it has simultaneously too much info and too little info 😂

Thx, Andy - audience is people who are not asteroid folks or even scientists - we can talk offline sometime about it

Pic shows reflectance spectroscopy for four different asteroids (Hektor, Eros, Kalliope, and Elektra) in the near infrared. Source: Emery et al "Chapter 19 - Spectral Analyses of Asteroids" in the book: Remote Compositional Analysis Techniques for Understanding Spectroscopy, Mineralogy, and Geochemistry of Planetary Surfaces.

asteroid skymind - I am looking for a figure that shows asteroid spectral type as a function of near IR wavelength (0.9-2.5 micron) spectroscopy. Like this chart, but perhaps generalized and also with C and M type asteroids. Any leads? @asrivkin.bsky.social?

Cole Gregg explores whether interstellar material might come from circumstellar debris disks (it probably can!), and if so, where that material might come from and what would be the physical characteristics thereof #epscdps #epscdps2025

Leah Albrow's talk (given by John Forbes who stepped in to give it) planet dynamical instabilities leave their mark on the ISO population #EPSCDPS2025

John Forbes: according to a model based on stellar populations, our galaxy contains a tapestry of streams of interstellar objects (ISOs) as illustrated in this still from a video that has been shown repeatedly in this ISO session #epscdps #epscdps2025

Close encounters of the average kind: Yukon Huang explores an analytic model of interstellar objects are scattered out of their planetary systems #epscdps #epscdps2025

Have interstellar objects ever hit Earth? No confirmed instances based on fireball statistics but intriguing hints. Dusan Marčeta explores the possibilities with a simulation and it could happen! #epscdps #epscdps2025

The visibility of the Ōtautahi-Oxford interstellar object population model in LSST With a new probabilistic technique for sampling interstellar object (ISO) orbits with high efficiency, we assess the observability of ISOs under a realistic cadence for the upcoming Vera Rubin Observa...

Followed by Rosemary Dorsey who points out how hard it is to find these things: with @vrubinobs.bsky.social completeness of population will be less than a percent. arxiv.org/abs/2502.16741

Rosemary Dorsey reviews a simulation of the interstellar objects that NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory might reveal - how many, what their characteristics may be (maybe 6-51 objects - hard to detect!) @vrubinobs.bsky.social #epscdps #epscdps2025

Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.social) talking about the Ōtautahi-Oxford model - "know thy galaxy, know thy ISO" - ISOs outlive their parent stars, so we need the sine morte stellar population. #EPSCDPS2025

@chrislintott.bsky.social kicks off the “interstellar objects” session with an interesting discussion of how the orbits can link to potential sources of stellar populations, which gives us us context for their potential chemistry #epscdps2025 #epscdps