Dr. Natalie Hinkel

Why are planetary scientists, astrobiologists and and SETI scientists so negative (pissed off, even) about Avi Loeb’s repeated claims that 3I/Atlas may be an invading alien spaceship?
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Abstracts submitted to LPSC 2026 are required to comply with White House (non-legally binding) executive orders forbidding mention of topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

At least USRA/LPI isn't hiding it.

But is this what our community wants? Or deserves? I don't think so.

I'm finally getting a real* office at work! I'm looking for couch recommendations and links (note: internal rules say I have to buy through Amazon, sigh).

Also, other recommendations for Things You Could Not Live Without are appreciated!

*Current office is 6x9 ft and was meant for a postdoc. ☹️

Similarly, I couldn't decide what to wear the night before my talk, so I opted to let tomorrow's Natalie figure it out since she was the one who had to actually wear it all day.

But also that dress DOES look great on you and you should get many versions. 🥰

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruzf.bsky.social and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...

NSF and NASA Budget Requests Pose an Unprecedented Threat to Astronomy The president's budget requests for NASA and the NSF were released last week. This post summarizes the major cuts and the impacts they would have, and provides resources to help fight back against thi...

From Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social : This post summarizes the proposed major cuts to NASA and the NSF and the impacts they would have, and provides resources to help fight back against this wasteful and unnecessary attack on science. 🔭✨☄️
astrobites.org/2025/06/02/b...

Don't miss our new NASA Science spending and economic impact resource at dashboards.planetary.org/nasa-science.html — see space science spending in every state and congressional district and custom reports for each region. A unique resource.

They must be chasing you. You should figure how to use this as some kind of super power. But, of course, only for good. 😉

I won the "Outstanding Undergraduate Faculty Teaching Award" in my department, as nominated by my students. That's after being at LSU for only 2 years and not even teaching this semester.

It's honestly carried me through the whole week. 😊

Astronomy is in trouble, but you can help! 🔭🧪

I made this video as part of the @aas.org #savescience week of action. Check out their resources on how you can help here

aas.org/advocacy/get...

I know there are SO SO SO so sooo many things going on right now.

But y'all, I went to the airport Baton Rouge TWICE today. 2 times, round trip. And I will still be sleeping in my own bed tonight. The storm in Dallas caused two of my flights to be cancelled. 🤬🚫✈️

NASA Is Terminating The GISS Lease In Five Weeks This was just sent to all NASA Goddard and GISS employees by Makenzie Lystrup

NASA Is Terminating The GISS Lease In Five Weeks
nasawatch.com/personnel-ne...

"NASA’s lease of Columbia University’s Armstrong Hall in New York City, home to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, will end effective May 31, 2025."

The Planetary Society: reported cuts to NASA would amount to an… The Planetary Society, the world’s largest independent space interest organization, issued a statement in response to recent reports that the White House…

There are reports The White House is considering a 50% cut to NASA’s science programs, and 25% of its overall budget, which would be catastrophic for both current and planned missions. But, there is still time for the administration to reconsider. Read our full statement ⬇️

Ah ok. Good to know, thanks! 😁

I completely agree. I'm having déjà vu from the '08 recession that also saw a huge loss of opportunities and the brain drain is still felt today. But when the larger opportunities go away, I think it's vital that people do what they can to support students locally in whatever way they can.

Truly sad to see, although not unexpected. I was able to do 2 REUs, UMich and UCLA, which was incredibly important coming from a small undergrad (Oberlin). I often credit the REUs as giving me the varied research understanding/skills that I needed to get into and later use in grad school. 💔🪐👩🏻‍🔬🧪🛰️🚀🔬

How A Balloon-Borne Antarctic Telescope Could Help Detect An Earth 2.0 An LSU-led team would like to use a high-flying Antarctic balloon-borne infrared telescope to detect the chemical makeup of some 300 red dwarf stars.

Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an Antarctic balloon mission!
www.forbes.com/sites/bruced...

Thanks to @bdorminey.bsky.social for talking with me about my team's high res, near infrared spectrograph proposal to measure M-dwarf compositions for planets and galactic chemistry!
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All of the new data, upgrades, and changes from beta have been pushed to the main website: hypatiacatalog.com!

So, if you go to the "new" page, it will either redirect you or give you a certificate warning.

Thanks to all of our users and for the great feedback. 😃

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mr bean is wearing a tuxedo and bow tie . ALT: mr bean is wearing a tuxedo and bow tie .

While the discussion is centered around astronomy, the overall plan and technology is fairly generalized. So I think it's useful to a broad range of scientists and people. 😉

Also, thank you! What's better than conveying an intent than a meme.

Oh that sounds interesting! I'll add it to my to-read list of books. Thanks.

Exactly. And the truth of the matter is that it took Caleb Wheeler (the lead author of the paper) about 4-5 years to really hash out the project, work with the students, and build up the website. And all of that work is SO important to make the connection to NASA observations. 😃

Totally fair. But make sure that you give yourself the credit for the climb, since that tends to be a huge amount of effort and persistence. 😉

✨ You Too Can Database: A Roadmap for Creating Specialty Databases & Web Portals ✨

Creating astro databases is like building higher and higher stories in a castle which can eventually reach the castle towers, or NASA observatories, which can see the furthest! 🤩

bit.ly/41gkxGI

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a sea otter is swimming in the water . ALT: a sea otter is swimming in the water .

Meet me at SEATAC! We gunna catch us some otters. I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine. And he shall be my Squishy. Come here, Squishy!!

Nice! I've only met a handful of people who do this sort of thing...and I feel like we all own pretty good headphones/earbuds 😉

I was probably ~13 yrs. I would listen to the same song on repeat for days (which was much harder with tapes/CDs). Even now I do it when working towards a deadline -- I'll play one song +100 times over a couple of days.

I created an "OCD playlist" which I, unsurprisingly, never get through. 😉

Science friends -- here are some great ways to make data more available and accessible! 🪐👩🏻‍🔬🧪🛰️🚀

a man with long hair and a beard is standing in front of a door that says sky one on it ALT: a man with long hair and a beard is standing in front of a door that says sky one on it

So not only can you explore some impressive protoplanetary disk spectra (all in one place!) -- but you can also understand what's going on behind the scenes to create something similarly incredible and useful yourself!

For questions or thoughts, please reach out! 😃

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Screenshot of the SpExoDisks home page which shows that the database has 507 stars, 1164 spectra, from 8 instruments.

All of this is wrapped around an amazing demonstration from the Spectra of Exoplanet-forming Disks, or SpExoDisks, database:
spexodisks.com
which is an amazing resource for to better understand protoplanetary disk compositions.

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Figure 3 from the paper: An organizational chart of the SpExoDisks data science pipeline (see the key in the lower-left corner). The pipeline starts at the top-left and processes clockwise, ending at center-left side of the diagram. The large dotted boxes denote pipeline process clusters that are triggered for each observed spectrum, where data read-in starts from icons that contribute data in the accumulation and context phase of the pipeline (top half to lower right). The second phase is public data export (bottom dotted box), which uploads data to a MySQL database software for efficient storage and retrieval. A locally-built, test website connected to the public server ("Build Test API and Website" process box) shows the newly staged data for inspection. The inspection environment is then configured to be deployed to the public website and uploaded to GitHub, completing the staging to update the SpExoDisks database portal.

To make things even better, we've included some of the BEST FLOW CHARTS YOU'VE EVER SEEN....which should really help explain a lot of the nuances when developing a database. 😉 Plus, Table 1 lists all of the technology/software used by the team.

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