New year, new career chapter! I am delighted to announce that I am now an Emeritus Professor at UW, and a new Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute. I’m looking forward to spending more time with my VPL team, and working on mission formulation for the NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory.

A new moon. An interstellar comet. An intriguing biosignature. An advance in signal detection. And so much more! Across the SETI Institute, this year brought remarkable progress in our search for life and our understanding of the cosmos. 🧪 🔭

Congratulations Julie!!!

The BS asymmetry principle: The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Thank you to every science communicator who is doing the almost impossible work of countering misinformation every day. Every single one of you is saving lives!

Are you looking graduating and looking for fellowship opportunities? The UW is a host institution for 51 Peg b! Applications are open now, and due October 3rd. We have faculty available in multiple departments available to host, across subfields in Planetary Science. Reach out for more info!

Writing a paper is one of science’s greatest pleasures— an opportunity to describe a problem exactly as you see it and explain how your research has advanced the field. It can also be creative, as the act of writing inspires new ideas and associations. Why would anyone give this up to a machine?

The non-technical talk by Dr. Oliver White (SETI Institute) on "Science at the Edge of the Solar System: Uncovering the Secrets of the Pluto System and Arrokoth," at the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series in late May, is now available to the public. 🧪 The YouTube video is at: buff.ly/bNZaRTS

No AI, this is a real photo taken by Percy’s engineering cameras of astronomical twilight on #Mars! You can see Deimos in the sky too. I worked pretty hard to plan, execute, and analyze this image, and it came out beautifully! A bit noisy, but it was very dark out after all. #astro #planetary

TIL there was a Scottish National Antarctic Expedition and it produced this image

The Roads Both Taken xkcd.com/3076

Hey Everyone, the 2nd lecture in our UW Astrobiology celebration series will be tomorrow (Wed) at 7pm PST and given by our superstar alum Prof. Rika Anderson, who is a microbial oceanographer. Sign up in the links below for in person (UW Kane Hall) or Zoom attendance!

This is wonderful news for all space missions everywhere!

Data underpin science. We look at how the defunding of federal institutions may affect our ability to collect health, weather, and basic research data. It’s Disappearing Data on @bipisci.bsky.social 🧪 🎙️ #podcast Listen here: buff.ly/XNAy02O

The UW Astrobiology Program is hosting a public lecture series in April 2025 to celebrate our 25th Anniversary! Registration is FREE but required for both in person and zoom attendance. For more info on the talks, to register, and to learn more about our speakers: www.eventbrite.com/e/uw-astrobi...

The shadow of the volcanic moon Io projected down on Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt. Processed using imagery from Juno’s Perijove 22 flyby. flic.kr/p/2kVG6EK

I fear there is deep truth here.

Folks, a huge number of people at JPL have been affected by the LA wildfires, with many losing their homes. If you can, consider contributing to a fund that's been set up to help them: (Link looks sketch but site is legit) caltech.imodules.com/controls/ema...

➡️ Science journalism job alert! Nature has a rare opening for a staff reporter, based in Berlin or Sydney. I know the cities are weirdly selective, but this position will join either the news team's European bureau or its Asia-Pacific bureau. Apply by Jan 20: lnkd.in/gCQjc-iE

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

Fantastic book by @zoeschlanger.bsky.social. Highly recommend. I borrowed the audiobook on Libby and picked up the physical copy today.

On #AGU24 Day One, Monday, 2:10 pm, Hall E in the convention center: come hear me, @afreedma.bsky.social/Axios, Kasha Patel/Wash Post, & Oliver Milman/Guardian opine on the changing political landscape in the US & its impacts on science. We TOTALLY have all the answers. www.agu.org/annual-meeti...

So well-deserved Maggie! Congratulations!

It’s not operational yet but the new GOES19 is looking good. This image is just a few minutes old. You are here.

Hey Seattle folks, want to spend an evening hanging with some astronomers, hearing about @vrubinobs.bsky.social, and the exciting science coming soon?! Register here! dirac.astro.washington.edu/news-events/...

It's finally here! Happy Women in Physics Day! Throughout the day I'll be adding to this thread, sharing info about amazing women in physics, why we're still under-represented in the field and what can be done to change that. 🎢 👩🏻‍🔬🧪⚛️

The Neolithic casts a long shadow over #Orkney, sometimes quite literally🏺 📷 today, Ring of Brodgar

Got the comet, Milky Way, and Venus out at the coast. 📷

#astro #astrophotography 🔭 on a recent trip to Tenerife and Mount #TeideObservatory the beautiful Milky Way lit up our night sky 🤩 #milkyway taken with Canon 6D, Canon 16-35mm f2.8, IOptron Skytracker Pro

Damn. Just Damn

I struggled with the decision over the last few weeks, but I’m devastated to announce that I must cancel giving my Sagan Medal lecture at the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting next week because the event has not been made accessible to me.

Congrats @nadiadrake.bsky.social and @zacksavitsky.bsky.social for winning AGU's journalism honors this year! 🏆 news.agu.org/press-releas...

If you're having a rough day, remember that in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee's paper for the World Wide Web was rejected and he was relegated to the poster session.

In case you don’t believe the same equations describe motion in the atmosphere and the ocean.

Come work as an intern with Nature's news team, January-June 2025! Position is NYC or DC-based. springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatu...

We may just be the only active NASA mission on the Bluesky platform, so be sure to tell all your friends they can see stunning images of Mars from the best camera ever sent to another planet that we're here, and help us surpass the 500-follower threshold. And thank you to all who follow us now!

Today marks the anniversary of the Burgess Shale #fossils discovery! Unveiled by paleontologist Charles Walcott in 1909, these fossils provide a window into early marine life, showcasing an array of extraordinary and mysterious (soft-bodied) lifeforms from the Cambrian explosion. #FossilFriday ⚒🧪

NASA SMD ROSES-24 C.20 Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research Clarification astrobiology.com/2024/08/nasa... #astrobiology #NASA

You guys! We wrote a paper. arxiv.org/abs/2408.07242 (it is pretty great if I do say so myself). How are we going to build the Habitable Worlds Observatory? Well, we better start working on it soon :D (This paper is about UV technologies leading up to HWO design and building)

Eunice Newton Foote was the mother of climate science. Her 1856 experiment was the first to document that the sun's rays could warm atmospheric gas. She showed that what we now call greenhouse gases were the cause "due to their own action" & inferred a link between atm. CO2 & warmer past climates. 🧪

Why you've never heard of the woman who discovered black holes #womeninstem

Celebrate this week's 30th anniversary of the Big Comet Crash! Judy Schmidt writes here about her reprocessing of the Hubble SL9/Jupiter images, which I requested for a BBC documentary about Hubble's 30th anniversary. illuminateduniverse.org/2020/06/18/g...

aas.org/press/planet... A milestone for The Planetary Science Journal. Thanks to all who made this possible. 🔭

🪅Happy Mardis Gras, all! 🪅I'm hiring an Interdisciplinary Postdoc for Star-Planet Chemical Interplay to work with me in my group at LSU! I'm interested in a wide variety of topics and people. See below for details or reach out to me with questions. 😃🛰️🪐👩🏻‍🔬🧪 jobregister.aas.org/ad/b4d744ca

This is so amazing. A team of four female marine scientists just rowed across the Atlantic ocean and won the women;s class. One of them is my #SFU colleague. 👩‍🔬 🧪

immense respect to this science teacher for seeing his opportunity and grabbing onto it with both hands

Stop caring what other people think and MASK UP

Beautiful!

So, it’s looking like COVID is really ripping through communities, finally felling people who’ve avoided it so far. As a member of team “I am totally screwed if I get COVID again”, here is some stuff you might want to consider layering on until more boosters are distributed and surges slow.