Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Sep 4

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

This is good news for US higher education, although far from the end of the story.

Judge Hands Victory to Harvard in Funding Lawsuit, Ruling Trump Administration’s Freeze Unconstitutional | News | The Harvard Crimson

A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the Constitution when it froze more than $2.7 billion in research funding to Harvard, striking down the freeze in its entirety and deliveri...

www.thecrimson.com

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Laura Kreidberg @lkreidberg.bsky.social · Sep 3

Update on the atmosphere vs no atmosphere debate for TRAPPIST-1 b and c -- here's a nice and (IMO) conclusive result from Gillon and Ducrot et al.: no thick atmosphere on either planet. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02128

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft @maxplanck.de · Sep 1

The #MaxPlanckPostdocProgram offers a guaranteed contract of at least 3 years, targeted mentoring, and career workshops. The call for applications is open now! 🚀 Take advantage of this opportunity and browse the job vacancies. www.mpg.de/en/max-planc...

Group photo of postdocs conducting research at a Max Planck Institute

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Rocky Worlds Meetings @rockyworlds.bsky.social · Sep 2

#RockyWorldsDiscussion is back from our summer break! 🔭🧪

Our next speaker is Laura Schaefer from Stanford University, who will tell us about redox gradients in planet formation simulations of terrestrial planets 🌍🌕🪨 Join us on Zoom on Thu 4 Sep @ 16:00 UTC

More: www.rockyworlds.org/event-detail...

An image of the speaker, Laura Schaefer. She is smiling and looking into the camera. She is wearing a purple-grey zip-up jumper and sunglasses on her head. She is against a background of a large rock with some grass visible near the bottom, clearly outdoors.

An artistic conception of early Earth showing the planet's surface impacted by asteroids. Earth is shown with partial oceans and the land that is visible is covered in clear craters. Part of the Earth (bottom left) is also shown as covered by lava or a magma ocean.

Image credit: Simone Marchi, NASA. Taken from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/early-earth-s-atmosphere-was-surprisingly-thin/

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jul 26

I've stuck a few more here:

people.seas.harvard.edu/~rwordsworth...

The CO rotational band makes a nice bass. Ozone is straight out of 60's Star Trek. And ammonia and water are terrifying.

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jul 26

yes, collision broadening is included

Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jul 26

Cool, thanks for sharing!

Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Douglas Natelson @nanoscaleviews.bsky.social · Jul 26

🧪 I'm a fan of this way of interacting with vibrational spectra. I did this on my blog a while ago: nanoscale.blogspot.com/2015/06/what...

What does a molecule sound like?

We all learn in high school chemistry or earlier that atoms can bind together to form molecules, and like a " highly sophisticated interlock...

nanoscale.blogspot.com

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jul 24

If you could hear in the infrared, what would CO2 sound like? We calculated this recently for a Gen Ed course, and the result is a little eerie.

Results were generated by mapping IR frequency in inverse cm to sound frequency in Hz.

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Lee Billings @leebillings.bsky.social · Jul 23

Now on @sciam.bsky.social, by @nadiadrake.bsky.social:

The U.S. has axed CMB-S4, its boldest cosmology experiment in generations. Tight budgets and crumbling infrastructure helped doom the project, which was meant to test cosmic inflation. RIP.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

U.S. Pulls Back from Quest to Confirm Cosmic Inflation

Researchers hoped CMB-S4, a $900-million cosmology experiment, would answer one of the greatest questions in physics. Instead it’s become another cautionary tale of pursuing big science amid shrinking...

www.scientificamerican.com

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Paul Voosen @voosen.me · Jul 15

Direct evidence for tectonics (of some kind!) 3.5B years ago. The timeline keeps moving back. Nice find by @alexwilkins.bsky.social at Goldschmidt.

Ancient rocks show earliest evidence of tectonic activity on Earth

The origins of plate tectonics on Earth are hotly debated, but evidence from Australia now shows that parts of the crust moved in relation to each other as early as 3.5 billion years ago

www.newscientist.com

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

New Scientist @newscientist.com · Jul 3

A lab experiment that simulated Mars conditions showed that green algae can grow in plastic containers made from the same algae, setting the stage for a self-sustaining system to build habitats on the planet.

Bioplastic habitats on Mars could be built from algae

A lab experiment that simulated Mars conditions showed that green algae can grow in plastic containers made from the same algae, setting the stage for a self-sustaining system to build habitats on the planet

www.newscientist.com

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 18

Thanks! Our simulations aren't quite in the same regime as Venus, but we separately used the model to recreate Venus's temperature profile and it did pretty well. We found it was right on the edge of convective instability in Venus's lower atmosphere, interestingly.

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

ClimateBook @climatebook.bsky.social · Jun 16

On a related note, we found that convective shutdown by the same mechanism can drastically shorten primordial magma ocean freeze-out times, though with enough irradiation there can be persistent magma oceans despite convective shutdown. arxiv.org/abs/2412.11987

Convective shutdown in the atmospheres of lava worlds

Atmospheric energy transport is central to the cooling of primordial magma oceans. Theoretical studies of atmospheres on lava planets have assumed that convection is the only process involved in setti...

arxiv.org

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 16

I mean yeah pretty worried, of course : ). The problem with the continuum in the visible is that we need really long path lengths and/or sensitive measurements, which means $$$ for experiments. Maybe ab initio can help, although H2O is a tough molecule to simulate.

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 16

New work led by Jess Cmiel finds that planets with steam atmospheres may be cooler — much cooler — at the surface than we previously thought.

  iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... 
arxiv.org/abs/2505.00775

This supports and extends conclusions published last year by Selsis et al. in Nature. 🔭 🧪

Characterizing the Radiative–Convective Structure of Dense Rocky Planet Atmospheres - IOPscienceSearch

Characterizing the Radiative–Convective Structure of Dense Rocky Planet Atmospheres, Cmiel, Jessica, Wordsworth, Robin, Seeley, Jacob T.

iopscience.iop.org

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Reposted by Robin Wordsworth

Tim Lichtenberg @timlichtenberg.bsky.social · Jun 2

The abstract submission for Rocky Worlds 4 is now open! groningen2026.rockyworlds.org/registration... 🌋🔭🧬😱

ROCKY WORLDS 4 - Abstract Submission

Abstract submission & conference registration Abstract submission and conference registration are done in two steps. First, the abstract submission below (including requests for financial support) run...

groningen2026.rockyworlds.org

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 2

The resurfacing is very episodic but it’d still be pretty bad in a period of peak activity. Then in the good times you’d have slimy microbial mats as far as the eye could see. No skyr or harðfiskur, unfortunately.

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 2

It's a fascinating question. Global temperature matters a lot, but so do other factors like total area and latitude (equatorial LIPs weather fastest due to higher rainfall rates). If e.g. Brazil was turned into a LIP today, that could well trigger a Snowball.

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 2

These ‘large igneous provinces’ have formed a few times in Earth history and are terrifying — imagine a huge chunk of the surface turning into Mordor in a geologic blink of the eye

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Robin Wordsworth @rdword.bsky.social · Jun 2

What does it take to turn Earth into a Snowball? Formation of a volcanic plateau about the size of India at the equator, according to our new study led by Charlotte Minsky:

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

🔭 🧪