Robin Wordsworth
@rdword.bsky.social
Physicist/planetary scientist/astrobiologist based at Harvard. Soccer dad in training. Social media native since 2024.
Very proud of my student Collin Cherubim for his discovery of an atmosphere on the habitable-zone exoplanet LHS 1140 b! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/s...
Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike Planet
It’s the first potentially habitable world known to host an atmosphere, making it a lead contender in the search for life beyond our solar system.
nytimes.com
Elon Musk boasted that he put USAID in the woodchipper, and bears responsibility for fuelling one of the worst Ebola outbreaks and the hundreds of deaths it has caused. hsph.harvard.edu/news/ebolas-...
Ebola's spread fueled by cuts in humanitarian aid | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Harvard Chan School's Phuong Pham shares how the shuttering of USAID and other foreign aid cuts have contributed to the current spread of Ebola—and what it might mean for global health security in the...
hsph.harvard.edu
We have a new paper out in PNAS led by Charlotte Minsky! Our research indicates that around 700 million years ago, Earth's climate may have been just One Snowball After Another. sciencex.com/news/2026-04... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected
During the Sturtian glacial period during the Neoproterozoic Era, Earth underwent periods of global glaciation, which have been described as either "Snowball" and "Slushball" Earth scenarios. In Snowb...
sciencex.com
Next week, March 31st at 6:00 pm EDT, head to the Harvard Geological Museum to hear Andrew H. Knoll discuss his new book, Earth and Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation. He will be in conversation with @rdword.bsky.social. RSVP is required for this free, in-person event: buff.ly/8Qm7Ahz
www.theguardian.com/politics/202... It's inspiring to see this result and speech from the Green party in the UK today!
‘We defeated the parties of billionaire donors’: Hannah Spencer’s victory speech
‘We don’t have to fight dirty to fight for change,’ says Green party’s new MP after Gorton and Denton byelection win
theguardian.com
NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) community webinars are starting this week! Please join if you're interested in contributing to NASA's next astrobiology roadmap. Sign-up link is here: science.nasa.gov/astrobiology...
NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy - NASA Science
The NASA Astrobiology Strategy from 2015 has been an excellent document for NASA planning and advancement of astrobiology. In the past 10 years, the National
science.nasa.gov
You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 6mo agoBreaking News: The Trump administration repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being, meaning that the EPA can no longer regulate them. nyti.ms/4rSszQu
I'm a day late with this because I was at the National Academies for this briefing. The big takeaway is that the search for life should be the top science priority when we send humans to land on #Mars! 🪐🧪🔭 #Astrobiology www.nationalacademies.org/news/search-...
Search for Life Should Be Top Science Priority for First Human Landing on Mars, Says New Report
When astronauts set foot on Mars, it will be one of humanity’s greatest milestones, marking the start of a new era of discovery on another planet. A new National Academies report identifies the highes...
nationalacademies.org
This is lunacy. The Chinese scholars I know are among the hardest working, most selfless people I've ever encountered. They want to contribute to our intellectual endeavors, and they make our research teams better.
U.S. Congress considers sweeping ban on Chinese collaborations
Researchers speak out against proposal that would bar funding for U.S. scientists working with Chinese partners or training Chinese students
science.org
Twin spacecraft are set to take off on an unprecedented, winding journey to Mars, where they will investigate why the barren red planet began to lose its atmosphere billions of years ago. https://cnn.it/49FLkR0
A personal reflection on the destructive erosion of ethics, norms and respect for law at NASA: 🧪🔭 🧵
New paper on arxiv led by Prune August on rocky exoplanet atmospheric reinflation! All comments welcome arxiv.org/abs/2510.25896
Atmospheric collapse and re-inflation through impacts for terrestrial planets around M dwarfs
Detection of an atmosphere around a terrestrial exoplanet will be a major milestone in the field, but our observational capacities are biased towards to tidally locked, close-in planets orbiting M-dwa...
arxiv.org
My new essay on the future of life in space just appeared in Noema magazine! Kudos to Satwika Kresna for the lovely artwork.
Noema Magazine@noemamag.com · 9mo ago“If building space habitats is hard & machine technology is gradually developing more life-like capabilities, does this mean we humans might as well remain Earth-bound forever?” — @rdword.bsky.social #spacetravel #spaceexploration #rovers
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...
thecrimson.com
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
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...
#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...
🧪 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
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.
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...
scientificamerican.com
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
newscientist.com
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
newscientist.com
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
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
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
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
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.... 🔭 🧪
Interesting paper by Yang et al. on arxiv today arguing clouds might _help_ us observe O2/O3 on exoplanets in some cases: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07760
arxiv.org
