Science
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The Fermi Telescope
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NASA’s latest space-based telescope has, until now, been known as the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). Today, they announced the very first results, and renamed it the Fermi Space Telescope, after physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi was one of the pioneers of modern particle physics, part of the Manhattan Project generation that created the fundamental…
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Broken
dreamsmug·
I’ve had this Fermilab-labeled mug ever since I spent the summer working there in 1990 (the picture is from a few years later — ignore the sartorial mis-step of the slouch-shouldered cardigan). Today, sadly, I dropped it fumbling with the keys to my office. Actually, that was a pretty fun summer. I was working on…
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What I did on my Summer Vacation, part I
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OK, not a vacation in the true sense of the word: I’ve been in the US, attending meetings (in Berkeley), workshops (in Santa Fe), conferences (in Pasadena) and, because I can’t seem to escape them, teleconferences everywhere and all the time. Berkeley In Berkeley, I attended the first all-hands collaboration meeting for PolarBear, an experiment…
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STFC Endgame
Thanks to Dave for pointing out that the final results of the STFC programmatic review sweepstakes popularity contest consultation exercise have been released. Following on from the recommendations, which grouped all projects into five projects, the STFC Council has decided where and how the money will flow. The best news overall is that only the…
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STFC Consultation results
No time for a full blog post, but I wanted to point out the results of the STFC Consultation, now available. Some of my favorite projects like AstroGrid seem to have not fared too well (the consultation panel rated it highly, but PPAN, responsible for the final ranks, disagreed). Nonetheless, Imperial Astrophysics projects like Planck,…
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Gruber Cosmology Prize 2008: Dick Bond
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Dick Bond, a friend, mentor and longtime collaborator has won the 2008 Gruber Cosmology prize. Dick’s work has been instrumental at bringing us into this age of “precision cosmology”. He has always concentrated on that interface between theory and observation, making predictions for what we would see in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and how we…
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IUSS vs STFC
Today’s obligatory pointer to the latest on the ongoing UK physics-funding crisis: the “Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills” committee has released a pretty scathing report, mostly slamming STFC’s handling of the situation (and refuting most of its arguments for how it got us into this mess to begin with). The BBC’s Today show had interviews…
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New Planck HFI Logo
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This is the new logo for the Planck Surveyor satellite’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI). I kind of like the retro 60s hand-drawn feel (or is it Le Petit Prince?) but the juxtaposition of typefaces on the bottom is awful (and “Planck” should probably be more important than “HFI”).
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Science, Blogs, Web III: Science Blogging Conference
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In its continuing bid to take over all aspects of science communication, Nature magazine (or more properly, an alliance between Nature Network and the Royal Institution) will be hosting a European Science Blogging conference in August or September. Right now, however, I’m in Norway. In addition to discussing how we’re going to measure the CMB…
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Science, Blogs, Web II: iPhone ArXiv
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But not all the news on ScienceBlogs is bad: Dave Bacon reports that there is now access to the arXivvia the iPhone: http://arxiv.mobi has a very iPhone-ish interface, with easy access to the whole arXiv. (The arXiv is a freely-available repository of preprints and papers in astrophysics and many other scientific disciplines.) I wouldn’t want…
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