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Big Questions: Spaceflight
In one of my earliest memories, I’m about four years old, at nursery school, sitting on the floor looking up at what must have been a small black and white television sitting on a table. The teachers were all terribly excited, and we little kids were always happy to watch television. But this wasn’t Sesame…
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On not being able to talk about science
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This week I was in the truly wonderful city of Bologna, home of possibly the oldest university in Europe. Nowadays, Bologna is also the home of IASF-BO, the Italian Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, and was hosting this year’s Planck Satellite Consortium meeting. Of course I can’t talk about anything that was actually…
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Sorry…
I’ll be back online soon, promise.
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Born to Run (for donations)
I feel a bit guilty about using the blog for this sort of thing, but… if you’re one of the lucky people feeling flush this season, and not otherwise philosophically opposed, you might want to consider donating to the UK Blue Cross (“Britain’s Pet Charity”) in support of my attempt to run the London Royal…
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Back to Life, Back to Reality
While I’ve been galavanting across Europe and the USA, the ongoing UK science-funding crisis has entered a new, possibly even grimmer, phase. The STFC itself is so strapped for cash it will only be issuing grants lasting until October 2010, instead of the usual two or three years. This is rumored to be engendered by…
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Born to Run
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Finishing off my summer of aging-but-still-strong rock ’n’ rollers and jazzmen, I pilgrimaged to New Jersey, the state of my childhood and adolescence, to see Bruce Springsteen play Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands, one last gig before they tear the place down. I’ve seen Springsteen a few times before: my very first concert back in…
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Festschrift: Turner in Chicago
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Since Barcelona, I’ve also travelled to Chicago to attend a meeting in honor of the 60th birthday of Michael Turner, Professor at the University of Chicago, and a former head of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the US National Science Foundation. Mike was one of my Ph.D. Supervisors, along with Josh Frieman, and…
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Planck’s First Light
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I’m happy to be able to point to ESA’s first post-launch press release from the Planck Surveyor Satellite. Here is a picture of the area of sky that Planck has observed during its “First Light Survey”, superposed on an optical image of the Milky Way galaxy: (Image credit: ESA, LFI and HFI Consortia (Planck); Background…
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The Universe is a Beautiful Place
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Or at least it’s very pretty. These are new pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope: NGC 6302 is a “planetary nebula”, material ejected from an aging star in our Milky Way galaxy; Omega Centauri is a globular cluster, a dense agglomeration of stars on the outskirts of the galaxy; the Carina Nebula is the…