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Floods: It’s not just the UK
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Flooding cripples New York subway system: Flooding from torrential overnight rains crippled the New York City subway system this morning. Delays of at least 30 minutes were reported on all subway lines, and customers were urged to forgo the subways entirely and take buses if possible. The thunderstorm caused havoc across the region, forcing thousands…
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More rock-star astrophysics
Combining as it does my vocation with my avocation, it’s impossible to resist an easy post about our favorite rock-star PhD student, especially when he’s made the Guardian’s Leader (aka Editorial) page and the front of the BBC News site (complete with a spiffy pic of the rock star with our new head of group).…
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Mapping the Galaxy from Portugal
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I spent the week before last in Portugal working with the team designing and building the GEM telescope: The Polarized Galactic Emission Mapping Project in Portugal. GEM (aka GEM-P or even P-GEM-P) aims to measure the emission of our Milky Way galaxy using light at a wavelength of 6 cm. Those frequencies are dominated by…
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Floods
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My thoughts and sympathy go out to the residents of my old neighborhood, Osney Island, in Oxford, where it’s just started to flood before the waters peak (we hope) later today. Good luck to all the residents — stay strong, stay dry!
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Gruber Prize 2007
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This year’s Gruber Prize in Cosmology has been awarded to the two teams that used distant supernovae — exploding stars that are nearly “standard candles” — to be the first to conclusively determine that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, likely due to something very much like Einstein’s “Cosmological Constant”. (Or, at least, among…
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Andrew’s post-gig guide
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When I’m not hanging out with astronomers or rock stars who want to be astronomers, I’ve been out to see rock stars (or at least rock ‘n’ roll journeymen and women) in their usual habitats. The Mekons have long been a favorite (obsession?) of mine: formed in Leeds during the UK punk explosion, they celebrated…
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MRR
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Congratulations to Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, former head of our Astrophysics Group at Imperial and president of the Royal Astronomical Society. This week, Imperial hosted a meeting in Michael’s honor on the occasion of his 65th birthday, From IRAS to Herschel/Planck: Cosmology with infrared and submillimetre surveys. Astrophysicists came from all over the UK, Europe and…
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Crowdsourcing Astronomy
One of the tenets of the so-called Web 2.0 is that it’s about an “architecture of participation”, allowing users (i.e., everyone) to contribute their knowledge and expertise — or just enthusiasm — to harness our “collective intelligence”. That’s why Wikipedia is about as good as the Britannica — and why you can look up photos…
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Scientific Illiteracy
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The Observer featured a lengthy article by Tim Adams bemoaning the generic scientific illiteracy of society today, tracing a line from CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” through Natalie Angier’s new book, The Canon:A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. It concentrates a bit too heavily on uber-agent John Brockman’s somewhat pretentious “Third Culture, a…
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Hard Rock in the Solar System
The Zodiacal Light is a fuzzy glow visible in the morning and evening sky, stretching along the line along which the constellations of the zodiac appear — the ecliptic that we now know to be the plane made up of the sun and the orbits of the planets. Observations of the zodiacal light show it…
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