Search results for: “CMB”
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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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Today we heard that the (bizarrely agglomerated) UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills will be significantly cutting the physics budget that comes through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). STFC was formed earlier this year out of PPARC (Particle Physics and Astrophysics) and the CCLRC (which ran big facilities like the Rutherford Appleton…
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Google has just released a new version of its Google Earth software — one that lets you look up to the sky instead of down to the ground. It’s essentially a consumer-grade Virtual Observatory, like the UK AstroGrid, the US National Virtual Observatory and the Euro-VO project. It’s not so obvious when you fire it…
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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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We take so much of the web for granted today, we often forget how very contingent it all is. Without the very specific work by Tim Berners-Lee inventing the http protocol, perhaps some sort of hypertext communication standard would have come along, but it’s hard to believe that it would be quite the same. Berners-Lee…
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Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom…
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I’m just back from a couple of days up in Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the UK. London is bigger, more intense, but Edinburgh is more beautiful, dominated by its landscape–London is New York to Edinburgh’s San Francisco. I was up there to give the Edinburgh University Physics “General Interest Seminar”. Mostly, I…
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OK, this is going to be very technical. In his comment to my last post, my colleague Ned Wright asks a couple of important questions about the way that the Planck Surveyor satellite is going to observe the sky. In the spirit of Mark Trodden’s question about the use of blogs in the research process,…
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Congratulations to my student, Anastasia Niarchou, on passing her PhD exam, for her thesis, “Low Power in the CMB and its Implications for the Topology of the Universe” — the same work that was covered last week in New Scientist. Great work, Dr. Niarchou!
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I know that nobody cares about the peregrinations of astrophysicists but there’s not much else to blog about when you’re on the road. So a quick explanation of my absence from the blogosphere: Last week, I was in Taipei for the CoSPA meeting (at which website you can find a copy of my talk on…