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Milky Way Project: Data Release 1

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Spitzer's view of the central regions of our Galaxy (NASA/Milky Way Project)

ResearchBlogging.orgSince its launch little more than over a year ago, Milky Way Project, the citizen science initiative to identify bubbles in the interstellar medium of our Galaxy, has gathered an amazing amount of classifications: over half a million bubbles drawn by around 35,000 users. Before Christmas we reached a major milestone when we submitted our first scientific paper for the project to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

Following some nice iterations (never said I didn’t like peer review….) with the referee for the paper, and coverage by the BBC at the AAS conference in Austin, TX, in January, we posted the paper to Arxiv a couple of weeks ago. From here it’s available to anyone to download and read. The paper was formally accepted today (yay!) but we haven’t uploaded the final revision to the Arxiv yet – keep an eye out for it in the replacements section if you’re interested, we did improve it significantly with the input of the referee.

As the project was only made possible by NASA publicly sharing the data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have of course made our first data catalogues publicly available as well on a dedicated site and on FigShare.

[Read more...]

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RB Editor’s Selections: Coaxial Lasers, The Moonless Earth, And Origins of Life

February 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sarah Kendrew Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News]

On All That Matters, Joerg Heber writes about a neat variation on the familiar coaxial cable: the coaxial laser. A new member of the family of light emitters with a host of potential applications.

How would the Earth have evolved without its Moon? Greg Fish describes how life on Earth might have been dramatically different without our little companion - though possibly still present.

Thinking about the origins of life has never been more topical, now that we’re learning about the strange new worlds all around us. On the Genealogy of Religion blog, this interesting post talks about pioneering experiments in this area.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back next Monday with more selections.

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RB Editor’s Selections: Tiny magnetic storage devices, Glow in the dark materials, and Self-cleaning clothes

January 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sarah Kendrew Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News.]

Today’s selections all seem to show us a glimpse of awesome new technology in a bright if distant future.

The shrinking magnetic storage devices story made some waves in the media, but not all stories got the science right. On All that matters Joerg Heber sets the record straight, and describes really nicely why this work should excite us.

Char’s Basal Science post on glow in the dark materials reminded me of the disappointingly faint glowing stars I once decorated my bedroom with. The science behind the phenomenon is pretty cool though, and the newly developed long-duration phosphorescent material he describes holds promise for exciting future applications.

How much water could we save if we could clean our clothes by just leaving them out in the sun for a few hours? Also on Basal Science, Cath talks about new developments in the quest for self-cleaning fabrics.

Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Monday with more picks.

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RB Editor’s Selections: Titanic weather forecasting, Networked football, and Billions of Exoplanets?

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sarah Kendrew Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News.]

In astronomy the talk is all of exoplanets at the moment, but it’s good to remember our own Solar System is just as weird and wonderful as these new foreign worlds. On Basic Space, Kelly Oakes talks about new weather models on Titan. Cloudy with a chance of methane!

It’s a beautiful game that transcends politics, class and conflict – or so we like to think. Scientists in Japan, however, see football as “a competitive relationship between two cooperative networks“. So there. On Science Left Untitled, Charles describes this interesting new study of the network dynamics of football.

Wait, what was I saying about exoplanets again? The latest story to emerge last week was that our Galaxy may well contain more planets than stars, which is quite an amazing claim. Greg Fish dissects the paper and its methods on weird things.

That’s all for the week! I’ll be back next Monday with more physical sciences picks.

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American Astronomical Society Meeting, Austin

January 9, 2012 By 2 Comments

AAS

This week I’m at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, TX. I’m excited to be here for a number of reasons, first and foremost that I’ve never been to a AAS meeting before. It’s one of the biggest gatherings of astronomers, so there’s lots of people to meet, including some old friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while. And of course there’s the talks, the posters, and the wonderful city of Austin:

Motel

I’m planning to organise a meet-up for DotAstronomy alumnae/i and enthusiasts this evening, so keep an eye on twitter for details of that.

As always there’s a big media presence at AAS so expect some astronomy stories in the papers and online this week. AAS have a list of blogs and twitter accounts covering the meeting (mine’s not on there but if I hear interesting talks I’ll certainly write something about it). I’ve had lots of discussions recently about science reporting, peer review, blogging and such, so I was interested to read Blogging & Tweeting guidelines in the printed programme. A few selections:

[...] Please do not publicly report private conversations – only scheduled presentations and public comments are fair game for blogging, tweeting, etc.

Remember that many presentations at AAS meetings concern work that has not yet been peer reviewed. So think twice before posting a blog entry or tweet that is critical of such work. It is helpful to receive constructive criticism during the Q&A after your talk or while standing next to your poster, but it is hurtful to be raked over the coals online before your session is even over and with no easy way to respond. [...]

That’s quite sensible really – it’s not trying to stop people from writing or commenting, just to be balanced, fair and take the status of the work into account. There’s also an embargo policy for the meeting:

When meeting abstracts are available publicly, either electronically or in print, they are not embargoed.Abstracts reflect the situation at the time of submission and often do not correspond exactly to the paper that is ultimately presented, usually months later. Reporters should note that preparing a story based exclusively on an abstract is ill-advised.Some results to be presented at AAS or Division meetings are also the subject of papers whose manuscripts are available via preprint servers such as arXiv.org or that have already been published in scholarly journals. Such publicly available results are not embargoed.Interviews with presenters, as well as graphics, animations, and other information to be presented for the first time at the meeting, are embargoed until the time of presentation, where “time of presentation” means the start time of the oral or poster session in which the paper will be given, or the start time of the corresponding press conference (if any), whichever comes first.For more information, see http://aas.org/press/embargo_policy.

If you’re a blogger/twitter friend, please come say hello!

 

 

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