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PhD Comics: Movie and Dark Matter

June 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Like many current and former graduate students I enjoy reading PhD comics from time to time. If you’re a scientists and you’ve never seen them, do check them out and prepare to see your (former) life caricatured in cartoon form.

It now looks like there’s going to be a movie about PhD comics soon. From this trailer, it looks like it could be fun – though perhaps not quite Oscar-worthy.

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

This video reminded me that I’d never posted this totally awesome PhD Comics video on dark matter, which is one of the most entertaining and informative explanations I’ve seen on the topic.

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

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Last launch for Endeavour today

May 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Endeavour, ready for launch. Credit: Ken Kremer

 

If you’ve never watched the Space Shuttle launch – either live or via NASA’s web feed - you’ve got just two chances left! Endeavour should launch later today, at 08:56 EDT. That’s 14:56 in Western Europe or 13:56 in the UK, just in time for your post-lunch coffee break. It’s the last ever launch for Endeavour, which makes space enthusiasts a little misty eyed. The 6 astronauts will be carrying the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS.  AMS-02 is a cosmic ray detector that will collect and analyse energetic particles as they travel through space. From these data we can gain important new insights into the nature of the unseen stuff – dark matter – in the Universe. The experiment has a neat website with lots of info and video ,  as well as a twitter feed. There’s a nice 365Days podcast today about this cool particle physics experiment.

I’ll be watching!

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Dark Matter Fisticuffs III: The Video Replay

December 1, 2010 By

If you enjoyed reading about the White-Kroupa debate on the validity of the ΛCDM model, you can now watch the full debate courtesy of Bonn University TV.

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Dark Matter Fisticuffs II: The Debate

November 21, 2010 By

Here is the live blog of the debate, with thanks to Andreas Küpper and Marcel Pawlowski in Bonn for blogging and for letting me share it. There’s also a Dark Matter Crisis blog to which additional comments get posted.

Favourite moment: Pavel Kroupa’s talk title was “Lambda CDM is ruled out”. Awesome.

Bonn University tv apparently taped the debate; if and when an embeddable video turns up I’ll post it here.

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Dark Matter Fisticuffs I: The Backdrop

November 21, 2010 By

The large scale structure of the Universe, as predicted in the Millennium simulations (V. Springel)

ResearchBlogging.orgOn Thursday, two giants of astronomy met in the sleepy German city of Bonn to debate one of the basic tenets of our current cosmological vision: the existence of dark matter. In the blue corner was Simon White aka. the Reigning Champion, Director at the Max Planck Insitute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching, and figurehead of the concordance cosmology model we all know and live by. In the red corner, Pavel Kroupa aka. the Challenger, Professor at the Argelander Institute in Bonn and well-known expert on stellar populations and dynamics.

Astronomers in Bonn live-blogged the event, and have given me permission to re-post their words on here – see Part II. But I thought I’d get you up to speed first.

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