To mark the end of the Space Shuttle era, folks at Nature produced this gorgeous video celebrating the programme. Get some coffee, switch to full screen and enjoy!
Postdocs want Bread and Roses too
October 10, 2010 By
Postdocs are the workhorses of research institutions and laboratories, the invaluable group glue between seniors and graduate students, and yet we’re a strangely invisible and transient population. We’re relatively cheap to fund and easily dispensed with when the wells run dry. Once just a quick waystation between studentVille and facultyStadt, the relative overabundance of postdocs (pdf) means that now even the best and brightest have to stick around long enough to pitch their tent in postdocIngham. Some even decide to settle there.
Yet despite postdocIngham turning into a burgeoning metropolis, it remains a curiously unregulated, lawless and fragile society. It remains unrepresented in the Parliament of researchIstan. Why is that so? In this week’s edition of Nature, Virginia Gewin looks at the rise of postdoc unions in the US, their successes and dangers they present. For those without access, I’ve posted the pdf here.
Massive star formation not so different after all?
August 2, 2010 By
Reconstructed image from near-IR interferometric observations of IRAS 13481-6124 using VLTI/AMBER
In my previous post on the Zooniverse Project IX I’m involved in, I talked about the importance of star formation in the Universe and some of the difficulties we face in studying it. Some big unanswered question particularly remain in our understanding of how massive stars form. Fittingly, the latest edition of Nature has a paper on a nice result in the study of massive star formation: a detection by direct imaging of an accretion disk around a massive young star.
Eps Aurigae’s dark secret (interferometry rules!)
April 8, 2010 By
Since a few weeks some PhD students and postdocs have been organising astro-ph coffee meetings three times a week, where the youngsters in the department can sit together and chat about recent papers. The advantage of having these meetings for only students and postdocs is that we can admit to our utter ignorance about stuff we should really know about – like gamma ray burst light curves or cosmic strings – without fearing the judgment of our supervisors. An additional benefit for me is that I now have a small army of minions scoping out interesting new research for me to blog about here. Ha!
Anyway, this morning we talked about a letter in Nature by Kloppenborg et al, published today, showing some fabulous new observations of the space oddity that is ε Aurigae. This star forms part of a binary system and is unusually eclipsed by its invisible companion every 27 years for a lengthy 18-month period. Astronomers have known about this for almost 200 years, and had hoped that the current eclipse, which began last August, would finally provide some definitive answers. The AAVSO has even enlisted citizen scientists worldwide to gather data for the star’s light curve with its Citizen Sky project, and I spotted today that ε Aurigae also has a twitter feed.
The essence of the paper is shown in the above video. These images look like a clever simulation – but these are actually real images (well, apart from the white lines, obviously). They are resolved images of the stellar disk of ε Aurigae! They were taken last November and December, in the early phases of the eclipse, and they clearly show that something dark is moving in front of the star. I’m an instrumentalist, I’m supposed to know this stuff, what we can and can’t observe, but I really didn’t.
Gender bias in peer-review: the final word?
June 1, 2009 By
It’s a much-quoted argument by advocates of “equal opportunities” in science that scientific papers written by female authors are consistently ranked lower in peer review than those of their male colleagues. Indeed, several studies (Bornmann et al, 2007; Budden et al., 2008; not exclusively in physics & astronomy) have appeared to indicate that women authors don’t fare as well in peer review, be it for papers, grant applications or fellowship proposals. It’s a popular topic of discussion in the “Women in Science” circles as a clear-cut, proven area where discrimination on the basis of gender takes place. [Read more...]
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