Browsing Archive: June, 2013

Ten Years of MOST

Posted by on Sunday, June 30, 2013,
It isn't very often that Canadians get a chance to celebrate a Canadian space experiment. Maybe it is a lack of science funding, or the smaller population compared with our southern neighbours, or maybe we are just too content to join in with other projects at the expense of our own. In any case, the day before Canada Day we get the chance to celebrate a full decade of data from the MOST experiment.

The Microvariability and Oscillation of STars (MOST) was launched on June 30, 2003 as part of  ...
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Scientific Terminology

Posted by on Friday, June 21, 2013,

There is a disturbing trend in the world today in which common society and the scientific community are growing apart, not just in beliefs and knowledge but in even the language used to communicate. This problem has gotten so bad, that there are now courses and textbooks being offered to scientists on how to give public lectures, write popular books, and perhaps most disturbingly on how to properly testify in courts as an expert witness. The language of science and technology is precise, and ...


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The Most Precise Microscope

Posted by on Tuesday, June 18, 2013,
Today marks the official launch of the University of Victoria's new advanced microscopy facility. It was actually installed in March, and tested out by imaging gold flecks, but it has taken several months to complete all of the installation and calibration.

The new device is actually a 4.5 meter tall microscope, called a  scanning transmission electron holography microscope (STEHM). It uses quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons, whose flux depends on the material it is passing through, and...

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Photographing a Distant Planet

Posted by on Tuesday, June 4, 2013,
There was an interesting announcement at the International Astronomical Union conference yesterday (which I must mention was held in Victoria, BC, my home town). A team of astronomer from France have photographed a planet orbiting a distant star. Usually only indirect evidence of such planets is found, and in fact only about a dozen photos have ever been made of extrasolar planets. Until twenty years ago, it wasn't even known if there were any extrasolar planets!

This one has been given the l...
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Thirty Years of Z-Bosons

Posted by on Saturday, June 1, 2013, In : Particle Physics 
It was on this day, June 1, 1983, that physicists at the CERN facility in Switzerland first confirmed the existence of the Z-boson and provided full confirmation of the GWS model of weak nuclear forces (also known as electroweak theory) first predicted twenty years earlier. Although it had been inferred from other experiments in the 1970s, this was the first direct observations of its existence. (The CERN press release can be viewed here.)

As I have written in past articles, the Universe is kn...
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About Me


Dr. Chris Bird I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.

   

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