Browsing Archive: October, 2013

Happy Halloween!!

Posted by on Thursday, October 31, 2013,

Happy Halloween Everyone!!

Remember to be cautious when driving tonight, as there will be many excited children flying on a sugar buzz and not always paying attention to their own safety. We want to keep the night fun for families, and devoid of accidents and injuries.

So go out, have fun, and most of all be safe.
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A Distant World

Posted by on Thursday, October 31, 2013, In : Astronomy

Just in time for Halloween, a team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a planet very similar to Earth, but much hotter. New studies of an Earth-sized planet circling the sun-like star Kepler-78 have shown that it has quantities of iron and rock comparable to those in Earth, and it is the first world of this size for which astrophysicists are able to calculate both its density and diameter. (Kepler-78 is located about 400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus.)

Unfortunately th...

The End of Planck

Posted by on Thursday, October 31, 2013, In : Astronomy

Today is a bit of sad day for the astrophysics community. The European Space Agency's space telescope, named Planck, was finally shut down after a little more than four years of collecting data.

The goal of Planck when it was launched back in 2009 was to provide higher quality data on the Cosmic Microwave Background. When the Universe was a mere 380,000 years old, the atoms that would form all matter cooled down to the point where they were no longer absorbing and emitting large numbers of pho...
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Laser Acceleration

Posted by on Wednesday, October 9, 2013,

There has been a lot of news coverage over the last few years of the Large Hadron Collider, and discussions about how it is setting records for the highest energy accelerator, the high costs and the engineering advances. However last week a team of scientists from Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching published results of experiments on a more affordable and compact method of accelerating subatomic particles. If successful, future accelerators could be made an order of magnitude ...
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Higgs Gets the Prize

Posted by on Tuesday, October 8, 2013,

In a surprise to no one, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Peter Higgs and Robert Engelert for the development of the Higgs model and prediction of the Higgs boson. Physicists searched for it for nearly five decades before the LHC confirmed its existence in 2012. Congratulations to them both, (and to the all of the other Higgs pioneers who can bask in reflected glories)!

I have written extensively about the Higgs model in the past (see for example, Still the Higgs, FAQs of Hi...
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Inspirational Address

Posted by on Wednesday, October 2, 2013,

There is a great video circulating the internet (viewable here along with a transcript) of a convocation address given by Tim Minchin at the University of Western Australia. I have attended a few such ceremonies, but this is one the best and most inspirational speeches I have heard in a while, and I wanted to share it here.

“In darker days, I did a corporate gig at a conference for this big company who made and sold accounting software. In a bid, I presume, to inspire their salespeople to gr...

Dr. Christopher Bird