PhD projects for Oct 2014 entry
For details about funding and how to apply, please visit this page. 1) Direct detection of dark matter and global fits Identifying the nature of the dark matter (DM) that inhabits the Universe is...
View ArticleIs Alice really burning?
Imperial Physics had the somewhat unexpected pleasure to welcome Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll (of preposterousuniverse.com fame) and science writer Jennifer Ouellette (whom the Twitterati...
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exp(Outreach!*Enthusiasm^n) = #IAS2014
I’ve been preparing for it tirelessly. I have chatted with previous participants, and asked them for tips about how to keep going all the way to the end. I have reviewed my past experiences, and in...
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“I didn’t know science could be so tasty!” @GSC1
The weather was predictably dismal in Glasgow on that bank holiday weekend. The calendar said that it was last weekend of May, but the temperature felt more like February. I didn’t mind — the bad...
View ArticlePigs beat dark energy 20:1
My friends at Catsnake tell me that their latest awesome video, about compassionate farming and the plight of pigs, got 4M views in a week. The awesome video we made together about dark energy got...
View Article#IAS2014: Two manic weeks that surpassed all expectations
What’s more exciting than winning the World Cup, more nail-biting than the Wimbledon final, more rewarding than getting a Nobel Prize, and at least as fun as looking for dark matter in the sky? Taking...
View ArticleAn event well worth the ticket – even a Ferengi would agree!
The annual World Science Fiction Convention begins on Thursday Aug 14th at London’s ExCeL, bringing together authors, artists, publishers, and fans of science fiction and fantasy. I’m excited to be...
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Flux Dance Theatre: Weaving science into dance
I was very pleased to be able to facilitate the participation of Flux Youth Theatre to last May’s Imperial Festival, the youth company of the innovative Flux Dance Theatre. Ran by two energetic and...
View ArticleDoes being on Twitter make you a worse scientist? Yes… a bit.
I was intrigued by this claim, found in a Twitter survey of the “Top 50 Science Stars on Twitter” that “most high-performing scientists have not embraced Twitter”. That article is debatable on other...
View Article14 yr old aspiring writer wins #upgoer5 Mr Santa competition!
In the run-up to Christmas and in collaboration with Imperial Fringe, I set up a competition for the best letter to Mr Santa written using only the most common 1,000 words in English, the idea behind...
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g-ASTRONOMY: The cosmos at the tip of your tongue
Astrophysics provides us with an exciting, engaging way to talk about the science of the cosmos and its importance for society. Posted on the IOP blog on Sept 20th 2016 Interest for astronomy and...
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Butchery or beauty? Explaining complex science using only the most common...
A version of this post appeared on the British Council’s VOICES blog on Nov 12th 2014 The 707 words used in “The Edge of the Sky”, arranged according to how frequently they occur in the book. Credit:...
View ArticlePapers of interest on the arXiv today – Sept 26th 2016
Two interesting papers on the methodology side today: A ML source detection method that detects ultra-faint streaks below the pixel level noise (arXiv:1609.07158). They call it “ML” but in reality it...
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Why Society Needs Astronomy and Cosmology: a Gresham College Guest Lecture
This is the text accompanying a Gresham College Guest Lecture I gave on March 15th 2016. Audio recording of the lecture:...
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Bad news for LISA and Dark Matter line emission from the Galactic Centre
Today on the arXiv (arXiv:1609.08093) Camille Bonvin and collaborators (whom I know well from my days in Geneva) rule out the possibility to use the distortion in the gravitational waves chirp signal...
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Today on the arXiv: from light bulbs to 2 trillion dark matter particles...
Today, Martin White suggests using a density-dependent correlation function as a tool to help distinguish General Relativity from modified gravity theories. The N-body simulation Zurich group shows...
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Today on the arXiv: Prospector-alpha opens the way to high-accuracy...
There is a terrific paper on today’s arXiv: The Prospector-alpha code is an impressive new approach to estimating a large number of important physical parameters of galaxies, including indicators for...
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Today on the ArXiv: How to ride a light beam to the stars, and how not to...
Today on the arXiv, a nice analysis of how to design a solar sail in such a way that the light beam powering it is prevented from rocking it side to side, and hence destabilising it. The key idea is to...
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Today on the arXiv: how to measure the intrinsic CMB dipole, and radio...
Elena Pierpaoli and her collaborator Slavash Yasini come up with a clever way of measuring the intrinsic CMB dipole, and disentangling it from the much bigger dipole induced by the Earth motion with...
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Today on the arXiv: Light echo gives insight into SNIa dust environment
I noticed this interesting paper using high resolution, multi-epoch images from Hubble to study the time evolution of the aftermath of the explosion of SNIa SN204J, which went off in 2014 in the nearby...
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