Category — Science

I was appalled to read this on the BBC News website:

UK astronomers will lose access to two of the world’s finest telescopes in February, as administrators look to plug an £80m hole in their finances.

Observation programmes on the 8.1m telescopes of the Gemini organisation will end abruptly because Britain is cancelling its subscription.

It means UK astronomers can no longer view the Northern Hemisphere sky with the largest class of telescope.

Researchers say they are aghast at the administrators’ decision.

So the bean-counters win out over the scientists. This is how one astronomer reacted:

“To withdraw from the state-of-the-art Gemini facilities leaves the UK ground-based astronomy strategy in disarray - some would say deliberately sabotaged,” said Professor Paul Crowther from Sheffield University.

“This will badly affect the UK astronomical community’s ability to address questions such as how galaxies form, or look for planets around other stars, or be able to adequately exploit space observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope,” explained the current chair of the UK telescope allocation committee for Gemini.

“The loss of Gemini North is particularly acute, since the majority of the UK past investment has been focused upon the Northern Hemisphere,” he told BBC News.

My daughter and son-in-law are both pursuing astrophysics PhDs and I know how precious telescope time is for both their projects. What’s more Britain has long played a leading role in astronomy, so to cut our astronomers off from this world-class telescope is the height of madness.

Aaaargh!!!

Technorati Tags: astronomy, astrophysics, Gemini North, telescope

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Space Shuttle Atlantis on its way to the launchpad

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Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and a webcam I can watch my astronomer daughter, Angharad (aka Hari) at work at the James Clark Maxwell Telescope, 13,000 feet up Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.

James Clark Maxwell Telescope

According to the telescope’s website:

With a diameter of 15m the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) is the largest astronomical telescope in the world designed specifically to operate in the submillimeter wavelength region of the spectrum. The JCMT is used to study our Solar System, interstellar dust and gas, and distant galaxies. It is situated close to the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, at an altitude of 4092m.

Angharad’s there for a week’s observation as part of her PhD research into the formation of high mass stars.

This webcam sequence was taken at around 4.30 a.m. in Hawaii (which was around 3.30 p.m. in the UK). As you can see, Hari is suffering from sleep deprivation (astronomers on observation are necessarily night workers) and lack of oxygen - well, you would lack oxygen at 13,000 feet. According to her posts on Facebook, she felt really stupid and sluggish at first. And the work can be pretty boring through the long hours of the night.

Being an astrophysicist is not all Brian May and glamour!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, astrophysics, astronomy, Hawaii, Mauna Kea, James Clark Maxwell, Brian May

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When I was a child at boarding school, I never slept well when the moon was full. Was I a werewolf? Well, no (I bet you’re reassured about that), but small boys are often superstitious. We had heard (from whom does one hear these things?) that you would go mad if you stared at the full moon through glass. We half believed it. Sort of. Anyway, I’m sure that my inability to sleep at full moon had more to do with the absence of curtains over our dormitory windows than with madness or nascent lycanthropy.

At about half past ten last night, we saw something that would, in former times, have prompted superstitious fears. A dark shadow crept slowly across the face the full moon, until the moon was now more than a dim coppery disk in the sky. A total eclipse of the moon, as the earth comes directly between the sun and the moon and casts its shadow on the moon’s surface is less dramatic than a total eclipse of the sun. But it is awe-inspiring, nonetheless.

I tried to take a picture. My digital camera fired its flashgun vainly into the sky. I turned the flash off and pushed the zoom button until the lens had extended as far as it would go, but really! How could I think to take a decent picture with a small camera held by wobbly hands of an object some 400 million kilometres away? A triumph of vain hope over the ineluctable laws of physics, I think.

So there’s no picture here, but there is one in the BBC story. And there are some wonderful pictures here.

By the way, the last total eclipse of the sun visible in the British Isles took place on 11 August 1999. Erica and I were at the Baha’i Academy for the Arts, which was taking place at the Quaker school in Sidcot in Somerset (not far from Cheddar). Everybody was outside at around 11 a.m., as the eclipse approached totality. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day, so we couldn’t see the eclipse clearly (standard warning: do not look directly at the sun, even in eclipse!), but we all fell quiet as the gloom deepened into a strange half light.

Of course, it is an astronomical event with a well understood physical explanation. But I can understand why people who had no notion of physics or astronomy were fearful of the daytime darkening of the sun, why they attached superstitious significance to it. Even now, an eclipse inspires awe and wonder.

Technorati Tags: sun, moon, eclipse, astronomy

No, it’s not a joke! 2008 will be the International Year of the Potato, as declared in a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly.

The humble potato is a remarkable tuber and is one of the world’s most important foods.

You can read more here.

Let’s hope that the UN doesn’t make a terrible mash of the Year, otherwise we’ll all have had our chips!

Technorati Tags: United Nations, potato, food

According to this report, reading Shakespeare is good for the brain.

Why? Well, apparently it’s to do with something called “functional shift“. An example of functional shift is using a noun as a verb, as in “he godded me” (from the tradegy of Coriolanus).

According to Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool’s School of English:

By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.

Professor Neil Roberts, from the University

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, brain, functional shift, noun, verb, Coriolanus

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How justified are we in thinking that raised levels of CO2 in the atmosphere cause climate change? Here’s a thought-provoking piece reporting an experiment whose results suggest that variations in the bombardment of cosmic radiation could be responsible for changes in cloudiness and thus in atmospheric temperatures:

A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth?s climate.

An essential role for remote stars in everyday weather on Earth has been revealed by an experiment at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. It is already well-established that when cosmic rays, which are high-speed atomic particles originating in exploded stars far away in the Milky Way, penetrate Earth?s atmosphere they produce substantial amounts of ions and release free electrons. Now, results from the Danish experiment show that the released electrons significantly promote the formation of building blocks for cloud condensation nuclei on which water vapour condenses to make clouds. Hence, a causal mechanism by which cosmic rays can facilitate the production of clouds in Earth?s atmosphere has been experimentally identified for the first time.

As Professor Stott comments:

The experiment ties in beautifully with the brilliant work of geochemist, Professor J?n Veizer of the Ruhr University at Bochum, Germany, and the University of Ottawa in Canada, and Dr. Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who for some time have been implicating cosmic rays and water vapour, rather than carbon dioxide, as the main drivers of climate change. Indeed, they have put down 75% of climate change to these drivers.

Cosmic rays are known to boost cloud formation - and, in turn, reduce temperatures on Earth - by creating ions that cause water droplets to condense. J?n Veizer and Nir Shaviv calculated temperature changes at the Earth’s surface by studying oxygen isotopes trapped in rocks formed by ancient marine fossils. They then compared these with variations in cosmic-ray activity, determined by looking at how cosmic rays have affected iron isotopes in meteorites.

Their results suggest that temperature fluctuations over the past 550 million years are more likely to relate to cosmic-ray activity than to CO2. By contrast, they found no correlation between temperature variation and the changing patterns of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Watch this space, as Professor Stott says.

Technorati Tags: CO2, atmosphere, climate change, cosmic rays, clouds, Earth

This montage of images taken by the Voyager spacecraft of the planets and four of Jupiter’s moons is set against a false-color Rosette Nebula with Earth’s moon in the foreground.

I love this montage picture of the Solar System from NASA.

Technorati Tags: Voyager, planets, Jupiter, Rosette Nebula, moon, Solar System

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OK, this has been sitting in amongst my bookmarks for ages. I’ve just been syncing my MacBook Pro with my smaller PowerBook prior to a trip; I found the link and paid a brief visit to the site.

Global Mindshift

The site claims:

Global MindShift is a non-profit organization that promotes an expanded view of what it means to be human based on the knowledge of our evolutionary journey.

We may be a lot like you: We lead comfortable lives, but when we look at the world as a whole we’re concerned by what we see… especially when we think about the world our children will inherit. So we asked ourselves, how can we contribute to a positive future?
For answers, we turned to experts from a wide variety of disciplines. We asked, “What do you believe is the root cause of today’s challenges?” We heard a common response: the problem is our worldview. The way we see the world and our place within it is no longer working.

What’s needed is a global mind shift… A new worldview that can help us see today’s problems in a larger context, and give us new, creative ideas about how to solve them.

I haven’t worked my way through the site yet, but what I’ve seen leads me think that we can learn a lot from it - and it will be useful for Baha’is who want to correlate science and religion.

You really need broadband to watch the fascinating video segments.

Technorati Tags: Global Mindshift, evolution, worldview, Baha’i, science and religion

Here’s another site you absolutely have to visit. Watch and play with the Flash animations that illustrate aspects of computation, physics and numbers.

Ooh, it’s such fun!

Technorati Tags: animation, numbers, physics, science