Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Science”
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Durham UK Cosmo meeting
Durham University, and in particular the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology hosted the annual two-day UK Cosmology meeting this year. There were lots of very interesting talks, and I hope to give a flavour of some of the issues that were mentioned over the course of the meeting.
The list of participants and the programme outline are on the Durham website, however I do not expect the slides of the talks to be uploaded except perhaps by individual speakers.
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Numerical Calculation of Second Order Perturbations
My new paper, written with Karim Malik, has just been released into the wild. We show that it is possible to numerically simulate second order perturbations for a single scalar field with a canonical action. I’ve been working on this for a long time and learned a lot about the mechanics of inflation in the process. I’ve also churned out quite a lot of python code, and learned some rudimentary parallel programming.
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The Big Bang Fair
The first ever UK Young Scientist and Engineers Fair is taking place in the first week of March. The Big Bang Fair in the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster will pit hundreds of schoolchildren against each other for the main prizes of UK Young Scientist and UK Young Technologist of the Year. There will also be exhibits run by all the main science and engineering bodies in the UK including the IOP, STFC and RAS.
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The End of Cosmology
Here in Queen Mary, we hold a discussion group every Wednesday during term time. The paper we are discussing this afternoon is a recent essay by Lawrence Krauss and Robert Scherrer, which has been causing a bit of a stir in cosmology circles, both in the blogosphere and the real world. The essay won 5th prize in the annual Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition which always features some interesting reading material.
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Reed Elsevier gives up its guns
Reed Elsevier, which publishes many scientific journals and magazines, has just announced that they are going to get rid of their lucrative side-business of running major armaments fairs. Earlier this year there was a lot of criticism of the company for this practice, from shareholders, rival journals and even the editors of the Lancet, one of Reed Elsevier’s most respected journals. The chief executive specifically talked about this pressure in his explanation for the change:
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UK Cosmology Dates
The next UK Cosmo meeting has just been announced and will take place in Portsmouth on the 26th of June. The local website has details about how to register to attend or give a talk. There is no confirmed venue yet but keep an eye on the site for more information and travel details. The UK Cosmo meetings are always well attended, and feature a wide range of topics with researchers from all over the UK.
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Scientific writing: Too impersonal?
Sorry about not posting for a while, I needed to fly home for a few days and am only back in college today.
An interesting discussion has started up around the science blogosphere about science writing techniques and whether the usual conventions are necessary or even useful. Chad Orzel started off by listing his pet peeves, some of which I agree with, especially
Myth 4: Scientific results are supposed to be a surprise.
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Brighten up your day
It's not a resource per se, but I probably should have mentioned the Astronomy Picture of the Day, run by NASA, which features a different space related picture every day. As you can see, some of these are amazing works of art in their own right, but with the accompanying blurb you can also learn some science while you're at it. The official site doesn't have an RSS feed unfortunately, but Jef Poskanzer has put together an unofficial feed which you can use to get your daily helping easily.