physicsfocus is a week and a half old! We hope by now you’ve had chance to settle in and get acquainted with our nine regular contributors. If not, here’s your chance to catch up with all of our bloggers’ first posts – and a bonus guest post too.
In Planck’s data is extraordinary, but will it teach us anything new? Andy Newsam shared his thoughts on the latest results from the European Space Agency’s Planck mission. That depends on what you mean by “new”, said some in the comments.
Suzie Sheehy’s post, A week in the life of a particle accelerator designer, measured her life in emails, meetings, travel and research. She even made available the spreadheet she used to track her time, so, if you’ve ever wondered exactly what a physicist does all day, now is your chance to find out.
Jim Al-Khalili spent a Sunday evening pondering how he manages to strike a balance between science and science communication, and offered some advice for early career scientists looking to do outreach.
In her first post, Jude Dineley explained why Australian astronomy is older than you might think. She spoke to Ray Norris, a radio astronomer with an interest in applying his scientific nous to working out what early Aboriginal Australians knew about the night sky.
Ending our first week, Athene Donald said that we need to teach both sexes – not just boys – how to take risks and cope with failure, in her post Girls need to learn how to fail, too.
Kicking us off again on Monday, Philip Moriarty re-opened the stripy nanoparticle debate and asked, Are flaws in peer review someone else’s problem? No prizes for guessing his conclusion. If his post piques your interest make sure to continue reading into the comments, where the discussion is still going on.
Alom Shaha told us how he balances students’ religion with teaching physics in God in the physics classroom. Did you know the person who proposed what became known as the big bang theory was a priest?
Amy Shira Teitel joined us on Wednesday and pondered the future of humans in space in her post Where will humans be in the future of space exploration? Do we need to go along on missions or are they best left to the robots?
And, last but not least, Mike Evans told us how he answers the perennial question: “What do you do?” In doing so he introduces us to his area of research: statistical mechanics, which “explains why ice is hard and water is runny and liquid-crystals are weird”.
If all that wasn’t enough, we also had our first guest post last Friday! Katie Mack sorted the fact from the fiction in reports of the latest results from the AMS detector in her post Space station detector has not found dark matter, despite what some media reports say.
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