A research group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has produced ultrastiff ultralowdensity metamaterials by 3D printing of microarchitected microlattices. This is very cool - they do additive 3D printing using microstereolithography with nanocoating and postprocessing and can make self-similar lattices with densities varying by several orders of magnitude in bulk density but near constant stiffness. Construction material can be metal, ceramic or polymer. LLNL engineered microlattices from Zheng et al Science 344 1373 The lattice geometry can be controlled to choose what mechanical…

Day two of the New Frontiers wrap-up conference. This is a slow liveblog with more cosmology and life in the universe. Yesterday's summary is here A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science. This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found. This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012. We start the…

A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science. This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found. This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012. The New Frontiers conference to report the hint of the beginning of the draft of the answers is under way... most of the investigators and about half of the…

Some people, with good cause, do not like the phrase "dark side of the Moon". The reason they do not like it, is because of a common cognitive misconception. Historically, the phrase refers to the farside of the Moon, which for most of history humanity could not observe, at all, because the Moon is synchronously rotating with the Earth and always presents the same side to the Earth. The word "dark" here is used in the sense of "hidden" or "unseen", which is a common colloquial use, but, in use then became confused with the more common meaning of "unlit", leading generations of students to…

"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." While the Moon has a nearside and a farside, it does not, actually, have a dark side or a light side, now. At least not a fixed dark side, just a slowly moving night side, and day side. But it used to. Sorta. "I remember the first time I saw a globe of the moon as a boy, being struck by how different the farside looks," said Jason Wright, assistant professor of astrophysics. "It was all mountains and craters. Where were the maria? It turns out it's been a mystery since the fifties." Jason, Arpita Roy a Penn State grad…

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon..." The Astrowright has been doing some lunatic slow blogging on an interesting problem: The Nearside of the Moon from Ron Hodges - NASA medialibrary The Farside from apod One of these is not like the other... Jason discusses how we came to be thinking about these things in Part I: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon I: The Lunar Farside Highlands Problem It is an interesting problem. The dichotomy is not superficial From GRAIL press release 2011 A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon II…

Smile, and the whole Universe smiles with you! - A Happy Asterism for #AAS224 A beautiful UV co-added image of the UDF from Hubble UV UDF But, if you look closely... Smile - it could be worse

yet again I trip across a snarky tweet about a distinguished scientist using comic sans or some other whimsical and easily read on a screen unprofessional and unserious design choice in a presentation these theological wars are becoming as bad as PC/Mac or emacs/vi flame wars of yore anyone care to summarise, rationally, and briefly, why serif or sans matters? Please avoid references to unrepeatable badly controlled A/B studies, and opinion polls of helvetica-phobic graphics designers.

"Standing down on this one" - was the first line of the email I read at about 7 am this morning as I rolled over and grabbed my phone, having had about 4 hours of sleep. After staying up past 2 am to run some numbers, we would, after all, not be submitting a request for Director's Discretionary Time override on the Hubble Space Telescope to do a Target of Opportunity urgent observation of a suspected transient in Andromeda. Andromeda This ended a fun 12 hour period of Astronomy in Action, bits of which occasionally frothed over onto social media, as Real Live Astronomers blew off steam,…

tab clearing: A collection of maths GIFs posted purely for aesthetic reasons. Simple Fractals Minimalist Posters of MathematicalObjects...

Not entirely coincidentally the general topic of misogyny, microaggression and harassment was featured on the Women in Astronomy blog recently: Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Defining the Problem Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Survival of the Clueless Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: The Serial Harasser's Playbook Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Power to Speak Up Fed Up with Sexual Harassment Harassment from Student Here are some other useful reads: Do Women Have an Advantage in Faculty Searches? Truth Against Humanity - Starstryder

Senior Review is out: summary - Swift #1, then NuStar. K2 gets partial funding. Spitzer is terminated. Panel recommends not cutting off the bottom but balancing fields. NASA Response to the 2014 Senior Review for Astrophysics Operating Missions - Final Version for Release (5.16.14) - this is an edited update of the NASA response that was on the website on the 15th of May. It is tagged as Final version and for release, so I guess it is now official. Final Report Astro 2014 Senior Review Panel (pdf) NASA Response to 2014 Senior Review for Operating Missions FINAL (pdf) NASA used the…

Why you might sometimes care about the sex lives of strangers. A snarky comment over on an evanescent social media site lead me to shoot back from the hip, but on reflection, unusually enough, I decided I liked the retort enough to preserve it in more permanent intertoobz form. The discussion was on oligarchy and extremes of wealth, and the comment was essentially that this was a private matter, and that the income, or wealth, of an individual was not a matter of public interest - that it was a prurient obsession of no more relevance than the identity of their sexual partners or preferences…

"The wonderful thing about Tiggers Is Tiggers are wonderful things..." Tigger was my favourite on the Hundred Acre Campus. "...bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy Fun, fun, fun, fun, FUN!" Recently I was at a meeting, and a comment was made about how someone was being negative. Not only was this a bit of a bummer, total downer, harshing everyone's mellow. It actually violated our Code of Mututal Respect and Cooperation! Namely Article 9: "Have a positive attitude" Huh? Well. Yes, I knew we had a Code. But I had not internalised this particular requirement, and the more I thought about it the…

Julia is a nifty new language being developed at MIT I stole this plot from github, it shows Julia's current performance on some standard benchmarks compared to a number of favourite tools like Python, Java and R. Normalized to optimized C code. And, there, in a single plot, is why Real Programmers still use Fortran...!

Big Eyed Beans from Venus - Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band! Cool. Literally Comparable to Mars in effective temperature, bit larger than Earth, probably slightly more massive than Earth (mean density could be lower), atmosphere unknown. Might well have extensive surface regions with persistent liquid water. Kepler-186f comparison

It goes like this... The Kingswoods Best Punkabilly ever finally on youtube! The Original "Pretty Vacant" for reference, for you young 'uns...

A frightening fraction of my open tabs are some of Bee's posts at Backreaction - so to save my browsers, I dump them here for further future perusal: Are irreproducible scientific results okay and just business as usual? Shut up and let me think Should the Nobel Prize be given to collaborations and institution? Women in Science, Again? Science Martketing needs Consumer Feedback Does Modern Science Discourage Creativity? The comeback of massive gravity? Can Planck Stars Exist? Book review: “The Theoretical Minimum – Quantum Mechanics” By Susskind and Friedman Do we live in a…

In times past we have lovingly tracked the proposal frenzy as the near annual Hubble Space Telescope proposal deadline approaches. As was noted by Julianne several years ago, and confirmed over the last half dozen cycles, the shape of the curve of number of submitted proposals as a function of time until the deadline is nearly invariant. Interestingly, the total number of proposals also does not change much, some dips and spikes with the loss and availability of instruments, but the total is near stationary and some measure of the statistical saturation of the ability of astronomers to put…

Notes on Academic Blogging - Crooked Timber pines for the Good Old days Old School Blogging - seeing a pattern here... Want an Academic job? Hold your tongue Is it Journalism or just a prepackage press release - Sunlight Foundation's Churnalism tool.