Collaborating over physics and beer choices

Cardiff is lucky enough to be part of a new group of universities, along with Exeter and Bristol, whose post graduates will regularly meet throughout the year and discuss the work we all do. Hopefully this will encourage work between the universities, improve our presenting skills and prepare us newbies on how scientific conferences work.

Yesterday was our first meeting, in Bristol, and I think everyone agrees it was a great success. It often feels in science that there is a fear of collaborating with other unievrisites and people too closely, a fear that people ideas will be diluted or stolen if shared with other people. A fear which is probably based on previous experience. But for the younger generation of scientists, surely for the future of research if will be beneficial to share our knowledge and ideas, as long as its in the right way.

So overall I think it was a very productive day and I look forward to the next one in the coming year.

The usual trip to the pub afterwards, for a beer and a pizza, also helped everyone come together. Talking at the conference is great, but its the relationships you build beyond your work which will make you want to work with someone again, I believe.

I hope these kind of collaborations exist throughout the UK, and throughout the world, because I believe the success of science comes from a strong community, not a strong set of individuals.

My 15 minutes of Fame!

So, at the beginning of this week I received an email from a journalist who was writing a piece on the graduate scheme at ESA. He wanted to talk to someone who had worked at ESA as a graduate and to write a small piece on it.

Luckily, my profile must have been the one he saw first, and so a few days later my brief interview has made it into the British newspaper The Times (15/11/2012). Specifically in the graduate section, which is on the middle page.

It's not a lot, but I meant every word about how good working for ESA is and I really hope more people apply for the positions and carry on in Astrophysics as a result.

The piece is below :)

With great computer-power comes great waste-ability.

I have been a unbeliever of Apple products for some time now. I see that they work well, they are powerful and simple to use (though this is probably also their biggest weakness). However my usual criticism is of the astronomical (pun entirely intended) prices they charge for something which is the same as the same product with a picture of an orange on it rather than an apple.

Which is why I now feel a hypocrite as I type this blog on my new iPad.

Admittedly this blog is less about Apple and more about the use of technology in science, and I guess businesses as a whole. For the last few years I have found myself ever increasingly dependant on printers as a way to prove how clever I am to my supervisors. Rushing to their offices with a stack of of pretty graphs and data tables does make one feel very smug. Unfortunately however it also makes the environment feel a little bit sicker. I really do try to do my bit for the environment, but when it comes to this area of environmental heroism I find it hard to change.

So to change this habit I have bought an iPad. My aim is to start flaunting my pie charts on its beautiful high resolution screen, rather than on dead vegetation. I'm not sure how well the iPad is set up to do many of these things, especially how good it is and linking up to my unix based work machine, but I'm going to try. If all else fails, I will become the true master of angry birds.

I hope that just as apple seems to have introduced content for the iPad for people in business and education, such as university lectures, that someone will take this a step further and allow people to fully integrate their day to day work with a tablet. Not for cash in their pockets, but trees in the forests.

I still believe iPads are too expensive. But in a philosophical tone, isn't the cost to the environment even more costly.

Physics isn't the only science

We have plenty of seminars and meetings at University to encourage to keep and interest in other areas of Astrophysics and Physics. It's through this knowledge of other disciplines that links and connections can be made, producing new areas of research involving the whole department.

However one also has to remember that there are other sciences out there other than Physics! So this brief post is dedicated to the Science of Biology. To illustrate the incredible nature of Biology I present to you this video made by Harvard University (from what I can gather).

Video from Youtube, courtesy of Harvard University.

This incredible video is an artists simulation of the inside of a cell, though based on real research and knowledge. I had to have the various things in the video explained, but a brief explanation is as follows.

The video shows the inner working of a single cell. Your body is made up of over 50 trillion cells, which is incredible enough, without knowing what happens inside them. Most of the little things you can see in the video are proteins, all with various different jobs to make your cells do what they're supposed to, in turn making your organs perform as a whole. 

It's these kind of videos which really make science and research appealing to people, yet I never saw this at school or college; it took till my PhD in another discipline to first see this video! It's a shame, but if you search hard enough gems like this can be found and hopefully shared to everyone else!