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Report from Single-Cell Biophysics conference

I attended the Single-Cell Biophysics: Measurement, Modulation, and Modeling conference in Taipei, Taiwan this month. From the conference, I was one of a group who blogged for the biophysical society. Here’s a run down of what we covered.

The first section was about imaging techniques, including structured illumination from Suliana Manley in bacteria, and full automation of super resolution/single molecule microscopy from Masahiro Ueda. Read all about it here.

Mechanobiology was the next one I covered; Pakorn Kanchanawong showcased his new lab’s work on the nanoarchitecture of focal adhesions. His new work is all about linking function to nanoscale changes in the make-up of the things. Also presented was work using DNA based tension sensors, and how mechanics work in the regulation of the bacterial flagellar.

Jumping ahead to the final day, we covered new sensors for metal ions (30% of proteins require metal ions to function) in live cells from Amy Palmer, as well as an acid resistant fluorescent protein compatible with super resolution from the Takeharu Nagai lab: keep your eyes peeled for rsGamillus in the coming months.

My last post of the meeting covered more from the Nagai lab—some amazing work on singularities—events in cells or cell populations that originate in a single place and spread to form a group decision. His examples of spiral wave cAMP signalling in social amoeba are mesmerising. Finally, Sua Myong gave us insight into the possible reason that microRNAs have mismatches between strands, and how they reduce efficiency in the swap from DICER to RISC.

Thanks all, for more, and to hear from the other contributors, simply go here.

  • The original version of this blog was posted on KCL Science

Flash Physics: Dead galaxy mystifies astronomers, a photon dam bursts, Space Industry Bill for the UK

A distant dead galaxy mystifies astronomers

A distant dead galaxy observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has astronomers questioning their understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve. Until now, it was assumed that dead galaxies – those that no longer produce stars – in the early universe are elliptical and maintain that shape as they evolve. Meanwhile, disc-shaped, spiral galaxies usually contain young stars and undergo star formation. But, galaxy MACS 2129-1 calls this theory into question. MACS 2129-1 is a fast-spinning, disc-shaped galaxy three times as massive as the Milky Way but half the size, and it stopped forming stars a few billion years after the Big Bang. The finding surprised Sune Toft from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and colleagues, as it indicated that some of the earliest dead galaxies must somehow evolve from Milky Way-like discs to giant elliptical galaxies, changing not just their structure, but also the motion of their stars. Toft suggests this probably happens through mergers. “If these galaxies grow through merging with minor companions, and these minor companions come in large numbers and from all sorts of different angles onto the galaxy, this would eventually randomize the orbits of stars in the galaxies,” explains Toft. “You could also imagine major mergers. This would definitely also destroy the ordered motion of the stars.” The study is presented in Nature and the researchers hope that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will provide further insights.

Physicists rupture a photon dam

The optical equivalent of water surging through a ruptured dam has been created by physicists in France and Italy. When intense light travels through a medium such as an optical fibre, the light can modify the optical properties of the medium. This can create an effective interaction between photons in the fibre, causing them to behave like molecules in a fluid. Now, Gang Xu and colleagues at the University of Lille and Stefano Trillo at the University of Ferrara have used this effect to mimic what happens when a dam suddenly breaks and water is allowed to flow freely through the breach – a well-studied phenomenon in fluid mechanics. Their experiment begins with a continuous wave of laser light flowing through a fibre, which represents the flow over the dam before it breaks. The team then increases the laser power sharply in about 25 ps to simulate the surge of water that occurs after a dam is burst. Careful monitoring of the light emerging from the fibre reveals characteristic shock waves, which are also seen in dam breaks. If the jump in power is above a certain threshold, the troughs in the shockwaves are so low that they contain no light at all – something that is not seen in water-dam breaks. Writing in Physical Review Letters, the team says that its set-up could be used to study other fluid-like behaviours of light including the emergence of rogue waves.

UK government unveils Space Industry Bill

Photograph of a facility at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited
Surrey Satellite Technology Limited is a leader in the UK’s successful space industry. (Courtesy: SSTL)

The UK government will introduce a Space Industry Bill in the current session of parliament. The Conservative government says that the purpose of the bill is to “boost the economy, British business, engineering and science by making the UK the most attractive place in Europe for commercial spaceflight”. A key aim of the bill is to allow space missions to be launched from UK soil. This is not currently possible because the country has no regulatory framework that covers operational insurance, indemnity and liability associated with spaceflight. The bill proposes new government powers to license and regulate commercial spaceflight including rockets, spaceplanes, satellites and spaceports. New security powers to protect spaceflight from unauthorized access and interference are also included in the bill. The UK space industry has enjoyed 8% annual growth over the past decade and is currently worth about £13.7 billion – much of that coming from the production of small satellites. Today, British companies have about 6.5% of the global space market and the government hopes to boost this to 10% by 2030.

Simple heating process generates metallic nanowires

Metal chalcogenides like MoTex have been used in various electronics devices because of their intrinsic semiconducting properties, since the exact nature of their electronic structure can be tuned from semiconducting to metallic based on their atomic arrangement. Scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas have discovered a way of inducing this electronic transition simply by heating the 2H-MoTe2 semiconducting phase in a vacuum to produce metallic Mo6Te6 nanowires. This simple synthesis technique could help the development of a new generation of tunable semiconductor devices.

Semiconducting materials are used in most electronic devices, and the ability to tune their properties through simple techniques is the holy grail of material synthesis. By identifying a new, conducting nanowire phase of this material family, lead researchers Robert M Wallace and Moon J Kim have helped integrate these materials into the fabrication of MoTex-based electronics.

Making the nanowires

Wallace and Kim observed the phase transition from layered 2H-MoTe2 to the Mo6Te6 nanowire (NW) phase after heating 2H-MoTe2 to approximately 450 °C in vacuum. The new NWs were stable at room temperature and after reheating because the ratio of Te/Mo significantly decreases to accommodate the phase transition. Other synthetic techniques induce the 2H (semiconducting) to 1T’ (metallic) transition under much higher temperatures, typically above 900 °C. However, since such high temperatures were not used in this study, no 1T’ phase was observed. The metallic character was therefore attributed to the new NW phase.

The researchers observed the nanowire phase transition by scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), providing beautiful images and videos of the reaction propagation in the crystals. The phase change appears to initiate at the surface of the 2H-MoTe2 crystal where Te desorption is highest, and can easily be modified with annealing time or temperature. This transition is atomically sharp with a well-defined interface between the two phases. The researchers characterized this new phase showing the 1D chain of Mo-Te NWs consisting of infinitely staggered Mo3Te3 units.

Looking at the electronic structure

Interestingly, scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) showed that the NW bundles were metallic in character, but density functional theory (DFT) simulations showed that may not be the case for an isolated NW. When the NWs exist in bundles, the conduction band is partially occupied, creating a band gap equal to zero. However, when the NWs are isolated the calculated band gap is approximately 0.3 eV, showing the importance of the surrounding electronic structure in the crystal. The reported NWs from this synthesis procedure exist solely in bundled clusters and were therefore only observed as a metallic conductor.

The researchers clearly demonstrated the phase transition from the layered 2H-MoTe2 phase to Mo6Te6 nanowire bundles preferentially forming at the surface of the crystal. They also showed that the NWs could have both a semiconducting and metallic electronic structure based on the intrinsic conduction network that exists both in a single wire and in bundled wires.

Ever since the discovery of 2D graphene and 1D carbon nanotubes, low-dimensional materials have inspired innovation and stretched the frontiers of various fields of materials science. Metal chalcogenides are on a similar path, with first the introduction of the 2D layered metallic 1T’ phase and now the Mo6Te6 nanowires. Clearly, this work will have significant impact on future material design.

More information can be found in Advanced Materials.

Flash Physics: X-rays reveal virus structure, Qatar blockade could affect helium supplies, LISA gets go-ahead

Virus atomic structure revealed with X-ray lasers

The atomic structure of a full, intact virus particle has been successfully deciphered using X-ray crystallography for the first time. A virus particle, or virion, contains a protein structure called a capsid that holds and shields the viral genetic material. Made of several sub-units, this structure also helps the virion attach to and penetrate a host cell. Therefore, understanding these protein structures can help biologist design defences against viruses. To do this, scientists turn to X-ray crystallography. When high-energy X-rays are fired at a crystal, the atoms diffract the X-rays, creating a diffraction pattern that is characteristic of the crystal’s atomic structure. While proteins are tiny crystals, they are not stable and sturdy like, for example, salt crystals. Instead, they are easily damaged by X-rays. The technique also needs large amounts of sample proteins. To combat these limitations, a team led by Alke Meents at DESY in Germany has developed a micro-patterned chip that contains thousands of pores for holding small amounts of protein crystals. By scanning a pulsed X-ray laser over the chip, a diffraction image can be recorded for each pulse. The team analyses a full virus crystal and a single virus protein using the LCLS X-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US. For the full virus, they achieved a 9% hit rate – when the X-ray successfully hits a crystal – and collected enough data within 14 min at room temperature to determine the structure of the virus down to 0.23 nm. In the second test, the team froze the isolated protein, which improved the hit rate to 90% and data collection only took 10 minutes. Freezing, however, is too brutal for some virus crystals because they are too delicate. “Our approach not only reduces the data collection time and the quantity of the sample needed, it also opens up the opportunity of analysing entire viruses using X-ray lasers,” Meents says. The results are presented in Nature Methods.

Qatar blockade could affect helium supplies

Photograph of a helium facility in Qatar
Closed taps: a helium facility in Qatar operated by RasGas. (Courtesy: RasGas)

Concern is growing within the helium industry that the current economic blockade of Qatar could have a negative effect on global helium supplies. Located on the Persian Gulf, Qatar accounts for about 25% of the global production of helium – an element that plays a crucial role in low-temperature physics experiments and is also used for cooling the superconducting magnets used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) medical scanners. For the past few weeks, Qatar has been blockaded by several of its Arab neighbours and reports from the country suggest that liquid helium is not being shipped out and empty containers are not being returned from abroad. “Qatar ships liquid helium around the world,” says low-temperature physicist William Halperin of Northwestern University in the US. “It seems like an obvious conclusion that a blockade will affect helium availability on a global scale.” Two facilities in Qatar that extract helium from natural gas are reported to have shut down. The US firm Air Products is involved in the construction of a new helium facility in Qatar and says that the project could be delayed because of the blockade.

LISA gravitational-wave mission selected for ESA’s Comic Vision

Artist's impression of LISA
The LISA mission will be ESA’s third large-class mission, following JUICE and Athena. (Courtesy: AEI / Milde Marketing / Exozet)

The LISA gravitational-wave mission has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) as its third and final large-class mission. The other two missions have already been selected and are the Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE) and the Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics (Athena). LISA – the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna – will be a gravitational-wave observatory comprising three satellites in Earth-like orbits of the Sun. In 2013 the ESA identified the “gravitational-wave universe” as the theme for its third large-class mission, which is part of the agency’s Cosmic Vision long-term plan for space science. Since then, the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected three gravitational waves caused by black-hole mergers and the LISA Pathfinder space mission has demonstrated key technologies that are required for LISA. Earlier this year, for example, scientists working on LISA Pathfinder showed that test masses on the spacecraft can be successfully isolated from electrostatic forces. The three LISA satellites will each have a test mass – and lasers will make precise measurements of slight displacements of these masses caused by gravitational waves. The mission was chosen during a meeting of ESA’s Science Programme Committee, where they also approved the exoplanet hunter Plato to move into development. Now LISA’s design and costing can be completed so that the mission can launch in 2034.

Optical centrifuge magnetizes molecular gas

A dense molecular gas has been rapidly magnetized using light. Done by physicists in Canada, the experiment involves using an “optical centrifuge” to rotate the molecules. This causes the electronic spins of the molecules to line up in the same direction. The technique could have a wide range of applications including the production of large amounts of spin-polarized electrons.

Creating a magnetized gas in which electronic spins point along the same direction is very difficult to do by simply applying a magnetic field – even using the strongest laboratory magnets. Magnetization can be achieved by shining circularly polarized light on a gas. If the light is resonant with the molecule’s electron energy levels, a high degree of spin polarization can be achieved in about 100 ns. However, this only works if a high-intensity source of light at the correct resonant frequency is available. Another problem is that the technique is only practical for relatively diffuse gas samples.

Corkscrew-like pulses

Now, Alexander Milner, Alexsey Korobenko and Valery Milner at the University of British Columbia have used a non-resonant optical technique to magnetize a sample of oxygen gas. Called an optical centrifuge, the method involves firing broadband laser pulses into an optical system that outputs corkscrew-like pulses. These pulses are then able to deliver large amounts of angular momentum to molecules. A process called spin-rotational coupling then causes some electron spins on the molecules to become polarized and point in the same direction, thereby magnetizing the gas.

Although only a few percent of the oxygen molecules are actually centrifuged in the process, the number of polarized electrons created is about 1000 times greater than achieved using resonant techniques. The magnetic field created in the sample is on the order of tens of milligauss – which is about one tenth of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Other benefits of the technique are that it works in less than one nanosecond, and that it can be deployed at room temperature in relatively dense gases. The team also found that the process can be enhanced by placing the gas in a magnetic field.

Chemical reactions

According to the researchers, the optical-centrifuge technique could be useful for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging because the electron-spin polarization can be converted to a nuclear-spin polarization for NMR. A spin-polarized gas could be used as a source of spin-polarized electrons for particle-physics experiments as well as for probing the dynamics of chemical reactions and analysing the electronic properties of materials.

The research is described in Physical Review Letters.

Flash Physics: Physics of skull building, exoplanets come in two sizes, South Korea begins nuclear phase-out

Building a skull with physics not biology

Physics and geometry have been used to simulate how the human skull grows. At birth, the skull is a series of bone plates connected by soft fibrous boundaries called sutures. The arrangement means the skull can grow and remodel around the increasing volume of the brain. To understand the driving force behind the growth, biologists have focused on genetics and biochemistry, but some believe the mechanical stresses induced by the evolving brain are equally important. Johannes Weickenmeier from Stanford University in the US and colleagues have built a computational model that is based purely on the mechanical processes. In the simulation, the cranial vault holding the brain is treated as a semi-ellipsoid, separated into segments that represent the plates. Using existing estimates of pressures, stresses and strains related to the developing brain and bones, the team incorporated two modes of bone growth. Suture growth refers to the accretion of new bone between the skull plates, compensating for the growing volume of brain. Meanwhile, surface growth thickens the bone plates and also allows for any changing curvature by removing bone on the inside surface and producing new bone on the outer surface. As well as depicting the growth of a normal skull, the simulation successfully modelled the development of known skull deformities, confirming that it accurately represents biological processes. Exactly how the brain and skull communicate in order to grow in sync remains a mystery, but the researchers hope that incorporating biochemical processes into the model will provide an insight. With further development, the work described in Physical Review Letters could help surgeons treat infants with skull growth problems.

Most exoplanets come in two distinct sizes

Histogram showing the prevalence of exoplanets in terms of their radii
Twin peaks: histogram showing the prevalence of exoplanets in terms of their radii. The horizontal axis is Earth radii and the vertical axis is number of exoplanets per 100 stars surveyed. Also shown are artist’s impressions of the Earth-like Kepler-452b and the mini-Neptune Kepler-22b. (Courtesy: NASA / Ames / Caltech / University of Hawaii (B J Fulton))

Most exoplanets fall into two distinct groups – rocky Earth-like bodies and larger “mini-Neptunes”. That’s the conclusion of a team of astronomers in the US and Canada, who have classified 2000 of the nearly 3500 exoplanets that are known to exist in the Milky Way. The 2000 exoplanets had been discovered using NASA’s Kepler space telescope, and the team used spectral data from the Keck Observatory to determine the sizes of exoplanets’ host stars. This allowed the astronomers to measure the radii of the exoplanets at four-times higher precision than before – thus revealing the two distinct size groups (see figure). The Earth-like exoplanets have radii up to about 1.75 that of Earth, while the mini-Neptunes measure-up between 2–3.5 Earth radii. There is also a clear dearth of exoplanets between 1.75–2 Earth radii, according to a paper by the team to be published in The Astronomical Journal. “In the solar system, there are no planets with sizes between Earth and Neptune,” says team-member Erik Petigura of Caltech. “One of the great surprises from Kepler is that nearly every star has at least one planet larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune,” he adds. “We’d really like to know what these mysterious planets are like and why we don’t have them in our own solar system.” In a separate development, astronomers working on Kepler have released their latest survey catalogue of exoplanets, which covers the mission’s first four years of observing. Kepler has so far identified over 4000 candidate exoplanets, of which 2335 have been confirmed. These include more than 30 Earth-sized exoplanets that are in the habitable zones of their stars – which means that they could harbour life.

South Korea to phase out nuclear energy

Photograph of president Moon Jae-in at Kori-1
Closing time: South Korean president Moon Jae-in speaking at the closure of the Kori-1 nuclear power plant. (Courtesy: Cheong Wa Dae)

South Korean president Moon Jae-in has announced that the country will begin to phase out its nuclear-energy programme. South Korea has 25 reactors that generate around a third of the country’s electricity, and in a speech yesterday at an event to mark the closure of the Kori-1 nuclear power plant, he declared that no new reactors would be built and existing units will not operate beyond 40 years. Moon says that the country would now focus on developing renewable sources of energy. “An era of clean energy that puts first the safety of the people is what our energy policies must pursue,” he notes. Kori-1, which came online in 1978, is the country’s oldest nuclear power plant and will now be decommissioned – the first South Korean nuclear power unit to do so.

No physics in gastrophysics

A word of warning. You might think that Gastrophysics: the New Science of Eating will be a book about “molecular gastronomy”, in which scientists create novel concoctions using our understanding of how food materials transform when cooked. The term was coined in the late 1980s by the University of Oxford physicist Nicholas Kurti, who famously created a reverse baked Alaska – a pudding that’s hot inside but cold outside – using a microwave oven. In fact, “gastrophysics” is a concatenation of gastronomy and “psychophysics” – a long-established branch of psychology that examines the link between physical stimuli and the sensations they produce. Gastrophysics, in other words, is a book all about the psychology of eating: how sight, smell, taste and dining environment influence our perception of the food we eat. Written by Oxford psychologist Charles Spence, the book nevertheless has some appeal for physicists, who will be intrigued, for example, by his description of why food and drink taste weird in the low-pressure environment of an aeroplane and why an unfeasibly large number of passengers pick tomato juice from the trolley (tomatoes are rich in umami taste, which we respond more strongly to on planes). The book, which over-eggs the anecdotes about famous chefs, suffers from presenting far more ideas than can be easily digested. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, it leaves the reader full but not particularly satisfied.

  • 2017 Viking 464pp £16.99hb

 

Losing physics Pictionary

Physics is often best explained with the help of a diagram, as anyone who has ever tried to explain the photoelectric effect will attest to. Whether in a lesson, lecture or coffee shop discussion, diagrams offer a simple way to portray complex information. Drawing Physics looks back on how this has been the case throughout history. In a series of short essays, author Don S Lemons aims to illustrate 51 key ideas in physics and mathematics using diagrams. Lemons, a physics professor at Bethel College in the US, begins as far back as Thales of Miletus and his work on triangulation in 600 BC, before travelling through the history of physics, up to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. On the way, he covers a huge array of topics aimed at those with little mathematical and physics background. As a book covering subjects from mechanics to astrophysics, it’s understandable that Lemons cannot go into much detail. Yet, rather than using his limited text to clearly explain the basic science, he focuses on the history of the scientists instead. While interesting, this seems to be a distraction from the book’s main aim as set out by Lemons in the preface, which was to outline the important role drawing has played in teaching and understanding physics. Furthermore, despite the book’s title, there are typically only two (poorly labelled) diagrams per chapter and these are not described particularly clearly. Although the book’s premise is promising, Lemons doesn’t quite do it justice. The diagram for the photoelectric effect, for example, is simply a rectangle containing circles with dashes and two wiggly arrows – there are no labels. His follow-up description is then reliant on bracketed directions, providing a rather stilted read. In a game of Pictionary, physicists may recognize this as a sea of electrons, two incoming photons and two outgoing photoelectrons, but Lemons’ target audience would likely be left wondering.

  • 2017 MIT Press 264pp £22.95hb

More than a minute needed

Physicist Richard Feynman supposedly said “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” The subject has expanded and grown by leaps and bounds since Feynman’s time, but the principles of quantum mechanics are still infamous for being weird, non-intuitive and just plain difficult to comprehend at times. In Quantum Physics in Minutes: the Inner Workings of our Universe Explained in an Instant, author and journalist Gemma Lavender aims to provide a quick and handy guide to all things quantum. The small, square-format book is part of a bigger series that includes titles on economics, world history and more.

Made up of more than 200 entries divided into 13 sections, this book covers everything from wave–particle duality and the Higgs boson to quantum cryptography and superfluids. Each entry is a page long, packed with information and accompanied by a diagram, picture or graph on the opposite page. Clearly explaining any topic in science in just a few hundred words is no mean feat, but doing so with as complex a subject as quantum mechanics is even harder. In some ways, this book could be the perfect pocket guide for an undergraduate just dipping their toes into the subject and looking for a quick and robust description of, say, Compton scattering or quantum harmonic oscillators.

A substantial chunk of the book is also dedicated to discussing particle physics and cosmology, which, while off-topic, may still come in handy. The same applies to the pages on string theory and supersymmetry. But it is the many entries on topics such as eternal inflation, “types of multiverse”, “quantum consciousness” and “no free will” that are worrying. While Lavender mentions that these are theories and not accepted science (even offering opposing views in some cases), it is exactly topics such as these that are commonly little-understood, greatly exaggerated and ultimately peddled as “woo” by those not intimately involved in the discourse and dialogue around such ideas. As tempting as it is to delve into these “extensions” of quantum mechanics – they are often the very things that make the subject interesting – they easily become hyperbolic and any actual scientific significance is lost. While debating such hypotheses is solidly within the remit of advancing science, doing so in 200 words or less, with minimal background and rebuttal, only breeds ignorance.

On the other hand, the book contains surprisingly few entries on quantum computing (though those present are very well written) and its many recent advances. Lavender would have done well to dedicate a few more entries to, say, superconducting versus silicon qubits, rather than vague descriptions of “the observer’s role” in possibly sustaining the universe.

  • 2017 Quercus 416pp £9.99pb

Web life: Hogg’s Research

So what is the site about?

Hogg’s Research: Galaxies, Stellar Dynamics, Exoplanets, and Fundamental Astronomy, as the name suggests, is a blog all about astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. Written by astrophysicist David W Hogg, the blog can best be thought of as his research diary. Hogg has some interesting rules that he has set for himself – that he must blog five times a week, so long as he is not travelling, and that his posts are based on ongoing research, rather than other topics in academia such as teaching or refereeing. Hogg – a professor at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University in the US – has been writing the blog since 2005. The website hosts an impressive 200+ entries per year, all of which are tagged. This makes it easier to jump to older posts on a topic – a useful feature on a blog with such a large archive of posts.

Apart from this website, Hogg, a veteran blogger, also writes four other blogs that cover everything from teaching to DIY to cooking. These blogs are much less frequently updated, with just a few entries every year. The most interesting of these is Hogg’s Ideas, which is a repository of scientific ideas that are “free to use by anyone” – an intriguing concept, though it remains unclear how many of these, if any, have come to fruition.

What are some of the topics covered?

Hogg’s research interests, as well as those of his group, centre on observational cosmology. As previously mentioned, the blog covers work as it is being done so many posts are short and quick with the latest update on, say, binary star systems or spectroscopy or black holes. In fact, almost every celestial object that you can think of has a few entries on the blog. Another theme that is regularly mentioned is statistics and big data – a topical subject in astronomy and cosmology today. But Hogg also reports on the many meetings, discussions, conferences and talks he attends, giving the reader a quick update on all the various studies and ideas in the community. This is probably one of the best parts of the blog – Hogg has many colleagues with whom he is in constant conversation, which he happily shares with the reader.

Who is it aimed at?

Thanks to the wide variety of posts each week, Hogg’s Research may be of interest to the discerning scientist with a keen interest in astronomy and cosmology. But at its heart, this is a blog for the community itself. Many of the posts are short and fairly technical and Hogg quite happily uses acronyms that non-astronomers may struggle with. Also, he regularly writes about ongoing research done by people in the field, but without much background or context, which make it quite hard for an outsider to keep up. Still, this is the very thing that makes the blog interesting – it’s a bit like walking into a lecture and not quite understanding the minutiae of what is being discussed, but still being interested in the conversation at large.

Can you give me a sample quote?

From a post published in April 2017, titled “Direct detection of the cosmic neutrino background”: “Today was an all-day meeting at the Flatiron Institute on neutrinos in cosmology and large-scale structure, organized by Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro (Flatiron). I wasn’t able to be at the whole meeting, but two important things I learned in the part I saw are the following: Chris Tully (Princeton) astonished me by showing his real, funded attempt to actually directly detect the thermal neutrinos from the Big Bang. That is audacious. He has a very simple design, based on capture of electron neutrinos by tritium that has been very loosely bound to a graphene substrate. Details of the experiment include absolutely enormous surface areas of graphene, and also very clever focusing (in a phase-space sense) of the liberated electrons. I’m not worthy! Raúl Jiménez (Barcelona) spoke about (among other things) a statistical argument for a normal (rather than inverted) hierarchy for neutrino masses. His argument depends on putting priors over neutrino masses and then computing a Bayes factor. This argument made the audience suspicious, and he got some heat during and after his talk.”

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