Monday, April 08, 2019

Brief items

A few brief items as I get ready to write some more about several issues:

  • The NY Times posted this great video about using patterned hydrophobic/hydrophilic surfaces to get bouncing water droplets to spin.  Science has their own video, and the paper itself is here.  
  • Back in January Scientific American had this post regarding graduate student mental health.  This is a very serious, complex issue, thankfully receiving increased attention.
  • The new Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has had "first light." 
  • Later this week the Event Horizon Telescope will be releasing its first images of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center.
  • SpaceX is getting ready to launch a Falcon Heavy carrying a big communications satellite.  The landing for these things is pretty science-fiction-like!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may have missed the sad passing of David Thouless, as it wasn’t included in your items: https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-david-thouless-1934-2019/

Douglas Natelson said...

Indeed, I found out about David Thouless a few hours after I made the post. Thanks for pointing this out. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to him at an APS meeting while I was a postdoc, and to have a chance to talk with him briefly about some mesoscopic physics work.

Anonymous said...

Today marks another big step for humanity. To quote Seth Fletcher, from Scientific American: "It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the strangeness of nature, and the remarkable fact that these sentient, tool-using bipeds on a small world in a backwater solar system somehow managed to turn their planet into a telescope and take a picture of an exit chute from the universe."