The Perth Observatory summer lecture this year is on February 25th, at 8pm, on the lawn behind the main Observatory building, so you can come early and bring a picnic dinner or snacks.

It's being given by Professor Miller Goss, and is about Ruby Payne-Scott, and her role in early radio astronomy in Asutralia. Payne-Scott helped design and implement ( Read more... )

This blog might interest a few people out there - 'Science in my fiction'. Entries are written by a collection of scientists, SF fans and SF writers, talking about putting real science in fiction - interesting scientific tidbits that might make good stories, and aspects of science and technology that don't seem to make it into fiction very often. ( Read more... )

David McCandless (from the 'Information is Beautiful' blog) has collated a spreadsheet detailing every single instance of time travel depicted in every single Dr Who episode (old and new), and made the data public. Anyone who wants can submit corrections, or download it and attempt to turn it into a graphic depiction, similar to the one he did for ( Read more... )

It was Ada Lovelace day a couple of days ago, but here's a late entry - I'd like to mention Penny Sackett, someone I've known since 1995 when she founded what turned out to be a truly groundbreaking research project - hunting for extrasolar planets in gravitational microlensing events using a small network of 1m-class telescopes around the world.  ( Read more... )

Anyone who enjoys xkcd (www.xkcd.com) has to read this post:

http://rocketscientista.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/tuesday-tunes-i-love-the-whole-world/

First the Discovery Channel created a couple of ads with a song with a 'we love the world' theme. Then xkcd did a comic based on the ads and the song. Then there were videos and songs based on the xkcd ( Read more... )

This is the first dish in ASKAP, the other Square Kilometre Array prototype telescope being built out at Boolardy, by CSIRO. They had just poured the foundations for this dish when I was out there in December - now it's up and ready to go. It'll be joined by 35 identical dishes over the next year or two, to make ASKAP. If the full SKA goes ahead ( Read more... )

Fascinating article here on testerone levels after voting in an election - they analysed the testosterone levels of volunteers before and after the last US election. The male voters who had voted for losing candidates showed a marked drop in testosterone, but female voters showed no change in hormone levels. The same drop in testosterone is seen ( Read more... )

There's a good post here on what real space battles (and military spaceships) might actually be like, without exotic and probably impossible technology (FTL drives, etc). I've seen a lot of what he covers described elsewhere, but it's a good summary. In particular, he points out that anywhere near a star or planet, fights wouldn't be anything like ( Read more... )

I'm going to be at Astrofest all day tomorrow (Saturday Nov 28th) - it runs from 2pm-10pm, and has activities, astrophotography and art competitions, scientific talks, activities for kids, stalls, and a public lecture. In the evening there's model rocket launches, a public lecture on the demotion of Pluto from planethood, and dozens and dozens of ( Read more... )

If anyone has a spare room to rent, or needs a housesitter, from around the first week in November (for a few weeks, maybe longer), let me know. I know someone moving out here from Canberra to work on the MWA radio telescope, and he needs a place to stay while househunting ( Read more... )