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Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Help us help kids with just a few clicks!

Posted in Charlottesville, astronomy, book, dsbk, education, outreach, science, teaching on September 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

If you know me in person, you’ve probably heard me talk on and on about Dark Skies, Bright Kids, aka DSBK. This is an astronomy club for elementary school kids in Albemarle County, run by volunteers from the Astronomy Department at the University of Virginia. We visit a different school every semester, meeting with the [...]

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A Preventable Disease

Posted in medicine, science, skepchicks, vaccines on August 26, 2010 | 7 Comments »

Whooping cough, also known as the “100 day cough” or, more formerly, pertussis, is on the rise. You can do something right now to protect yourself from what sounds to be a really uncomfortable disease, and the youngest ones around you from contracting a disease that could be fatal. Many of us got a vaccine [...]

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Teaching… about ALIENS!

Posted in academia, astronomy, education, personal, science, teaching on August 4, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Hello! Oh, wow. Hi. Back. Or something… Um, yeah! So my month of teaching MADNESS is done. And weddings and seeing family and Tim’s family and all that good stuff is behind me. And I’m trying to get my head all back into research and such, and lots going on, plus my inbox is still [...]

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Two Weeks in the Quiet Zone…

Posted in astronomy, nrao, paper, personal, science on May 25, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Hello to those of you who haven’t given up on me ever posting here again! I’m slowly getting back to a normal schedule after spending two weeks in Green Bank, West Virginia, in the Radio Quiet Zone. What’s that, you ask? Well, I wrote a two-parter all about radio astronomy’s own version of “light pollution” [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week: Blazar

Posted in AGN, astronomy, black holes, jargon, science, superluminal on April 7, 2010 | 3 Comments »

This week’s… last week’s… aw, did I miss a week? Anyway, THIS week’s “astrojargon” has a super-fun name, and it’s a pretty fun object as well. I’m talking about blazars. This is a subclass of AGN, the jargon with which I started my series. A blazar is highly variable, very luminous, and quite polarized. (Polarization [...]

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Nan Dieter Conklin: Two Paths to Heaven’s Gate

Posted in astronomy, lovelace, science, women on March 24, 2010 | 6 Comments »

This year, for Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to celebrate women in technology and science by celebrating the life of another early pioneer of radio astronomy: Nan Dieter Conklin. (If you haven’t, check out last year’s post on Ruby Payne-Scott!) A couple of years ago, I picked up Nan’s memoirs, “Two Paths to Heaven’s Gate” [...]

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What’s the message?

Posted in education, museum, outreach, science on March 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

This past weekend, I batted my eyelashes at Tim to go to the Hayden Planetarium with me once I discovered it was a few blocks away from a wedding we were attending. We took all of Saturday afternoon to catch the latest planetarium show and browse the rest of the American Museum of Natural History. [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week – AGN

Posted in AGN, astronomy, black holes, jargon, science on March 7, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Jeffrey Bennett, astronomer and author, once told us that a typical astronomy textbook has about as many vocabulary words as a typical foreign language textbook. So, in addition to teaching physical and astronomical concepts, we’re teaching a whole new language! Jargon is incredibly useful for making detailed communication within a specific field efficient and convenient, [...]

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Science Meets Art – “Poetry of Reality”

Posted in Dawkins, Sagan, art, music, science on February 28, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Symphony of Science has done it again… Wow. Yeah, what they said. Don’t forget to check out the first four: A Glorious Dawn, We Are All Connected, Our Place in the Cosmos, and The Unbroken Thread. (via Bad Astronomy)

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SDO and Space Weather

Posted in astronomy, paper, science, space, sun on February 20, 2010 | 3 Comments »

The Solar Dynamics Observatory launched last week for the thrilled scientists and engineers who have worked for years on this mission, some happy #SDOisGO TweetUp participants, and countless other space fans around the world. (The who? The wha? Oh, pretty!) LEGO SDO, designed by spectacular SpaceTweep John Knight SDO’s EVE instrument (Extreme-ultraviolet Variability Experiment) is [...]

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