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About Dr Helen Klus
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Blog postThe Royal Astronomical Society is a society in London that represents astronomers and geophysicists. Women were not allowed to become Fellows until 1916, yet made substantial contributions from the beginning. You can find more about this on a thread created by Royal Astronomical Society for Women’s History Month.
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Blog postHomophobia, transphobia, and sexism may all stem from the idea that people can be easily categorised. If there are only two genders that can be identified from birth, and everyone with the same gender acts the same way, then a world of 7 billion people seems less daunting. This is a childish fantasy. People from cultures all around the world have identified as genders other than male and female, as genders other than their sex, and as sexualities other than straight throughout recorded history.
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Blog postScientists have found thousands of planets outside of the Solar System, many of which are thought to be habitable. The next step is to search for signs of life.
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Blog postScientists at Harvard University have recently suggested that intelligent life forms in another galaxy may have used interstellar spacecraft billions of years ago. Their paper, co-authored by Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb and entitled ‘Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails', has just been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Blog postCrystals are objects with atoms that are arranged periodically. This can be seen on a large scale as they form natural cubes, triangles, or more complex symmetrical shapes like snowflakes.
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Blog postA theory will never become a law; theories and laws are two separate things. Both have been thoroughly tested, and so both are often referred to as facts.
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Blog postIn the 20th Century, most people thought that all dinosaurs were lizard-like and extinct. We now know that dinosaurs are not lizards and that birds are a type of dinosaur. Scientists now refer to modern birds as avian dinosaurs and to extinct dinosaurs as non-avian dinosaurs, many of which had feathers and beaks.
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Blog postIn November 2016, NASA officially announced that they've tested British engineer Roger Shawyer's controversial spaceship engine known as the EM Drive. They found that it appears to work, despite the fact that it appears to contradict the conservation of momentum, making it as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.
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Blog postIn a paper published in MNRAS in June 2016, astronomers David Kipping and Alex Teachey showed how we could cloak the Earth using lasers. We could also do the opposite, and use lasers to broadcast our presence. If we can do this, then presumably any other intelligent, technologically advanced species can do this too.
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Blog postIn the 1960s, science journalism in the United States was sparse and mostly performed by journalists with little or no scientific background. Science was perceived as minimising the need for pseudoscience, but it didn't fill the spiritual void this left in people. Eugenics and nuclear warfare had shown how scientific progress can lead to destruction, and science did not seem to offer hope for humanity. These problems were challenged by American astronomer Carl Sagan.
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Blog postOver 180 impact craters have been identified on Earth, and most of these were discovered in the first half of the 20th century. Impacts have been associated with mass extinction events since the 1980s, with strong evidence coming from the Chicxulub Crater, which was linked to the extinction of most of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.
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Blog postIn November 2015, a team of scientists led by Sjoert van Velzen of Johns Hopkins University and Gemma Anderson of ICRAR (the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research) in Perth discovered what happens when a supermassive black hole devours a star.
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Blog postOur understanding of planets has increased dramatically in the last decade, particularly since the launch of NASA's Kepler satellite in 2009. This has resulted in the detection of thousands of extra-solar planets, and led to a better understanding of how planets form.
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Blog postIn September 2015, NASA announced that they've found evidence of liquid water currently flowing on Mars. This began with the discovery of dark streaks on the sides of several craters. These are up to a few hundred meters long, and appear seasonally.
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Blog postMany scientists used to think that there are only two genders, male and female, and that a person's gender can be solely determined from their genitals or chromosomes. We now know that this is not the case. While a person's sex can, by definition, be determined from their genitals or chromosomes, gender is much more complex than this.
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Blog postIn June 2015, a team of software engineers working for Google released images created by programs designed for image recognition software. Image recognition software works by using artificial neural networks, which attempt to mimic neural networks in the brain. Information is input, artificial neurons process the image, and the identification is output.
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Blog postEverything with mass produces a gravitational field, which causes things to accelerate towards it. The gravity on the surface of the Earth is about 9.8 ms-2, which is often referred to as 1 g. This is just high enough to keep us from falling off the surface and drifting into space, but low enough to allow us to jump up and down.
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Blog postScientists often utilise the same tools as artists to record or illustrate their ideas. They may create computer-generated images to use in academic papers, animations to show during presentations, or models to educate the public, and scientific organisations and agencies often employ artists to do this for them.
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Blog postScience has a massive impact on everyone. How we teach it, and what we decide to fund, can literally have life and death consequences for millions of people. This means it's vital that everyone has a good understanding of what science is and how it affects them.
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Blog postIn April 2014, scientists in South Korea and the United States announced that they had cloned a human embryo, which could have developed into a foetus if it had been implanted into a surrogate mother. Cloning is the process of producing genetically identical individuals. This happens naturally in all asexual reproduction and in sexual reproduction when identical siblings are born.
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Blog postIn February 2014, science educator Bill Nye debated young-Earth creationist Ken Ham on the topic of whether the literal interpretation of Genesis is a viable model for the origin of the universe. At first glance, this debate may seem strange and pointless, Ham is free to believe whatever he wants, as everyone should be, and science and religion are not in obvious conflict.
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Blog postFor the last two years, I have been researching neutron stars at the University of Southampton, supervised by Professor Malcolm Coe and Dr Wynn Ho, and we have recently made a surprising discovery. Neutron stars are the most magnetic objects in the universe, with some having magnetic fields so high that quantum behaviour comes into effect.
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Blog postBefore construction began on the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1954, the atom was known to be composed of electrons (an elementary particle, and a type of lepton), and a nucleus containing neutrons and protons (which are hadrons, particles now known to be made of smaller particles called quarks and gluons), and all of these particles were thought to have an antimatter partner.
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Blog postWomen are massively under-represented in physics and other STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects at all levels. A report by the Institute of Physics, using data from 2011, showed that 46% of schools in the UK had no girls continue to study physics after the age of 16.
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Blog postJune 18th 2012 marks half a century since the first X-ray source was discovered outside of the Solar System. This began a race to map the X-ray sky, leading to the discovery of the most extreme objects in the universe.
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Blog postWhile there's no single accepted definition of science fiction, science fiction usually deals with worlds that differ from our own as the result of new scientific discoveries, new technologies, or different social systems. It then looks at the consequences of this change.
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Blog postScience has disproved many specific aspects of religious texts, if they are to be taken literally. The fact that the Earth is significantly older than the Bible suggests has been generally accepted since the end of the 19th century.
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Blog postThe desire to explore our surroundings is part of human nature. It's that which drove our ancestors to leave Africa tens of thousands of years ago, walking across continents, and traversing unmapped oceans in simple rafts.
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Blog postIn August 2011, physicists working in the UK and Canada found evidence that there may be universes beyond our own. Their research, co-authored by Stephen M. Feeney, Matthew C. Johnson, Daniel J. Mortlock, and Hiranya V. Peiris, is to be published in Physical Review D.
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Blog postThere's evidence that prehistoric people understood simple mathematics, as well as astronomy. The oldest evidence comes from the Lebombo bone, which is about 37,000 years old and was found in Swaziland.
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Blog postIn April 2011, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), announced that if they've not discovered the Higgs boson by the end of 2012, then physicists should give up on finding it and reconsider the standard model of particle physics.
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Blog postLast week, the Space Shuttle Endeavour left Earth for the final time, carrying banana spiders and fruit flies to the International Space Station. They are the latest in a long line of animal astronauts. Literally thousands of animals have been to space, including 32 monkeys, two cats, and at least 27 dogs.
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Blog postThe penultimate Space Shuttle mission is due to launch on the 16th May, and will transport a device known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS-02, to the International Space Station. The AMS-02 is designed to identify cosmic rays, high-energy particles that originate from space.
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Blog postIt may seem obvious that we can't remember the future because it hasn't happened yet, but this cannot be all there is to it.
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Blog postApril 24th 2011 marks the 21st anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA has released a new image to mark the occasion. This shows the interaction of spiral galaxy UGC 1810 with its companion UGC 1813. The success of the HST took decades of persistence and hard work.
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Blog postIt's now been over 50 years since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to space. On 12th April 1961, Gagarin spent 108 minutes orbiting the Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, before safely landing back on Earth.
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