“Not all discoveries come from new observations,” says Pete Worden, in a comment referring to original thinking as applied to an existing dataset. Worden is executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives program, which includes Breakthrough Listen, an ambitious attempt to use SETI techniques to search for signs of technological activity in the universe. Note that last word: The targets Breakthrough Listen examines do extend to about one million stars in the...
Read the new Scientitic American blog entry by Avi Loeb,
"Progress in science is sometimes triggered by surprises. Data collection resembles gathering of new pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and placing them together. Sometimes one of the pieces does not quite fit. It is natural for scientists to instinctively argue that such a piece does not belong; perhaps it is an artifact driven by uncertainties in the data or a misinterpretation of the experiment."
"Interstellar distances are vast. It takes light four years and three months to cross the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which hosts a habitable planet, Proxima b."
Essay written by Avie Loeb for Scientific American, "They’re nurtured by informal dialogues in environments where mistakes are tolerated and critical thinking is encouraged"... Read more about Where Do Ideas Come from?
Second year graduate student Juliana Garcia-Mejia traveled to her hometown, Medellín, to participate of Clubes de Ciencia (translation: Science Clubs), Colombia. Clubes de Ciencia is a non-profit organization founded in 2014 by a group of graduate students and postdocs from Harvard’s MCB & CCB departments and medical school. Read her first hand account of the trip.
"Atronomers are proposing a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the universe: It is possible that a fraction of dark matter particles may have a tiny electrical charge."
At the annual Awards Ceremony for the Department of Astronomy Edo Berger presented Leo Goldberg prizes for excellence in a senior thesis to Danielle Frostig,graduating senior.
Edo Berger also presented the Leo Goldberg prize for excellence in a senior thesis to Eden Girma. Eden is also a recipient of a University Hoopes Prize for the project entitled “Astrometric Detection of Intermediate Mass Black Holes.”
