Many animals have been put into space. Here I list my favourite space critters, including the Orbiting Frogs for which this very blog is named.

Originally posted in August 2007.

There was a New Scientist feature last week on Boltzmann Brains. Now I hadn’t heard of these before, and so I thought it may be worth a blog post. A Blotzmann Brain is an intelligent, self-aware entity which arises as the result of a random fluctuation in…

If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built…

Following last week’s open letter to the AQA, Wellington Grey has posted on his blog to thank everyone for their support. It seems he had quite a response, being linked from digg, reddit and boingboing. He has followed it up with two things.

The first is an online petition, which Wellington…

Wellington Grey is a guy I just read about on BoingBoing. He is a physics teacher in the UK who is currently very irked by the teaching of his subject (I agree) and on the side he makes fun diagrams, including the recent WiFi will kill yours babies one.

Not…

The Darwin Lecture for the National Astronomy Meeting 2007 was given by Dr. Reinhard Genzel. He spoke about the black hole which sits at the centre of the Milky Way, our own galaxy.

Early infrared astronomy showed very fast motions in the central mass of the galaxy. 20 years later…

I know this is literally yesterday’s news but here is my take on the story anyway. Researchers using the ESO 3.6m telescope in Chile have analysed the wobble of a star known as Gliese 581 (centre of starfield below). This star is about 20 light years away. Previously, a Neptune-like planet…

These days we’ve all seen pictures of other worlds in stunning detail. We are familiar with pictures of the Moon and of the Earth and well know that the circles we see online and on paper are really globes, floating around in outer space. Now NASA’s STEREO mission to observe the…

The image above shows the Bullet Cluster. Also known as 1E 0657-56, this is a pair of clusters of galaxies some 3.4 billion light years away. As Jon Davies told us in yesterday’s Astrolunch meeting however: you should be careful about believing everything you see. This image is not a regular photograph…

Day two of the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting was very good. It started with two excellent talks given by two excellent speakers. It ended with drinks and dancing at Preston’s National football Museum (odd venue choice, in my opinion).

The day began with a talk titled ‘50 Years of Nucleosynthesis’…

I don’t speak Welsh but assume this says something like ‘daffodil that was frozen in nitrogen and then crushed during first year physics lab’. I know that because I crushed and froze it myself and this photo was taken by…

So I got my PhD in Cardiff and formally accepted it today. good news, yay etc. I am very excited and have made myself a little something to get me more excited still about one day being an astronomer man.

In the end I received offers from both Cardiff and Exeter…