[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News.]

Today’s selections all seem to show us a glimpse of awesome new technology in a bright if distant future.

The shrinking magnetic storage devices story made some waves in the media, but not all stories got the science right. On All that matters Joerg Heber sets the record straight, and describes really nicely why this work should excite us.

Char’s Basal Science post on glow in the dark materials reminded me of the disappointingly faint glowing stars I once decorated my bedroom with. The science behind the phenomenon is pretty cool though, and the newly developed long-duration phosphorescent material he describes holds promise for exciting future applications.

How much water could we save if we could clean our clothes by just leaving them out in the sun for a few hours? Also on Basal Science, Cath talks about new developments in the quest for self-cleaning fabrics.

Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Monday with more picks.

In recent years the E-ELT project, Europe’s flagship next-generation optical observatory, seems to have gone from strength to strength: in 2010-2011, ESO Council officially gave the green light to the baseline technical design of the telescope (with the primary mirror slightly reduced in size), several member countries pledged their support for the project, others announced substantial investments into the development of hardware and instrumentation, and crucially, membership fees from giant new member state Brazil looked set to provide a major boost to the project’s financial coffers.

But apparently the E-ELT has hit a snag. This article in Brazilian publication Veja talks about Brazil’s failure to ratify the accession to ESO and support for the E-ELT project because of financial difficulties in 2011. Although an agreement was signed between ESO and the then science minister of Brazil in December 2010, Brazil’s parliament has yet to give its approval. Since then, Brazil’s been through general elections, and the new science minister hasn’t been forthcoming in continuing this approval process.

As Brazil’s contribution to ESO is crucial for the project to go ahead as long as no other new members join, the European members’ governments cannot now commit until Brazil formally comes into the club, and the project has been put on hold. ESO Director-General Tim De Zeeuw made some strong statements to the press about Brazil dragging its feet on the ratification, saying that the current accession conditions cannot be guaranteed beyond mid-2012, and new countries are lines up to join ESO if Brazil drop out. The article lists Australia, Israel, Russia, Poland and Estonia as potential new members.

An awkward point is that following the initial agreement in late 2010, Brazilian astronomers were already given full access to ESO telescope time. If Brazil now fail to ratify their accession, that privilege may be revoked again. That would be a big shame for their observers, who may have already planned multi-semester projects on ESO’s telescopes.

I can imagine that ESO really (really!) don’t want to start having negotiations with new member states at this point, as that’s likely to set the project back even further. Meanwhile the instrumentation community in Europe is working hard to keep the instrumentation projects for the new telescope alive, funded and staffed before getting the go ahead for the next phase of development.  I hope it happens soon!

Thanks to friendly Portuguese colleague Elisabete da Cunha for translating the article.

Image: Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ESO

This past week the UK collectively discovered its love for stargazing with the help of the BBC and a whole lot of keen astronomers. Professionals and amateurs took part in Stargazing events all over the country, and even more watched along on TV. 3.8 million of them, apparently, which is amazing.

Lots of my on- and offline friends and colleagues were on the air, and I was really disappointed I couldn’t watch, as I’m abroad and no TV. Some years ago I spent a summer at the BBC working on a similar programme (yes, I even met Brian Cox) and I have a lot of fun memories from that time. But anyway, I hope lots of you enjoyed watching or taking part, whether you’re an old hand in the business or an astro-newbie.

Planethunters, Milky Way Project‘s cousin in the Zooniverse family, got some special attention, as new volunteers signed up in droves to carry out almost 1.1 million new classifications in 48 hours. As a result, the Planethunters team were able to announce the discovery of a potential new exoplanet by a Stargazing viewer.

This great little video’s been doing the rounds on the interwebs, created on the back of BBC Stargazing, showing how and why we simulate galaxies. It was created by Oxford astronomer Andrew Pontzen, who featured on the programme.

Maybe one day I’ll work at one of these great institutes and hang out in its gorgeous library.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News.]

In astronomy the talk is all of exoplanets at the moment, but it’s good to remember our own Solar System is just as weird and wonderful as these new foreign worlds. On Basic Space, Kelly Oakes talks about new weather models on Titan. Cloudy with a chance of methane!

It’s a beautiful game that transcends politics, class and conflict – or so we like to think. Scientists in Japan, however, see football as “a competitive relationship between two cooperative networks“. So there. On Science Left Untitled, Charles describes this interesting new study of the network dynamics of football.

Wait, what was I saying about exoplanets again? The latest story to emerge last week was that our Galaxy may well contain more planets than stars, which is quite an amazing claim. Greg Fish dissects the paper and its methods on weird things.

That’s all for the week! I’ll be back next Monday with more physical sciences picks.

It’s been a busy week for the Milky Way Project team, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Several of us are at the AAS conference in Austin, TX, and we’ve spent much time talking about the next steps for our project, and follow-up studies to get started with using our first data release.

Back at Zoo HQ in Oxford, Rob Simpson finalised the revisions to the paper and resubmitted it to the journal (MNRAS), where it will hopefully be accepted very shortly.

We took advantage of the big media presence here in Texas to chat to Jason Palmer, Science Reporter for the BBC. This has resulted in a really nice piece on BBC today describing the project and its first results. Science teamer Eli Bressert provided some snappy quotes too.

I’ll write a little more about the science once the paper is posted to astro-ph. For now I can say that Milky Way Project has been brilliant to work on from the very start, and I’m really thankful to my great collaborators and of course to all the volunteers who donated their time and eyes for our study.

Click to enlarge!

I’ve spent so much time recently looking at infrared images from the large Spitzer surveys GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL for Milky Way Project, that I sometimes forget there’s a new infrared space telescope on the block. WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is a 40-cm telescope launched just over 2 years ago in December 2009, that’s been quietly imaging the entire sky from 3 to 25 microns. Although it’s a little smaller than Spitzer, its images are stunning and the survey will give us a cool new reference atlas of the sky at infrared wavelengths.

This great image was released at AAS today, showing a portion of the galactic plane in 4 infrared bands not unlike those we use in 3-colour Spitzer images: blue represents 3.4 µm, cyan 4.6 µm, green 12 µm and red 22 µm. Can you see the bubbles?

This particular version of the image is annotated with the names of the nebulae and star forming regions, and traces of nearby constellations.  More versions of the image and a detailed caption on the WISE webpages.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

This week I’m at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, TX. I’m excited to be here for a number of reasons, first and foremost that I’ve never been to a AAS meeting before. It’s one of the biggest gatherings of astronomers, so there’s lots of people to meet, including some old friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while. And of course there’s the talks, the posters, and the wonderful city of Austin:

I’m planning to organise a meet-up for DotAstronomy alumnae/i and enthusiasts this evening, so keep an eye on twitter for details of that.

As always there’s a big media presence at AAS so expect some astronomy stories in the papers and online this week. AAS have a list of blogs and twitter accounts covering the meeting (mine’s not on there but if I hear interesting talks I’ll certainly write something about it). I’ve had lots of discussions recently about science reporting, peer review, blogging and such, so I was interested to read Blogging & Tweeting guidelines in the printed programme. A few selections:

[...] Please do not publicly report private conversations – only scheduled presentations and public comments are fair game for blogging, tweeting, etc.

Remember that many presentations at AAS meetings concern work that has not yet been peer reviewed. So think twice before posting a blog entry or tweet that is critical of such work. It is helpful to receive constructive criticism during the Q&A after your talk or while standing next to your poster, but it is hurtful to be raked over the coals online before your session is even over and with no easy way to respond. [...]

That’s quite sensible really – it’s not trying to stop people from writing or commenting, just to be balanced, fair and take the status of the work into account. There’s also an embargo policy for the meeting:

When meeting abstracts are available publicly, either electronically or in print, they are not embargoed.Abstracts reflect the situation at the time of submission and often do not correspond exactly to the paper that is ultimately presented, usually months later. Reporters should note that preparing a story based exclusively on an abstract is ill-advised.Some results to be presented at AAS or Division meetings are also the subject of papers whose manuscripts are available via preprint servers such as arXiv.org or that have already been published in scholarly journals. Such publicly available results are not embargoed.Interviews with presenters, as well as graphics, animations, and other information to be presented for the first time at the meeting, are embargoed until the time of presentation, where “time of presentation” means the start time of the oral or poster session in which the paper will be given, or the start time of the corresponding press conference (if any), whichever comes first.For more information, see http://aas.org/press/embargo_policy.

If you’re a blogger/twitter friend, please come say hello!

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News.]

Happy New Year! It’s my pleasure to write up the first batch of Editor’s Selections for 2012.

Embeddable sensors are a really neat application of carbon nanotubes. I really enjoyed this post by Cath on Basal Science Clarified, describing the development of skin-like sensors made from carbon nanotubes for medical applications.

In astronomy we talk a lot about sharing and referencing code with our research, and it’s a hot topic in biology apparently too. This post on The Curious Wavefunction talks about reproducibility in computational modeling, and how modeling results can be validated to avoid reproducibility problems.

Are famous musicians really at a higher risk of dying at the age of 27 than the rest of us? On Salamander Hours, Arielle describes a paper that performs a retrospective study of UK #1 album artists, to investigate the myth or reality of the “27 Club”. This paper has informative histograms, music and actual muppets – what’s not to love?

On that note, I’d like to wish you all a fabulous year full of love, good health and science. I’ll be back next week with more selections.

Lovejoy was also visible for us Earth-dwellers, and I found some great pictures on Flickr. This one is a particular favourite, taken just yesterday in rural Argentina by user lrargerich.

And with that I’d like to wish you all lots of love & joy for the festive season!