A brief personal update as to what I have been doing.  There has been much interesting science news to discuss.   A possible galaxy comprised of not much more than gas and dark matter with no stars. Many other things in astronomy and physics.  Things I might normally write about.  So why haven't I?  Well, I am getting on with the day-to-day work of being a low level academic and scientist. 

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life is valid?  In 2014 I used the planet Kepler 186f as an object for discussing this very question.  First of all, at best we can know the odds that a given planet has life.  We can't be 100% certain until we get a sample and if that planet is around another star, then it'll take a while.   What we can do is roughly estimate the odds based on three primary lines of evidence.  These three types of evidence are things anyone can understand and assess based on the output of professional scientists.  You need not know how to analyze the data, but any scientist claiming to have found alien life on planet X needs to be able to claim to have

Last week it was claimed that a material that would be superconducting at  normal pressure has been found.  This substance known as LK-99 was alleged to be superconducting at normal atmospheric pressure and "room temperatures.  This would mean being able to say, make a superconducting power grid that could transport electricity without loss, or cheap superconducting magnets for maglev vehicles or particle accelerators etc. Since writing this story more than one team has reproduced the diamagnetic looking effect in which samples of LK-99, both big and small, all lean to one side in a characteristic way. The sought for Meissner effect would not do that, at least not in a way that is the same no matter how big the sample is.

What are gravitational waves? What are Pulsars and what does it mean to time a pulsar? How does this relate to past and future observations of gravitational waves? These are all fundamental questions to ask and this article seeks to answer them in simple and easy-to-understand terms for a general audience.

The UK Daily Mail published a story with the misleading headline “Humans DID live with dinosaurs…” The story then talks about placental mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs. This shows a lack of basic knowledge by the writer, the editors and anyone else involved in the story. Placental mammals are not humans. They are a large group of mammals that give birth to fully developed offspring. These ancestors were not human 65 million years ago or even 6 million years ago. They were not even primates, which had not evolved yet. The closest relatives of humans in the Cretaceous period were small, shrew-like animals. Some other branches of mammals were larger, like cats or dogs.

Most if not all deep submergence vehicles that take people to the deepest parts of the ocean have a spherical pressure hull, not a cylinder. There is a simple reason for this: symmetry. The spherical symmetry of these crafts ensures that the pressure and forces will distribute in a way that causes, as much as possible, the cancellation of the forces acting on the hull. Ocean Gate’s Titan being a cylinder with two hemispherical end caps, one under the pointed fairing, violated this principle to an extent. The curved cylinder does have this same effect going on… but not to the same extent as a spherical shape. Carbon fiber vehicles have been made as pressure vessels for holding in 1 atmosphere of pressure against very low outside pressures.