Astrophysics news, demographics, and Saha
There's a big announcement scheduled for Monday at 10:00 EDT (14:00 GMT) from the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave collaborations, alongside "some 70 observatories". There's a livestream available -- it promises to be pretty exciting!
The other exciting news this week is an announcement about "missing matter". From cosmological models, we can predict the density of regular (not "dark") matter in the universe. However, if you just count the stars and galaxies we see, that gives only about half the predicted amount: the rest has now been confirmed as hot diffuse gas in tendrils between galaxies. Two teams, based in Orsay and Edinburgh, successfully found correlations between instances of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in CMB maps and pairs of galaxies in the SDSS galaxy catalog.
I happened across this biography of Saha, the Indian astrophysicist, this week. It's a great portrait of a man who saw science as a tool for improving the lives of his compatriots in a decolonizing society.
An essential paper by Kanim and Cid looks at the demographics of PER research participants. They find that our research significantly over-samples universities with wealthier and less-diverse populations and stronger math preparation. It's a fascinating and important read.
We know that students' expert-like attitudes toward science typically decrease during regular physics courses, as measured using the CLASS assessment. Robertson and Daane report that a summer PD course for primary and secondary science teachers significantly increased expert-like attitudes. The course seems to focus heavily on the development of a model for thinking about energy.
This week's #iteachphysics chat focused on the question of leadership for K12 physics educators. Some interesting ideas emerged, including leadership opportunities like contacting your local representative to offer to be a science advisor or getting involved with organizations like the AAPT. There were issues, too, like lack of time and question of whether principals with a science background are able to help out.
Some more great ideas on twitter this week, including this nerf gun projectile motion practical from Dan Burns, Marta Stoeckel's approach to posting daily objectives when the goal is discovering something new, Nicole Murawski's matchbox car jump, Brian Monson's resonance demo on a kinematics track, and Pivot Interactives, who have finally done the Ruben's Tube.
Lastly, I want to note that often I'll be a couple weeks behind the publication dates for some papers. This is because I've decided to contact the authors of paywalled papers to try to get them to upload preprints or accepted manuscripts to personal websites, so that I can link only to freely-available sources. However, access rights frequently change and I make mistakes, so please let me know if any of the links are not accessible to you. Thanks for reading!
The other exciting news this week is an announcement about "missing matter". From cosmological models, we can predict the density of regular (not "dark") matter in the universe. However, if you just count the stars and galaxies we see, that gives only about half the predicted amount: the rest has now been confirmed as hot diffuse gas in tendrils between galaxies. Two teams, based in Orsay and Edinburgh, successfully found correlations between instances of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in CMB maps and pairs of galaxies in the SDSS galaxy catalog.
I happened across this biography of Saha, the Indian astrophysicist, this week. It's a great portrait of a man who saw science as a tool for improving the lives of his compatriots in a decolonizing society.
An essential paper by Kanim and Cid looks at the demographics of PER research participants. They find that our research significantly over-samples universities with wealthier and less-diverse populations and stronger math preparation. It's a fascinating and important read.
We know that students' expert-like attitudes toward science typically decrease during regular physics courses, as measured using the CLASS assessment. Robertson and Daane report that a summer PD course for primary and secondary science teachers significantly increased expert-like attitudes. The course seems to focus heavily on the development of a model for thinking about energy.
This week's #iteachphysics chat focused on the question of leadership for K12 physics educators. Some interesting ideas emerged, including leadership opportunities like contacting your local representative to offer to be a science advisor or getting involved with organizations like the AAPT. There were issues, too, like lack of time and question of whether principals with a science background are able to help out.
Some more great ideas on twitter this week, including this nerf gun projectile motion practical from Dan Burns, Marta Stoeckel's approach to posting daily objectives when the goal is discovering something new, Nicole Murawski's matchbox car jump, Brian Monson's resonance demo on a kinematics track, and Pivot Interactives, who have finally done the Ruben's Tube.
Lastly, I want to note that often I'll be a couple weeks behind the publication dates for some papers. This is because I've decided to contact the authors of paywalled papers to try to get them to upload preprints or accepted manuscripts to personal websites, so that I can link only to freely-available sources. However, access rights frequently change and I make mistakes, so please let me know if any of the links are not accessible to you. Thanks for reading!