The tricky issue of science funding in Australia, which thankfully was soon rectified (for a year or two) after this broadcast. I also got to chat about Blackholes which is far more fun but without the funding we couldn't actually study these beasts so the two issues go hand in hand.
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I managed to corner the Prime Minister for a chat about my research during Science Meets Parliament when 200 scientists descended on Canberra to learn how to talk science to the funding bodies and politicians.
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Astoundingly discovery that the moon of Jupiter known as Ganymede has more water below the surface than all of our oceans combined. Also a quick chat about science funding.
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The Sun (like most stars) didn't form alone but came with 10s - 100s of siblings are born together. Thanks to new telescopes we can track down these long-lost sibling stars and see if they too have life.
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An unusual chat setting the non-science world to rights about House of Cards (piracy) and of course aliens.
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Definitely knowing that there are aliens out there requires us to see their signals, either radio waves from TVs say or twinkling lasers from their interplanetary communications. We can even think bigger and look for Dyson Spheres glowing red hot.
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NASA launched a new spacecraft DSCOVR to monitor the Sun and warn us of impending, potentially highly damaging, solar outbursts known as Coronal Mass Ejections.
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The Beagle 2 lander remains have been discovered on Mars. I remember this launch and potential landing well, the silence from the lander was crushing. If only Colin Pillinger had lived to see its successful landing.
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My look at the awesome year that's coming ahead in space exploration for 2015. There's new things from Rosetta around Comet 67P, SpaceX landing a reusable rocket and solar storms
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My round up of the year that was in space, from methane on Mars, landing on comets, hundreds of alien worlds and more. It was a massive year in space!
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NASA is getting back into the crewed spaceflight game and although I am huge fan of SpaceX and reckon it will be the default choice for Low Earth Orbit we still need the NASA genius to get us to Mars.
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A non-science chat on the couch debating issues around the world although I managed to sneak in a discussion on AI
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I got to tell a younger audience about the fantastically exciting landing of Philae on Comet 67P.
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The first paper from the "DRAGONS" team led by Prof Stuart Wyithe, investigating how the First Galaxies formed. Using a series of hydrodynamical simulations series known as Smaug we show that the first billion years after the Big Bang is a very exciting time, with the entire universe lit by a hidden population of small galaxies that current telescopes have yet to see. Reference: Duffy, Wyithe, Mutch, Poole 2014 MNRAS 443, 3435D.
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Thanks to powerful supercomputers we can know create virtuals universes that on galaxy scales are hard to tell from reality. These then act as numerical laboratories within which we can test out new laws of physics or dark matter to see what that universe would look like.
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Accompanying a large online article on news.com.au about searching for alien worlds I recorded this little chat
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The two year anniversary of the Higgs Boson discovery meant I got to chat with AJ about what it meant and more importantly what the future holds!
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The first of a regular space round up section.
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In this paper, I analysed the ability of radio and optical (visible light) telescopes to probe the nature of Dark Energy. I showed that radio telescopes are rapidly improving in capability and although starting from a low base they will rival the best optical telescopes by the time of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). One issue is that the SKA demands such a large supercomputer that Moore's law might not get us such a machine by the time SKA is built. Reference: Duffy 2014 Annalen der Physik 526, 283D for the Special Issue "The Accelerating Universe".
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A fun chat on the couch with Michael and Virginia discussing the upcoming solar eclipse and the safest ways to view it.
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