The first paper by PhD student Shanti Krishnan who I co-supervise with Prof Geoff Brooks, and it’s fair to say that she has blown us all away with the level of work (and quite frankly technical brilliance) in this paper in the Journal of Instrumentation.
Shanti has designed a novel solution to detecting muons with a low-cost silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) that offers a robust, miniaturized, and cost-effective, cosmic ray detector. Pretty amazing first publication!
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One of the great strengths of the Royal Institution of Australia is our community of distinguished figures from science, education and industry, who have made this Nation better through science; we call them our Braggs. At a fancy lunch that brings together distinguished guests, former recipients and of course our new Braggs we celebrate their achievements and encourage all involved to collaborate in the hopes that a room full of brilliant will do brilliant things, both with the RiAus but also beyond it.
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Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of space, a huge fan of Apollo and a MASSIVE fan of Apollo on the biggest screen in the world. In other words, it was a complete joy getting to explain the incredible achievements that made the Moon Landing possible, as well as the film itself Apollo, to attendees at the premiere screening at IMAX Melbourne. Afterwards I was able to try and answer a few of the hundreds of attendees questions in the Q&A that really kept me on my toes..!
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Victoria's state government will contribute $5 million to build the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory.
The funding has been announced by Victoria’s state Minister for Regional Development, Jaclyn Symes, and matches the federal government’s funding commitment confirmed in April. The laboratory will be built one kilometre underground, within the Stawell Gold Mine, as a bespoke excavated cavity 30 metres long, 10 metres wide and 10 metres high. It will provide ultra-low background research facilities (free from the particles that form background radiation) needed in the ground-breaking search for dark matter.
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Published in the highly ranked ApJS and JOSS (as well as being available on arXiv for free) the “Probabilistic Regression Instrument for Simulating Models” package PRISM was a massive undertaking by my PhD student Ellert vd Velden. He built a brand-new open source MPI-capable Python package that can take ANY model from a user and map out the entire parameter space for regions that can explain the data.
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This is the last paper from the thesis of my amazing PhD student (now Dr!) Yuxiang Qin, which was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and explored the modifications to semi-analytic models that best describe the nature and impact of star formation and stellar feedback (i.e. when stars explode!) on the early galaxies. He created an entire new paradigm, with accompanying model/code, that others can incorporate into their own simulated universes. The preprint version of the paper is available freely.
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Really excited to finally share something that’s been in the works for a while, I’ll be lending my weight to a national grant program for schools to purchase cool experiments - through the OfficeMax and Winc STEAM Grant-Bot Program.
To all school teachers out there, just submit a 250 word (or less) entry before July 12 on the www.impressgrantbot.com.au site explaining why you and your school deserve to win. Smart algorithm ‘Grant-Bot’ will select the finalists (with my and leading whale researcher Dr Vanessa Pirotta’s help!) to be in the running to win their share of $50,000 worth of STEAM grants.
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This is the main collaboration paper for the dual hemisphere dark matter detector project SABRE. It outlines the various efforts underway to reduce contamination of the Sodium-Iodide crystals that react (we hope!) to colliding dark matter particles as well as an active veto system that removes background sources of radiation from our data collection.
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At nearly a quarter billion dollars (!) of cash and inkind contributions SmartSatCRC is the largest space R&D investment in Australian history. Huge congrats to all 84 partners, but in particular UniSA and Nova Systems who led this bid from an idea just 18 months ago. On a personal level it’s incredibly exciting to know that we at Swinburne will be a core partner in this incredible new CRC developing a new era of tech for space and the better monitoring of our planet.
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This is the heart of darkness.
The gravity of the blackhole is so great it casts a ‘shadow’ 2.5 times larger than itself (as defined by its event horizon) against the glowing material swirling into its maw.
That darkness is the size of the solar system but even so 6.5 billion Sun’s worth of mass crushes up pretty small when you’re a black hole.
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An exhaustive study using Monte Carlo simulation techniques into the expected ability of the prototype SABRE dark matter detector to find, well, dark matter.
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Turn your smartphone into a cosmic ray hunter with the free CREDO app! Currently available on Android (any Apple developers out there get in contact) and already with 2.5 million detections the growing userbase is helping us search for the most extreme events in the Universe. Not that this helped me with Virginia on News Breakfast who asked me some seriously tough (but as usual, brilliant) questions on the health risks of Cosmic Rays.
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We have two chances this year - on both Thursday and Friday evening the Sun sets perfectly for MelbHenge which is lucky as it’s otherwise going to be a tougher time due to poor weather for the ever-growing grassroots effort to map out the best place to view it. Remember this phenomenon of a setting Sun framed by a mile long canyon of Melbourne's skyscrapers is both awesome but also dependent on favourable weather, but you only need a brief gap in the clouds to when the Sun is so low on the horizon, so head out from 8.15pm onwards and cross your fingers.
Last year most sat on Treasury steps, looking directly at the Sun unfortunately (please please don’t do that!) but for those who enjoy the photo from their phones please share it online with your location and hashtag so Swinburne University of Technology can map out the best viewing points and let’s get this as big as Manhattenhenge!
Headline photo from last year is courtesy of Melbourne photographer Jonathan L R Reyes, find him on insta @jlrreyes or his website
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It’s fair to say I love all things space, but I have a particular fascination with developing novel uses of space to help us back on Earth. At Swinburne’s Data Science Research Institute we try to bridge the divide between discoveries in academia and their potential commercial uses in Industry. Working across the university and our data science experts to find solutions to current industry needs that can make Australia a healthier, wealthier and safer country? The next few years will be fun!
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OK two times in one week being on one of the biggest shows in the nation talking science? Amazing.
This time tried to explain the importance of NASA outsourcing the Return to the Moon to commercial aerospace companies (especially startups). It’s an exciting development but needs careful watching.
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An incredible evening interviewing Dr Megan Clark AC, Head of the Australian Space Agency, on how universities can support Space 2.0 and innovative technologies in Australia more generally, all as part of our Swinburne University of Technology research retreat.
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An insane week of astronomy meant that I was able to explain the latest astrophysics discoveries to over a million viewers with The Project - but from the desk! This is a big deal, and my nerves knew it! The live studio audience really helps ramp up the energy too..!
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Great news with the announcement that my Australian Research Council projects were funded! Huge congratulations to Dr Greg Lane of ANU and Dr Phil Urquijo of UMelb who led them (and I'll explain the science we hope to achieve with them in a bit) but while I'm delighted by my ARC funding outcomes I know that so many (too many!) of my colleagues haven't been so fortunate.
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The Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) project is turning smartphones into cosmic ray detectors, allowing a global search for extremely extended cosmic-ray phenomena, the cosmic-ray ensembles (CRE), beyond the capabilities of existing detectors and observatories.
This paper explains the incredible science opportunities with CREDO.
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Delivering they keynote address for the South Australian Science Excellence Awards is an intimidating prospect - how do you teach such a learned audience? Surely they had already heard everything I could say. Well I made the decision to lean into that, and talk about the incredible success stories of South Australia that they all should know, and how these are providing an exciting platform for the State to surge ahead through STEM in the years ahead.
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