Category: Science

The Nobel prize in Chemistry this year goes to Robert H. Grubbs (Caltech), Richard R. Schrock (MIT), and Yves Chauvin (Institut Francais du Petrole) for the development of metathesis. Massive misspelling of “Caltech” runs amok among the world’s newspapers.

Cabi’s Glasses points to a new online discussion group The Efficient Academic. What amazes me is how productive academics can be, often times in spite of their organization skills.

Strange stars:

Stars race around a black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy so fast that they could go the distance from Earth to the Moon in six minutes.
The finding, announced today, solves a mystery over the source of strange blue light coming from Andromeda’s center. But it generates a new puzzle: The stars’ phenomenal orbital velocity suggests they should never have formed in the first place.
Astronomers first spotted the blue light near Andromeda’s core in 1995. Three years later, another group determined that the light emanated from a cluster of hot, young stars. Nobody knew how many were involved.
New data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal more than 400 blue stars that formed in a burst of activity roughly 200 million years ago, astronomers said.
The stars are packed into a disk that is just 1 light-year across.
That’s amazingly compact by cosmic standards. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). The nearest star to our Sun is about 4.3 light-years away.
Unlikely setup
“The blue stars in the disk are so short-lived that it is unlikely in the long 12-billion-year history of Andromeda that such a short-lived disk would appear now,” said Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. “We think that the mechanism that formed this disk of stars probably formed other stellar disks in the past and will trigger them again in the future. We still don’t know, however, how such a disk could form in the first place. It still remains an enigma.”

The problem with science fiction is that whenever you read articles like this, and you see some strange configuration of stars in a cool locale, you immediately think…”Aliens!”

Many of you have probably already seen this. Jorge Hirsch, a physicist from UCSD, has proposed an interesting way to measure research impact of an author. For details, see this Nature article or Hirsch’s original article physics/0508025. The basic idea of Hirsh’s h-index is very simple. The index is simply the number of papers which the author has written which have more citations than this number of papers. Thus, for instance, if an author had written five papers with the following number of citations, 10, 6,4,2, and 1, then the h-index would be three because the forth most cited paper has only two citations, which is less than four, but the third most cited paper has four citations which is greater than three. The highest h-index among physicists, Hirsch claims, is Ed Witten who has an h-index of 110. This means he has written 110 papers with greater than 110 citations. Wow! Another important quantity Hirsch defines is the average rate at which an h-index has been changing per year over a career. This is just a person current h-index divided by the time since they first started publishing. Witten has an astounding value of 3.9 increase in h-index on average per year over his career. What this all means is very much open to debate, but heck, it’s kind of fun!
One thing which is nice about the h-index is it is very simple to calculate it using the ISI Web of Science citation tools or, more dangerously, from citebase. My h-index from citebase (access to Web of Science is painful from my current computer location) is 12. The funny thing is that Hirsch says that this is about the h index (with large error bars) at which one should get tenure. Haha, very funny!

New York Times: One Find, Two Astronomers: An Ethical Brawl After reading this you might want to double check the security of your local research wiki or blog.

Nature gets the best title of the day award for “Cosmic ‘cigar’ spins at astonishing pace”. Seems that Santa is a very strange object, indeed.

Over at Musings, I just learned that the Arxiv now has trackback capabilities. Now we can spend all our time that we normally spend counting citations, instead counting trackbacks!