Learn One Thing A Day

Once a day a remarkable event is observed in the universe: a gamma ray burst (GRB)! Gamma Ray Bursts  are collimated energy sources which last from seconds to several hours and having the same energy content our Sun has released in 10 Billions of years!!! Just think about! Are you not impressed? What's wrong with you? (This artist’s impression of a gamma-ray burst shows the two intense beams of relativistic matter emitted by the black hole. To be visible from Earth, the beams must be pointing directly towards us. (Image: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones) source: universetoday.com ) What does originate a GRB? Even if these events were discovered in the last '60 no-one knows for sure how they originate. The best guess is that they come from the collapse of very massive stars. This is also supported by the fact that the GRBs observed until now have been originated in distant galaxies rich in highly massive stars. All GRBs observed to date have o...

Have you ever wandered why do we draw Stars as Star-shaped objects instead, let's say, just dots? The short answer is ...  the light diffraction through small imperfections in our eyes. The long answer is ... provided by the beautiful video from MinutePhysics ... (totally worth to watch!!!)

(source: www.agefotostock.com ) "You need a love of the idea of physics and a love of doing physics -- and they are not the same thing. Try not only to read papers but also to visit labs to see what doing research means in the different fields. It is better not to choose the same thing as everyone else. If you are becoming a physicist, try to resist the increasing tendency toward aggressive competition among individuals. Research is a very demanding activity, but perhaps the best success may be achieved by a right balance: between your involvement in personal as well as collective research efforts, personal and family life, and your responsibility as a scientist and a citizen in society." Hélène Langevin-Joliot (1927) is a French nuclear physicist and also known for her work in actively encouraging women to pursue careers in scientific fields. Daughter of  Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) and Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900-1958) and granddaughter of...

Today I dediced to write about John Bardeen (1908 - 1991) [1] , brilliant American Physicist. Up to the moment, he is the only person who has ever won the Nobel Prize in Physics, twice!!! The first time in 1956 together with  William Schockley (1910 - 1989) and Walter Brattain (1902 - 1987) for the invention of the transistor (that simply revolutionized the electronic industry!!!) ... (Image from http://www.nobelprize.org/ ) ... and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper (born 1930 - ) and John Robert Schrieffer (born 1931) for the theory of conventional supercoductivity, known ad BCS theory (from their intitials). (Image from http://cerncourier.com/ ) About John Bardeen there is a very funny anectode, that I heard the first time from one of my Physics Teacher at the University. The first time that Bardeen received the Nobel Prize, at the ceremony in Stockholm he brought only one of his three children. A pretty unsual thing, since you would b...

Last update  April, 8th, 2018 After the post about ebooks , I have thought you may be interested on academic papers too and here I am! :) THANKS for your contributions to this post! On the subject education, there is also a new post about the free university courses you can attend online, for free!!! Anyway, if you are a PhD student or a researcher you need to download and study other people's scientific works. For most journals (the most important ones) your institution should have already a subscription. However you'll probably have already experienced that sometimes, you need a paper you cannot download through your institution, pretty annoying eh? So... how can you solve this problem? Where can you download research papers for free? Where to find free scientific journal articles? How to get that f*ck*ng full-text pdf? Are there alternatives to sci-hub ? Yes, just read below! By the way, is sci-hub down? NO, once again, just read below! I will...