The Sun: Our own backyard plasma laboratory

The cosmic web in our own backyard.

On the largest scales, matter is strung out on an intricate pattern known as the cosmic web. The tendrils of this web should reach right into our own cosmic backyard, lacing the Galactic halo with lumps of dark matter. The search for these lumps, lit up by stars that formed within them, is a major astronomical endeavor, although it has failed to find the huge expected population. Is this a dark...

Not in our backyard

A year ago, biofuel was a buzzword, a reasonable technical solution to many of our environmental problems. Politicians across the European Union and in North America were busy setting targets, deciding what percentage of transport fuels should be replaced by biofuels by what time. The corn-ethanol industry in the US went into overdrive, and many governments in the developing world set up fuel c...

Our Sun: the Nearest Star

Making Our Own Luck

QuickCheck-style property-based random testing [4] requires efficient generators for well-distributed random data satisfying complex logical predicates. Writing such generators by hand can be difficult and error prone. We propose a domain-specific language, Luck, in which generators are expressed by decorating predicates with lightweight annotations controlling both the distribution of generate...

Working with international populations--abroad or in your own backyard.

T their careers, many family physicians may have an opportunity to exercise their interest in global health by getting away from their current practice lives, if only for a short period of time, and practicing elsewhere. They may be nudged on by a new generation of students and residents, many of whom already have had considerable experience working and traveling in other countries and are look...