You have to guess the student !

http://iwitness.weather.com/_Snow-at-Western-University-1/video/1818311/148597.html

The Department of Physics and Astronomy, along with The Department of Chemistry, hosted an open house of the shop facilities in the newly renovated Physics and Astronomy building on February 6, 2013.

[more images] [watch the youtube video]

The rumblings amongst the astronomy community have been large enough to rail any modern infrasound detector.

It started with the infamous ‘Physics’ neon sign.

Astronomers were forced to take precious classroom and research time in order to design their own sign. Faculty would like to apologize to any students who suffered due to slumping classroom performance by their astronomy lecturers during this period.

Now comes another slap in the face by physicists, in which this new T-shirt logo has been announced:

So, yet again, precious teaching and research time was expended in finding an appropriate response by astronomers. In the end it was decided to go straight for the jugular and make up a competing T-shirt logo.

Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, the word “Astronomy” was simply too long to place on a T-shirt, so an appropriate substitution was made for the sake of brevity and accuracy.

So, new battle lines have been drawn, and astronomers await a response.

The tradition of international pot luck lunches continued on Feb. 1, 2013. This time everyone thoroughly enjoyed the new venue, that being our new Physics and Astronomy building commons area.

There was a world-wide representation in dishes, which originated from diverse locales such as Israel, Sri Lanka, India, China, Belgium, Iran, Central America, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, and Sudbury, to name a few.

The lunch was expertly planned and implemented by Kanthi Kaluarachchi, Shailesh Nene, Lisa Tocker, and Phin Perquin.

[more images]

PhD candidate Chad Harris has been selected as a finalist for the I. I. Rabi Award in basic science of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

Chad will be given the opportunity to give both a 20 minute talk and a poster paper on his topic of “A new approach to shimming: The dynamically controlled adaptive current network.”

The winner among the finalists will be determined on the basis of the manuscript, abstract, and presentations. Finalists receive a $500.00 prize.

In case you’ve been living under a rock like me (I hear geologists asking, “What kind of rock?”).

Official video of the 75 minute glacier calving event in Greenland.

And I want to see this film about the adventures of National Geographic photographer James Balog and his crew!

Trailer for “Chasing Ice”

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/24/dung-beetles-navigate-via-the-milky-way-an-animal-kingdom-first/

The department held a fun curling night on Jan. 26, 2013. Many first time curlers came out and had a blast.

In the photo above, Ed Stokan tries his hand at delivering a stone.

[more images of curling night]

Dr. Peter Brown (right side of left inset) and the Meteor Physics group at Western will take their expertise in low frequency infrasound detection abroad, in order to help find a possible source of the so called ‘Windsor Hum’. Among the Meteor Physics group are PhD candidate Elizabeth Silber (at left in left inset), and research scientist Zbignew Krzeminski (right inset).

The Windsor Hum is a long standing ‘noise’ that has plagued a part of the Windsor, Ontario community for several years.  It has been described on Youtube.

The group from Western will work alongside engineer Dr. Colin Novak of the University of Windsor.

The announcement was made at The University of Windsor by Bob Dechert, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The Canadian federal government is funding the project.

[See it in The Western News] [CBC News] [images of the news conference]