Love this blog! Even with it though, I've been lacking a lot of science on my dash. Are there any science-y, especially chemistry related blogs you could recommend? Thank you :)
Hello! Thank you very much! :)
Some really good blogs I could recommend are Nanodash (lovely physicists who don’t just specialise in physics), ThatScienceGuy (general science), SciUniverse is an excellent blog (general science), txchnologist (technology and science), Explosionsoflife (biology) and the best chem blog I know of is thecraftychemist. :)
There are just too many good science blogs than I can name off the top of my head, though!
Shout out to the awesome folks at the Txchnologist for creating this incredible retro Voyager 1 poster! It's going to look great framed and hung in the office!
Their blog is great to follow, too, as it talks about a lot of up-and-coming technological innovations and scientific progress!
Bubbles at the Edge of Space: Merav Opher Is Changing Astrophysics
By Txchnologist Editor
In the yellowing photograph from the late 1970s, two twin girls, their astronomer father, and a young friend stand beneath the dish of a radio telescope outside São Paulo, smiling and waving at the camera. At a NASA press conference last year, the physicist Merav Opher, who had been one of the twin sisters in the picture, shared it to convey—with her typical exuberance—how deep her passions for space science run. Not long before the photo was taken, the two Voyager spacecraft had embarked on their long journeys past Jupiter, Saturn, and the other giant planets. Today, that little girl from Brazil has grown up and used data from those probes to revolutionize concepts about the edge of the solar system.
“The edge of the solar system” is more than a turn of phrase. A tenuous, invisible wind of ionized gas billows off the sun at a million miles per hour, carrying with it the sun’s magnetic field. It does not radiate out infinitely: far beyond Pluto’s orbit, this solar wind abruptly slams into the thin interstellar medium and the scattered gaseous remnants of exploded stars. That border defines what astronomers call the heliosphere.
Just a few years ago, Opher played a key role in explaining why the heliosphere is unexpectedly lopsided and off-kilter. Now an assistant professor in Boston University’s astronomy department, Opher is interpeting data that suggests that part of the heliosphere’s edge may be a churning magnetic froth, which could have broad implications for astrophysics.
“She’s had a huge impact on this outer heliosphere field,” remarks James F. Drake of the University of Maryland, a physicist who collaborated with Opher on the most recent work. “When she was starting out, most people didn’t really think the interstellar magnetic field itself did much. I think Merav played a lead role in convincing people.”
That description might have gratified Opher’s parents. “They raised us to think, ‘If you’re going to work in any field, just make a mark,” she recalls. “‘Really try to do something that matters.’"
New York-Haifa-São Paulo
Merav and her fraternal twin sister Michal were born in 1970 to a pair of expatriate New Yorkers living in Haifa, Israel. Her father, Reuven Opher, was at that time an astrophysicist at the University of Technion. Yet a sabbatical to Brazil led to her father falling in love with that country. When she was eight years old, they moved to São Paulo, where he had taken a position at the university.
She still rhapsodizes over São Paulo, which she calls a “very sophisticated, incredible place.” Brazil’s multicultural environment also helped the Ophers blend in, even though they continued to speak Hebrew at home. “Brazilians are super nice,” she says. “It’s not a place where you don’t feel welcome.”
In college Opher first thought she might become a film director. Then in her third year she fell in love with physics and put herself on a path to earn both a bachelors degree in physics and a Ph.D. in plasma studies.
Plasmas and the magnetic fields that animate them became the common threads running through all of Opher’s work. She thinks she was drawn to the subject because she knew she could never master it. “Plasma is complex,” she says. “I knew it was something I could not get my head around easily. I would have to work at it.” She adds, “I felt this was something larger than me. It was scary, but I liked the fear.”
