WORDS ARE IMPORTANT. THEY CONVEY OUR THOUGHTS, OUR IDEAS, OUR INTUITIONS. PASSION, LOVE, DISCOVERY, THEY ALL MATERIALIZE FROM WORDS EMERGING FROM THE INNER WORKINGS OF OUR MINDS. AND WHEN WE WRITE, WHEN WE FILL WITH WORDS THE EMPTY CANVAS IN FRONT OF US, SOMETIMES THOSE INTUITIONS, THOSE FEELINGS, THOSE BEAUTIFUL BUNDLES OF THOUGHTS, THEY SUDDENLY BECOME CLEARER. ALL OF THE SUDDEN WE REALLY UNDERSTAND. THE WRITERS. THE READERS. THE LOVERS. TO LOVE, PASSION, DISCOVERY. TO WORDS. Happy Writing, - Matteo and The Authorea Team

The KITP invites collaborating researchers who were participants of selected recent programs to apply to visit, in order to pursue work initiated during their prior KITP visits. The goal is to enhance those collaborative efforts initiated at a KITP program that would clearly benefit from a brief, focused return to the KITP. Groups of 2-6 members with established collaborations arising from the following programs may apply to visit for 1 or 2 weeks during the period October 26-December 18, 2015: - Magnetism, Bad Metals and Superconductivity: Iron Pnictides and Beyond - Galactic Archaeology and Precision Stellar Astrophysics - Dynamics and Evolution of Earth-like Planets - Quantum Gravity Foundations: UV to IR Proposals should be short, consisting of 1-2 pages justifying the group of researchers who will participate, explaining the science and objectives that the group will pursue during the visit, and explicitly stating the preferred dates when the group can come. Visits must be for one or two complete weeks, with all applicants in residence at the same time. Applying to the program consists of two steps: 1. One collaborator must submit the group’s proposal at Form. 2. Each member of the proposed group must also fill out a brief online application at Activities. All application materials must be received by July 5, 2015. Invitations will be issued by July 17, 2015. For those invited to participate, KITP will reserve and directly pay for housing at West Cottages and provide office space in Kohn Hall during the visits. Visitors will be fully responsible for travel, meals and any other expenses.

CERN's 2008 Large Hadron Collider is not just the world's largest and most powerful particle collider but also the largest single machine and most complex experimental facility. Here, physicists are able to test fundamental physics theories by smashing particles with extremely high energies. On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider."

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This is a layman summary of “Local Radiation Hydrodynamic Simulations of Massive Star Envelopes at The Iron Opacity Peak” from Yan-Fei Jiang (姜燕飞), Matteo Cantiello , Lars Bildsten, Eliot Quataert and Omer Blaes. The full article can be downloaded from the arXiv. This layman summary is part of the Public Friendly Open Science initiative.

During the night of August 11th, a meteor shower called ’Perseids’ might put up a memorable show. After the moon sets, which occurs around 1:00 AM local time, it might be possible to see up to 200 ’shooting stars’ per hour. Below, what you need to know about this astronomical event. WHAT IS A SHOOTING STAR? Despite their name, shooting stars are actually small rocks (meteoroids) falling towards the Earth due to our planet’s gravitational attraction. As they move rapidly through the atmosphere, they reach very high temperatures due to friction with air particles. This makes them burn and become visible to the human eye. The trail they leave is called ’Meteor’. Due to their tiny size, they usually almost completely burn in a fraction of a second. In some very exceptional cases, large meteors can continue the hot descent and hit the ground. If they also survive the crash, they get promoted immediately to the ’meteorites’ class. Generally speaking a meteoroid producing a meteor needs to be at least as large as a marble to reach the Earth and eventually become a meteorite. Some Burning facts: - Average meteorite velocity: 30000 miles/hour (48000 km/h) - Max temperature: 3000 F (1650 C) - The Meteor Crater in Arizona was formed 50000 years ago by an object 160 feet (50 meters) across - ... yes, impacts like the one that produced the Meteor Crater are extremely rare

A NEW COLLABORATIVE TOOL COULD REVOLUTIONIZE SCIENTIFIC AUTHORSHIP. Originally published by Scientific American

Peer review is arguably necessary for effective communication amongst researchers.  Authors, editors, and the public rely on peer review to ensure a first measure of trust in scientific communication.  While peer review is considered to be integral in scholarly communication by most, its shortcomings are becoming evident. Former editor of JAMA and NEJM Drummond Rennie once said, "if peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market." Is this true? Does peer review, as it is done today, cause more harm than good?

What does being a scientist mean to you?To me, science is about thinking rationally, solving problems and enjoying learning new things about the universe. People who are not professional scientists can also be scientists. This is the idea behind "citizen science" projects: https://www.zooniverse.org. You, too, can be a scientist, even if it’s only for an hour at a time!  Can you summarize the main focus of your research and what drew you to that field of study/work?I use numerical simulations to model how stars like our sun formed. When I was a physics graduate student I was interested in working on some kind of computational modeling. It turns out there are a lot of really interesting complex problems in astrophysics that you can only study with large computers. The study of star formation has a lot of different physics in it: gravity, magnetic fields, turbulence, and radiation. These interact in nonlinear and sometimes unexpected ways, which make star formation a fun thing to model. I also use the simulations to make cool movie

Thomas Edison has an impressive 2,332 worldwide patents. Some of his well-known inventions include the phonograph, motion pictures, and the magnetic iron ore separator. After the success of his first major invention, the quadruplex telegraph, Edison wanted to build his own laboratory so that he could continue to innovate. In 1875, he purchased around 34 acres in Raritan Township, NJ and built the "Invention Factory". By Spring 1876, the Invention Factory consisted of a main laboratory, ancillary buildings, a carpenters’ shop, carbon shed, and blacksmith shop. His first breakthrough at the Invention Factory, the phonograph, produced the first voice recording (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) and earned Edison the title, “The Wizard of Menlo Park”.

The search for extrasolar planets (EXOPLANETS) is one of the most rapidly expanding fields in astrophysics. Thanks to recent space-based efforts the number of detected planets in extrasolar stellar systems has increased dramatically, and more than 900 objects have been identified as of today, see e.g. http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/. With candidates identified in the so-called habitable zone (HZ)[1] the question of extraterrestrial life becomes very actual. Here we discuss ideas that could lead to infer the presence (or the past existence) of an extraterrestrial civilization by the detection of artifacts in orbit around the host planet. [1] The theoretical band around a star where a planet could orbit and host liquid water

THEORY OF EVOLUTION AND DEATH OF MASSIVE STARS Overview of the material that will be covered at the “Look & Listen” School 2014 Abstract We will first cover some basic principles of stellar evolution, with a particular emphasis on the physics of massive stars. Then we will focus on the phenomena that are currently believed to prominently influence the life of massive stars and determine the conditions at the pre-SN stage. Informed by the most recent observational results, we will also focus on some unsolved problems in stellar physics and how they could impact the death of massive stars and their stellar remnants. Schedule 1. Tuesday 14 Jan - Principles of stellar evolution (20+10) - Massive Stars evolution: Main Sequence and He-Burning (20+10) - Massive Stars evolution: Late evolutionary stages (20+10) 2. Thursday 16 Jan - Stellar Rotation (20+10) - Stellar Rotation and Magnetic Fields (20+10) - Mass loss (20+10) 3. Friday 17 Jan - Massive Binary Stars (20+10) - Very Massive Stars (20+10) - Progenitors of NS/BH, SNe, PISNe, GRBs (20+10)

This collaborative document has been created for the panel discussion on “Rotation in massive stars” (FOE 2015). All conference participants have been added to the document and can edit / comment / add figures (just drag&drop) / references and even LaTeX equations if needed (check the help page for more infos on how to edit the document). Hopefully this will capture the essential ideas and interactions that will stem during and after the discussion. The document can be forked at any time, so that particular discussions can be taken further and potentially lead to active collaborations.

Our goal is to reconstruct pre-SN mass-loss history using radio variability observations and constrain the dominant mass-loss mechanism during the last few hundred years of massive star evolution. We will draw from existing observations to re-design the strategy for future observing campaigns.

A variety of research demonstrates that humans learn and communicate best when more than one processing system is used . Authorea - a leading collaboration platform to write, share and openly research in realtime - allows people to author manuscripts and include rich media, such as data sets, software, source code and videos. The media-rich, data-driven capabilities Authorea make it the perfect platform to create and disseminate a new generation of research articles, which are natively web-based, open, and reproducible.

The Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) is the official image celebrating the 26th anniversary of Hubble's launch into Earth orbit's. Since 1990 Hubble has been capturing awe-inspiring images of the Universe. Floating about 350 miles above the Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is able to take high-resolution images free of the image-distortion that occurs due to atmospheric turbulence. Hubble performs a full orbit around the Earth approximately every 95 minutes, and since its launch has completed 1.2 million observations. Among its many accomplishments, HST helped scientists determine the rate of expansion of the Universe.

I seek to explore various frequentist and Bayesian methods for drawing conclusions about genetics of gene regulation, both for cis- and trans- association studies, in the context of RNA-seq dataset with known/inferred confounders.IntroductionIn their paper Bayesian new statistics: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-016-1221-4, Kruschke and Liddell explain the divide in the statistical community, between frequentist and Bayesian methods, and between estimation and quantification of uncertainty. Not only do the authors recommend a shift from the former to the latter in both respects, they also try to point out that additional aspects of statistical analyses such as meta-analysis, randomized controlled trials and power analysis may benefit from this shift.Being aware of this recommendation, and also of the recent advances in deep sequencing projects that provide rich information about variation in genotypes, expression and other phenotypes of interest in a variety of settings, I would like not only review, but also further develop, methods that seek to reason about this transition in genomics. As a first step, I focus on RNA-seq studies with genotyping information, which provide a proxy to overall expression levels of proteins and thus cellular activity in a system of interest, and also the potential to separate out genetic and non-genetic basis of variation in expression, giving us important insights into regulatory mechanisms of these systems.Primer: RNA-seq workflow, problems and (partial) solutionsIn this primer, I go through our current (and some not yet implemented) RNA-seq workflow, organizing them into problems and (partial) solutions. In cases where the solution is insufficient (which is true in most cases), I've marked them as possible paper topics.dbGaP - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gapSRA library - https://trace.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/sra/sra.cgi?view=run_browserFirst, we can take the sequence library form an experiment, usually in *.fastq format, from public studies shared in the above resources, or from a proprietary dataset. We are currently working with Illumina 76-bp paired-end RNA-seq reads in the case of GTEx data, but certainly are not limited to this setup.Problem:We need to make sure the that the reads are not contaminated (adapter sequences, other non-human reads, etc.), have no unexpected biases, and that the reads have sufficient quality score. In addition, usually the sequences towards the end have poor read quality, and we want to be able to account for this.A solution:Use FastQC and Trimmomatic to perform QC and trim reads for poor quality ends:FastQC manual: https://biof-edu.colorado.edu/videos/dowell-short-read-class/day-4/fastqc-manualTrimmomatic manual: http://www.usadellab.org/cms/uploads/supplementary/Trimmomatic/TrimmomaticManual_V0.32.pdfOptional: An example FastQC output from a real GTEx sample:

É stato dimostrato per la prima volta che é possibile determinare la presenza di intensi campi magnetici nelle regioni interne di stelle evolute. Questo puó essere fatto grazie all’asterosismologia, una disciplina simile alla sismologia ma applicata ai corpi celesti. L’asterosismologia sfrutta la presenza di onde che si propagano attraverso oggetti astronomici come le stelle, per determinarne le proprietá interne. Questo é analogo a un’ecografia, in cui si usano onde sonore per ottenere immagini di parti altrimenti invisibili del corpo umano. Le regioni esterne delle giganti rosse, stelle piú anziane del sole e con un raggio maggiore, sono caratterizzate da movimenti convettivi turbolenti che causano onde sonore. Questo é simile al rumore prodotto dall’acqua che bolle in una pentola. Queste onde si propagano all’interno della stella e a loro volta generano un altro tipo di onde (le onde di gravitá, da non confondersi con le onde gravitazionali). La forza responsabile per il moto oscillatorio delle onde di gravitá é la stessa responsabile per il galleggiamento dei corpi nell’acqua. Infatti le onde del mare sono un tipo particolare di onde di gravitá. In pratica quello che succede é che le onde sonore si propagano negli stati esterni della stella, che ’suona’ come un gigantesco strumento musicale. Nelle giganti rosse l’energia associata con queste onde sonore riesce a far oscillare anche gli strati piú profondi della stella, appunto sotto forma di onde di gravitá che si propagano fin nel nucleo stellare. Questa specie di interferenza tra i due tipi di onde richiede che un pó dell’energia presente nei moti oscillatori acustici che caratterizzano gli strati esterni, venga trasferita ai moti oscillatori che avvengono nel nucle della stella sotto forma di onde di gravitá. Se peró nel nucleo sono presenti dei campi magnetici, la situazione puó cambiare. Questo avviene se i campi magnetici sono abbastanza intensi da alterare la propagazione delle onde di gravitá. Il campo magnetico in questo caso puó essere immaginato come un grosso elastico che intrappola il gas stellare. Un’onda di gravitá, come un’onda del mare, prova a creare uno spostamento del fluido (in questo caso il gas) a cui peró si oppone la tensione dell’elastico. In questa situazione la propagazione delle onde viene alterata fino a indurre una specie di intrappolamento. Questo effetto é stato battezzato “Effetto serra magnetico”. Quando le onde di gravitá sono intrappolate dal campo magnetico, l’energia che avevano ottenuto a scapito delle oscillazioni acustiche degli strati esterni viene formalmente persa. Qusto si ripercuote in una diminuzione dell’ampiezza delle oscillazioni visibile alla superficie della stella. Questa diminuzione dell’ampiezza delle oscillazioni é stata in effetti osservata dal telescopio spaziale Kepler in un gruppo di giganti rosse. Kepler é in grado di misurare variazioni piccolissime della luminositá di una stella (una parte in un milione). Perció é possibile porre dei limiti o addirittura misurare il campo magnetico interno per alcune di queste stelle. Il risultato é sensazionale: Alcune di queste stelle posseggono campi magnetici intensissimi nei loro nuclei, milioni di volte piú intensi del campo associato a un tipico magnete da frigorifero. Questo rappresenta un importantissimo passo avanti nella comprensione delle stelle, poiché questi campi magnetici hanno un ruolo fondamentale per l’evoluzione stellare e le proprietá degli stadi finali della vita di una stella. Per esempio alcune delle esplosioni piú luminose nell’universo (i lampi di raggi gamma) potrebbero essere associate con la morte di stelle con massa 10 o piú volte maggiore del sole, che hanno mantenuto un forte campo magnetico nel loro nucleo.