Recent research findings on M87 (NGC 4486)

M87 (Messier 87), also known as NGC 4486, is a giant elliptical galaxy, located about 53.5 million light-years away. It is noteworthy for several reasons, including the presence of an unusually large supermassive black hole (SMBH) in its active galactic...

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Pinwheel of Star Birth

Pinwheel of Star Birth (10/19/10)This face-on spiral galaxy, called NGC 3982, is striking for its rich tapestry of star birth, along with its winding arms. The arms are lined with pink star-forming regions of glowing hydrogen, newborn blue star clusters,...

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Hey professor, I am honestly, truly sorry

Here are the (mostly disturbing) entries for the Final Exam Excuse Contest 2010. I have numbered them so that you can vote on your favorite in the poll at the end of the post. Some of these are real e-mails from students; some are not. Some are easy...

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12 Months of Urban Science Adventures! © A Blogging Meme Story

All the cool kids other science bloggers were doing it, so I joined in.  Here is how it works: Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.So here goes:January: Setting My New Year's Resolutions Happy...

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Answering the Mail

In an attempt to be less of a slacker at answering my FSP e-mails, today I am going to give quick replies to some that have been lingering in my mailbox for varying lengths of time. That way, I will feel more psychically prepared for 2011. My apologies...

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Roots of unity and cyclotomic fields

In preparation for many good things that are to come, we need to have a talk about another important class of field extensions of ℚ – the cyclotomic extensions. (Check here for a list of previous articles on algebraic number theory.)A cyclotomic field...

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Blogging my way to the North Pole.

Send me far, far away...only for a little while.  I'm trying it again*, entering a Quark Expedition Contest to Blog my Way to the North Pole, this time.  No thanks to climate change, the polar regions of our world are shrinking.  The Arctic...

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Uninvited Speaker

Imagine this scenario:You are organizing a conference session and thinking about possible invited speakers. You want a mix of old(er) superstars and dynamic early-career people.One of the early-career candidates for an invited talk has told you that...

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What Are You Saying?

Today's post, in response to a reader/professor who wrote to me when one of his international students complained that he (the professor) was hard to understand, is at Scientop...

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Wordless Wednesday: Simply Red

&nb...

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The Contest : 2010

Two years ago at about this time, some FSP readers submitted entries to the Statement of Purpose (SoP) contest. Last year, we did a Letter of Reference (LoR) contest. What shall it be this year?I have contemplated various archetypal academic texts as...

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Sabbatical Spouses

My experience with sabbaticals and spouses involves planning with a professor-spouse, so I don't have any personal advice for those with non-professor-spouses. I do know that my colleagues with non-professor-spouses have done one or more of the following:...

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Splitting of prime ideals in algebraic number fields

*.overline {text-decoration: overline;}Our series of articles on algebraic number theory is back again. Maybe this time it won't be so sporadic. Stranger things have happened. The previous installment, of which this is a direct continuation, is here....

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