The fact we are alive and pondering a vast Universe from spaceship Earth raises a number of fascinating questions. Astrophysicist are now asking why “here” and why “now”. What is the chance of life emerging around a star like the Sun, about 12-13 billion years after our Universe was born?

Einstein published in 1916 a paper containing the prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. It has just one author (A.E. himself) and consists of a few pages of text and equations (Einstein, 1916). Fast forward exactly 100 years, the LIGO collaboration announced in a paper that they observed what Einstein had predicted. The paper has more than 1000 co-authors and it condenses, in just a few pages of text, equations and figures, an enormous amount of technical information (Abbott et al., 2016).

A Big Discovery

On 14 September 2015 at 4:50:45 AM Eastern standard time, the LIGO experiment detected for the first time the passage of gravitational waves. Scientists saw a very specific pattern of stretching and compression of space-time called a “chirp”. The detection was done independently at the two locations of the experiment, one in Hanford (Washington) and the other one in Livingstone (Louisiana). This amazing discovery has occurred almost exactly 100 years after Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativy (Einstein, 1916), and represents the last verification of this beautiful theory of gravity.

How did the waves look like? Glassy and double-overhead!

In a nutshell: Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space time produced by violent events, like merging together two black holes or the explosion of a massive star. Unlike light (electromagnetic waves) gravitational waves are not absorbed or altered by intervening material, so they are very clean proxies of the physical process that produced them. They are expected to travel at the speed of light and, if detected, they could give precious information about the cataclysmic processes that originated them and the very nature of gravity. That’s why the direct detection of gravitational waves is such an important endeavor. Definitely worthy of a Nobel prize in physics.

\[\label{einstein} G_{\mu\nu}+\Lambda T_{\mu\nu}=\frac{8\pi G}{c^4}T_{\mu\nu}\]

Open Science

“Open science commonly refers to efforts to make the output of publicly funded research more widely accessible in digital format to the scientific community, the business sector, or society more generally” writes the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its newly released study “Making Open Science a Reality”.

In the digital age the role of tools like Authorea is to increase the efficiency of research as well of its diffusion. The benefits of open science identified by the OECD are multiple:

1. Reducing duplication costs in collecting, creating, transferring and reusing data and scientific material; allowing more research from the same data; and multiplying opportunities for domestic and global participation in the research process.

2. The greater scrutiny offered by open science allows a more accurate verification of research results.

3. Increased access to research results (in the forms of both publications and data) can foster spillovers not only to scientific systems but also innovation systems more broadly. (Firms and individuals may use and reuse scientific outputs to produce new products and services.)

4. Open science also allows the closer involvement and participation of citizens.

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.

There is on average one planet orbiting every star in the Universe. Our Galaxy (the Milky Way) is an immense disk of gas and stars with a diameter of about 100 000 light years, hosting about 100 billion stars and, therefore, also about 100 billion planets. Take a deep breath. Now, it turns out the Milky Way is just one of 100 billion galaxies that populate our Universe, a colossal expanding stretch of spacetime with an age of 13.7 billion years. The math is trivial: There are about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 = \(10^{22}\) planets out there. This number is extremely large. Apparently larger than the number of grains of sand found in every beach and every desert on Earth. But how many of these planets host life? And in particular, how many planets host intelligent life we might be able to communicate with?

RSVP and join us for our second official New York Open Science Meetup. Check this blog post series if you wanna know more.

This event is supported by Authorea.com, Minds.com and the Bitcoin Center NYC.

Previous “A “Modern Scientist” Manifesto”
In the 21st century science is growing more technical and complex, as we gaze further and further while standing on the shoulders of many generations of giants. The public has often a hard time understanding research and its relevance to society. One of the reasons for this is that scientists do not spend enough time communicating their findings outside their own scientific community. Obviously there are some exceptions, but the rule is that scientists write content for scientists. Academia is often perceived as an ivory tower, and when new findings are shared with the outside world, this is not done by scientists, but by the media or even the political class. The problem is that these external agents do not have the necessary background to digest and properly communicate this knowledge with the rest of society. They often misunderstand, over-hype and in some case even distort the results and views of the scientific community. It’s ironic and somewhat frightening that the discoveries and recommendations for which society invests substantial economic and human capital, are not directly disseminated by the people who really understand them.

At the same time transparency and reproducibility are at stake in the increasingly complex world of research, which is still using old-fashioned tools when packaging and sharing content. This is not only a big problem for research itself, but can give science a bad name in front of the public opinion, which increasingly does not understand and trust the work of scientists. To the average tax-payer science is often cryptic, with most recently published papers behind a pay-wall and the majority of research virtually inscrutable. In this scenario it is hard for the public to access and capture the relevance of scientists’ work. I strongly believe that a society that does not trust its scientists is set on a dangerous course.

Action Items. To improve the situation 21st century scientists need to:

1. Learn to efficiently share and communicate their research with the public at large.

2. Make their research more transparent and reproducible, so that it can be trusted and better understood by their peers and the public at large.

21st century scientists need to produce “Public-Friendly Open Science” (PFOS).

The Times They Are a-Changin

Science is going through a rapid phase of transformation. Two important trends are emerging:

1. Research is becoming more complex, requiring larger collaborations and bigger experiments.

2. Science and technology increasingly affect modern society.

The first trend is easy to understand. Let’s think of the cumulative knowledge of humankind as a sphere. Scientists work at the surface and try to “push the boundary”. Discovery increases the volume of knowledge. As the sphere’s volume grows, so does its surface area. Therefore an ever increasing number of researchers is required to tessellate the expanding cutting-edge of science. Moreover, contrary to a few hundred years ago when the sphere of knowledge was so small that a single polymath could master large chunks of it, nowadays no human can understand the details of more than a few research topics. To capture the bigger picture and understand very complex research questions, collaborative efforts combining together a number of highly specific expertises are required.

Friday June 26, 2016.

Today is a great day for human rights.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. This decision reflects a shift in American public opinion: according to recent polls, 60% of Americans now support same-sex marriage.

As a company devoted to promoting openness and collaboration, Authorea feels strongly this is an important step in the right direction.

Obviously, sharing the ups and downs of life with another person is an immensely more important and complex task than writing a collaborative paper. Yet if we can draw a parallel, we might say that a useful measure of the progress of a society, and humankind in general, is its ability to share and care openly, together.

That’s the way to unlock society’s true potential, and foster creativity and love.

Happy writing.
Happy loving.
Authorea

Previous “Fermi Paradox”
In order to estimate the number of technological civilizations that might exist among the stars, in 1961 Frank Drake proposed a simple equation. Below you can play with an interactive plot showing the number \(N\) of communicative civilizations in the Galaxy as function of their average longevity \(L\). You can change the values of the various parameters using the sliders.

In this short post series I try to tackle one of the biggest questions out there: Are we alone? The reasoning leads to some radical implications for the very near future of humankind. Read till the end and feel free to comment as you go. Hopefully this will spark interesting discussions.

1. Habitable Planets How many habitable planets exist in the Universe?

2. The Drake Equation How to estimate the number of technological civilizations in our Galaxy?

3. Astrobiology Is biological life common in the Universe?

4. The Fermi Paradox Is intelligent life common in the Universe? And if yes, does it last?

5. Interactive Drake Equation Use your own intuition to calculate the chance of being alone or not

Previous “Astrobiology” – Next “Interactive Drake Equation”
With an estimated diameter of 93 billion light years and age of 13.7 billion years, our Universe is an astonishingly big place that’s been around for a very long time. When you look up, you only get a short glimpse at a fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars that populate our Galaxy (which in turn is one of hundreds of billions in the cosmos), but it’s enough to make you wonder: “Are we alone?” In the previous post we discussed the likelihood of the emergence of (intelligent) extraterrestrial life. Starting from the famous Drake Equation and using recent findings in astrophysics and some astrobiology arguments, we obtained a simple way to estimate \(N\), the number of communicative civilizations in our Galaxy. This reduces to the product of the chance of emergence of intelligent life \(f_i\) and the longevity \(L\) (in years) of a civilization’s communicative phase:

\[\label{eq:Drake_simplified} N \approx \, \frac{1}{4}\, f_i \, L \,.\]

Previous “Drake Equation” – Next “Fermi Paradox”
We are thinking creatures living on a planet orbiting a pretty common star in a pretty common galaxy. Our home planet has been around for about 4.5 billion years, while the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old. We just learned that there are about 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 = \(10^{21}\) planets potentially similar to the Earth in the cosmos, a number larger than the amount of grains of sand found on every beach and every desert on Earth. Are we alone? To answer this question in 1961 scientist Frank Drake formulated his famous equation, which I discussed in the previous post of this series. The Drake equation calculates the number \(N\) of communicative civilizations in our Galaxy. In its 2015 form it reads:

\(N \approx 2\, f_l \, f_i \, f_c \, L\)

Scientists are busy people. We have deadlines to meet, meetings to attend, lectures to give. And of course we need to write papers, not only because we are excited to share our findings, but also because scientific papers are the currency of the academic world. Authorea was created by scientists and for scientists. The idea: improving the process of writing and sharing the results of research. While Authorea has big plans for the paper of the future, in this post I want to focus on the here and now. This is because when I talk about the platform with my colleagues, by far the most common question I get is “Why should I use Authorea to write my paper?”

Great question! Here some highlights that should make you curious:

1. With Authorea, your paper is accessible from any computer anywhere in the world.

2. You can write it from your browser, no installations required.

3. You can write in rich text (wysiwyg) LaTeX or in markdown.

4. Your paper is also a beautiful web page.

5. Collaboration is made easy. Managing your co-authors is straightforward.

6. Authorea is version controlled. Again, no installations required.

7. Adding citations has never been easier. Believe me, you will never wanna go back.

8. You can include data and code in your paper. This allows for transparency and reproducibility of results.

9. Export to any journal format with just one click.

10. Powerful commenting system. For internal or even external review.

Ok, If you got this far you deserve more than a list of fancy features, so here’s my personal experience and why I think you should start using Authorea.

I switched to writing papers with Authorea about a year ago and I noticed a number of immediate improvements: first of all my papers get written faster. Then I noticed that I have no need to exchange emails with collaborators concerning the paper. This is fantastic. All the action happens (and it’s logged) on Authorea, including discussions about revisions and suggestions for improvements. This said, I didn’t really expect the most important upturn. By getting rid of the overhead I previously considered necessary, unavoidable parts of the scientific writing process, something remarkable happened. I actually started enjoying writing more! And I do not mean just publishing; I had experienced that joy before. The difference is I now cherish the time I spend putting my science into words. It might sound crazy, but Authorea did something amazing: it made me discover the pleasure of writing science together with my collaborators.

Previous “Habitable Planets” – Next “Astrobiology”
There is on average one planet orbiting every star in the Universe (Swift et al., 2013; Cassan et al., 2012). If this sounds exciting, you might wanna read the previous post in this series. Our Galaxy (the Milky Way) is an immense disk of gas and stars with a diameter of about 100 000 light years, hosting about 100 billion stars and, therefore, also about 100 billion planets. Take a deep breath. Now, it turns out the Milky Way is just one of 100 billion galaxies that populate our Universe, a colossal expanding stretch of spacetime with an age of 13.7 billion years. The math is trivial: There are about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 = \(10^{22}\) planets out there. This number is extremely large. Apparently larger than the number of grains of sand found in every beach and every desert on Earth.

But how many of these planets host life? And in particular, how many planets host intelligent life we might be able to communicate with?

In order to estimate the number of technological civilizations that might exist among the stars, in 1961 Frank Drake proposed the following simple equation:

The peer review process is a pillar of modern research, verifying and validating the ever-increasing output of academia. While the academic community agrees that some process of review is necessary to ensure the quality of published research, not everybody agrees on the best approach. In particular, doubts have been cast on the current peer review process: most journals select and assign one anonymous referee (few journals assign two or more) who is in charge of reviewing the manuscript and recommending it for publication or rejection. The argument is that the current peer review system is becoming inadequate. Here’s an incomplete list of issues:

• Research is increasingly collaborative, complex, and specialized. Thus, it is less likely that one or a few referees can have the necessary expertise (and time) to properly handle many modern articles. Simply put, the average number of authors per paper has been steadily increasing in the last few decades, while the number of referees per paper has not.

• “Publication pressure” means there is a growing number of papers to referee. This need can not be easily matched since scholars, who need to constantly publish and engage in the “funding race”, have less time to be dedicated to community service (in a “single referee” system the review process is very time consuming).

• Given the anonymous nature of peer reviewing manuscripts, researchers who volunteer their valuable time and knowledge don’t get recognition for contributing.

• Cases of peer-review scams, mostly from predatory open access publishers, have grown in number over recent years. A number of journals, exploiting the publication pressure climate, accept and publish articles with little or no peer review.

• Similarly, there are reports of fraud in which authors review their own or close friends’ manuscripts to give favorable reviews \cite{Ferguson_2014}.

Yale scientist and Authorea Fellow Fabio Del Sordo just got back from a once-in-a-lifetime trip: he traveled to a group of remote arctic islands to chase one of the most inaccessible solar eclipses of the century. We asked him some questions.

A recent article titled The spin rate of pre-collapse stellar cores: wave driven angular momentum transport in massive stars was written on Authorea and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) and to the arXiv as a pre-print.

While waiting on peer review from the ApJ, the authors want to test Authorea as a platform for open peer-review. By going to the document’s page, you can comment on a section, figure, observation, sentence, or the whole piece. The authors and other commenters can respond and further the discussion. And it’s all out in the open, just how science was meant to be.

But it doesn’t stop there. You can also view full-size, high-resolution versions of the paper’s figures, as well as easily follow links in the References at the bottom of the page.

In the paper, Fuller et al. (2015) show for the first time how internal gravity waves, excited in the turbulent layers of stars at least ten times larger than the Sun, can radically change their internal rotation rate. In particular, these waves – somewhat analogous to ocean waves – can determine how rapidly the stellar core spins around its axis when the star is about to die and become a supernova. The spin of a pre-supernova core is important because it deeply affects the stellar explosion and determines the rotation rate of the stellar remnant (neutron star or black hole).

Tens of thousands of innovators met in Austin, Texas last week to discuss emerging tech, science, and innovation. It was the Interactive portion of South by Southwest (SxSW). Authorea was there.

Among many great events, the MIT Media Lab presented “SOLVE”, an initiative set to bring together the most gifted researchers and innovators to identify and tackle challenges where new thinking and emerging technologies have the potential to make the world a better place. SOLVE identified four main themes: Learn, Cure, Fuel, Make.

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

A revolution has occurred in the last two decades in the world of astrophysics. It all started in the mid ’90s with the first discovery of new worlds around other stars. The term “Extrasolar planet” (or Exoplanet) became widely used to identify planets orbiting a star other than the Sun. A planet is a celestial body massive enough to be bounded by its self gravity (unlike a rock or an asteroid, that are kept together by electromagnetic forces), but not massive enough to produce energy through nuclear fusion (as stars do). Planetary scientists have confirmed the existence of more than 1500 exoplanets and have identified a few thousand exoplanet candidates that require more investigation before they can join the planet club (see exoplanets.org for the most recent figures). The most remarkable discoveries came only in the last couple of years thanks to the Kepler space telescope. This amazing instrument has been patiently looking for the extremely tiny dimming induced by the passage of a planet in front of its host star. The wealth of data provided by Kepler has revealed an astonishing fact: “When you wish upon a star, you are wishing upon a star with planets” (W. Borucki). There is on average one planet orbiting every star in the Universe (Swift et al., 2013; Cassan et al., 2012). Just in our Galaxy this means we have 100 billion planets. Since we have about 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, there are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = \(10^{22}\) planets out there.

In 1937, just one year before suddenly disappearing under mysterious circumstances, a brilliant italian physicist named Ettore Majorana predicted the existence of a very peculiar particle. Having the exciting property of being its own antiparticle (that is it simultaneosly behaves as matter and anti-matter) the elusive “Majorana particle” has been finally observed by a group of scientists at Princeton University (Nadj-Perge 2014). To achieve the important result they used a two-story-tall microscope to observe the end of a superconducting wire.

Physics: Efficient Blue Light-Emitting Diodes

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, three engineers responsible “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes (LED) which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”. While the Nobel Prize winners are chosen in recognition of being the first to discover a technology, the honor is just as heavily weighted by humanitarian impact. The LED that Nakamura and colleagues invented is 20 times more efficient than the incandescent light-bulb. Given that almost 25 percent of global energy expenditure is in lighting, advances in LED technology are having a tremendous impact environmentally speaking. The international effort to phase-out incandescents demonstrates the obvious importances of advances in lighting technology. Further, with 1.4 billion people still lacking access to electricity, solar-powered LEDs allow these communities to spend money on food instead of fuel. The impact of this research is enourmous, both economically and from a society point-of-view.

Isamu Akasaki (85), Nagoya University, Japan
Hiroshi Amano (54), Nagoya University, Japan
Shuji Nakamura (60), University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Read more : University of California Press Release
Read more : NobelPrize.org

Rise and fall of the biggest discovery of the century highlights the importance of open, collaborative science.

On 17 March 2014 BICEP2, a South Pole based experiment aimed at studying the very first moments of the universe, made a sensational announcement. They claimed to have detected for the first time the signature of an extremely rapid expansion of space that occurred right after the universe’s birth. This expansion, also called inflation, is believed to be responsible for the existence of large-scale structures like clusters of galaxies, as well as to explain why the properties of the universe appear to be the same for all observers. If confirmed, the existence of inflation would represent the first evidence of a fundamental connection between gravity (general relativity) and quantum physics.

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)