#science

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Just as some of Europe's brightest minds sought refuge in the United States during the dark days of fascism, we should now welcome the best minds from America to Europe.

A recent example proves the point: Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian immigrant rejected and humiliated at an American university, found opportunity at a German startup for her work with mRNA - ultimately helping to save millions of lives during a pandemic and winning a well-deserved Nobel Prize.

On Friday, I was informed by a collaborator and friend that postdocs on a probationary period at the United States Geological Survey Coastal Sciences Office in St. Pete to short, Florida, were fired on 30 minutes notice. They received an email that they were terminated and they had 30 minutes to cleat out their offices, download data, and leave. At that point they would no longer have access to their computers and their key cards would not work.







HHS employees, DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL

HHS employees, DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL.

Not without reading this first.

They’re going to cut off your network access as soon as you read your email, so you need to download a bunch of things first. Details at the link.

DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL WITHOUT READING THIS FIRST.

See also the firings in the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

Something I love about my job is working with ESO's visual artists to explain complex phenomena.

Here we were working on an animation of the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect, a method to work out the inclination of the orbit of an exoplanet relative to the rotation of its star. That's my simple doodle and the much nicer version by my colleague Martin Kornmesser.

Here's a video we made to explain how we do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6SDxtW4gs

A person – only his hand is in the photo – is holding a white sheet of paper with some doodles showing various circles, arrows and numbers indicating a sequence of events. Behind the sheet of paper there is a large computer monitor showing a 3D modeling program where the contents of the sheet of paper are implemented in a more elaborate way. The screen shows a planet crossing in front of a large yellow star, as seen from different orientations.