Category: Astroengine news

Astroengine.com Roundup and Opinion

It’s been a while since I last posted as I’ve been flying from the US to the UK and have only just gotten my office up and running. That’s not to say I haven’t been writing. On the Universe Today, I’ve posted quite a few articles ranging from quite an elaborate April Fools story (but not quite as elaborate as Virgin and Google’s Virgle prank), to a black hole hiding in the middle of Omega Centauri, to rocks rolling around on Mars… here’s a round up of the most interesting…
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Upgrade to WordPress 2.5

Keeping up to date with the upgrades, astroengine.com has been successfully upgraded to version 2.5. Apparently v2.5 has been in the making for six months, and I must say, everyone has done a great job. The Administration section is especially nice. Let’s see if the upgrade converts into an increase in speed…

Ouch, a few plugins are now dead, but I’ll be sure to find replacements. Feel free to point out any problems with the site as you go, sending a message to ijo@astroengine.com.

More to come…

UK Physics and Astronomy in Danger

Color composite adaptive optics image of the planetary nebula M2-9 using the ALTAIR adaptive optics system on Gemini North. Image credit: Gemini Observatory/Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage

My true aim for astroengine.com is to post advanced (but interesting) space physics concepts on an informal stage. But when news like this comes along, I feel compelled to say something. In a nutshell, the UK physics and astronomy community has been hit with a series of harsh and ill thought-out budget cutbacks in recent years. Things have gotten worse since April 2007 (when the two main research councils PPARC and CCLRC merged) when all UK physics and astronomy funding started being managed by The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It would appear the main focus is to find ways to plug the £80 million funding deficit it has inherited and not to find ways to protect research projects.

So, physics and astronomy in the UK is facing cutbacks on a scale that defies intelligence. Why is a nation, as scientifically gifted as the UK, making cutbacks to research that will shape the most exciting era of science mankind has ever seen?
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Server Errors, RSS Feed Fix and Eeron.com

OK, I think I have it sorted out… I installed WordPress on astroengine.com so I could make life easier for me to write and organize articles – afterall, the previous version was always a “work in progress” and never became a serious science blog. I gained some satisfaction from building the site from the ground up, including custom RSS feeds, custom functions, creating complex gallery systems… all in all the “Astroengine Project” consumed months of development time. And yet, I was never satisfied.
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Astroengine.com Finally Up and Running!

For those of you who are regular to astroengine.com, you may notice a drastic change… what’s all this science all about?? Well, this has been in the pipeline for many, many years, but I couldn’t find the niche nor the time to put this together. The astroengine.com/.net/.co.uk domain kinda became my personal pages when I was in university, and it’s only now that I have decided to put something more focused online.
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