I will analyze the struggle with gender equality resistance from the perspective of social movements studies, specifically as a reaction to a feminist social change. As a feminist and a queer activist, I will also present examples of tackling this resistance in a hostile Polish context. Drawing from personal experience and scientific literature, I will suggest some strategies we could use to...
Space weather chain consist of many components connecting phenomena from the Sun which propagate in the interplanetary and near-Earth’ space with the ground. Forecasting the potential space weather hazards has become vital in our everyday life because today we are completely dependent on undisrupted operations of human technology in orbit and on the ground. Each component of space weather has...
The Cold Dark Matter model is highly successful at explaining observations of the large-scale structure of the Universe. However, it has challenges in matching observations on small scales, in the regime of dwarf galaxies. Observationally, these challenges have been established more convincingly for dwarf galaxies in the Local Group, and particularly within the Milky Way. Simulations with...
One of the most important cosmological discoveries ever made is that our Universe is
expanding, and that this expansion is accelerated. Interestingly, we don’t know why! The best
model so far describing the evolution of our Universe is primarily dominated by Dark energy,
a mysterious force which comprises ~75% of our Universe, and is believed to cause the
expansion. Additionally,...
Black holes are an extremely fruitful playground for theoretical physicists, allowing one to address complex questions about the nature of reality, such as the information paradox, quantum entanglement, and even the use of black holes as a proxy for a quantum field theory in flat space. Here we discuss what we can learn solely from the mathematical structure of certain black holes in a...
Universities and national labs in North America have, in recent years, increased the level of activities supporting and promoting diversity in the field of physics, bringing together minority groups for educational and inspirational conferences, discussion panels and summer camps. In this work, I summarise different types of programs I have been involved in (both as the main organiser and as a...
Twelve countries founded CERN - the European Laboratory for Particle Physics - in 1954. Since then it has grown into a scientific melting pot where thousands of physicists from all over the world work together to uncover what the universe is made of and how it works. Ten years ago, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovered the Higgs boson, a central...
Previously, the focus of gender in science, in terms of the STEM fields, was mainly on numbers and the problem of underrepresentation of women in these disciplines. While this continues to be of great importance, issues of the content of the disciplines and the gendered culture of science are gaining more interest. The presentation addresses the some of the questions in the gender and science...
A virulent phage (virus that infects bacteria) infection to a host bacterial cell results in lysis of the cell, where hundreds of phage particles are released after a latency time. Therefore, phages are one of the biggest threaThe phage pressure is believed to be an important factor in shaping the microbial communities and a driving force of their evolution, and yet we are far from having a...
The Standard Model of particle physics is an extremely successful theory predicting experimental outcomes with outstanding accuracy. Its last particle, the Higgs boson, was experimentally observed 10 years ago by ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC and has been studied with increased accuracy since then. Yet, all the particles of the Standard Model make only 5% of matter-energy budget of the...
Higher education physics has long been a field with a disproportionately skewed representation in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Responding to this challenge, this study explores the trajectories into higher education physics, with a particular focus on “unexpected” physics students. Drawing on semi-structured timeline-guided interviews with 20 students enrolled in university physics...
The number of women has increased greatly in higher education over the last decades but women are still underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education programs. This gender difference has been reported and analysed, and many recommendations put forward and interventions tried focusing on different issues, but the effects and changes are slow. In our...
Moderator: Tomas Brage; Participants: Beata Bielska, Carole Mundell, Eija Tuominen, Þorgerður J. Einarsdóttir.
