On 2-4 November, the European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid, Spain, will host the Gaia 2016 Data Release #1 Workshop. Many of the talks will be broadcast live.

The first catalogue from the Gaia satellite, containing the positions and brightness measurements of more than a billion stars, was published on 14 September, along with the Tycho–Gaia Astrometric Solution, a data set of distances and motions for about two million stars. The ICCUB has participate very actively in this release as we contribute with many engeneers and astronomers.

Since then, astronomers worldwide have been exploring the data, accessible via the Gaia Archive. Now, ESA and the Gaia Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) have organized a workshop to provide deeper insight into the data and hands-on guidance in using the archive.

The workshop will provide a basic introduction to the mission concept and its performance in space, an overview of the catalogue contents including scientific quality and practical information on how to handle them for science research. In particular, workshop participants will learn how to interact with the data within the Gaia Archive and using Virtual Observatory protocols and tools.

Hope, persistence, creativity and commitment are the reference points in the research carried out by 5.000 researchers every day at the University of Barcelona, and are also the main values highlighted in the video Som recerca, a short documentary driven by the Vice-rector’s office of Research, Innovation and Transference to open the doors of the science and research world of the University of Barcelona to society. This audiovisual work, showing different stages of the professional life of a researcher, aims to emphasize the relevance of basic research and knowledge transfer to promote the progress of social, economic and cultural welfare.



Som recerca is an invitation to discover how university research is a strategy element to respond to the demands of a society which is continuously changing and to improve the life quality of citizenship. Through the audiovisual picture of a bunch of experts from different research fields at the University of Barcelona, Som recerca reminds us of the effort made by scientists who turn research into a motor of social, economic and cultural change, encourage vocations among youngsters and contribute to build a more trained society, sensitive and responsible towards the challenges of a globalized world.


Mapping the Milky Way with creativity



If you want to see the cosmos through the eyes of a scientist, “you have to be creative, you have to have ideas. I link creativity to the ideas of looking for the question you want to solve, I mean, your project. You have to be creative lots of times so you do something different from the others, and you are the leader in your field”, says Mercè Romero, a researcher of the team of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) which takes part in Gaia, the most precise astrometry mission of the European Spatial Agency (ESA) which proposes creating the most precise star map of the Milky Way.



Astronomy is linked to the history of the oldest civilizations and scientific and cultural progress of humanity. Gaia mission, a giant step to build the map of the Universe, will answer lots of open doubts on the origins and evolution of our galaxy. With the telescope from Fabra Observatory behind him, Professor Xavier Luri (ICCUB-UB), member of the Gaia project, says that “research, at first, is a vocation at a personal level. Then it is a job, obviously, and I work on this. Thirdly, I think it is a service, public service: we do this for society. Now research doesn’t make sense without society”.


Eagerness to defend the environment



There are more and more threats to the natural ecosystems around the world. Improving the understanding of the natural systems and promoting social sensitiveness towards environmental problems are challenges that go further than academic and scientific environments, and involve all people. “Research is probably the curiosity to know about everything surrounding you. In my case, I think the environment is what motivates me, what surrounds me, and I think it is the focus of everything we do, eventually”, says the researcher Maria Soria, during a sampling of the scientific project RIU.net, an initiative by the research group Freshwater Ecology and Management (FEM) of the UB to preserve and improve the ecological status of rivers in Catalonia.



While she gets closer to the river wearing rain boots, Maria says “For me, hope is basic. It is the basis of everything. I remember walking around the Pyrenees with my parents and seeing treeless forests, and thinking it was very unfair. The environment is suffering from a lot of injustices but without that hope we cannot change the world”.



Fighting against neurodegenerative diseases with perseverance



Every drug that gets to a client is the result of a long process –and expensive- which has the basic research of lots of scientific teams as a starting point. “Research is up to a certain point, a way of understanding life, because it is about asking about what is established. That is, not being ok with what we already know and trying to go further”, says the researcher Andrés Miguez, from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the UB and August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS).



Finding new drugs to treat Huntington’s disease and other pathologies is one of the objectives of the work by Andrés Miguez, member of the Consolidated Research Group of Pathophysiology of Neurodegenerative Diseases of the UB. This is a journey full of obstacles, effort and gratitude, which according to Miguez seems to share elements from the thinking of the writer Borges, prolific creator of literature universes: “In particular, the order and adventure, because on the one hand, in research it is necessary to be constant, disciplined, perseverant, but at the same time we have to discover new paths, which enables us to advance”.




Commitment to solve learning difficulties



Leaving no kids behind in the reading learning, a basic skill for human communication and personal development: this is the essential mission of the research line directed by Professor Josep Maria Sopena at the Faculty of Psychology of the UB. According to Sopena, “research is finding problems important to solve because they can help us understanding the world in a better way, and it is a passion. I guess this is one of the things I like the most in this life”.



Solving difficulties and make kids recover their confidence and enjoying reading is the focus of the research by Professor Sopena leading Binding, a research project of the University of Barcelona to develop tools to acquire and improve reading skills, designed specifically for people with reading difficulties and kids. According to Professor Sopena, “the great satisfaction we have in the team is to see how kids who had difficulties and were sa, turn into happy children willing to learn”.



The video Som recerca, which was created by the team of the Audio-visuals Unit of the University of Barcelona, can be seen in this link.

Source: UB News

The Observatori Atsronòmic del Montsec (OAdM) of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) organizes the first guided tours of its facilities in the Montsec, Sant Esteve de la Sarga, Lleida. This is a unique opportunity to see close up the largest facility on astronomical research in Catalonia and one of the most advanced of the Iberian Peninsula.

“The aim of these tours is to bring to society the astronomy research which is conducted in Catalonia and the instruments available to us to do it” explained Kike Herrero, IEEC astronomer and ICCUB collaborator working at OAdM. “Visitors will see the Joan Oró telescope, the largest in Catalonia and one of the most advanced in Europe in robotics; the telescope Fabra-ROA Montsec and the telescope XO-Montsec, we will explain how they work and the science we do with them. ”

They can also observe the All-Sky camera of IEEC, a camera to detect dangerous meteors and asteroids near Earth.

“The Montsec sky” says Herrero “is the best of Catalonia to observe the space for its climate and quality of the dark sky”.

The first tour will be on Sunday May 1 and one visit will take place one Sunday a month during the summer months. To register just fill out this form: http://www.oadm.cat/en/visites.htm

TERMCAT has just published on-line the Diccionari de física, produced by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Enciclopèdia Catalana and TERMCAT. It includes more than 3.000 Catalan terms, with equivalents in Spanish, French and English. Two members of the ICCUB, Carme Jordi and Eduard Masana contributed to the edition of the dictionary. This work gathers and defines concepts related to different branches of Physics, like Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism, Optics, Relativity, Quantum Physics, Particles Physics, Nuclear Physics, Atomic Physics and Condensed Matter Physics. This selection is completed by a block about Space and Earth Physics and another about Medical Physics. The dictionary contains 3.085 terms, like: Higgs's boson, Planck's constant, Hertzsprung-Russell's diagram, Photoelectric Effect, Maxwell's equations, Gravitation Newton's Law, Standard Model, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox or Wegener's theory. Every terminological article includes one or some Catalan names and their equivalences, one definition and, quite often, encyclopedic notes. Likewise, it is indicated the area which every term belongs to. You can look up the words alphabetically, thematically or by search. El Diccionari de física has been produced by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Enciclopèdia Catalana and TERMCAT, with a large group of specialist in some sub-specialties, and it is a part of a collection of Scientific and Technological dictionaries. Also have been cooperating Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera and Fundació Torres-Ibern .