Interview with Josep Manel Carrasco, ICCUB (IEEC-UB), and Ignasi Casanova, INTE (UPC), on the programme "Via Lliure" - RAC1 on the section "D'aquí 10 anys". They talk about the space missions in the future, about the possible future trips to the Moon, to Mars...

The Catalan Institute for Women has made available a tool to search expertise profiles of women working in specific scientific, academic and business fields, among others.

The aim of this tool is to increase the visibility of women's contribution, especially in those areas where women's presence has traditionally been low.

• Cercador d'Expertes
• Article by El Punt Avui

For a planetary surface to boast extensive areas of both land and water, a delicate balance must be struck between the volume of water it retains, and the depth and height of its valleys and mountains. With too much water, sea levels will be above the highest point on the planet. But if a planet doesn't have enough water, it will be quasi-desert.

The Earth has both continents and oceans. Is there any natural process that makes this situation probable, or were we just lucky?

ICCUB researcher Fergus Simpson has explained in a recent paper, noticed and commented on the prestigious US National Public Radio (NPR), why the Earth has a nearly equal coverage of land and water mass: it is a form of natural selection.

Read more about this:

• NPR link
  
• Original paper

Related topics:

• RAC1 interview
  

Interview with the researcher Mercè Romero of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences on the occasion of the talk she gave at the "Centre cultural Sant Josep de l'Hospitalet de Llobregat" conmemorating Women's day.

More information about the talk

Link with the interview

The ICCUB researcher, C. Jordi, explains how to measure the distance to the stars in this article on "La Vanguardia" science section "Big Vang".

Link with the article

Image: Artist's impression of Gaia.
Credits: ESA–D. Ducros, 2013.

The ICCUB researcher, Roberto Emparan, talks about Newton on the radio programme "A vivir que son dos días" section "Burque al cubo" on "Cadena Ser".
The programme devotes some minuts to this subject on the occasion of the celebration of the birthday of Newton and of Jesus Christ in the same date.

The ICCUB researcher, Xavier Luri, talks about Gaia Mission on Radio Miracel (Sitges).
The programme is devoted to this subject on the occasion of the second DPAC consortium meeting.

Radio Programme

Interview with Xavier Luri in the supplement "Presència" of the "Punt Avui" talking about Gaia Mission and the popularization of science.

The ICCUB researcher, Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols, talks about the Moon and the missions to the Moon on the radio programme "Estat de Gràcia" on Catalunya ràdio, minute 11:20.
The programme devotes few minuts to this subject on the occasion of the death of the most recent man to walk on the Moon, Eugene Cernan.

Link with the programme (Catalan)

Solar storms are now becoming a phenomenon of risk given the great social dependence of electricity and communications. Last year the president of the United States gave the alert, with his executive order "Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events". The question now is if more countries are becoming aware of the need to work on the forecast and prevention of these phenomena.
The ICCUB researcher * Blai Sanahuja *, speaks about the diffferent phaenomena caused by the solar storms, in this article on the "Periódico de Cataluña" :

«Solar flares [light], produce little effects (knock out radio transmissions); solar wind [particles], reaches 400-600 km/s [and can affect satellites], and the coronal mass ejection [material from the solar corona], which reaches 2.000 km /s and which can cause strong geomagnetic storms».

News on "El Periódico"

Credit image: K. Herrero

Space Weather

An average main-sequence star, the Sun is at a long and uneventful stage of its evolution. However, it experiences periodic changes and unpredictable bursts of activity known as solar activity. The response of the space environment to the constantly changing Sun is known as “space weather”.

Heliospheric Physics and Space Weather at the ICCUB

ICCUB’s lines of research in heliospheric physics mainly focuse on solar energetic particles (SEP) events triggered by solar activity and by interplanetary disturbances, i.e. energetic protons and near relativistic electrons.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the main agents of SEP acceleration, together with proxies of solar activity, the solar wind plasma and the interplanetary magnetic field, are the background components of the SEP scenario.

Similarly, ICCUB researchers are working both on data analysis and the study of SEP events, both individual and multispacecraft events. They also model energetic particle events and give scientific support to the participation of technological groups of the UB in ESA’s Solar Orbiter project.