Dr Giorgia Busso talks about her work on the Gaia Mission at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Dr Giorgia Busso is an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy working on the European Space Agency’s Gaia space mission. Dr Busso is part of a small team at the University of Cambridge who processes the photometric and low resolution spectral data sent from Gaia. Launched in 2013, Gaia operates in an orbit around the Lagrange 2 (L2) point, located 1.5 million kilometres behind the Earth in the direction away from the Sun. The primary objective of Gaia is to measure stellar distances using the parallax method. To date, Gaia has catalogued around 2 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This data helps astronomers to understand the formation history and evolution of our Galaxy.
The team in Cambridge is part of a wider international consortium of scientists working on the Gaia mission.
From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.
Mathematical Proceedings is one of the few high-quality journals publishing original research papers that cover the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics and statistics.
Biological Reviews covers the entire range of the biological sciences, presenting several review articles per issue. Although scholarly and with extensive bibliographies, the articles are aimed at non-specialist biologists as well as researchers in the field.
The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
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The fundamental laws of physics look different when reflected in a mirror. This is the statement that the laws of physics have a handedness, what physicists call chirality. This is one of the most important facts that we know about the universe, a fact that, remarkably, goes a long way to fixing the mathematical structure of the laws of nature. I will explain how we know about this handedness, why it’s so important, and why there are still several chiral mysteries that remain unsolved.
Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
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