Ethics: A Trip to Space

Grishma Gupte shares her ethics & society case study, which she completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. Aristotle the legendary Greek philosopher said, “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual.” Although, humans are known as social “animals”, yet we consider ourselves to be superior to other animals. With our highly developed cortex, we demonstrate […]

June 4, 2018

Outreach: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Astronomy

BMSIS Young Scientist Sumeet Kulkami gave a talk at the British Council’s “Cafe Scientifique.” Read his reflections below. I started with a brief history of the development of Artificial intelligence, and highlighted the difference in how a regular computer algorithm works as opposed to a machine learning algorithm, using the popular Towers of Hanoi toy. I also talked about how the development of computing power and AI was best reflected in how they conquered two games: chess and GO respectively. […]

June 4, 2018

Outreach: Inspiring the Younger Generation

Blue Marble Space Institute of Science Young Scientist Participants at NASA Ames, Genesis Berlanga and Stephanie Meursing, conducted an outreach workshop with four and five-year-old students at Stanford Madera Grove Childcare Center which was facilitated by their instructor, Vanya Chandra. We spoke about planetary science, geology, our X-ray diffraction work, and spectroscopy work at NASA, in support of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover and the CheMin instrument. The activity included talking about rocks, rover instruments, and passing around various […]

March 26, 2018

Outreach: Society lives by faith and develops by science

BMSIS Young Scientist Grishma Gupte led an outreach event at the University of Mumbai, India. The Young Scientist Program (YSP) of BMSIS gave me the opportunity to promote science in the society. On 25th February, 2018 I conducted an outreach event for students of a certificate course in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Mumbai. The topic of my presentation was Astrobiology, and it consisted of various aspects ranging from the basic definition of life to exoplanets. I always […]

February 13, 2018

The Ethics of Reproducibility in Computational Research

Sumeet Kulkarni shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. I was motivated to choose this topic for study since my own BMSIS YSP project involved the computational modelling of bubbles growing in lava. The vesicles they leave behind when the lava solidifies into rock are important proxies in determining the atmospheric pressures at that epoch. This method has already been put into use in field studies of vesicle size distributions in […]

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