If you built a very expensive telescope, would you hitch it to a balloon and fly it 40 km above the surface of the Earth? That is what Mohamed Shaaban at the University of Toronto and an international team will do next year when they launch their SuperBIT telescope on NASA’s superpressure balloon. Shabaan explains why the team is putting their telescope on a balloon and how the instrument will be used it to study gravitational lensing, which could improve our understanding of how much dark matter there is in the universe.
John Enderby, who died last week aged 90, was a pioneer of neutron science and a staunch advocate of scholarly publishing. For many years he was our colleague at Institute of Physics Publishing and associate director Tim Smith joins the podcast to chat about Enderby’s contribution to publishing and science.