The first week of February

Just the first day - Feb 1st astro-ph: Articles I might find interesting. I will remove some of them after I browse through them. Also, I am just cutting and pasting the relevant lines from the email I receive from the arXiv and I am not going to put accents on names nicely.

1. Testing the Proposed Connection between Dark Energy and Black Holes
Authors: A. Aykutalp and M. Spaans
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6372
2. Exoplanets Bouncing Between Binary Stars
Authors: Nickolas Moeckel and Dimitri Veras
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6582
3.  Dark matter and alternative recipes for the missing mass (conference proceeding)
Authors: Crescenzo Tortora, Philippe Jetzer and Nicola R. Napolitano
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6587
4. The cosmic spin of the most massive black holes (conference proceeding dedicated to Steve Rawlings)
Authors: Alejo Martinez-Sansigre, Steve Rawlings
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6591
5. The Sizes of the Nearest Young Stars
Authors: Kyle A. McCarthy and Russel J. White
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6600
6. Cosmological tests of sudden future singularities
Authors: Tomasz Denkiewicz and Mariusz P. D\c{a}browski, Hoda Ghodsi and Martin A. Hendry
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6661
7. Perceiving the equation of state of Dark Energy while living in a Cold Spot
Authors: Wessel Valkenburg
http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.6042
8. Blazars as Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic-Ray Sources: Implications for TeV Gamma-Ray Observations
Authors: Kohta Murase, Charles D. Dermer, Hajime Takami, Giulia Migliori
 http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5576
9.  More Exact Tunneling Solutions in Scalar Field Theory
Authors: Koushik Dutta, Cecelie Hector, Pascal M. Vaudrevange, Alexander Westpha
http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2380
10. Title: Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves and eLISA/NGO: Phase
 Transitions, Cosmic Strings and Other Sources
Authors: Pierre Bin\'etruy, Alejandro Boh\'e, Chiara Caprini, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Dufaux
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0983

Why start this new blog?

I am creating this blog to motivate myself to read more science articles and books (and fewer random news articles) and to understand the papers I read better. I will start by posting the articles that I find interesting on the arXiv and once I read them I will post a brief summary. I aim to have one post per week.

Sometime I may talk about books I read and other science I find interesting. Part of the reason to do this is that I spend way too much time on facebook and on random news sites and not enough time being a scientist. I am at the office every day for many hours and yet I do not feel that I accomplish much by the time I go home. When I am home, my mother and Edward and David ask me what I have done today and the usual answer is "nothing" or "not much". Of course, they would not care about the latest papers on the arXiv, but it would at least keep me more up to date with science world.

I apologize in advance for the times I will misunderstand work by other people. I hope it won't be too often. It is, however, important to keep in mind that what I write reflects my opinion and does not represent any institution or anybody else. If I am sometimes wrong, it just proves that I am human.