Tag: spain
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The howling Universe
Before I moved from IFT to IPhT, I filmed a video all about what standard sirens are and why they’re useful for cosmology. The video is now on Youtube, in English with Spanish subtitles. Take a look!
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From Madrid to the Cotswolds by train
I can’t pretend to enjoy flying. It’s noisy, stressful and horrendously bad for the environment. On my last journey to Madrid, I took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander and the train on from there. The ferry crossing itself took about thirty hours spread over two nights (with an evening departure and an early morning…
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My first N months as a postdoc (where 0 < N < 12)
How long have I been a postdoc? It’s a little difficult to quantify. I finished my PhD thesis in December 2020, and submitted it in January 2021. I passed my viva in February 2021. I spent a few months climbing the walls waiting for my Spanish visa, and trying to do research at the same…
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The road (back) to Madrid
On Friday last week I signed my contract and started my job as a postdoctoral researcher at the IFT in Madrid. It feels extremely good to type that. I have also been waiting a very long time to write this post. I was offered this job on the 12th of April 2020 — when the…
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Visa application
I am starting to regret this resolution of writing a blog post every day for thirty days. I’ve already missed a few days so the thirty will no longer be consecutive and perhaps my days are not as interesting as I anticipated. I suppose that’s mainly because this week has been a week of admin…
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Travelling during the pandemic
This week has been a particularly exciting one, and not just due to the XENON experiment result that has set both the arXiv and cosmology Twitter abuzz. Fate finally smiled on me and the Spanish borders have reopened to non-residents, thereby allowing me a small window of opportunity to return to Madrid to collect the…
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Homeless due to COVID19! Madrid week nine
I’ll admit it’s a bit of a clickbait-y headline, but yes, on Tuesday I was made homeless due to the coronavirus pandemic. Let me explain. I’m currently living in Madrid, on long-term attachment from my home university of Portsmouth in the UK. I’ve been here since January to work with a collaborator of mine. We…
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Paper day! Madrid week seven
Today my first paper as first author came out on the arXiv! You can check it out here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10449. In this work, we reconstruct a coupling function between dark matter and vacuum energy. Such models are generally motivated as solution to problems such as the Hubble tension, so we were keen to update our previous…
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The mountains are calling: Madrid week six
This week was largely uneventful in terms of science, so instead this week’s blog is about what I got up to at the weekend. We finally had two days of solid sunshine (my idea of typical Spanish weather has certainly been changed over the past six weeks) and I decided to head to a small…
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If at first you don’t succeed: Madrid week five
Last week was a week of success for me. I solved a problem that’s been plaguing me for about six months! I’m not going to talk in great detail about what exactly the problem was (I’m saving that for a post in a couple of weeks’ time), but it was one of those small, persistent…
Natalie B. Hogg 