Welcome to astatine-190

 I received an email today from the Isotope Discovery Project to say that the discovery of astatine-190 has been announced by a publication in Physical Review C.  It was made at Jyväskylä in Finland at their accelerator lab via the bombardment of strontium-84 on a silver-109 target, along with the emission of three neutrons.  

This is the lightest astatine isotope now known.  It decays via alpha emission to bismuth-186, as the start of a decay process which the team followed as far as platinum-178.  At-190 was measured to have a half-life of 1.0 ms.  So - I would say "welcome, At-190", but you didn't stay around long enough to hear me say it.

Section of isotope chart where At-190 will be added.  From the Colourful Nuclide Chart

Up Etna

 I am still at the COMEX 7 conference, and enjoying the physics talks.  Yesterday (Wednesday) there was an afternoon off, with an optional excursion organised, taking willing attendees up to near the summit of Mt Etna.  Etna last had an eruption only a matter of a few weeks ago.  In fact, one of my colleagues, Jim Al-Khalili, told me he recently had a trip cancelled as all planes were stopped from flying into Catania airport because of the eruption.  I saw on the web that ash had fallen all over the city, including on the runway.  Well ... I trusted the tour guides to know whether it was safe for us to go up, and the excursion did go ahead.  It involved a pretty long coach journey up as far as it is possible to drive a coach, followed by a cable car trip up to a higher elevation, and finally a kind of bus-cum-moon-buggy to take us even closer to the top.

That 'closer to the top' was tantalisingly not quite up to the crater that erupts, but pretty close.  The ground was desolate and we were walking on ash that had only recently fallen there.  In fact, some of it had covered the winter snow fall, and we could see patches of snow just below the "soil".  The snow was protected from melting by the soil.  That was a bit weird.  It was pretty cool being up there, but kind of a shame not to see lava, or steaming vents, or a crater ... Here are some photos of the trip

At Comex7 in Catania

 I'm at the COMEX7 conference in Catania.  COMEX = collective motion in exotic nuclei, and the conference is mainly about giant resonances.  In fact the COMEX series follows an older series called "Giant Resonances" with the name change indicating a expansion of the topic to other collective motion.  Having said that, I don't think something like fission (a collective motion of nucleons) would be considered on topic while, in common to all conferences, there are plenty of (perfectly good and interesting) talks which are squarely off-topic. 

I travelled on Sunday, and the conference started yesterday.  As always happens at conferences I get reinvigorated with the excitement of the field; hearing the new results; getting ideas for ways I can contribute.  I'm here with my colleagues Abhishek and Esra, the latter of whom gave an excellent keynote talk yesterday:

My Surrey colleague Esra Yüksel talking at COMEX7

Catania is very pretty.  It is full of grand buildings though is also a bit run down and chaotic like big cities can be.  It feels like a big city when you are in the centre, though the official population is around 300k - so not so big, but the whole metro area is over a million.  

The conference is at the University in the outskirts of the city, and we have a conference bus taking us from the city centre where most delegates are staying.  I'm talking on Friday in the last session of the conference before heading off to the airport for the trip home.  Here is me last night with the city cathedral in the background

The author, and Catania cathedral

Greggs vs Pret

 A nuclear physics colleague of mine – Robin Smith of Sheffield Hallam University – Tweeted a little while ago about a tongue-in-cheek (or oxtongue-in-bap) study he made of the relative density of Greggs Bakeries vs Pret-A-Manger sandwich shops, using machine learning to define the optimum line dividing England into a Greggs region, a.k.a. "The North", and a Pret region, a.k.a. "The South".  The study was then mentioned by a colleague of his at The Cheltenham Science Festival, and lo and behold the Daily Mail has picked it up.  Here's a tweet from yesterday by Robin with a link to the story, and the map.

It may have taken 10 years as a practicing scientist but I have finally been mentioned in the Daily Mail 👌 🔥 🥐 🤖 Thanks @vicky_dmail ! For anyone interested in baked goods and Machine Learning, take a look 👇https://t.co/YdM4rJk97A

— Dr R☢️bin Smith (@UnclearPhysics) June 7, 2023

It's been quite a while since any light-hearted studies I did were picked up for news coverage.  I hope Robin doesn't suffer too much ire from Daily Mail readers thinking scientists are spending research funding doing things like this when it is clear (even from the story in the Mail) that he did it all in his own time.  Now... what similar study could I do.  I think Waitrose vs Morrison has already been done.