Members of the CMBeam team participated in Vísindavaka, an annual public outreach event for young people. Our booth was equipped with a 1.5-m diameter gravity demonstrator, some videos (in Icelandic) on various astrophysics activities at the University of Iceland, a Hoberman sphere, a perpetual motion machine, and a poster summarizing CMB research activities at the university. The gravity demonstrator and perpetual motion machine were definitely the main attractions.

We went away with lots of ideas on what to demonstrate next year and we will definitely be participating again :)

Members of the CMBeam team visited Yokohama, Japan, to participate in the SPIE conference. It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones. The highlight was definitely talking to all the brilliant people at the poster sessions and learning about their work. Also, it turns out that there is a clothing store in Japan called BEAMS!

Here are some photos from the meeting:

The New York Times did a news article on the Simons Observatory see link to the online article below. The article also appeared in the Science Times printed version of the NYT. Surprisingly, the journalist decided to use a figure from Nadia’s recent paper describing simulations that probe beam reconstruction capabilities of the Simons Observatory Small Aperture Telescope optics.