It must be me but it seems that UVic issues a story each month about some telescope or other. The latest story concerns two astrophysicists at the university, who have been analysing how a cluster of ‘dwarf’ galaxies are rotating around a neighbouring galaxy called Andromeda. Galaxies are not supposed to orbit things like planets and moons so this is a key discovery. Scientists using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii collaborated on the project.

Lots of details on the project can be found here. There is also a little video, with some Mendelssohn thrown in, showing what they have seen through the big telescope in Hawaii.

During the SuperComputing 2012 (SC12) conference earlier this month, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers from the University of Victoria, the California Institute for Technology, the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt’s Brookhaven National Lab broke their own record for data transfer using the latest generation of wide area network circuits. Apparently, this is just the start, according to this report, 1,000 Mbps speeds will be possible in the next 12 months.

Overall, the transfer rate achieved by the team hit 339 Mbps. For the sake of comparison, a 3G cellphone can usually achieve data transfer rates of around 18 Mbps while brand new super-exciting 4G cellphones can hit 30-35 Mbps in real-world scenarios.