Casting of the third primary mirror of GMT will start this Saturday, Aug 24, in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, Univ. of Arizona. FOXNEWS reports the even and introduces the GMT online:

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/08/23/giant-telescope-mirror-for-future-observatory-to-be-cast-saturday/

Dr. Wendy Freedman, Chairman GMT, and Dr. Pat McCarthy, Director GMT, discuss the Giant Magellan Telescope’s mirrors and the science that they will enable.

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The Practical Optics Workshop (POW) is a set of focused activities outside of the regular curriculum that provide graduate students opportunities to learn valuable practical skills.  The goal of POW is to fill the gap between the classes and the actual research work.  It covers skills that are broadly need for graduate students’ research and their future employment. The main organizer of this workshop is Dr. Ping Zhou from LOFT. Faculties through out the College of Optical Sciences will participate teaching. Test runs for some of the sub-workshops are already under going. The official kicked off will be in the coming semester. A more detailed introduction can be found here:

http://www.loft.optics.arizona.edu/documents/presentations/POW_Introduction-student.pptx

In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute. (from io9.com)