A crisp and perfectly flat white plain lies like freshly fallen snow, 100 kilometres (60 miles) across and 3,600 metres (12,000 ft) up in the remote Bolivian Andes. This hauntingly beautiful place, Salar de Uyuni, could be part of the key to tackling climate change, helping to wean the World away from its love of fossil fuels.
Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry is a technique for separating ions of different masses by measuring the time taken to traverse a fixed distance through a magnetic field. Sounds a bit arcane? The technique is used daily by forensic investigative teams to research criminal profiling and provide reliable evidence for the prosecution…
Copper occurs naturally in rocks, as native copper, and the history of its use by the oldest civilisations dates back to at least 10,000 years. These days, copper is in ever increasing demand for its extraordinarily versatile conductive and ductile properties, highly sought-after by the power generation, electronics and communications industries. Remote barren war-torn Afghanistan harbours great stores of the mineral…
The impacts of climate change include a higher risk of flooding and changes to crop yields and water availability. No single country causes climate change, and no one country can stop it. We need to match the urgency of our response with the scale of the science.
Major Timothy Peake has been training for space underwater in Germany to prepare for work in zero gravity. The British astronaut who is set to go into space next year said that learning how to live and work in space will be essential to the future survival of our species.
Mysterious flashes of light and clear-sky lightning, blue flames? Glowing orbs and fireballs? Will-o’-the-wisps? Stand-alone rainbow clouds and light pillars? How could this be…?
Continue reading The Enduring Mystery of Earthquake Lights – What Makes a Miracle?
This blog isn’t really “trendy”… “Physicists aren’t cool, and you never meet them anywhere anyway because they are all lesser known characters, some of them shady, who spend all their time toiling in obscurity on things no one does understand.”
Continue reading Quantum Physicists in Disguise…
The oldest remaining grain of early Earth’s original solid rock crust has now been confirmed to be a 4.374-billion-year-old zircon crystal from Jack Hills, Australia.
Continue reading Earth’s Crust – Could the Jack Hills Zircon be its Oldest Piece collected to date?
A new global monitoring system, Global Forest Watch has been launched that promises “near real-time” information on deforestation around the World. GFW uses information from hundreds of millions of satellite images, as well as data from people on the ground. Despite a greater global awareness of the impacts of deforestation, the scale of forest loss remains significant.
Break a magnet into two pieces, and what do you obtain? What you get, unsurprisingly perhaps, are two new magnets – each one with two sides of opposite polarity. You don’t get a north half and a south half. Back to square one, it seems…