Category Archives: Environment

We Check the Time of Death with Post-Mortem Degradation of Skeletal Proteins – And Other Gruesome Forensic Facts of Life

A photomontage showing a body outline, "Do Not Cross" yellow police tape, and a magnifier focused on the word "Forensics". The picture also lists the following forensic ways to estimate the time of death - Wait: Determine the time of death; Rigor mortis; Decomposition; Forensic Entomology; Succession on corpses; Other decomposers.
Estimating the Time of Death

Forensic researchers from the University of Salzburg have developed a new method for establishing an exact time of death after as long as 10 days – a significant step forward from the current method of measuring core body temperature, which only works up to 36 hours after death.

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Seeing the Light Fantastic – Particles, Waves and All

This seminal photograph shows, for the first time, light in all its beauty, simultaneously seen as a wave and as a particle.
Light in All its Beauty

Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists were able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving simultaneously both as a wave AND as a stream of particles.  You need light to take a photograph.  But how do you take a photograph of light?

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Just a Second…

A close-up photograph of an analog clock showing the hands just reaching the hour.
What Does a Second Look Like?

1/60 minute.  1/3,600 hour.  1/86,400 day.  1/1 hertz.  The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a 133 55Cs caesium isotope corresponds to one second.  But what does it look like?  And where might you find a second?

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El Niño – Return of the ‘Enfant Terrible’

A composite picture showing a heat map of the Earth, highlighting the location of the temperature anomaly in the southern hemisphere, with superimposed on it the face of a young child having a tantrum. Image: NaturPhilosophie
El Niño: A Temperature Anomaly

Still in its early stages, El Niño has the potential to cause extreme and even devastating weather around the World.  According to climate graphs, we have reached a 0.6 value for the ENSO.  It’s a 60% probability.  El Niño is now officially back.

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Space-Age Rocket

A photomontage showing the American space shuttle taking off over a background of roquette salad, hence "Space-Age Rocket".
Salad Growing… in Space?

Ever since the early days of human space travel, back in the 1960s, astronauts have run experiments involving plants in space.  Over a million seeds of rocket (two kilograms of rocket seeds) are shortly due to take off from Florida, bound for the International Space Station, as part of British ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s six-month Principia mission.

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The World Outside My Window… What a Window!!

What a World!!

Amazing timelapse footage of the Earth (including aurorae, lightning and city lights) as seen from the International Space Station.  Just mesmerizing…

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All Alone in the Night…

Late O’ Clock at Night

It’s late o’clock at night. All alone in the night? Enjoy this amazing time footage flyover of the Earth from the International Space Station. Absolutely uplifting… Positively enthralling…

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Nitrogen – Nature’s Explosive Building Blocks

An animation showing the violent explosion of a nitrogen-filled balloon.
“Lifeless”

One of the all-time most interesting elements in the Periodic Table, nitrogen is a colourless, odourless, inert diatomic gas that makes up to 78% of the Earth’s atmosphere.  We breathe it everyday, although an atmosphere of pure nitrogen is nefarious to animal and human life.  It is vital to life and plants simply strive on it.  Nitrogen compounds are explosive, and nations have gone to war over it.  It can feed… or kill.

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Coffee’s Up!

A photograph showing Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, sporting her Starfleet uniform on board the International Space Station.
#BlueDot

Expedition 43 astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti snapped this photograph of herself wearing the Starfleet uniform from TV series “Star Trek: Voyager” aboard the International Space Station, and posted it on her Twitter account @AstroSamantha last month.

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Where The Streets Have No Name

A computer-generated drawing based on a photograph from a typical street in Saragossa, in Spain. Image: NaturPhilosophie
Addressing the World

About four billion people on our planet actually live in places with no house numbers,  no street names, or without anything that constitutes a proper address.  They are effectively off-the-map, with no voting rights or access to public utilities.  A new company called What3Words proposes to revolutionize that…

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