If you have had it up to here with floods in England, if you are left cold by the snow in the United States or mystified by the unseasonably mild temperatures in Scandinavia, blame it on Santa Claus!
Ancients called mercury the “first matter” from which all other metals were formed. For centuries, mercury, a heavy metal, was also used in medicine. Yet mercury is now in such disfavour that an international treaty exists to curb its use…
Engineers have designed a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil in under an hour. All from a verdant green algae paste with the consistency of pea soup…
Manmade Carbon CO2 Pollution Has Already Put Us on Track for 20 Metres of Sea Level Rise
The bad news is that we’re all but certain to end up with a coastline at least this flooded: 20 metres or 69 feet. The “good” news is that this might take 1000 to 2000 years (or longer/shorter), and the choices we make now can affect the rate of rise and whether we blow past 69 feet to beyond 200 feet.
The Sun ought be awash with activity right now. But space scientists are baffled… The Sun has reached its solar maximum: the point in its 11-year cycle where activity is at a peak. Yet it has hit a lull. And to see when the Sun was this inactive last… you’ve got to go back about 100 years…
Magnetic North made an unusual and historic shift. For the first time in more than 220 years of map making, Ordnance Survey has noted that North lies East, and not West, of Grid north for parts of Southern Britain. But how does this shift in magnetic field affect map reading in Scotland’s hills?
January 20, 2014. 500 million miles from Earth. 09:59:58… 09:59:59… 10:00:00 GMT. After spending two and a half years into deep-space hibernation, Rosetta awakes…
Commander Chris Hadfield ascended to international stardom when he released his cover version of David Bowie’s 1972 Song ‘Space Oddity’ from the International Space Station.
A world wide web for robots to learn from each other and share information is being unveiled for the first time. The eventual aim of the system is that both robots and humans will be able to upload information to the cloud-based database, which would act as a kind of common brain for machines.
Well, you can try… I love a gothic mystery, don’t you? 😉
You have six weeks to do it – and a staged murder at Strathclyde University’s Ross Priory house – using the techniques of forensic science. Starting NOW.
An Essential Molecule for the Sustainability of Life
Water. H2O. The chemical formula is simple. Two atoms of hydrogen H and one atom of oxygen O, held together by covalent bonds, are all it takes to make what is perhaps the most fundamental substance to life on Earth.
Olivine is a common green mineral, present in the Earth’s subsurface. The mineral is also called ‘peridot’ and ‘chrysolite’ when mined as a semi-precious stone.
At a time when the United Kingdom’s Education System is being put on the spot for encouraging the enduring gender bias in subjects being taught at school, Google celebrates the 107 year-old birthday of Grace Murray Hopper in classic Google Doodlestyle. That is, Dr Grace Hopper. Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. “Amazing Grace” Hopper.
Just when you had high hopes of getting your hands on the latest gizmos and trendy gadgets in time for Christmas… and Boom! You’re being given a comet! Not just any comet. Comet ISON (C/2012 S1). It’s 4.6 billion years old! And it will pass within 40,000,000 miles of Earth.
Typhoon Haiyan was a huge weather system. If you haven’t heard about the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines by now, then you probably don’t care…
Just nine months ago, a massive asteroid blew up above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. The explosion created by the Chelyabinsk asteroid on Friday 15 February 2013 was thelargest explosion on Earth since the one that occurred over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908.
And what does the Law of Conservation of Energy actually mean? In science and Nature, the word ‘energy’ conjures up a wealth of images associated with speed of movement, activity and work. Energy does appear in many guises. Even matter is a form of energy. Actually, everything in the Universe is nothing more than energy in one form or another…
Back in May 2013, scientists announced that they had managed to capture a photo of an electron’s whizzing orbit within a hydrogen atom, using a unique new technology of ‘quantum’ microscopy. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a short trip into the infinitesimally small! Here is the first photograph of a hydrogen atom!
In 1909, physics pioneers Robert Millikan (1868-1953) and Harvey Fletcher (1884-1981) performed an experiment that would ultimately enable them to determine one of the most fundamental of all physical constants: the elementary electric charge, i.e. the electric charge of an individual electron – the constant e.
The Physics Nobel Prize was awarded on 8 October 2013 to Edinburgh University-based scientist Peter Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism crucial to our understanding of the origin of everything…
According to the current understanding of Physics, there is as yet no uniform field theory. No all-encompassing well-rounded theory that would enable all the known fundamental forces and elementary particles to fit neatly into one simple model, and to be expressed in terms of a single field.
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