On 12 June at Arena Corinthians in São Paulo, shortly before 5pm local time, a young paraplegic Brazilian youth will stand up from a wheelchair… walk over to midfield… and take a kick in the opening ceremony of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil!
Continue reading Rise of the Exoskeletons – Get Up… and Kick-Off!
Helium is the second most abundant element in the Universe, after hydrogen. On Earth, helium is relatively rare, because it is one of the few elements that can escape gravity and leak away into space. Therefore, helium exists as a finite resource. But as our reserves of the precious element steadily decreases, helium is in increasing demand. In medicine, helium supports the fight against cancer…
Continue reading Helium – Lighter than Air
Buoyancy is the upward force exerted by a fluid that opposes the weight of an object immersed in a particular substance. Essentially, this is what Archimedes (c.287 – 212 BC) observed when he stated that:
Continue reading Up Archimedes! – The Principle of Buoyancy
They are found everywhere in Nature. From the leaf arrangement in plants, to the pattern of the petals of a flower, the bracts of a pine cone, or the scales of a pineapple. The Fibonacci numbers are applicable to the growth of every living thing: a single cell, a grain of wheat, a hive of bees, all of mankind. From sunflowers to sea shells, the same recurrent mathematical pattern can be observed in Nature, again, and again, and again…
Continue reading Fibonacci’s Golden Spiral – The Relationship between Maths and Nature
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…
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?
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…