Better than the A-Team, it’s COP21! Never have so many World leaders been in the same place on the same day. This time, they have just ten years to make a difference! Could the problems be solved? Will the World finally be saved?
Continue reading COP21 – The Return Les “Entreprenieurs” in Paris
This blog is so cool. It’s spontaneous! It’s electric!! But not as cool as it has been at these cutting-edge laboratories on the outskirts of Europe. Scientists there are dealing with an entirely new type of solid matter – ‘spontelectrics’.
Continue reading What’s the Matter… with Spontelectrics?
Following World War I and World War II, at least three major powers disposed of massive quantities of captured, damaged and obsolete chemical warfare material by dumping them into oceans, seas and lakes around the globe. Mustard gas, phosgene, lewisite… Submerged chemical ammunitions pose very serious ongoing environmental problems.
Continue reading What Lies Beneath – The Toxic Legacy of Post-War Ammunitions Sea Dumping
23rd October 2015. The ‘strongest ever’ hurricane recorded in the Western hemisphere is about to make a “potentially catastrophic” landfall on the western coast of Mexico. This is hurricane Patricia. At that time, the super storm is a Category 5. Weather scientists predict 20 inches of rain and 200 miles per hour winds…
Continue reading On the Trail of Hurricane Patricia
In the run-up to the 2015 physics Nobel prize, which was awarded on Tuesday 6 October, Physics World looked at how Nobel-prize-winning physicists have been moving around the globe over the past century.
Continue reading Physics Without Frontiers…
Mars is not the dry, arid planet we once thought it was. Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found. NASA’s announcement has the potential of turning some Red Planet theories on their heads…
Continue reading Mars Has Water!
A new online citizen science initiative, Fossilfinder, is inviting ordinary members of the public to help hunt for fossils in the Kenyan desert. The volunteers will have the opportunity to sift through one million images from the arid Turkana Basin – a key area for fossils of early human ancestors.
Continue reading Armchair Fossil Hunting in the Turkana Basin
With his wind-swept mane, the inimitable Richard Feynman looked devilishly handsome. And he darn-diddly knew it too! As for Fritz Haber, Rosalind Franklin and Neil deGrasse Tyson, they were the original hipsters. That’s according to BuzzFeed anyway…
Yes, modern-day hipsters take heed. BuzzFeed – the undisputed masters of click-bait – even made it a feature in unique BuzzFeed style: 11 Pictures That Prove That Scientists Were The Original Hipsters.
Marie Curie (1867-1934) – the ‘foreign student‘ who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She didn’t shy away from a bold pattern.
Fritz Haber (1868-1934) figured out the method used in industry to synthesise ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gases. Known as the Haber-Bosch process, the food production for half the World’s current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilisers. So, you wouldn’t dream of taking a dig at his glasses…
Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) may be considered to be the “father of the atomic bomb”, but you wouldn’t think of criticising his tie.
Stylish Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was unravelling the mysteries of DNA structure, long before anyone even heard of DNA.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson? The only thing hotter than his facial hair are the supernovae he studied in his field of Astrophysics…
If you thought physicists weren’t known for their good dress sense, think again!
Once upon a time, Europe was almost covered by one giant forest. Now, it’s almost entirely fields and grasslands. Humans are controlling tree densities. Understanding the global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere.
Continue reading Three Trillion Trees
I met Cortana mid-afternoon. The perfect time for a well-earned tea break and a chat down at the local café. I was keen to meet Cortana for the first time. By then, she was already a celebrity.
Continue reading All the Trappings of Artificial Intelligence – Does Cortana Dream of Electric Sheep?
Astronomers have found the smallest exoplanet yet to be directly photographed by a telescope on Earth. A methane-shrouded gas giant. A young Jupiter…
Continue reading Exoplanet ‘Young Jupiter’ 51 Eridani b
The radiocarbon 14C dating method has been used for decades to accurately determine the age of a wide range of artefacts. But our relentless use of fossil fuels has pumped a type of carbon into the atmosphere that is starting to confuse the dating technique. By 2050, scientists warn, new fabrics could have the same radiocarbon date as items 1,000 years old!
Waste fibres from cannabis crops can be transformed into high-performance low-cost pseudo-graphene energy storage devices.
Continue reading From Super Weed to Super-Capacitors, Another Surprising Use for Cannabis…Let’s talk about size… 😉 How big are the objects floating in our Universe and how big can they get? Starting with a “big” object, our very own Moon… Embark on a tour of space… A tour of our Universe…
Continue reading Size Matters… in Astrophysical Terms
First predicted in the 1960s, like the Higgs boson before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its recent detection at CERN’s LHCb collaboration. The discovery amounts to finding a new form of matter…
Look into my eyes. The eyes, the eyes. Not around the eyes. Don’t look AROUND the eyes. Look INTO my eyes. The eyes… [click] You’re not under! But… Can you read my mind?
Continue reading Eyes of the Beholder
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.
Continue reading We Check the Time of Death with Post-Mortem Degradation of Skeletal Proteins – And Other Gruesome Forensic Facts of Life
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?
Continue reading Seeing the Light Fantastic – Particles, Waves and All
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?
Continue reading Just a Second…
Deep down, in huge subterranean caverns… Underneath the Franco-Swiss border… 300 feet underground… lies a beast of unprecedented power… and mystery. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that man summons to explore the uncharted corners of the sub-atomic realm… After two years of a deep slumber, the mighty beast has awoken…
Continue reading Physics at 13 TeV – Cranking Up the LHC
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.
Continue reading El Niño – Return of the ‘Enfant Terrible’
How could the humble Tortoise ever beat legendary Greek champion, Achilles, in a race to the finish? And what about that time when the champion of the animal kingdom simply ridiculed his next-door neighbour aka the Hare?
Continue reading Zeno’s Paradoxes or What Happened When Achilles and the Hare Decided to Outfox the Legendary Tortoise
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.
Continue reading Space-Age RocketAmazing timelapse footage of the Earth (including aurorae, lightning and city lights) as seen from the International Space Station. Just mesmerizing…
Continue reading The World Outside My Window… What a Window!!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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