Category: Science
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Keep Warm in the Big Chill… Without Turning Up Your Heating.
As the cold snap grips, I thought a little starter course in thermodynamics might come in helpful 😉 First up: resist turning up the thermostat. Please. For the sake of everyone, now and in the future, we can’t afford to heat the huge air volumes in our houses by burning fuel. It’s highly inefficient. I…
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The 33
The story of the Chilean miners has been one of the most incredibly moving events I can remember. There’s something of the two-fingers-up-to-nature which is both exhilarating and troubling, and something of the deeply archetypal and transformative about the rescue… 33 Sliding, encased, through the bowels the earth thirty-three steel turds are evacuated into the…
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The Unconscious Microscope | Monsters
Fascinating series of images in The Daily Telegraph. Using an electron microscope, scientists have taken photographs (then recoloured) of bugs and insects… and it’s amazing just how ‘monstrous’ they look. It’s as if the human unconscious has its own microscope which has always been aware of these bizarre life-forms, which are so similar to the…
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Into Great Science | Solar Flares
Very interesting report today in the Telegraph that NASA have detected a large solar flare erupting from the sun – which is likely to cause some spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights. These ‘coronal mass injections’ are actually a source of immense worry for disaster planners, as the largest eruption could result in…