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- What do Y, Yb, Tb, Er, Gd, Tm, Sc, Ho, Dy and Lu have in common?
- Why is Quincy, Washington so popular with tech companies?
- Why putting missiles on roofs in London isn’t as dumb as it sounds.
- The classified Space Shuttle missions
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- Clockwise
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- Three different types of magnetism
- Consanguinity and the coefficient of relationship
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- Water in Bermuda
- Do bowling balls float?
- The base rate fallacy
- Recent solar flare
- The man who put his head in a particle accelerator
- Does time go faster as you get older?
- Unclaimed Antarctica
- Uptake of triple science
- LHC quilts
- Which university course is most popular?
- Understanding the problem with RSA
- How big are pizzas?
- Shapes of equal width
- Ebb and Flow
- The polarisation of the sky
- Whiteboards
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- Biosphere lungs
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- Curiosity’s nuclear battery
- You’ve already experienced the earliest Easter you’ll ever know
- Logarithmic scales
- The Milky Way is shaped like a CD
- The speed of jet lag
- Types of Desert
- UK electricity import and export
- The Moses Bridge
- Why does metal feel cold?
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Monthly Archives: July 2011
Passive Institutional Controls
The storage of nuclear waste is a long term problem, on the scale of tens of thousands of years. Regular warning signs are no use on a timescale this long: paper rots, metal rusts and paint peels. Changes in language … Continue reading
Tagged nuclear, psychology, waste
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How fast? The Doppler effect bumper sticker
There is a running joke amongst physicists about a bumper sticker than turns blue. This is a joke about the Doppler effect. When a source of waves are moving towards a detector (e.g. your ears or eyes) the frequency of the … Continue reading
Solar wind and real wind
“Solar wind” is a colloquial term for the stream of charged particles ejected from the surface of the Sun by heat and strong magnetic fields. It is the interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field that is responsible … Continue reading
Tagged arXiv, solar, sun, weather
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Paperweight
I do not think the physics teacher responsible for this properly understands how paperweights are supposed to work.
Tagged books, weight
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Electricity consumption in the production of aluminium
Aluminium is a very useful metal; it is the most widely used non-ferrous* metal in the world. It has a very low electrical resistance and a very good strength-to-weight ratio and has therefore found many applications: from packaging in drinks … Continue reading
Tagged aluminium, electricity, energy
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Revetments
In order to prevent excessive coastal erosion engineers often create revetments, structures designed to absorb the energy of the incoming waves before they strike the coast. It seems to be the law that the pieces used to create these structures … Continue reading
Tagged coast, erosion
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Snow in the Atacama Desert
A convincing argument can be made that the Atacama Desert in Chile and Argentina is the driest place on Earth. The average rainfall is one millimetre per year and some weather monitoring stations have never detected rain. This week eighty … Continue reading
Tagged satellite, snow, weather
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How does SVK’s ultraviolet ink work?
SVK is a comic book written by Warren Ellis, drawn by Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker and published by BERG. SVK’s unique selling point is that it contains two “layers” of story: the regular, black and white layer, and a hidden layer, visible only … Continue reading
Tagged comic, ultraviolet
3 Comments
Nobel prize winning sentences
To commemorate the Lindau Nobel Meeting — a gathering of Nobel laureates held in Lindau, Germany — the Scientific American blog looked at “sentence[s] that … best represents [laureates’] Nobel prize-winning work.” They mainly focused on the Physiology or Medicine and Chemistry prizes and … Continue reading