Category Archives: General

The man who put his head in a particle accelerator

Posted on 5th March by Mr Reid

The U-70 syn­chro­tron control room. On July 13 1978 Anatoli Bugorski, a phys­i­cist working on the U-70 syn­chro­tron at the Insti­tute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia decided to put his head into the particle accel­er­ator whilst it was … Continue reading →

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Does time go faster as you get older?

Posted on 1st March by Mr Reid

Whilst two observers moving relative to each other will exper­i­ence the other’s time as moving slower or faster (Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity), the passage of time for any given observer in a single ref­er­ence frame is constant. But as you … Continue reading →

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Unclaimed Antarctica

Posted on 27th February by Mr Reid

Offi­cially, Ant­arc­tica is not ruled by anybody; the entire con­tinent is terra nullius: land that belongs to noone. After the Moon, it is the largest terra nullius area that men have walked on. Seven coun­tries (the United Kingdom, New Zealand, … Continue reading →

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Uptake of triple science

Posted on 26th February by Mr Reid

There are two main options for pupils taking GCSE science in the UK: Dual Award and Triple Award. In Dual Award Science pupils are awarded two grades across the three sciences, and in Triple Award Science they are awarded one … Continue reading →

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LHC quilts

Posted on 24th February by Mr Reid

Artist Kate Findlay makes beau­tiful quilts inspired by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. I don’t know if they’re for sale, but I’d def­in­itely buy one if they were.

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Which university course is most popular?

Posted on 20th February by Mr Reid

UCAS provides a great deal of stat­ist­ical inform­a­tion about uni­ver­sity applic­a­tions. One of the most inter­esting datasets compares the number of applic­ants for each course with the number of places avail­able. (Note that the scale starts at three applic­ants per … Continue reading →

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Understanding the problem with RSA

Posted on 17th February by Mr Reid

Recent reports suggest that the very commonly used RSA encryp­tion algorithm has sig­ni­ficant security flaws. I couldn’t find a good explan­a­tion of the math­em­at­ical problem that causes these flaws online, but I think I’ve worked it out below. The security of … Continue reading →

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How big are pizzas?

Posted on 13th February by Mr Reid

Is a 12-inch pizza twice as big as a 6-inch pizza? Simply put, no. The amount of pizza (its area) is pro­por­tional to the square of its diameter, so a 12-inch pizza is actually four times bigger than a 6-inch … Continue reading →

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Shapes of equal width

Posted on 9th February by Mr Reid

Circular objects roll because a circle is a shape of equal width. No matter where you measure from, the distance from one side to the other (through the centre) is the same. But circles aren’t the only shape with this property. … Continue reading →

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Ebb and Flow

Posted on 7th February by Mr Reid

The twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Labor­atory satel­lites were initally given the highly original names of GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B. But thanks to students at a Montana ele­mentary school they are now the best-named satel­lites out there. Readers, meet Ebb and Flow: … Continue reading →

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The polarisation of the sky

Posted on 5th February by Mr Reid

When light from the Sun or the Moon strikes Earth’s atmo­sphere it is scattered, sent in all dir­ec­tions by the atoms and molecules that make up the air. During this scat­tering process some of the light is polar­ised  —  instead of the … Continue reading →

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Whiteboards

Posted on 4th February by Mr Reid

Some­times after a lesson I take a pho­to­graph of the white­board left over. Some recent pho­to­graphs are below.

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The cost of coins

Posted on 23rd January by Mr Reid

It used to be the case that coins used as currency had value because of the material from which they were made: a solid gold coin weighing one ounce had the same value as one ounce of gold. The intro­duc­tion of … Continue reading →

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Technetium-99m generators

Posted on 15th January by Mr Reid

Technetium-99m is a radio­active tracer that is used in twenty million medical dia­gnostic pro­ced­ures per year. At least 31 radio­phar­ma­ceut­icals based on Tc-99m are used for imaging and studying organs such as the brain, heart muscle, thyroid, lungs, liver, gall­bladder … Continue reading →

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Plug wiring colour scheme

Posted on 6th January by Mr Reid

UK plugs use brown insu­la­tion for the live wire, blue insu­la­tion for the neutral wire and green with yellow stripes insu­la­tion for the earth wire. But why this par­tic­ular com­bin­a­tion of colours? The answer is decept­ively simple: there is no type … Continue reading →

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Night vision

Posted on 2nd January by Mr Reid

The vision of human beings is well-adapted to daylight; the human eye has evolved to see in the range of wavelengths that are brightest in the spectrum of light that the Sun emits. The intensity of the light the Sun emits … Continue reading →

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The most radioactive parts of the UK

Posted on 28th December by Mr Reid

The average radio­active back­ground dose in the UK is 2.7 mil­lis­iev­erts. Of this 2.7 mSv, 1.35 mSv comes from radio­active radon gas leaking out of the ground. This radio­active radon (Rn-222) is produced by the decay of uranium-238, after a series of inter­me­diate … Continue reading →

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Biosphere lungs

Posted on 27th December by Mr Reid

Some people refer to the rain­forests as “Earth’s lungs”. In reality this is quite far from the truth, as rain­forests actually con­tribute little (net) oxygen to Earth’s atmo­sphere; 70% of oxygen pro­duc­tion is done by water-bourne green algae and the … Continue reading →

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Anscombe’s quartet

Posted on 21st December by Mr Reid

Anscombe’s quartet is four sets of data that are used to demon­strate the import­ance of graphing data. Set 1 Set 2 Set 3 Set 4 x y x y x y x y 10 8.04 10 9.14 10 7.46 8 … Continue reading →

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Haversine formula

Posted on 20th December by Mr Reid

The hav­er­sine formula is used to cal­cu­late the distance between two points on the Earth’s surface spe­cified in lon­gitude and latitude. d is the distance between two points with lon­gitude and latitude (ψ,φ) and r is the radius of the Earth. As … Continue reading →

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