Archive for the ‘Science & technology’ Category
What does the new periodic table look like?
January 5th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
A lot has changed since I did my Chemistry ‘A’ level 50 years ago and the periodic table now looks rather different. This week, four new elements were confirmed. You can view the new periodic table with a look at selected elements here.
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Unhappiness will not shorten your life
December 10th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
“Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill … We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a 10-year study of a million women.” So states Dr Bette Liu, now at the University of New South Wales in Australia, about a study which has just been published in the […]
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Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus
December 1st, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Instead each of us is from our own unique planet. But what about that book? Ignore the fiction; look at the facts as demonstrated by the latest research based on MRI scans of men’s and women’s brains conducted at Tel Aviv University. As the head of the project puts it: “We show there are differences, but […]
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UTC or not UTC? – that was the question
November 22nd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
An international agreement has been reached to retain the “leap second” in coordinated universal time (UTC). The deal was reached at the International Telecommunications Union World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-15) which is currently taking place in Geneva. Leap seconds are periodically added to adjust irregularities between the earth’s rotation and UTC in order to remain close […]
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The end of the world is not yet nigh
October 31st, 2015 by Roger Darlington
This Halloween just got a whole lot scarier with the discovery of a huge asteroid hurtling towards Earth. The space rock was discovered less than a fortnight ago by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. With the asteroid expected to come within the 7,500,000 km threshold of proximity to Earth, it has been classified […]
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Remembering the Soviet role in the space race
October 13th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
When I was an adolescent in the 1960s, the space race between the USA and the USSR was at full pelt. It was an exciting time with a new achievement almost every few months. But, of course, we knew much more at the time about the background to the American space programme compared to the […]
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Google -> Alphabet -> The Circle?
August 12th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
The news that Google is to restructure its operations fundamentally, with a new holding company called Alphabet, underlines just how diverse and ambitious are the company’s aspirations. Where is all this taking us? One profoundly unsettling scenario is offered in a novel called “The Circle” by Dave Eggers. It is not a prediction but it […]
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Exploring the Multiverse
August 11th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
For the third time in a week, I attended a one-day course at the City Lit in central London. The previous two courses were on Henry V [my blog posting here] and climate change [my blog posting here], but this latest course could not have been more different. Andrew McGettigan [his slides here] and Rich Cochrane […]
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Why do bad things happen? – a review of “The Magic Of Reality”
July 25th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Popular science books and programmes have become, well, popular because we all want to understand our world and our universe. Richard Dawkins in a master in explaining complicated science in understandable language and I’ve just finished reading his 2011 book “The Magic Of Reality”. You can read my review here.
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The discovery of a new sub-atomic particle: the pentaquark
July 20th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Although the relevant data was accumulated more than three years ago, those clever people at CERN on the French/Swiss border chose to announce the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle on the same day as the New Horizons photographs of Pluto were published by NASA, so you won’t have heard about it. The particle is […]
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