Archive for the ‘Science & technology’ Category
Would you like to find some stardust?
August 20th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
On 15 January 2006, the Stardust spacecraft’s sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust’s dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004 and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originate in distant stars, […]
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“Enemies Of Reason” (1)
August 13th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
I’m a fan of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He talks immense sense and is not afraid to challenge arrant nonsense. In January 2006, I watched his television programmes entitled “The Root Of All Evil?” when he attacked the falsity of religious belief [my blog posting here]. More recently, I read his book “The God Delusion” […]
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Welcome to the world of spintronics
August 9th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Continuing the scientific theme of this week’s NightHawk postings, let’s consider for a moment what might come after microelectronics which is reaching the physical limits of what can be achieved. The successor technology might be something called spintronics (spin-based electronics) which is also known as magnetoelectronics. This is a science which exploits the spin factor […]
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Discovery of new sub-atomic particle
August 8th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
This week, NightHawk seems to be focusing on science. Today’s subject is sub-atomic particles, something on which I touched only recently in this posting. Now it may have escaped your notice – it escaped mine at the time – but earlier this summer scientists issued a statement announcing the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle. […]
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Sorting out a million galaxies
August 7th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
At the weekend, Vee and I were in deepest and remotest Kent to visit our friends Derek and Mandy who live in a little village called Broughton-under-Blean. From the balcony of their house, we watched the sunset behind the orchard next to their home. Derek was a colleague of mine in the Research Department of […]
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The unnaturalness of nature
August 6th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The variations in nature are simply amazing. We all know that there is a metal that is liquid at room temperature: mercury. But do you know about non-newtonian fluids? These are fluids that do not behave like regular liquids. For example, if subjected to sudden stress, a non-newtonian fluid will solidify. These videos show a […]
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What’s the most complicated thing in the world to understand?
July 28th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Dear reader – I give you: quantum mechanics. Do I accept the Copenhagen interpretation? How is it that light is both a wave and a particle (the wave-particle duality)? How can Schrödinger’s cat be both alive and dead? How is that the physical universe is probabilistic rather than deterministic (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle)?. Now, some 40 […]
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Pale blue dot
June 23rd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
I was a big fan of Carl Sagan, the American scientist who died in 1996, so it was a real pleasure to listen to him narrate this short piece on the importance of our planet.
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Mayhem in Muscat
June 22nd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Friends of mine in Oman have sent an account of the devastation caused last week by tropical cyclone Gonu.
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Have we found dark matter?
May 16th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The planets, stars and giant clouds of dust and gas that astronomers can see with telescopes account for only 4% of the mass of the universe. The majority of the cosmos is made up of an invisible form of mass called dark matter. No one knows what dark matter is made of, but astronomers believe […]
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