(Yes, this entry is about physics, but it takes a little while to get there, so please bear with me…) Last night I attended a talk on nutrition. It was focused towards a particular health issue, but was also reasonably general in places. Now, I emphasize that I am a physicist not a nutritionist, so […]
Continue readingMonth: April 2009
Goodbye summertime
So daylight savings is over for another year. Back to boring old standard time. Now’s a good moment to comment on what time zone New Zealand sits in. In ‘winter time’ it sits twelve hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, GMT (or Univeral Time, as astronomers like to call it). Is that reasonable? In Greenwich (south-east […]
Continue readingMoney, money, money
I’ve just been reading in ‘Physics World’ magazine (IOP publishing, physicsworld.com) of one of the less well-known side effects of the delay on the Large Hadron Collider: many PhD students, who hoped by now to have that final bit of data to conclude their PhD theses, are stuck. A PhD is a research degree – […]
Continue readingA sun in your own living room
The holy grail of power generation is nuclear fusion. That’s the process by which stars are powered – simply put, hydrogen turns into helium and releases energy in the process. What makes it so perfect is that there is pretty-well a limitless supply of hydrogen on the Earth, tied up in the copious quantities of […]
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