Those of you who check out the NZ metservice website frequently, may remember last week’s ‘photo-of-the-week’: It’s of fallstreak cloud, and this example was spotted by my mother-in-law, Barbara Seccombe, off the coast from New Plymouth recently. (Photo credit to my father-in-law, Wally Seccombe, used with permission). It’s not something you see everyday, so I asked my brother […]
Continue readingMonth: March 2010
Heat transfer within edible objects
The veggie-juicer in our kitchen will happily take fruit, such as apples and oranges. Apparently, in the case of the orange, it works best if the fruit is cold (but not frozen) throughout. So here’s the question my wife asked me last week: If I have an orange at room temperature, and want to cool it […]
Continue readingTectonic Plates and Angular Momentum
As we know, the earth spins on its axis once every twenty four hours. (Well, actually it doesn’t, but we’ll leave aside the difference between solar and sidereal days for the purpose of this entry). The spinning earth posses something we physicists call angular momentum. It is the ‘spinning’ version of linear momentum; the latter […]
Continue readingFundamental Constants and the problem of gravity
A few years ago I wrote, along with a collaborator, a guide to uncertainty analysis (commonly and misleadingly referred to as error analysis) in university physics. Yesterday I had a quick look at this, to see if I should update anything for our new bunch of students. As part of this, I had a look […]
Continue readingScience research works
I was pleased to read in February’s PhysicsWorld that a spin-off company started by Henning Sirringhaus and Richard Friend (the latter being one of my old university lecturers) has launched an exciting product into the electronics market – the Que. (Don’t ask me how to say it, nor why they have chose such awful colours for their […]
Continue readingJust what did Rutherford get up to?
This story, reported by Hamish Johnston, is interesting. Did Rutherford leave something nasty lurking in his lab in Manchester? What mutant lifeforms are slowly evolving at the back of his old filing cabinet? Is Coronation Street safe? What hideous organism is about to eat its way out of the building and destroy half of North West England? […]
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