Don’t cook the baby

 Last week we had a new oven installed. Our old el-cheapo one that came with the house was never in Karen’s good books. Small, dirty, incapable of getting to a high temperature and generally giving the impression that it was about to die at any moment. Indeed, it did a couple of Christmases ago – […]

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The ticker-tape car

Somewhere in the Cambridge / Hamilton vicinity is a car with no oil in it. I know this because on the way in to work this morning there was a trail of oil on the road.  The damp road surface led to it being very prominent. A splash of oil, being less dense than water, […]

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Units – they just don’t go away

 One thing that’s become really clear to me in teaching physics is that dimensions and units are not straightforward concepts for students. I might hazard the assertion that they are ‘threshold concepts‘ – ones where grasping what they are about transforms you way of thinking. Most people at least half-understand the idea of units – […]

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What does electricity cost?

 I was at a local intermediate school this morning, talking to a group of students about energy. It’s a pretty broad topic, and they were very enthusiastic, meaning I only got through about half of what I wanted, but that’s OK. If it inspires them to go and find things out for themselves, then that’s […]

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The sleep machine

I came across this paper while doing a bit of reading about the applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A TMS machine applies pulses of magnetic field to the brain. The rapidly-varying magnetic field induces an electric field (Faraday’s law) and this in turn influences neural activity (but just how and where is an open question).  A […]

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Big and small

 Here’s a great interactive website by Cary Huang to give you an idea of how big and small things are. Thanks to Greta Dromgool for pointing me towards it. It covers a whopping 60 orders of magntiude in length – from ten to the power of minus thirty five (the Planck Length) through to 10 […]

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