It’s been a couple of weeks since the NIH studies on mice, rats and cellphones hit the headlines. The studies were released with perfect timing to be used in our Science Communication paper – a third-year level paper for science undergraduates on communicating science ideas well. In short, we had half the class look at […]
Continue readingWe have now been in our ‘new’ house for four months. This one still does feel a little ‘new’, being only 5 years old. It even incorporates some radical features (for New Zealand): proper insulation, double glazing (though I note that the frames are still aluminium) and well engineered drainage from what otherwise would be […]
Continue readingI came across the following on the BBC website "Australia's summer broke 205 records…" It draws from the recent Climate Council report. The BBC article doesn't list them all 205 of them, but does pull out the most impressive – the hottest summer on record for Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, and the wettest on record […]
Continue readingAs if you didn't know already, digging holes is important in Western Australia. And there is a LOT of Western Australia to dig holes in. Sitting in a park in the centre of Perth is a great collection of stuff that comes out of these holes – the 'Ore Obelisk'. It's a great idea – […]
Continue readingWe were away this weekend – in sunny Whakatane. That was a smart move weather-wise. We arrived back home about 2.30pm yesterday afternoon, just as the fog was lifting from Cambridge. An hour later, it was settling down again for the night. A glance at the MetService website shows that, while Whakatane and Rotorua basked […]
Continue readingRight. Time to come up for air after a hectic month. I can breathe again, at least until the end of tomorrow, when the next pile of assignments land on my desk for marking. I bought a new car last week. Well, new for me. The previous 22-year-old piece of machinery had finally succumbed to […]
Continue readingA couple of days ago I cleaned the filters in our heat pumps. What prompted me to do this wasn't the cold weather, but the visible build up of dust on the casing of the indoor units. It looked horrible. On opening the unit up, it was clear that the filters were well overdue a […]
Continue readingWhile there is some great fiction out there, one really shouldn't try to learn much physics from it. One case in point, which I am forced to listen to over and over by the youngest member of our house, is the story of the Three Little Pigs. I'm not talking here about the relative merits […]
Continue readingI've been reading through a student's report of his summer work placement. He had a project on improving the performance of a heat exchanger used for getting rid of heat from a cryogenic cooler. The basic concept is that materials are being cooled to about 40 kelvin (that's 40 degrees above absolute zero, minus 233 […]
Continue readingIn the lab, my summer student has been working on a small device to keep a small piece of equipment at a stable temperature. It uses a Peltier device – in essence it's a solid-state heat pump. Pass through current one way, and heat is drawn from the top surface to the bottom; pass current […]
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