I am teaching part of an electromag course this semester but I am doing the maths bit of the course, so I’m not doing much electromag, apart from doing stuff like getting the students to calculate the electrostatic potential inside a spherical cavity. This is a bit of a shame as this means I don’t […]
Read more
On 16th January 1943 in Portland, Oregon, USA, the air was split by a crack so loud that it could be heard over a mile away. It was the sound of the tanker SS Schenectady breaking in two. The Wikipedia page with a rather impressive picture of the snapped-in-two tanker is here. It is believed […]
Read more
There are two more weeks of semester before the Easter break. I have mixed emotions. On the one hand I am a bit knackered – teaching on two courses, co-writing 4 scientific papers, working on 2 grant proposals, etc, etc, moan, moan, grumble, grumble – but on the other hand it is fun to be […]
Read more
You almost certainly have not heard of Prof Cornelia Bargmann, of Rockefelller University in New York. But there was an interesting feature about her in Nature a couple of weeks ago. First of all it was very timely, it came out in the week in which Prof Bargmann won a $3 million Breakthroughs in Life Sciences prize. […]
Read more
There is a new, and big ($3 million), prize in science. It is the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The idea (and money) come from by a number of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Google co-funder Sergey Brin, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The prize is in the field of biomedical research, it aims “to recognize excellence in […]
Read more
Comment