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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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Before NASA there was NACA, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. NACA was upgraded into NASA in 1958 – shortly after the then USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik, and the USA decided they needed to pull their finger out in space. Anyway, back to NACA. In the late 1940s NACA worked with the US […]
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