This is a rough estimate of the number of alien civilisations in our galaxy, obtained from the Drake equation. Last week I went to a Institute of Physics local branch general talk, by Alok Jha. He quoted this equation. The Drake equation is clearly a bit of a guess, but it is an interesting way […]
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Many men are growing mustaches to raise money and awareness for prostate and testicular cancer, including a number of our students, you can see two of their taches here and here. Then I began to wonder when someone casually said that he had ‘unusually rapid hair growth’. I wondered if it was true, that indeed some people’s […]
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I don’t research on evolution any more (sadly I had to give it up as I didn’t have the time) but I still think it is pretty cool. One of the big questions in evolution is why we humans evolved such large brains. These sorts of evolutionary questions are hard to answer definitively partly because […]
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Over the summer I went to a couple of conferences and in one I enjoyed a talk by a Barcelona-based British scientist called Ben Lehner. It featured an interesting idea, and Lionel Messi. I guess if you work in Barcelona, Lionel Messi is your go to guy if you want to illustrate an idea; in […]
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On Friday an atmospheric scientist I know from the University of Leeds, Ben Murray, gave a talk on his research. His research is on how ice forms in the atmosphere. It was very interesting, and one of the things I learnt is how big the atmosphere is, and how high up some clouds are. The image above is taken from the International Space Station and at the top of the image are what are called noctilucent clouds.
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