Many of the most powerful, and to me, most interesting, ideas in science connect two apparently unrelated observations. The breakthrough is to realise that there is a hidden connection between two aspects of the natural world. A simple example is the force one charge exerts on another, that is a distance r away. Coulomb’s Law tells […]
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Over the last few days, I have been struck by the number of uses of the statistics term ‘median’ by a number of politicians and commentators. This is a relatively technical term and I rarely hear it from politicians, or indeed anyone else on TV or in newspapers. The terms has been used in the […]
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Nowadays when you are teaching a course at university, you are co-teaching it with Dr Wikipedia. Your lecture notes will be supplemented, for free, by Wikipedia. This is almost always good. Although it does mean that you if took inspiration and examples off Wikipedia, which I have done, you will be found out. Incidentally, the […]
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I have been watching and enjoying the BBC’s Frozen Planet series on Wednesdays. This Wednesday they showed this amazing footage of a brinicle forming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMhBuSBemRk worth the licence fee alone. The amazing thing is that this is salty water being frozen by even saltier water.
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I had always thought this orginated with Newton, and thought it a bit odd as he was notoriously argumentative and touchy about receiving what he thought was the proper credit for his work. But according to the mighty Wikipedia it orginated with a chap called Bernard of Chartres. Newton did however say it as well. […]
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Of course that is not true, your great grandpas were human. However, it has been known for a while that big chunks of your DNA is from viruses. Retroviruses such as HIV reproduce themselves by copying their genetic material, which is actually in the form of RNA not DNA, into DNA which is then incorporated into […]
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