I am teaching one of the things I most like to teach at the moment, and on Saturdays running Open Days. I am teaching signal-to-noise discrimination in the night vision of us and other animals, like the cat shown. Improving signal-to-noise is the reason why the eyes of cats and other animals that hunt at […]
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I have spent a lot of time recently reading drafts of my PhD student’s excellent, and over 200 page, thesis. It is written in Microsoft Word so I am switching on this softare’s track-changes function and using it to add comments to my students’ draft chapters, and to tweak the English here and there (her first […]
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I will start teaching diffusion in a few weeks. Diffusion is how everything from gas and liquid molecules to small particles in a liquid move around – when there is no flow. As usual I will be telling some small lies. I will say something like “Diffusion of particle can be described as a random […]
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It has been a busy week, the undergraduates are back, semester has started, and all 3 of the academic bloggers in the Department got to dress like penguins (see piccy of Jim to the left). The occasion for the dressing-like-a-penguin was the Institute of Physics (IoP)’s annual awards bash. Jim won the Kelvin medal this […]
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When I was an undergraduate student, back in the dim and distant 1990s, I enjoyed my undergraduate degree, and hopefully I learned a lot of stuff, but I spent the whole degree learning by going to lectures, solving problems and going to lab classes, until I could avoid the latter in the final year by […]
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I love the Ig Nobel prizes. These are the annual awards that are announced a bit before the Nobel prizes, and recognise a wide spectrum of science, including both very bad science and science that is good, but on a topic that is on first appearance a bit whacky. This year‘s physiology prize went Wilkinson, […]
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