Surrey Physics Blog

Science is a guessing game

This is the post with the link to FAQ page of the American Donkey and Mule Society’s site. That was not a sentence I thought I would be typing 20 minutes ago, but science takes you everywhere. There is an entertaining website Snopes, which examines urban truths and tries to assess whether they are true […]

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Molten lava, diet coke and mints

Molten lava and diet coke have something in common: too much gas. See here for gas escaping from lava, and throwing molten rock into the air, and see just for fun, because it is just great. They are using simply bottles of Diet Coke and a brand of mint called Mentos. That’s all.

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Maths education: more questions than solutions

Often, when physics academics like me meet up with each other, we moan about how little maths our incoming students can do. Certainly here at Surrey we are finding it difficult to convince some students with weak maths and little confidence in their maths ability to work hard at it, and to ask for help. […]

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Visiting students on the shores of the Med

Most of our undergraduates go out of the University and spend a year doing a placement off campus. Almost all our MPhys students do this and a majority of our BSc students do this. During the year they are visited three times by an academic.

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Playing with Lego inside cells

I printed out an interesting paper by Delebecque et al. in the journal Science about a week ago and now I have got round to reading it. It is really rather impressive, they are assembling structures in cells, or more accurately getting the cells to express carefully engineered RNA molecules that spontaneously assemble into scaffolds actually […]

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Toothbrush or Neodymium-YAG Laser?

For some random reason, about half-an-hour ago I wondered how toothpastes that claim to treat sensitive teeth work. Admittedly, half an hour on the web hardly qualifies me as an expert – a shame as dentists earn more than research scientists. But as far as I can see it seems that nobody really knows with […]

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