I work on how water droplets start form in the air but got distracted today by the other end of the process: Why don’t they grow to huge sizes? Why don’t you see rain droplets the size of your head? The maximum size of a rain droplet as it falls through the Earth’s atmosphere is […]
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@PhysicsatSurrey follows NASA on twitter and a NASA tweet advertised science on the International Space Station (ISS). The project list is here. A whole series of the projects have a (ground based) lead of Paul Chaikin (a prof at New York University). I know Paul Chaikin a bit, we kind of work in the same […]
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Scientists do experiments with all sorts: semiconductor lasers, low temperature helium, … babies. There is a paper in last week’s Science by Gweon and Schulz on reasoning in (16-month old) babies. Scientists can reason, at least I hope I can. If my mobile is inert, I check the battery isn’t flat by plugging it in […]
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Over the last two days perhaps 250 or more prospective students and their parents visited the Department, saw our labs, and heard talks from either Jim and Paul, or Paul and I. It was busy, as was campus, I think there almost 4,000 on campus on Saturday. It took a lot of effort to organise. […]
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Of course, there is both good and bad coverage of science in the media. Entertainingly, a Mail Online article has both. It covers a Nature paper by Copeland et al., a team of anthropologists who measured levels of strontium isotopes in teeth from our early human ancestors. The Mail Online article starts “Scientists may finally have […]
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