Today was the last of this year’s five Open Days for prospective students (typically those wanting to start in 2014). I ran it with 9 students and 9 other members of staff, and now I am very tired. We have a big undergrad lab – useful today as in the morning we had about 150 […]
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Very recently, the physical science bit of the 2013 IPCC report on climate change came out. I took a look at the summary for policymakers (link to report here). As I often do with a scientific paper, I got bored quickly with reading the intro, and skipped forward to the figures – where the data is. […]
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Energetic materials is a rather innocuous sounding expression for far-from-innocuous materials, they are explosives (I think at least some fuels are also classified as energetic materials). The idea being that energetic materials are materials that can yield large amounts of energy, and explosives can certainly do that, and very rapidly too. Many energetic materials are […]
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This week was the 2013 IgNobel prize ceremony, the IgNobel prizes are the Nobel prizes’ amusing little brother. The Physics IgNobel was won by a bunch of Italian physicists walking on water. Presumably due to their limited budget, they did this on Earth, but rigged up a harness to take 5/6ths of their weight, to […]
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I have been reading a fascinating paper on a couple of proteins called lamin-A and lamin-B. Our cells have their DNA in a particular compartment called the nucleus and the lamin’s basically strengthen the wall of the nucleus, protecting the DNA inside. The work is by Dennis Discher’s group at the University of Pennsylvania.
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