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Carbon — to capture or not to capture

This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture...

The Azolla Event: when is a fern not a fern?

...

Betelgeuse, Gamow, and a Big Red Horse

There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not...

Climate Change, the Walrus and the Carpenter

I have recently watched two videos on climate change by Sabine Hossenfelder. The first one...

Robert H Olley

Until recently, I worked in the Polymer Physics Group of the Physics Department at the University of Reading.

I would describe myself as a Polymer Morphologist. I am not an astronaut,

You’re Not Sustainable, PET

Oct 13 2010 | comment(s)

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the third most common synthetic polymer and accounts for about 18% of world polymer production. It is an aromatic/aliphatic polyester which possesses very practical thermal properties that are not found in the all aliphatic commodity thermoplastics polyethylene or polypropylene: a glass transition temperature (Tg) near 67°C and a melting temperature (Tm) of 265°C. But like those two, it is derived from fossil fuels: the key aromatic component of PET, terephthalic acid, is derived from petroleum, while ethylene glycol is derived from petroleum or natural gas.

Maurice Allais is no longer with us.

Oct 12 2010 | comment(s)

Maurice Allais won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988. So why is he of interest here? His Telegraph Obituary is headed:

Maurice Allais, who died on October 9 aged 99, was a Nobel Prize winner who warned against "casino" stockmarket practices that eventually precipitated the current global financial crisis; he also claimed to have disproved Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Now to readers of Science 2.0, the last sentence would immediately flag up a nutter alert.

Who are the British?

Oct 11 2010 | comment(s)

At the dinner held 10 days ago for those who had retired as our department finally closed the day before, my previous PI (until 2002) recommended me to read

The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain

by Stephen Oppenheimer (ISBN 9781845294823), the product description of which goes

British prehistory will never look the same again.' Professor Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge.

Poo Power

Oct 06 2010 | comment(s)

When I was a lad (a little bit later than when Sarahsaurus was around), there was a common misunderstanding among schoolboys that methane was responsible for the foul smell of flatulence. A story was told of a boy who used to set fire to his farts with a cigarette lighter, the fabric of his trousers acting as a kind of Davy safety lamp protecting his nether regions. This was indeed evidence of methane, but methane was not the source of the smell.

But is it so obvious?

Oct 02 2010 | comment(s)

Geoffrey Lean, the hard-pressed environmental correspondent of the Telegraph, has come
in for some stick again. He published

Rubbish saves birds, a major study finds

And this was typical of the replies.

Gosh! Incredible scientific insight. Animals thrive better where food is readily
available.
Deserves a Nobel Prize for the bleedin' obvious.

How Group Theory Dispelled My Worry About Mirrors

Sep 17 2010 | comment(s)

I remember, as a child, being very upset by a ventriloquist’s dummy at a show, and crying out and making a ‘scene’. Even well into my teens and beyond, I felt disturbed by “magic”, even in mathematics or science. One particular incident I remember was being shown in class the ‘proof’, by an elementary form a calculus of variations, that the shortest path[1] between two coordinates is a straight line. This left me with an uncomfortable feeling.