Near-tropical thunderous rain downpours have succeeded the balmy high temperatures that summer has brought to Glasgow of late. Deep black skies. Thunderbolts. Lightning. (♫ Very, very frightening! Galileo Galileo… ♫) Unusual conditions even for a very wet Scotland.
Nope. Nothing to do with the arch-nemesis of the Smurfs or with an avant-garde artistic masterpiece, unlike the top picture appears to suggest… Actually, the Gargamelle on the left is at CERN and takes its name after the giantess in the works of satirist François Rabelais: she was Gargantua’s mother! The Gargamelle is a historical ‘bubble chamber’ detector however…
Glasgow Science Festival 2013 begins today with a busy schedule of events for all ages!! Highlights include “Science Sunday”, a free event taking place at the University of Glasgow, Hunter Halls on June 9th between the times of 10:00 and 16:00.
The Open University has created a series of 6 short animated iTunes videos about the Philosophy behind Maths and Science.
IBM researchers currently hold the Guinness World Record for the ‘World Smallest Stop-Motion Film’ after creating a short film about a boy and his ball, by manipulating single atoms.
Apparently, the phrase “once in a blue moon”, in the sense of something that occurs very rarely, dates back to 1824. I will check this out as soon as I have time…
Today, Thursday 14th March 2013. Only last year, the world of Particle Physics research was getting excited among rumours and speculation that the hunt for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was finally over, following the news that a Higgs-like particle had been identified in July.
Our planet is surrounded by layers of gas, the ‘atmosphere’, maintained around it by the very gravitational attraction of the Earth. An important part of the atmosphere that we use to breathe and that plants use in photosynthesis is the ‘air’.
The Open University has teamed up with “geek chic” comedian David Mitchell to release a series of 12 short animated YouTube videos about the Physics of the Cosmos: “60-Second Adventures in Astronomy”. A real treat. And it’s educational! If you have only 60 seconds, you can now learn everything we know about matter, energy, life, the Universe and everything…
Continue reading 60-Second Hilarious Adventures in Astronomy
The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a theory about the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear interactions, developed throughout the mid-to-late 20th century, as a worldwide collaborative effort. Upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks, the theory is finalised in the mid-1970s. Ever since that time, further evidence of its validity have been provided by successive discoveries of the other predicted particles, such as the bottom quark (1977), the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000) and even more recently, the Higgs boson (2012) to complete the whole set.