My work has headed in a slightly different direction over the last couple of weeks, we’ve become much more interested in the nano-scale silicon spikes I described here . We are now pretty sure we can tie together the ice spike phenomenon with the silicon pillar spikes. We have good reason to believe the spikes …
Category Archives: geeking
Extreme Natural Hazards
I’ve just received my confirmation / reminder email for my place on the Extreme Natural Hazards conference later this month at the Royal Society in London. Two days of talks and discussions about the various ways the world is trying to kill us off. The conference is free to attend and I believe you can …
Eclipse
This coming Monday morning there is a solar eclipse, it isn’t a total eclipse of the sun, the last of those visible from the UK was in 1999, this is a partial eclipse. It starts 08:49, the point of maximum eclipse is a 10:01 and the moon leaves the solar disk at 11:18. If you …
What I do.
This post presents an overview of my work for the last 3 years. Essentially I’ve been developing new techniques for structuring materials on the sub milimeter scale by a combination of laser ablation, plasma chemistry and standard wet chemistry. Silicon has been the wonder material of the late 20th century and looks set to continue …
A matter of scale (ice spikes and silicon pillars)
One of the great things about science is how interlinked everything is once you start looking deeply enough. One example of this came a couple of months back when I was reviewing the electron micrographs from the latest experiment. My work involves the growing of meso-scale (about a 100th of a millimeter) pillars on a …
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