It’s not commonly known that the Monument in London was constructed not only to commemorate the great fire, but also as a scientific laboratory. Two of the great scientists of the day, Hooke and Newton performed experiments in basic physics and materials science. Yesterday evening, some physicists, myself included from Queen Mary University visited with …
Category Archives: science
VHF Radio Coverage
I’ve just discovered a nice tool for plotting radio transmission coverage. Here’s where I can expect to get a signal too from my home location. Yellow shows 0.50 μV signal level, Green is the 1.58 μV signal level This seems to match up quite well with contacts I’ve had on the two-meter band, but with …
Prime Time (-ish)
Today at 2:03:05, the date and time, if you write it in a particular form, is a string of the first six prime numbers: 02:03:05:07:11:13 This only works if you use DD/MM/YY format for the date, and not the American MM/DD/YY, or the more sensible YYYY/MM/DD format. So, just after lunch take a look at …
Touching Mars
The Natural History Museum in London is one of my favourite places in the world, so it was wonderful to spend two days there last week at a conference on X-raying stuff. On the last day there was a presentation by Dr Caroline Smith on Martian meteorites. She spoke on how X-ray imaging allowed the …
Spider Season
As autumn draws in we start to see more spiders around the house, what are they are why are there here? The most commonly encountered UK house spider is Tegenaria Duellica, this cute little fellow: I saw fellow because the great majority of these you’ll see are males – you can tell by the …