Once upon a time, Europe was almost covered by one giant forest. Now, it’s almost entirely fields and grasslands. Humans are controlling tree densities. Understanding the global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere.
Continue reading Three Trillion Trees
Waste fibres from cannabis crops can be transformed into high-performance low-cost pseudo-graphene energy storage devices.
Continue reading From Super Weed to Super-Capacitors, Another Surprising Use for Cannabis…Let’s talk about size… 😉 How big are the objects floating in our Universe and how big can they get? Starting with a “big” object, our very own Moon… Embark on a tour of space… A tour of our Universe…
Continue reading Size Matters… in Astrophysical Terms
First predicted in the 1960s, like the Higgs boson before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its recent detection at CERN’s LHCb collaboration. The discovery amounts to finding a new form of matter…
Look into my eyes. The eyes, the eyes. Not around the eyes. Don’t look AROUND the eyes. Look INTO my eyes. The eyes… [click] You’re not under! But… Can you read my mind?
Continue reading Eyes of the Beholder
Forensic researchers from the University of Salzburg have developed a new method for establishing an exact time of death after as long as 10 days – a significant step forward from the current method of measuring core body temperature, which only works up to 36 hours after death.
Continue reading We Check the Time of Death with Post-Mortem Degradation of Skeletal Proteins – And Other Gruesome Forensic Facts of Life
Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists were able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving simultaneously both as a wave AND as a stream of particles. You need light to take a photograph. But how do you take a photograph of light?
Continue reading Seeing the Light Fantastic – Particles, Waves and All
1/60 minute. 1/3,600 hour. 1/86,400 day. 1/1 hertz. The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a 133 55Cs caesium isotope corresponds to one second. But what does it look like? And where might you find a second?
Continue reading Just a Second…
Deep down, in huge subterranean caverns… Underneath the Franco-Swiss border… 300 feet underground… lies a beast of unprecedented power… and mystery. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that man summons to explore the uncharted corners of the sub-atomic realm… After two years of a deep slumber, the mighty beast has awoken…
Continue reading Physics at 13 TeV – Cranking Up the LHC
Still in its early stages, El Niño has the potential to cause extreme and even devastating weather around the World. According to climate graphs, we have reached a 0.6 value for the ENSO. It’s a 60% probability. El Niño is now officially back.
Continue reading El Niño – Return of the ‘Enfant Terrible’