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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...

A Very Large Hadron Collider?

Frontpage image: Illustration of spherical explosion (kilonova) of two neutron stars (AT2017gfo/GW170817)...

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Robert H OlleyRSS Feed of this column.

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,

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Neil Armstrong changed the way we think of ourselves – but, oddly, not the way we think of the Moon, writes Daniel Hannan on Telegraph Blogs.

But what I particularly like is the comment by one Maria Kay:
I've toured the USS Hornet, now retired in Alameda, Calif. (That is the aircraft carrier that fished the Apollo 11 capsule out of the ocean.) There is a small museum of moonshot memorabilia stored on board.

Do plants have muscles?  Strictly speaking, no, but time-lapse photography shows that they can be quite thuggish in behaviour.

The sailing event of the recent 2012 London Olympics were held at Weymouth, half-way along Dorset and East Devon’s famous Jurassic Coast.  Thinks:


Sources: Sailing picture: goc2012.culture.gov.uk; Plesiosaur LHL Digital Collections

The BBC (cue: Land of Hope and Glory!) has just started yet another series on Chinese food.  In Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure, two famous chefs, the illustrious Ken Hom OBE and the rising star Ching-He Huang (黃瀞億) (neither of whom has an entry in Chinese Wikipedia) are travelling around China, and so far have been travelling around the region of Beijing, encountering a Grandmaster of Peking Duck.  Crisp skin and moist meat are essential, but the Chinese are becoming increasingly health-conscious, and over half of the ducks they eat are now of a reduced-fat v

This is an almost verbatim copy of a press release from the London Centre for nanotechnology.

When Watson, Crick and Wilkins discovered the DNA double helix nearly sixty years ago, they based their structure on an X-ray diffraction image (courtesy of Franklin) averaged over millions of DNA molecules (derived from squid sperm, I understand). Though the double helix has become iconic for our molecular-scale understanding of life, thus far no-one has ever “seen” the double helix of an individual double-stranded DNA in its natural environment, i.e, salty water.