Here is our fourth weekly round up of science news, where we try to collate interesting links that have a thread running through them. This week, from nuclear power to gender imbalance via Earth’s orbit. The Guardian’s weekly podcast asks why we are scared of nuclear power, since fewer people die per unit of energy […]
Month: May 2018
How does a phone call work? Part 2
In part 1 of this post, we described the path that a mobile phone call takes across the Atlantic. Here we will describe what is travelling along the ‘through the air’ part of that path. Well, it’s a phone call, right? But in what form? In what follows, some details may be spotted by telecommunications […]
Weekly round up, part 3
To create a Fibonacci sequence, each number is formed by adding the two previous numbers. So, if we start with 1 and 1, the sequence goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 21 etc. There are interesting and well-known examples of Fibonacci numbers appearing in nature, and a related concept is the golden ratio. […]
Weekly round-up, part 2
In science news this week… The Guardian newspaper reported on the likely fate of the Sun in a few billion years’ time. Amazing that the Sun is losing mass at the rate of 4 billion kilograms per second (due to its nuclear reactions and the wonder of ) and yet it will still last this […]
How does a phone call work? Part 1
You should be much more in awe of your mobile phone (cellphone) than you are. In ‘The World’s War’ by David Olusoga, we learn that the first British action of the First World War was “the severing of five underwater telegraph cables that linked Germany to the United States.” The effect of this was that […]
Weekly round-up, part 1
This is the first of our new (hopefully!) weekly round-ups of interesting science articles, videos, podcasts, etc. We’ll try to give up to 10 decent links each week. On the 14th of September 2015 the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory made the first direct observation of gravitational waves. Since then five other events […]