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 generation for nuclear power, than say, for coal. As an interesting aside, the first year in the UK in which there were fewer than 1000 deaths in the coal mining industry was 1960 (source: a distant memory of a trip to the UK’s National Coal Mining Museum). A scary thought.
By the way, those interested in radioactive process could do a lot worse than read Jim Baggott’s book ‘Atomic’, which describes the science behind the atomic weapons race. It includes a crazy story about a secret agent who prevented an enemy ship sailing off with all the ‘heavy water’ by getting the entire crew too drunk to sail… If that doesn’t make you want to read the book, then I can’t help!!
A common use of radioactive materials is in dating objects (radiocarbon dating is a common and famous example). The dating of rocks has recently been used to discover changes in the Earth’s orbit over a period of approximately half a million years, as reported in the New York Times.
Speaking of orbits, last time we pointed you to a video of asteroid discovery. This week, the discovery of a ‘retrograde’ asteroid was reported in the Guardian.
Rather larger than asteroids are neutron stars. They are the remnants of massive stars; they emit narrow beams of radiation as they spin. Some of them emit their beams in such a direction that Earth receives a radio signal every time they spin, just like the light from a lighthouse. Their ‘pulsing’ signal led to them being called pulsars. Fins out about some cutting edge work on pulsars at astronomy.com.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967. Her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, shared a Nobel prize for this discovery with Martin Ryle, but Bell was excluded from the prize. This decision generated much controversy then and since, and is sometimes cited as an example of the patriarchal nature of science. This week, Hayaatun Sillem, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering was quoted as criticising a continuing gender imbalance in engineering.
See you next week.