Part 5 of our article (one more to go!), in which we hope to develop an understanding of atomic structure and the periodic table, from the beginning of secondary school/junior-high level, to first/second year undergraduate physics/chemistry, via one fictional conversation. Find the others at our blog page sciencebydegrees.com/blog. Sigrid has just asked Sally what spin […]
Atomic structure and the periodic table (Part 4 of 6)
Part 4 of our article, in which we hope to develop an understanding of atomic structure and the periodic table, from the beginning of secondary school/junior-high level, to first/second year undergraduate physics/chemistry, via one fictional conversation. Find the first three parts on our blog page: sciencebydegrees.com/blog. Sigrid has just asked Sally how fluorine bonds ionically […]
Atomic structure and the periodic table (Part 3 of 6)
Part 3 of our article, in which we hope to develop an understanding of atomic structure and the periodic table, from the beginning of secondary school/junior-high level, to first/second year undergraduate physics/chemistry, via one fictional conversation. Missed Parts 1 and 2? Find them here and here! Sigrid has just asked Sally what ‘n’ is… SALLY: n is […]
Atomic structure and the periodic table (Part 2 of 6)
Part 2 of our article, in which we hope to develop an understanding of atomic structure and the periodic table, from the beginning of secondary school/junior-high level, to first/second year undergraduate physics/chemistry, via one fictional conversation. Missed Part 1? Find it here. Sigrid has just asked Sally what the point of an electron is… SALLY: […]
Atomic structure and the periodic table (Part 1 of 6)
In this article, we hope to develop an understanding of atomic structure and the periodic table, from the beginning of secondary school/junior-high level, to first/second year undergraduate physics/chemistry, via one fictional conversation. We hope that people at any stage of that journey will find a section that speaks to them. We would love it if it […]
Science round-up (6)
See how we’ve stopped calling this a ‘weekly round-up’. That was an ambition we could never live up to… 🙂 The Parker Solar Probe has been in the news a lot this week. Here’s an article from the New York Times, plus a video explainer. The probe will reach the melting point of steel, and […]
An introduction to liquid crystals
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that there’s more to the world around us than the three states of matter that we learn about at school. In the short time that we’ve been writing we’ve looked at plasma, dark matter and colloidal systems, all of which challenge the traditional view that […]
What does the periodic table really look like?
Hi. So what’s this? OK, so it would have been a better question had the answer not been in the title of the post… But you would have known this was a Periodic Table anyway, right? And that’s quite amazing from just the outline (no details) of what is just a series of rectangles (or […]
Why can’t the microwaves fit through the holes? Visualising e-m waves
Many microwave ovens have a gauze in their window, to reflect the microwaves and keep them inside the oven. Someone once asked me “How come the microwaves can’t fit through the holes?” It’s a brilliant question. Which we are not going to answer. If you want to, you can look up ‘how diffraction depends on […]
Orbits, gravity and the atmosphere
“Things float in space because there’s no gravity above the atmosphere, right?” I was thinking about this common misconception, and I thought I’d share it (I just did!) and then explain ‘the truth’. And then it occurred to me that this misconception is so interesting that exploring how/why it is so tenacious and persuasive in […]
Has your action had an equal and opposite reaction?
In our post on anthropomorphism, we discussed benefits and pitfalls of ascribing human motivation to subatomic particles. There is a related but different phenomenon, which can occur when popular culture appropriates a scientific idea. It often happens when science uses an everyday word for a technical concept – people may then be forgiven for generalising […]
Earth’s atmosphere
This wasn’t supposed to be a post on Earth’s atmosphere. I was trying to write about a common but underappreciated misconception about orbits, gravity and the atmosphere (post to follow!). But I kept writing phrases like “above the atmosphere”. And it became clear I was being dishonest. I mean I know that there is no […]
What will happen to our sun?
In our previous post I described that the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram: Shows a survey of the properties of all the stars in the galaxy Provides a means of describing the lifecycle of a single star In this post I will concentrate on the second of these, and ask “what will happen to the Sun, and what […]
The coolest infographic ever… oh, wait, it’s a graph!
This is a piece about my favourite diagram in all of science, the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. It’s such a cool thing, I need to stop writing and just put it here, at the top. Here it is (please do scroll down and read the post though!). This diagram describes and charts the properties of the […]
A primer on colour
For a while now I have been telling people to read ‘Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs’ by Jamie Wong, on the basis that it is one of the best explanatory pieces of ‘writing with diagrams’ I have ever come across. A few of those people have given the feedback that it started at too high […]
Mixing oil and water
We all learn pretty early on that oil and water don’t mix. Add a glug of cooking oil to a glass of water and you’ll end up with the oil sitting on top of the water1. Stirring or shaking this two-layered mixture will form droplets of oil in the water and you could argue that […]
Weekly round up (5)
Here is our weekly round up of science news, where we try to collate interesting links that have a thread running through them. This week, we found such a funny story, that we thought we’d devote the whole post to the five funniest science stories we could think of. These might not have the same […]
Gels – solids, liquids or something else?
We are all taught at school that there are three states of matter, although those of you who read our recent post on the topic will know that there are more. Even so, we tend to label the materials that we encounter in our everyday lives as solids, liquids and gases and don’t often need […]
Weekly round up (4)
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 […]
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 […]