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Meet the snow pilots

Mon, 12/19/2011 - 08:41 — Ben Gilliland

Are bacteria manipulating the weather?

Snow can be a powerful thing. It can bring a nation’s transport sys¬tem to its knees and bring out the inner child from within the most dour and life-weary soul. It is a virgin canvas wait¬ing for the imprint of an angel. It is a fluffy mound, pregnant with sculptural potential and is a fort – complete with artillery.

Most of us have seen at least a dusting of snow in the last couple of days but what caused it to fall in the first place?

You might think that snow is just what happens to rain when it gets a bit chilly but things are a lot more complicated than that.
For a start, it hasn’t been cold enough for ice to form spontaneously.

We all know that water freezes at 0C but you might not know that at temperatures above -40C or so, it actually needs a kick-start to get those ice crystals forming.

The (wholly) Earth catalogue

Mon, 12/12/2011 - 08:12 — Ben Gilliland


[Above: According to Nasa, Kepler-22b, has both land and water and has an average surface temperature of around 22C (72F) – perfect for life.
The Planetary Habitability Laboratory, who compiled the catalogue, are a little more conservative and cautious in their assessment of Kepler-22b and are awaiting further data before ranking the planet as a potentially habitable world]

Last week, the world got very excited about the discovery of a ‘new Earth’ – an alien world that seems to orbit its parent star at just the right distance to make the possibility of life existing there, well, a possibility.

The planet in question, Kepler-22b, was discovered by Nasa’s exoplanet-hunter – the Kepler Space telescope – and is perfect for life, according to the agency.
But sometimes Nasa can be a bit like an excitable puppy and, sometimes, when it claims to have caught a rabbit, it just turns out to be a squeaky chew-toy.

Glass: the laziest liquid of them all?

Sun, 12/04/2011 - 18:46 — Ben Gilliland

Glass is all around us. It is the window we gaze out of on a warm summer day, the computer screen in front of us and in the watch that counts down the hours until we can go home. It is the modern office block in which we toil, and the empty bottle of wine we discard at the end of a long week. In the modern world, glass is ubiquitous, essential and deeply mysterious.

The mystery of glass started when people looked at centuries old windows and observed the panes seemed to be thicker at the bottom. This led to speculation that glass was a liquid that, in short timescales, seems to be solid but over the centuries acts like warm toffee – flowing downward into the encouraging arms of mother gravity.

A long history of failed Mars missions

Mon, 11/28/2011 - 09:03 — Ben Gilliland

Mars has long occupied a special place in humanity’s consciousness and imagination. For millennia, it has been associated with malevolence, pestilence and disaster. Ancient cultures saw the Red Planet as the physical incarnation of various capricious and violent gods – an incarnation that demanded worship and sacrifice. For the Egyptians, it was ominously known as The Red One, for the Babylonians, it was The Star of Death and for Romans it was The God of War (Mars).

Even into the 20th century, Mars was a planet that loomed large as an object of fear. We imagined a world inhabited by a violent alien culture – little green men hell-bent on destroying humanity and claiming Earth for their own.

Then came the space age and the opportunity to visit Mars in the flesh. But, even as grainy images of a lifeless and benign world finally quenched the flames of age-old fears, a new myth, no less malevolent, was rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the old. Mars was to gain a new reputation as a technology devouring terror – a ‘Great Galactic Ghoul’ every bit as capricious as its ancient mythological forebears. In the history of Mars exploration, 37 missions have attempted to reach the Red Planet and, for one reason or another, about two-thirds of those missions ended in failure.

Taking a bite from Earth's Core

Mon, 11/21/2011 - 08:52 — Ben Gilliland

A scientist sits at the helm of a revolutionary new drilling machine of his own design, called the Iron Mole. At the pull of a lever, the machine lurches forward and, in a wake of flying soil and rock, vanishes underground.

The scientist and his plucky assistant find themselves in a strange subterranean cavern – a labyrinthine world populated by prehistoric beasts and primitive Palaeolithic peoples. So begins their great adventure at the ‘centre of the Earth’… or at least as Jules Verne imagined it.

Back in the real world, no Iron Mole or any amount of derring-do would enable a scientist to travel anywhere close to heart of our planet. In fact, the deepest we’ve ever managed to drill is a paltry 15km (nine miles) and that’s only 0.5 per cent of the 3,000km (1,900-mile) distance to the core.

The tale of the neutrinos that broke light speed (in limericks)

Fri, 11/18/2011 - 14:40 — Ben Gilliland

This is what happens when I finish my work early and have an hour or two to spare... you, poor reader, get subjected to more limerick lunacy. So I apologise in advance as I present to you...

The tale of the neutrinos that broke light speed (in limericks)

Introducing CERN

There once was a place called CERN,
That was built with the purpose to learn,
In broken atoms it digs,
For a thing they call Higgs,
Whose presence is hard to discern

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