Category: Science

I love the fact that Wikipedia is already completely up to date following today’s news that Pluto is no longer a fully-fledged planet. It’s now a dwarf planet, although I’ll be sad to lose it somehow.

Well worth a read or a listen.

I’m really glad these doctors have come out to speak up against the pointless waste of the NHS spending on “alternative” medicines that offer absolutely no proof of actually working.

They’re in my Flickr stream anyway, but here are the best of the photos I took this morning out in Golden Square of the eclipse. I’m pretty pleased with the results considering the lack of proper equipment and heavy cloud cover. The maximum magnitude of the eclipse in London was only 16.8% at 11:33 BST…

All very sad.

This week’s Horizon squarely took on creationism “Intelligent Design”, and in many respects it’s a shame. A shame that a science programme had to give up an episode to explode the myth of something that’s propogated by fundamental Christians. The programme didn’t shirk its responsibility to the subject, and the programme took a familiar structure:…

51% of Americans don’t believe in evolution. I wonder how many don’t believe in gravity, or maybe eschew the idea that the earth travels around the sun? In the meantime, a trial reaches its conclusion.

Mars really is spectacular at the moment. Without even trying, and just looking up in a firework filled, and streetlight heavy London sky, it’s very easy to spot – just near The Pleiades. In other news, Inmarsat is launching a massive satellite on Monday afternoon which is part of their global broadband system. It’s being…

I know that The Guardian published this picture of Dione in their double-page spread on Thursday, but it’s still worth a look. It’s spectacular. And this video from the flyby is also worth a 10MB download. Just wait until Cassini flys past Dione.

This is sad news. I met someone who works for a satellite company the other day and she was speaking about how risky a business it is, and what kind of insurance premiums you have to pay. So let’s hope that if CryoSat truly is lost, that its worthwhile job is done by a follow-up…

The Mansion, originally uploaded by adambowie. It’s probably been ten years since I last visited Bletchley Park, so it was high time for another visit. They’ve done quite a lot to the site in the meantime. Last time I went, it was only open on alternate weekends over the summer. Now it’s open everyday except…

Sadly it was too cloudy here in north London to see the partial annular eclipse this morning. A shame really, because I found my mylar eclipse viewer glasses from an RGO guide that I bought for the 1999 total eclipse of the sun. I could have done with them for last year’s transit of Venus.

I’ve just been watching the Space Shuttle successfully landing on what NASA are calling a test flight. There’s still quite a lot of questions in the air about both the future of the Shuttle and indeed of manned missions in general. Last week I read a well-argued article questionning the worthiness of what’s been happening,…