Category: Science

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,…

The live Nasa TV feed of Discovery docking with the ISS makes for fascinating viewing.

This is a spectacular photo of comet Tempel 1 taken from the flyby craft just after the impactor craft had hit the comet – actually 67 seconds afterwards.

The New Scientist has a piece about urban gaming which I found especially interesting as I’m in the very early stages of designing an “experience” myself. It’s quite exciting.

There’s a nice piece by Simon Singh in today’s Times about junk science. He calls for proper checks and trials such as those that real medicines have to go through before alternative remedies are flogged.

It’s for stories like this one, that I read the Bad Science column in The Guardian. And what a charming bunch some of those Penta water people sound like. For those who are unaware, Penta water is an “ultra premium purified” water. Their site is full of scientific bollocks giving reasons why this water should…

I learn from listening to Material World on Radio 4 that the digital camera on the Cassini and Huygens probes have lower mega-pixel ratings than the average mobile phone (Cassini is 1 mega-pixel and Huygens, much smaller) – and of course they’re black and white. Obviously this is a combination of things like data rates…

This piece from Slate details exactly what Cassini and Hugens have been through to get where they are. Even though none of it is “news” to me, it does put in perspective what our society has achieved.

The Huygens probe seems to have been phenomenally successful with all sorts of pictures and even sounds being released. It’s incredible to see these pictures from such an alien world so far from our own. The whole thing’s phenomenal!

It’s all very exciting today with the Huygens probe landing on the surface of Titan. What will it find? Will it all work? We’ll find out later today, and in the meantime, I’ll be looking at the Cassini-Huygens website quite a lot.