Sprinting is Good for the Heart (but not so good for the planet)
Inevitably, spring cleaning and winnowing of the paper archives throws up blasts from the past – often in the form of faded, pre-digital-age photographs. They waft the embers of dormant memories....
View ArticleThe Amazing Disintegrating Screwdriver
Gee, I spoil you guys: a blog about a broken screwdriver. Not just any old screwdriver though, because the handle of this one is made from nitrocellulose, and they don’t do that anymore – not since the...
View ArticleOf Blitz and Bomb Shelters
Watching the last episode of Tony Robinson’s ‘Blitz Street’ on Channel 4 this week has prompted a few thoughts and surprising memories. The four-part series revisited the intensive ‘Blitz’ bombing of...
View ArticleHuxley and Tyndall, Ill-Prepared Alpinists ?
It’s many years since that winter weekend I met up with friends in the UK’s Lake District National Park, intent on hiking the slopes of Helvellyn. Helvellyn (Photo: Simon Ledingham, WikiCommons) We’d...
View ArticleEaster Telescope Resurrection
With a diameter of 120,000 kilometres and a bright reflective surface, Saturn is an unmissable object in the night sky right now. But at 1.3 billion kilometres away from us, it looks only a hundreth...
View ArticleBlast Through Your Past – with Google Street View
“in Sensation we believe external Things exist, in Memory we believe they were, in Imagination we neither do the one nor the other” (Erasmus Darwin quoting poet Richard Gifford back to himself in a...
View ArticleA Century of Southern California Aerospace
One of my favourite NASA clips shows the 1972 Apollo 17 lunar module blasting off, bringing home astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt – the last humans to set foot on the moon. The film is...
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