Recent Posts
Newton's Ocean
Return To Blog Listing
science writing that celebrates the amazing world we live in and our scientific understanding of it
Recent Posts Tagged With 'everyday science'
brake cables and drip coffee machines
A while back, I had what might be called an epiphany of ignorance. In such a situation, what makes the sudden insight so mind-broadening is the realization that one has lived for so many years on this planet in complete ignorance of a simple aspect o...
high-speed orbits
The news a week or so ago about the high speed crash between the Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian military satellite got me wondering about why orbiting satellites have to go so damn fast. The artist's impressions of these thing...
colliding submarines
So what is the actual probability of any two objects colliding at random in the Atlantic? Well it was high enough for the Titanic to come a cropper on its maiden voyage of 1912, but then again there had been warnings of large numbers of icebergs and ...
cold fingers
So the other question I posed a while back was:why does a glass feel colder than a plastic cup?Well, if the glass and plastic cup have been sitting around in the kitchen for a while, they should be roughly at room temperature, so your fingers and bra...
cold black bodies
A couple of weeks ago I posed two questions. The first was:Why is the sun so bright if it is supposed to be close to an ideal black body?It's funny. I have thrown out the odd question in the past, more as a sort of advertisement for a planned future ...
hot bodies
In my last post, I threw out a little tidbit of knowledge that I learnt many years ago. Back then I memorized it for some future exam and didn't even stop to think about how or why. Basically, as the temperature of a hot object increases a bit, the a...
Then, farewell, heat, and welcome frost!
I woke up this morning and a cold blast of air forcing its way through the gaps around our bedroom window announced that winter had truly arrived in Toronto. The title of this post is taken from the Merchant of Venice. The Prince of Morocco has just ...
Maxwell's beautiful synthesis
30 day tour of the world of science - day 22Yesterday, I talked about mechanical resonance. In a pendulum, this occurs due to a regular transfer between movement (kinetic) energy and potential energy corresponding to the energy stored in an object th...
mechanical heartbeats
30 day tour of the world of science - day 21Early time-keeping relied quite naturally on the regular rotation of the earth about its axis and around the sun. Early clocks were later developed to use continuous motion such as water flow and broke it u...
toilet physics
To take in the grand sweep of scientific thought, let’s shift away from the high tech wizardry of the Large Hadron Collider and examine the workings of the flush toilet. I got a close look at one of these gadgets this past weekend when I decided t...
