In 1834 the Scottish engineer John Scott Russell observed an intriguing phenomenon while he was carrying out experiments to design efficient canal boats. He noticed that when one of his boats was pulled through the…
I spent my summer with the university’s cold atomic physics group and for the first time experienced working as part of the scientific community. The group’s primary goal is to produce an exotic state of matter known…
When I knock an apple off my table, it falls to the floor. It doesn’t explode into lots of little oranges or pears, nor does it float suspended in the air and rain organic apple juice into the cup that magically…
Venice is a very magnificent place…’tis impossible to give a stronger idea, ‘tis in a style peculiar to itself… With this words a British lady on her grand tour described her impressions of Venice, a city which, when…
Eventually and hesitantly, I cleaned my fume cupboard. I was surprised to find how tidy and well-kept research fume cupboards appear to be. Apparently I have falsely been under the impression that the key to a…
For my research I have been given the opportunity to work on light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM), some of the most cutting edge research currently. With the LSFM technique being chosen by the scientific journal,…
What happens when crude oil runs out? It’s a question asked by the public, governments and in particular the chemical industry. Currently chemical feedstock is obtained from crude oil; examples include precursors to…
Over the course of my internship, I’ve learnt that research requires a lot of thinking-on-your-feet, flexibility and patience! One of my supervisors, Dr Maggie Ellis, aptly describes the research process as a squiggly…
The only way one can know the world is through discourse, or the use of language. Objects do not exist as unit prior to language rather, language creates the objects it represents as it speaks about them. For example,…
The physical laws governing the smallest scales of existence are vastly different from those we experience in real life. In peering into the microscopic world we truly are examining another philosophical universe. The…