Science and Engineering – Page 4

Edward Jenner – The greatest man you might never have heard of

This morning I received my free Flu vaccination and a time when nearly all of us are fortunate enough to receive vaccinations and inoculations for many illnesses from the winter flu upwards it is well worth remembering that there was once a time when people weren’t so lucky. When there were countless diseases and infections… Continue reading Edward Jenner – The greatest man you might never have heard of

Apple or Microsoft – The big dilemma

All these years of blogging I have been working on a 10 year old + PC, sometimes a first generation iPod and in the last year just occasionally an iPad Air. Writing out a long blog on an iPod is quite a labour of love. The tiny keyboard makes writing out a blog of several… Continue reading Apple or Microsoft – The big dilemma

The death of the Aral Sea

Once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world and half the size of England has over the last few decades almost totally disappeared. The Aral Sea sits in the middle of the Kyzylkum Desert fed by the two rivers, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya. It wasn’t really a sea but a… Continue reading The death of the Aral Sea

How Technology Can Help Solve The Water Crisis In Africa

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was thrilled that I was approached and then commissioned to write for one of the leading academic environmental magazines in the world, TerraGreen after they read my post on The Green Wall of Africa. I was thrilled that it was made the March 2014 Cover Story with… Continue reading How Technology Can Help Solve The Water Crisis In Africa

Clouds loom over the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web

You might not know it but the modern internet is 25 years old today! It started life as an idea in a paper written by a young computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee in a rather obscure laboratory in Europe known as CERN. At first his idea wasn’t exactly taken on enthusiastically by his colleagues with… Continue reading Clouds loom over the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web

How Google Keeps The Roads Moving

Like pretty much everyone, I used Google nearly every day. In fact probably dozens of times a day. I don’t use it as much as I used to due to privacy concerns and there are no shortage of alternative search engines and service providers that don’t misuse my data or let untrustworthy governments spy on… Continue reading How Google Keeps The Roads Moving

A brief history of time(zones) or why do we keep changing the clocks?

Some of us have just done it and others are about to do it but this week sees many of us changing our clocks to go onto winter time but why do we do this often quite annoying ritual. In the old days every town and village in effect had its own time-zone. When the… Continue reading A brief history of time(zones) or why do we keep changing the clocks?

Autumn is here or why is weather in Britain so complicated

It is mid-October now but until a day or so ago, we in England were still enjoying to some degree a summer. This despite the fact that the sun crossed the equator around 3 weeks ago. Until Tuesday, the weather in much of Southern England at least was 22 degrees C or 72 degrees F. … Continue reading Autumn is here or why is weather in Britain so complicated

The Black Marble : The Earth from Space at night

Last week NASA released a number of fantastic images detailing our planet at night under their Black Marble project. It took hundreds of orbits before the planet could be fully mapped and below are some of the images which I though might be of interest to people. One of the amazing things of the photo… Continue reading The Black Marble : The Earth from Space at night

Petrol from thin air

Originally posted on The Political Idealist:
It might sound like complete science fiction, or at least a distant scientific advance, but it is being done now: the production of zero carbon petroleum from nothing more than air and water. What’s more, it’s happening in Britain. Today’s Independent features the news feature, and we could be…