The fascinating story of the far end of the periodic table. The book starts off from the beginning of man-made elements, those beyond uranium, before moving on to the the beasts lurking above atomic number 104 – the superheavies. It’s a story I thought I knew quite well as a […]
We all get our fair share of spam – although as filters are getting better I actually don’t see that much of it – but as an academic scientist there is a special class of junk hitting the inbox: Invitations to publish in journals and to give talks at conferences. […]
All Saints’ Day is one of the most Polish holidays when people are taking to the cemeteries by the millions. Stanley Bill wrote beautifully about it on the new web-page for the Notes from Poland news service. Over the years I have taken many photos of our local cemetery at […]
This week the Polish Chemical Society (PT Chem) has its annual meeting. This year it’s in Warsaw at the technical university. Despite the fact that for several years now I officially count as chemist, I think this is the first general chemistry conference that I’ve been to. I mean, I’ve […]
I took a cycle trip today down along the river to the ferry between Gassy and Karczew south of Warsaw. It’s a nice trip on small roads with very little traffic. Unfortunately on the other side the only way back is along a more busy road – mostly without bicycle […]
I was in Katowice over the weekend to attend a concert by Bobby McFerrin. I’ve seen him a couple of times before when he visited Poland and his concerts are always an amazing display of the versatility of the human voice. This time he was accompanied by the group Gimme […]
I just finished reading Emily Lakdawalla‘s “The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job“. It’s a remarkable book, even though it’s not quite the book that I expected. The first few chapters describes the general design and mission of the rover – how it came […]
I saw this tweet from New Scientist about the Kepler mission. Kepler of course was an amazing mission that completely changed our view of the universe. But the numbers got me thinking a bit about the cost of a scientific publication. It says that 2946 scientific papers were published, I […]
Did a wordcloud of my articles from last year. It seems quite reasonable. Electrode is the biggest word with sample, surface, figure and other general “experimental” nouns also high on the list. We can see verbs like used, using, can, and so on that are also very generic. Would it […]
Like most people that have grown up hearing the stories of World War 2, coloured through the lenses of Hollywood and British and American writes, I thought I knew all about the brave pilots of the RAF defeating the Luftwaffe and the heroes of Bletchley Park cracking the Enigma codes. […]
