Time to get out of the office

Is your office job destroying your body?

The nuclear reactor in your basement

How would you like to replace your water heater with a nuclear reactor?

Sheds of the Year

The annual Shed of the Year competition to search for the UK’s most wacky and wonderful sheds is underway.

Flexible imaging

New Imaging Device That Is Flexible, Flat, and Transparent

How to be a genius

No question about this working - how to be a genius - it did for me!

Be IT savvy

Some tips on how to be IT savvy

Beam me up Scotty

Curved glass and wearable electronics, could it be the iWatch?. Watch this space.

Prime digits

2 multiplied by itself 57,885, 161 times, minus 1, has 17,425,170 digits. High prime!

Slippery discs

UCLA researchers use standard DVD burner used to produce graphene material for micro-supercapacitors

Characterizing New Graphene Devices with Multiple Spectroscopic Techniques

Graphene Characterization with Raman and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy
Register here

8 years rocking

Since starting as k-Space Associates, Inc.'s European partner in 2004, we have been their Representative of the Year every year. How? - by building a strong team, with deep expertise in their products and applications and providing responsive customer support. Some parallels perhaps with another (but older) British team who had a string of successes in the US - starting with their album Sticky Fingers (1971).

Paint your asteroid

Last month was quite worrying with a meteor striking the earth and an asteroid passing close by. Not everyday events but potentially very life changing.  One new idea from Texas A&M University to deflect earth bound asteroids involves using paint. It is all due to the Yarkovsky effect, a force, on a body in space caused by the anisotropic emission of thermal photons that carry momentum. Apparently spraying dry paint powder onto a spinning asteroid could generate unequal heating effects with the photons imparting sufficient momentum to cause the asteroid to change course. Bruce Willis is on call if Plan B is required.

Picasso the decorator?

Picasso was undoubtedly a truly great artist. Recent work using the X-ray fluorescence nanoprobe at Argonne National Laboratory has added weight to the notion that Picasso was one of the first master painters to use common fast drying enamel house paint rather than traditional artists' paint. By comparing decades-old paint samples purchased on e-Bay with samples from Picasso paintings, scientists were able to show that the chemical makeup of paint used by Picasso matched that of the first commercial house paint, Ripolin. The purity of the zinc oxide and the lack of impurities such as Pb and Fe were important pointers.

DNA and horses

Recent months have seen the spectacular application of of the technology of DNA to two very different areas. It now seems conclusive that the body unearthed under a Leicester car park is that of King Richard III, the last English king to die in battle. A vital part of the overall evidence being that DNA from the skeleton matched two of Richard III's maternal line relatives. Richard was killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth. According to Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Richard the Third when the battle raged around him he called out “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”

A surfeit of horse seems to be the problem within the European food industry. DNA testing has shocked consumers by identifying the presence of horse meat within several processed food products. It seems that horse has been substituted for beef. Clearly products must contain, and only contain, the stated ingredients but as carnivores is horse less preferential to beef or pig? Whilst the situation currently is an unbridled disaster for some food producers perhaps, when things are more stable, we need to take a less blinkered view about the mane ingredients in processed meals?

What has tickled materials scientists in 2012?

Top 5 Materials Science news of 2012