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. […]
I really have too little time to read! I love reading, and I read a lot – just that the last couple of years I read very few books. It’s more stuff for work: articles, manuscripts to review, things students write… But to summarise last year: I managed to read […]
In the end of October last year I visited Shenzhen in China for a few days to participate in a meeting organised by a colleague of mine who is now working as guest-professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) We spent a few days being ushered around […]
I thought I’d just add a few photos from a quite nice family hiking trip in Austria this summer. We were in Ramsau am Dachstein. A really lovely area for hiking and relaxing a few days. Some more pictures can be found in the album here.
Det tog sin tid, men till slut kom artikeln ut i alla fall; en artikel i Sensors and Actuators B – Chemical med titeln “Fångst av fluorescerande virus med silvernanotrådar”. Det här är ett arbete som pågått i flera år – artikeln har avvisats, nya mätningar har gjorts, och nu […]
For two days now we have discussed answers to the question You drink a glass of ordinary tap water. How many water molecules in this glass were in the blood of Socrates when he died? First we used probability to determine that the value is at least tens of thousands […]
Yesterday we saw how a normal glass of water contains at least 20000 molecules of water that were in the blood of Socrates when he died. Here, we’ll see why that is completely wrong! You might think it has something to do with the way we estimated the circulation of […]
There is a classic question that comes up every now and then, usually meant to demonstrate how enormous Avogadro’s number is (or alternatively, how damn small a molecule is). There are many versions of it, but the one that I read in Göran Grimvall’s Brainteaser Physics many years ago, goes like […]
