Jag hörde talas om kabelbakterier första gången på ett seminarium för ett par år sedan när en fransk elektrokemist (Alexander Kuhn) berättade om experiment de gjorde med dem. Jag tänkte väl inte så mycket mer på dem tills för någon vecka sedan när stötte jag på dem igen, i ett […]
Elektrokemi kan nog vara den mest underskattade vetenskapsdiciplinen vi har. Jag säger inte det (bara) för att det råkar vara mitt fält och att ingen verkar ha en aning om vad det handlar om! För även om elektrokemi kanske inte är lika sexigt som astronomi eller spektakulärt som partikelfysik så […]
En av de viktigaste sakerna för att få folk att följa regler är att de förstår varför reglerna finns. Det gäller inte minst nu i koronatider när vi uppmanats att hålla avstånd, bära ansiktsmask, stanna hemma osv. På lördag släpper Polen ytterligare på restriktionerna. Nu skall man inte behöva bära […]
Not only have we been sitting indoors for the last months because of the coronavirus, it has also been unusually dry. We haven’t seen any proper rain in Warsaw for over a month. Meteorologists are warning that we already see water levels that we usually have in the middle of […]
Moscow, 1937 by Karl SchlögelMy rating: 5 of 5 stars The original title, Terror und Traum (Terror and Dream), really summarises the book perfectly. Schlögel paints a wide tapestry over Moscow and the Soviet Union at a time when it had emerged from the civil war and the future looked […]
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane My rating: 4 of 5 stars A very entertaining introduction to what artificial intelligence does and what it doesn’t. Full of hilarious examples of AI […]
We had a discussion the other day at work about Arthur Eddington, of solar eclipse fame. It started with a tweet from @landetannien about proofs in science. The point of the tweet being that she’s frustrated with people insisting that science needs to prove things. That reminded me of a […]
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 […]
