Hong Kong’s Victoria harbour has a fantastic combination of bold skyscrapers and hazy mountain back-drops like nowhere else I’ve seen. It’s all the better when viewed at sunset from the roof of a boat. This was just one of the highlights of a great trip thanks to the IOM3 World Lecture Competition. Any young materials researchers should get involved in this competition immediately; anyone else might want to consider becoming a young materials researcher.
Unsustainable (by Muse) is both a great song and one of the best descriptions of the 2nd law of thermodynamics I’ve heard. That is quite an achievement and just goes to show that there are other places to find a bit of science in your art.
The view from Howth pier last week.
Are you looking at huge boulders and crashing waves, or small ripples rolling over a single rock? Continue reading
Most people will say that the wind is blowing to the right in this picture without even thinking about it, because leaves don’t get blown onto trees. That’s because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is something that almost nobody can explain to another person, but almost everybody understands intuitively thanks to things like this we see every day.
Probably the most impressive looking sky I’ve ever seen, and that’s all I have to say about this one.
Apatite is the mineral found in our teeth and bones, but it also comes in hundreds of other forms and is found in many types of rock. It gets its name from the Greek for “deceive”, because it is sometimes so difficult to tell what type of apatite you are looking at, or even if it is apatite at all. For example, what you are looking at right now is part of an x-ray diffraction pattern for fluorapatite, but it looks more like some mountains and trees.
During my research I have spent more time on x-ray diffraction than anything else. This is a Guinier powder diffraction camera, which is small enough to fit in your cupboard and uses x-rays to analyse the structure of crystals with an accuracy of 0.00000000000001 m. I think its quite cool.
