You may have seen news items about Shell’s Prelude LNG ship – the largest sea-going vessel of all time. I like the graphic above that shows it in contrast to the Sydney Opera House – the ship is the orange shape at the back! It is designed to be a floating platform for extracting natural gas (methane) …
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Category:Climate Change
More Methane…
Methane (CH4) is the simplest hydrocarbon molecule and the gas that we burn in the lab. It is produced when organic material rots or is fossilised. As natural gas it is one of our three major fossil fuels used to offer a source of energy for power stations such as Didcot B power station. Like all hydrocarbons, methane …
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Synlight…
I don’t suppose very many of my usual readers take The Guardian at home, but in general I have found its science reporting to be better than the other newspapers. They still fall prey to press releases from Universities and industry, publishing reports of scientific findings uncritically and without checking their sources, but usually I feel …
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Cows – Nature’s Most Noble Beasts…
Some of you will know that cows are my favourite animals so you can imagine how delighted I was to see a headline a few years ago in the Telegraph… “McDonald’s launches study into flatulent cows used in its burgers” This seems to include several of my favourite scientific themes; namely cows, the scientific method, food and burping (eructation). What …
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Global Warning…
[This was first published on 5th October 2009] Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of mainland Europe, about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The glacier in the picture below is called the Austfonna ice cap. The striking photo was taken by Michael Nolan during his annual voyage to observe the glacier and its surrounding …
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It’s Never The Ozone Layer…
Earth’s twin planet in the Solar System, Venus, has an ozone layer. The Venus Express space craft detected the signature of ozone about 100 km up in Venus’s atmosphere. Ozone is a molecule of oxygen containing three atoms of oxygen (O3) rather than the normal two (O2) that we breathe. It forms when ultra-violet light acts …
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OK Pinheads, How’d The Moon Get There?
One of the reasons I love science so much is that it gives you the tools to find answers to questions. Asking good questions is one of the most important skills a scientist will learn. A scientific question is one that can be investigated; one that has the possibility of being answered. A question that …
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Jolly Hockey Sticks…
Science involves a process called peer review. When a scientist wants to publish his experiment report in a journal for others to read, it has to be submitted to a few other experts in the field who check that the basic science is sound. If they feel that a good job has been done with …
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