Category: Blog

Here’s an interesting article from Architecture Week about the world’s tallest building (for the moment), the new Taipei 101 Tower. It’s built just a couple of hundred metres from a fault line, so the engineering challenge was, well, immense.

I was just thinking I hadn’t heard anything about the new installment of Doctor Who recently, when lo and behold, here’s a story. Most exciting news? CBC will carry the new series, beginning in April!

And while we’re on the subject of weird-looking robots, check out what NASA’s been up to.

Robit scale models of Dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex and Parasaurolophys will stroll the grounds of the upcoming World Expo in Japan.

As a long-time Car and Driver addict (though I went cold turkey a few years ago and have recovered nicely since), I found this list of what magazine road-test evaluation terms really mean amusing.

Ever watch a movie and wonder how on Earth it ever got made? Be thankful it’s no worse. After all, they could have made some of these.

I just got my copies of my latest non-fiction children’s book, The Basics of Quantum Physics: Understanding the Photoelectric Effect and Line Spectra, from Rosen Publishing. On the extremely unlikely chance that someone reading this blog has been looking for a book just like this one–a 48-page intro to the very very basics of quantum …

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Israeli soldiers are experimenting with wrist-mounted video screens that can instantly feed them images from unmanned aerial drones. “We are fulfilling the science fiction movies that we see,” said Itzhak Beni, chief executive of the Elisra Group’s Tadiran Electronic Systems and Tadiran Spectralink companies.

Here’s a fascinating collection of colour photos of the First World War. Makes it all seem much more recent, doesn’t it?

Analysis of the cranium of the tiny human fossils recently found in Indonesia confirms that their brains had avanced features–and that Homo floresiensis was indeed a distinct species. Which is all very interesting, but what strikes me is that every news story about Homo floesiensis refers to them as “hobbits” or “hobbit-like.” I wonder what …

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No need to worry about nanobots running wild and reducing the world to a pile of gray goo, says the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. Well, that’s a relief. But when they say molecular manufacturing systems will be no more autonomous than inkjets, and “No one worries about an inkjet printer crawling off the desk and …

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An Israeli anti-terror veteran has come up with a relatively simple device that could allow people to escape high-rise buildings from any floor up to 1,155 feet.