Tag Archives: science

The other week a group of colleagues and I were up in St. Petersburg on business. And in among our busy schedule while there we paid a useful and informative visit to the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. And it was there I got my first glimpse of Cherenkov radiation (and you thought radiation was invisible?), which I’d dreamed of doing for years. I also stood on the roof of a working reactor of RBMK (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalniy, meaning ‘high-power channel-type reactor’). An unforgettable experience!

Note: since there’s absolutely no photography allowed at any nuclear facility, the photos below are all taken from the internet.

So, the main thing: Cherenkov radiation. In case you haven’t clicked the link, here’s what it says about it on its Wikipedia page: ‘Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wave in a medium) of light in that medium’ (the links –added by me).

And you can actually see this wonder of physics – and beautiful it is too: a fluorescent blue in the core of a nuclear reactor in cooling fluid. The spectacle is a cosmically fantastic one…

(photos from Wikipedia and here)

Read on…>

Hi folks!

If you’re a regular reader of this here blog, you’ll have noticed how I occasionally touch upon ecological topics in my posts here: protecting the environment, global warming, and assorted other things like CO₂ emissions. Oh, and by the way, before you shout ‘climate change denier!’… for example, those CO₂ emissions, they’re most certainly on the rise – fast. No one in their right mind can deny that, from the man in the street through to the states that signed Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. But when folks become perfectly hysterical paranoid about man’s role in that rise – that’s where I beg to… not quite differ, but at least state that we need to see the larger picture: it may just be possible that industrial and anthropological emissions aren’t the most important factor…

I’ve written somewhere before that:

• CO₂emissions are rising and the climate is warming up. Facts;
• But putting that down mostly to the activity of human beings is… bothersome. And it does whiff rather of megalomania: is man really that significant and influential to be able to have much effect on what are surely extraordinarily greater, stronger forces of nature?
• I don’t know the answer to the question just put, but, because I don’t know, I say we need to measure not only emissions of carbon dioxide, but also nature’s intake/usage/absorption thereof. Could CO₂ levels be growing not just in and of themselves, but as part of a growing imbalance between emissions and consumption?

Now, those musings, hypotheses, question marks… they’d have stayed musings, hypotheses and question marks, probably, if the corona virus hadn’t become a global pandemic in 2020: quarantine, lockdowns, restricted travel > less emissions from humans and their filthy cars and planes. But, as I wrote in April 2020, how will those lower emissions affect the overall total levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere? 

Here’s my quote from the mentioned post from April:

“Curiously, we’re currently living in… interesting times, and it just so happens that we may be able to get an answer to the second of my two questions here today (‘how will nearly the whole world’s industry coming to a halt affect the growth of CO₂ in the world’s atmosphere?’). 

Indeed, soon we’ll get the results of a unique (if unexpected) global experiment: how the lockdown and the partial halt to world production affects increases in CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere. It will also present a good opportunity to check the soundness of several theories about the how much climate is affected by man.

I have to say, it will be somewhat odd if the lockdown makes no difference whatsoever. I mean, among many other things, it would completely cancel out the need for the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, while making a mockery of every country that ever signed either; or am I being too harsh there? ‘Mistakes happen’, they’ll say!” 

So what do you think folks? What is the result of this unique global experiment? I ask as, that answer is ready! And here it is!…

Read on…

The other day I visited a most unusual, unique place – and just down the road too. It’s a space-travel training complex where they do simulations of long missions into space. You may have heard of a small group of volunteers who cut themselves off from the world for a long as it takes to fly to Mars and back? Well, this is the place where that happens…

…In this unassuming building:

…Namely – inside cylindrical chambers like the one in the following pic, whose size is no larger than that of a modern-day space ship. Inside everything’s set up to imitate as closely as possible a space flight: limited space, regeneration of water and oxygen, time delays in communications ‘with Earth’, etc. The only thing that’s not reproduced is weightlessness; oh – and windows through which you can see stars ).

Read on…

A week or two ago, I posed 2 + 12 questions to you on the occasion of Earth Day. 

The first question was a rhetorical one: How will the world actually change as a result of global warming? 

There are various hypotheses, models, projections. For sure, sea levels are rising, but not only for the obvious reason that icebergs are melting. Yes, icebergs are melting, but so is the ice – several kilometers thick! – that covers (and presses down) places like Greenland and Antarctica, and this will cause these landmasses to slowly rise up – so much so that, for example, Greenland may join up with North America! Imagine that?! They’ll have to install a new Canadian-Danish border across the new landscape!

But we’ll probably only get an answer to this question in another two or three generations. That is, if the world doesn’t suddenly opt for another stint of ice age.

Swiftly moving on to question 2…

How will nearly the whole world’s industry coming to a halt affect the growth of CO₂ in the world’s atmosphere?

We’ll get an answer to this sooner. Most curious for me is – what if it doesn’t affect it at all? But of course I hope it does. Anyway – most of the various answers to this were already discussed.

All righty. Now we turn to questions of a less global nature: about ice, rocks, mysterious circles on the earth’s surface and about animals. Lets’ go!…

Where did the water come from to make the ice on the 80^th parallel on Antarctica – some 700km from the shore? Water that then freezes into fields of ice – upon which cargo planes can land:

The hint was there for the taking on the photos: mountains!

Read on…

The other day – Earth Day – I paused to reflect upon global warming on Earth. Today I’d like to pose 12 13 questions about the Earth – about some of its most incomprehensible and mysterious phenomena that have come to my knowledge over the years, many of which phenomena I’ve visited.

So here we go – 12 13 questions about Earth’s mysteries. Ready? Off we go…

And I’ll start… right at the bottom of Earth – in Antarctica!

I. Water in an ice desert

Practically the whole of Antarctica (with the exception of some mountains and coastal areas) are covered with thick layers of ice – compacted snow that’s fallen over the centuries millennia. But in some places there is real ice – frozen water. Like this:

Read on…

On Earth Day – today – I’d like to say a few words about global warming, particularly the anthropogenic factors that contribute to it – or don’t!

I’d like to go over a few of the theories of, and interdependencies and tendencies regarding, global warming, and also compare some of the theory with the practical. I’ll do so through two two questions…

1. How will the world actually change as a result of global warming?

It is totally and blatantly obvious that the world is warming up. At a minimum in the arctic and temperate zones we can see this for ourselves.

Example: Around 40 years ago when I was a teenager, ~-20°С in winter in Moscow was the norm, -30°С was common, and the occasional dip down to -40°С or below occurred a few times a year. Such cold temperatures, it goes without saying, came with a lot of snow. Today, Christmas and New Year can come and go… without snow! WHAT?!

But it’s not just Moscow. Warming is everywhere. Take… Siberia as another example. But here the damage done may become apparent sooner rather than later: extreme global warming may see inner Siberia becoming an appendage to the Gobi Desert, with Lake Baikal surrounded by tall barkhan dunes. And that’s only after so much methane and other harmful gases have been emitted into the atmosphere that the permafrost in the region – permanently frozen for millions of years – will start to melt!

And it’s not just Russia, of course. But for some regions it will be a different thing altogether.

Take the Middle East, for example. With global warming, excessive evaporation of oceanic water could radically alter the quantity of rain in the region. This could mean the region turns into a fertile flowering garden instead of a famously barren desert. Or… maybe not. We don’t know for sure, we can only speculate!

Then there’s a theory that the current warming is the calm before the storm a mere climatic fluctuation before… an upcoming ice age!

Read on…

It’s been a while since we’ve had any excavation news from the Minoan Bronze Age settlement of Akrotiri. But that doesn’t mean the archaeologists there aren’t still working away diligently. In fact, today I’ll show you how they’ve been continuing to expand our understanding of the ancient world.

You might be asking yourself: why Akrotiri, and not some other ancient city? Here’s a synopsis if you’ve missed my past posts.

In the Aegean Sea, the island of Santorini is probably best known for its Insta-friendly white houses, blue roofs, and breathtaking sunsets. But what a lot of people don’t know is that the island was once the site of one of mankind’s most significant natural disasters. Around 3,600 years ago, the Theran eruption destroyed a flourishing ancient culture. When excavations began here in the mid-20th century, archaeologists discovered an amazingly well-preserved city buried in volcanic ash, including two and three-story buildings. The settlement was incredibly advanced for the time, boasting structures with built-in sewage and water supply lines (I repeat: three thousand six hundred years ago!). Researchers have unearthed frescoes, pottery, furniture and numerous other artifacts attesting to the unbelievable cultural advancement of this ancient seaside society.

But when archaeology budgets were cut in Greece, excavations stopped due to lack of funding. Here and there some minor digging continued, but overall the project went into conversation mode. That’s where my obsession with the excavation begins, in 2006, when I first got acquainted with the settlement’s history. And when I put my mind to making the world a better place in some specific way, I get it done (or in this case, started!). So in 2016, lo and behold, excavations were resumed, after more than a decade, with our financial support! That’s how I ended up getting a chance to do a little digging myself, and dig I did! I even discovered a Cycladic statuette dated ~5,000 years old. Now every year we learn more and more about how the island’s ancient inhabitants lived.

So what were the highlights of 2019? There’s lots of fascinating progress to share in different areas:

Read on…

The emotions evoked from a short walk through the rocky area surrounding the Namibian town of Luderitz can be summed up rather succinctly. In fact, one word would suffice. Or maybe one or two more. Unfortunately, they’re all expletives.

But they’re just rocks, I hear you say. OK, let me try and share my impressions in a slightly differently way – like this ->

They’re not just rocks. This is a real mix, a hodgepodge of all kinds of rock forms. It’s as though someone threw heaps of different kinds of stones into a giant “stone mixer” and heated it up on one side. And it turned out something like this. Over a huge area:

Sedimentary rock layers, next to basalt outcrops, in a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes…

Read on…

Guten tag folks!

As promised earlier, herewith, a bit lot more detail on some of the presentations at this year’s Starmus in Zurich. The main theme here: the first moon landing.

Quick (relevant) digression: it was our traditional all-day-and-night birthday bash the other week, and since it’s just a few days since the 50^th anniversary of the Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, we thought we’d add a sprinkling of cosmonautical space dust to the proceedings: we invited along two very experienced and very highly-respected astronauts: Oleg Kotov and Sergey Krikalyov. (And let me tell you that both of them have no doubts whatsoever that the Americans really did land on the moon!)

But back to the Starmus highlights. Let me go through some of the best few presentations:

Gerry Griffin was one of the managing directors of the Apollo Program. He was one of the heroes who managed to get the stricken Apollo 13 back to earth safely. A very interesting story – dramatized many times, most notably in the 1995 movie Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks.

Read on…

So, what else did we get up to in Zurich, besides beer-and-bathe by/in the river? We got ourselves to perhaps my fave annual festival – STARMUS, which – oh my galaxy! – is already in its fifth year! Space, universes, stars, black holes; man’s space projects; plus assorted other jaw-dropping reports on scientific research from all over the planet and beyond; plus a traditional mega-music concert of impressive caliber (alas, which we traditionally miss).

Check out some of the speakers at this year’s event:

• ‘Moonwalker’ Buzz Aldrin (yep – second man on the moon (on Apollo 11);
• Charles Duke (Apollo 16); and
• Harrison Schmidt (Apollo 17).

Read on…