An engineering commentary for everyone on the first Wednesday of every month
Many people will be familiar with an iron filings and magnet experiment often performed in high school physics classes. Iron filings on a sheet of paper with a magnet underneath, when the paper is gently tapped, align with the lines of the magnetic field sometimes forming ‘chains’. In our research group, we have performed a […]
In her novel, ‘The Gap of Time’, Jeanette Winterson writes that Buddha and Jesus knew that when you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then worldly goods were worthless. Modern capitalism has generated a small number of owners of capital who have this much money. For the rest of us worldly […]
I was excited last month when our latest research on tracking nano-entities was published by the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The paper describes the real-time and label-free tracking of bacteriophages, or phages, in an optical microscope using caustics (see right thumbnail). Phages are of interest due to the potential applications in biotechnology and […]
Some months ago, I wrote in unflattering terms about artificial intelligence applications (AI apps) and large language models (LLMs), (see ‘Ancient models and stochastic parrots‘ on October 1st, 2025). My view is changing, probably as AI apps develop and my user skills improve. I have started using a couple of different free AI apps as […]
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! As newspaper vendors used to shout. The Pint of Science Festival is happening across the UK in the week beginning Monday 18th May for three evenings in venues in 43 locations. I am talking on the first evening, May 18th, in Lime Street Social (51 Lime Street, L1 1JQ) […]
What would you do if you found yourself face-to-face with a polar bear? Run? Probably not a good idea because polar bears regard anything that runs away as a potential meal and they can reach speeds of 40 kph or 25 mph, so they can easily outrun you. This question is probably theoretical one for […]
The final PhD student for whom I will act as lead supervisor is scheduled to finish this month. I have graduated forty PhD students since I was appointed a lecturer in 1985. I am still in touch with many of them – they are divided between industry and universities with a bias towards industry (about […]
Greenland has been in the news recently and as a consequence more people know about it than when I visited there about 45 years ago (see ‘Ice bores and what they can tell us‘ on January 12th, 2022). I was part of a small expedition that spent a short Arctic summer on the Bersaekerbrae glacier […]
I am writing this post while I am in the middle of leading a breakout activity for more than a hundred PhD students from our Centres for Doctoral Training in nuclear science and engineering, GREEN and SATURN. We have asked them to construct a knowledge network for a start-up company commissioned to build either a […]
I spent a day last month marking essays that were part of the assessment for a postgraduate module I have been teaching about engineering leadership. I use Boyatzis’s theory of self-directed learning to talk about how students can develop their leadership competences. Then, we ask the students to reflect on the leadership and ethical issues […]