Why should we care about the stratosphere? Such is the question Simon Clark presented us with at the latest of the Physics society’s weekly talks. Former undergraduate at St Peter’s College Oxford and prominent Youtuber, Clark has made a name for himself as a powerful and effective science communicator and it becomes clear why as…
Sara Middleton Sara Middleton (PhD candidate in ecology) is injecting the drama into grassland communities by creating a drought. This is all in the name of research to try and find out how certain plants respond to extreme conditions because, as Middleton points out, they can’t just move somewhere nicer. The star of this “plant…
Maria Violaris Why can’t you plug your computer into your bathtub? It seems like an obviously bad idea but, as Maria Violaris (4th year physicist) points out, when you zoom right in you’re surrounded by fast moving particles buzzing with energy. If we could find a way to harness this energy it begins to seem…
Arianna Schuler Scott “What is privacy to you?” The large black letters on the board set the tone immediately for Arianna Schuler Scott’s talk which asked us all to think carefully about the privacy of our data, how secure it is and how bothered we should be. In her five minute talk, Schuler Scott (a…
Following the release of ‘Finding Nemo’, numerous global news providers, including the BBC and CNN, reported that the movie’s popularity was driving an increase in demand for clownfish as pets and threatening wild populations. This effect, dubbed the ‘Nemo effect’ by media outlets, was so widely reported that it became conventional wisdom amongst amateur animal…
Gaining insight into interiors of black holes, subtleties of the quantum realm, the Big Bang pushes us beyond the reach of experimentation. To get their hands to work, physicists turned to easily manipulable “analogue” systems governed by similar equations. In 2016, a physicist created a sonic black hole by making a fluid to trap sound…
Regardless of how advanced our AI algorithms are, they have to be trained by humans in order to be smart. For an algorithm to accurately recognize an apple is an apple, it needs to be taught with thousands to millions of pictures of apples. Some algorithms even have to be trained in culturally specific ways….
We all know how the story goes for quantum computing: A qubit (short for a quantum bit), unlike classical bits, can be at the state of 0 and 1 simultaneously. The superposition of states offers quantum computers the superior computational power over traditional supercomputers. Its unprecedented efficiency for tasks like factoring, database-searching, simulation, or code-breaking…
Atreyi Chakrabarty (St. Cross College, DPhil in Interdisciplinary Bioscience) in conversation with Professor Dorothy Bishop (Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford) More and more scientists are starting to doubt the nature of their own playing field. Their colleagues’ studies published in acclaimed journals, but the key findings mysteriously never seem to materialise when others try to…
By Dr Alice Thorneywork Be it ice in a drink, chocolate left in the sun, or the wax of a lit candle, melting – the phase transition in which a substance turns from a solid to a liquid – is a scientific phenomenon that we experience every day. While on a macroscopic level we know what melting looks…
