Category - The Macrocosm
Seeing is believing
If you didn’t see Horizon last night on BBC2, do catch it on iPlayer. The programme was chocker with fascinating insights into how, and some of the “why” our minds can be manipulated . . . Here’s an extract: A woman responds to The Rubber Hand Illusion
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Meet the New Optimists – Stuart Slater talks innovation
Our latest video update finds Dr Stuart Slater, Director of the Institute of Gaming and Animation in the West Midlands, talking about innovation and his high hopes for current and future students.
There’s more about Stuart and what he wrote about in The New Optimists here.
Mum’s the word
This post from the Guardian’s Environmental blog takes an interesting angle on the climate change issue – unlike much of the coverage and debate around such a button-pushing topic, it takes a more personal and, above all, motherly point of view — albeit Professor Gail Whiteman, a mum with a prof-ship at Eramus University in Rotterdam.
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Are SUDS The Answer to Floods?
It’s another rainy day in the West Midlands and visions of the floods the UK suffered in the summers of 2007 and 2008 are inevitably surfacing.
Flooding costs in the region of £1 billion a year to clean up and it’s likely to get worse too; a recent Parliamentary report suggested annual flood damage could cost £27 billion annually by 2080.
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Microhabitats and Motorbikes
To Aston University’s New Optimist Lucy Bastin, derelict wasteland is far from an eyesore. It’s home. Not hers obviously. But often home to more biodiversity than any fertile farmland.
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Why evolution isn’t “true”
How many people in the US, do you suppose, believe in evolution? According to a survey reported in The New Scientist in 2006, a high percentage don’t. Another survey carried out here, indicated that 50% of us Brits don’t either.
If only, as Ian Stewart reminded us in the 2009 Lunar Society Annual Lecture, it were zero percent who believed in evolution!
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Adaptable Algae & Magic Moss
Algae doesn’t get much press. As a potential biofuel, food source and integral part of our ecosystem, it deserves more attention.
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Human IVF
One of Spike Walker’s images on the book cover is of the moment before a human IVF. It won a 2009 Wellcome Image Award.
Not only did I find it very powerful so too, did the Wellcome judges. “I think it’s an image
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