IOP claim physics guilty of Titanic sinking

The editorial to the IOP physics world claims the sinking of the Titanic to be caused by physics. The article then goes on to explain about the transition temperature of the steel (it seems that the toughness would be good enough for the steel to buckle) and the use of ONLY the Best rivets (rather [...]

Incredibly low dislocation density in Steel

Gutierrez and Raabe have reported amazingly low dislocation density in Fe-3Si (wt.%) alloy after deforming to 500 MPa, using electron channeling contrast imaging in SEM-EBSD. In their paper “Dislocation density measurement by electron channeling contrast imaging in a scanning electron microscope“, published in Scripta Materialia, Vol 66, Issue 6, 2012. They report dislocation density of [...]

Science on trial?

BBC report on Italy scientists on trial over L’Aquila earthquake. Alfredo Biondi the lawyer of Mr Eva, Alfredo Biondi, said the trial was not credible, “This is a trial which opens on very shaky foundations. You cannot put science on trial. Surely this is exactly wrong, if something can’t be tested/trialled then how can it [...]

X-ray challenge

Spot what is the problem with my experiment shown in this image:

Hawking warns about alien contact

Stephen Hawking says although life almost certainly exists elsewhere, we should not attempt to actively initiate contact with extra–terrestrial life forms. As Jared Diamond has pointed out before, historical evidence of encounters between humans, and biological evidence of contacts of different groups of animals, shows it always goes badly for the native population, often resulting [...]