Searching for: the future

Now is the Future

October 21, 2015

We all know the Back to the Future trilogy, right? I’m sure it’ll have come to your attention that today is the day which the Marty McFly and Doc Brown went forward to in Back to the Future Part 2. 4:29pm on 21st October 2015, to be exact. Although the vision of the films was...

Chirp has a New Home

October 7, 2023

At the end of 2019, I posted about a little app that my colleagues and the University of Birmingham and I had been working on called Chirp — a web and iOS app for keeping track of the latest gravitational wave alerts. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down LIGO, and Chirp, but now it’s coming back...

What I’ve Been Listening To – November 2015

December 1, 2015

And so it’s that time of year again. The nights rapidly draw in after making the exasperated jaunt back from British Summer Time to good ol’ GMT. The fog lies thick over the city as the temperature make it’s downward meander to sub-zero degrees celsius. The feeling of autumn, and indeed shortly after the crisp...

What I’ve Been Listening To – October 2015

November 1, 2015

Yes, I know, I’ve been a little quiet on here lately. To remedy that let’s have a good old fashioned music post. What with now being an office dweller, and occasional observatory dweller too, I’ve had plenty of time to listen to music over the past month. Thanks to Spotify’s excellent discovery features that’s made...

#InternationalWomensDay

March 8, 2015

You may have noticed that today, Sunday 8th March 2015, is International Womens Day. This sounded like an ideal time to write about some exceptional scientists whom I greatly admire; who just also so happen to be women. Rosalind Franklin The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA The discovery of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is the...

Bodmin Moor – International Dark Sky Landscape

August 26, 2017

Some time ago, in mid-November last year the XRT-C project, the student radio telescope project based at Caradon observatory in Cornwall, as well as Space Exe, the student society at the University of Exeter that maintains and runs the former, were called upon to play a small part in something truly special; to support an...

Boldly Going for 50 Years

September 8, 2016

It’s very much not an overstatement to say that I adore Star Trek. Today is a very special for someone who claims this level of adoration for the franchise as it is exactly 50 years old today. Back on September 8th 1966 the first ever episode of Star Trek, The Man Trap, hit the screens...

What I’ve Been Listening To – July 2016

August 1, 2016

Welcome to another great instalment of my regular monthly revelry in auditory excellence. This month’s list is unabashedly short and single minded in its focus. Basically, this will probably go down in history as the ‘Sam finds Christine and the Queens month’. So, with this in mind let’s get going on our helpings for July....

My Top Tips for Preparing for a Physics Degree

August 10, 2015

You’ve just finished your A-levels, you say? Well done, I think you’ve earned a break so go on and enjoy it. However, I wouldn’t mind guessing that at some point in the next couple of months you’re going to get a little bit bored and might even start looking for something to do. If you’re kicking...

Modeling Atmospheres with the Unified Model

February 24, 2015

In my last couple of posts I’ve been going through some of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. From some of the basic approximations that make the equation possible to analytically solve in this post, to some more specialised theory in the context of planetary systems in this post. In these posts we’ve been slowly...

Dust in the Ointment

October 18, 2014

It’s nice every now and then to have a slight reminder why your work is valuable. At the moment I’m part of a research team, working in the astrophysics department at the University of Exeter,  that are studying dust. I know exactly what you’re thinking, how interesting can dust be? The truth is that interstellar...