The Curious Case of Cosmic Rays 2012 marks the 100 year anniversary of Victor Hess’s official discovery of cosmic rays for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1936 [1]. But skipping forward to the present day, scientists still don’t know where these mysterious particles come from… What are cosmic rays? Well first of all, [...]

We have moved! We hope that we found a permanent base for Edinburgh Science tutors. Our new office is located just 5 min walk from the West End of Princess St and allows us to host two tutorials at any time. Our own office is ideal for one-to-one tutorials and a bigger meeting room can [...]

Portrait of Peter Higgs by Ken Currie [1] As you may know, the Higgs boson was discovered back in July.  Well, kinda.  Officially, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found something that looks very much like a Higgs boson, behaving the way that they expected the Higgs boson to behave.  It’s not definitely [...]

If you’d like to read the first part of this series, you can catch it at here  After going down past micro- and nanoseconds, next up there’s pico-, femto- and attoseconds, the basis of chemistry and physics.  After that, we’ll go past the frontiers of science as we know it. Picosecond A picosecond is a [...]

Cool Science: Working Tractor Beam Invented! You might have seen higher than normal (i.e. at least one) mentions of Star Wars and/or Star Trek in the news last week. That’s because scientists at New York University have created a working ‘tractor beam’ by using a laser to pull in microscopic spheres made of silica. ‘So [...]

Humans and chocolate have a long, long history together; scientists have found cocoa deposits in Mayan ceramic pots used in food preparation that are dated all the way back to 600 BC! The world is filled with chocolate lovers but just what keeps us coming back for more for more than 2 millennia? Above: A [...]

Now that we’ve gone down to the shortest time possible, let’s go check out the time scales the opposite direction.  It shouldn’t take too long, but give me a little time.  (I will also try to cut down on the “time” puns.) Kilosecond Normally in science we give data in terms of units of ten [...]

Earlier in the year, I wrote two articles about the length scales of the universe, from the shortest to the longest. This post is a sequel, of sorts. Please allow me to (briefly) tell you about the time scales of the universe, from a second to a nanosecond. 1 second Originally, a second was simply [...]