Imagine a device which could replicate any taste. Millions of dishes, drinks, desserts and snacks and your fingertips or, more accurately, at the tip of your tongue. Introducing the Norimaki Synthesizer, a device which, using electricity, electrolytes and 5 different gels, can produce flavours directly onto your tongue. So how does it all work?
This blog post will walk you through to applications process for Natural Sciences at Cambridge, sharing my advice and personal experiences. I currently hold an offer to study NatSci but, due to the current situation of all A Level exams being cancelled everything is a little up in the air currently so with all my free time I’ve decided to sit down and write this guide.
This post will contain advice for applying to university in general, specific Oxbridge advise, and even more specific Physical Natural Sciences at Cambridge advise.
Michael Crichton, perhaps best remembered as creator of the sensational Jurassic Park, has quickly become one of my favourite writers. He wrote over 30 novels (not including his short fiction and screen writing work) throughout his lifetime, many of which became best-sellers. Not only that, but he was also a graduate of Harvard Medical school, with his many years studying medicine providing an ideal basis for the science fiction books he would later write.
So, without further adieu, here’s my top 5 reasons why Michael Crichton is an author whose work should, and will, remain relevant.
I love Lego. Always have. I remember having a big bright red box containing hundreds of pieces when I was younger of varying colours and shapes. With its simple (yet indestructible) design, Lego is a fantastic children’s toy for promoting curiosity in developing years. But it turns out, Lego has some cool properties which interests physicists (and sometimes the odd chemist) even today.
Around 60 million coffee machines are sold each year. A coffee machine is great for creating a quick drink with a fairly consistent taste, meaning the coffee produced should taste the same each time. And yet, two espressos, despite being made with the same ingredients and by the same machine, can taste different.
There’s many factors which can influence the variation in a coffee’s flavour: water quality, ratio of coffee to water, temperature. This study focused on the extent to which coffee beans were ground and how this impacted the flavour, and how what implications this would have on industry.
It was recently Bonfire night (otherwise known as Guy Fawkes Night) so my father and I went to watch the local annual fireworks display. About part-way through I started to wonder how they work. How are such vibrant colours produced? How high do they explode and how is this calculated?
As we go into winter, it’s time to start pulling scarves and fluffy coats out the wardrobe, and keeping hand warmers in our pockets. If, like me, you like getting value for money, you might consider getting a reusable hand warmer instead of a one-time use one. They work quickly and effectively: simply snap the metal plate and wait for the crystals to grow and your hands to warm.
But how does it work? A wonder of chemistry, clearly. But some keywords are saturated (well, actually supersaturated), instability, crystalisation and exothermic. You can probably piece together a rough idea of what happens, so below I’m going to go into more depth and detail!
Continue reading “How do reusable hand warmers work?”
Boomerangs are pretty cool, you throw them and by some genius of physics, they come back. I remember seeing them during my childhood when I lived in Australia and generally when people think of Australia, boomerangs and kangaroos are among the first things thought of. So how do return boomerangs work?
Continue reading “A look at the physics behind a boomerang’s ability to fly and return”Moving into my final A Level year of chemistry, my class has started to cover optical isomerism. Part way through the lesson the teacher mentioned, as a side note, Turin and his work on explaining why we smell what we smell. I thought this sounded interesting and I’ve recently spent some time looking a little more into his work.
Luca Turin is a biophysicist and is well known for his work on the vibrational theory. His book, The Secret of Scent, details Turin’s work on perfumes, from his own history to his vibration theory about how we, as humans, smell. He has worked in academia for many years, working at University College London (UCL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and most recently in the neurobiology division at the Biomedical Sciences Research Center (BSRC) Alexander Fleming.
There are two common theories which both attempt to explain why things smell the way they do: the vibration theory of olfaction (by Turin), and the shape (docking) theory of olfaction. Below, I will look into both of them, the basic principles, evidence for both theories and issues with each theory.
Continue reading “Theories of our sense of smell- a look at the docking theory and Turin’s vibrational theory”
I’ve had an allotment for a couple of years now. Throughout the year, my family and I grow a variety of plants, including potatoes, peas, beans and carrots- the usual. Every year we sow and water the seeds, and the plants grow. And every year comes the same problem anyone trying to grow anything has had since the dawn of agriculture: bugs. So, to deal with this, mankind invented pesticides. But issues with pesticides creates demand for more natural solutions- could coffee be one?
Continue reading “Pesticides: the potential usage of coffee as an insect repellent”
Distilled Thoughts 