Both Alberto and I love the snow. I go skiing and he goes snowboarding and as we haven’t ever been together in a snow trip I’ve decided to share some of how this activity looks like to me. When you are a scientist you wake up in the morning in a nice village a few kilometers away from the ski resort, let’s say in the Pyrenees, you look up at the sky and then you wonder: How can there be clouds in winter when it is too cold for water to stay as a vapor? Although clouds look like they are made out of vapor that’s not true. You may notice when cooking that water vapor is invisible… so, why would that be visible on clouds? Water vapor is invisible because its molecules are too far apart to optically scatter light so there has to...
The Energy crisis The modern way of life depends on fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal. Although the majority of the people take them for granted it took nature about 5 million years to create the fossil fuels that the World consumes in one year. Oil powers 96% of all transportation. This demand will grow fast in the following years; considering the population grows at 3% per year, this means it doubles every 23 years. Since 1860 the World has used approximately half of the oil that has been discovered. At first oil was easy to find and cheap to extract, but once an oil well starts producing it’s only a matter of time before it starts to decline. Typically it takes 40 years after the peak of discovery for a country to reach its peak of production...
I have strange thoughts in the shower! I guess everybody does: – What if you could drill a tunnel through the whole planet and then jumped down this tunnel; would you be able to get out the other side? – If gravity suddenly increased would airplanes fall out of the sky, or would it compress the air in such a way that airplanes could keep flying? – Would humanity survive if the sun went out? Let’s talk about the last one… and I don’t mean what would happen if the sun explodes, but what would happen if someone, maybe a powerful Alien stole or switched it off. This is what scientists call a mental experiment. You don’t need fancy equipment to do science, just your imagination! If the sun suddenly disappeared we wouldn’t notice immediately. As you may know the light from...
