Check out
Dedicated hosting in Europe
Are you looking for quality dedicated hosting in Europe? Our company has two datacenters in Prague and Brno. Check out our dedicated hosting service ...
Search
Calendar
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | ||||
Navigation
12,746 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science
- title
- Guardian Unlimited Science
- tags
- description
- Articles published by Guardian Unlimited Science
- last updated
- February 10, 2012 (21:21)
- homepage
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science?gusrc=rss&feed=science
- feed url
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/rss
- date added
- September 13, 2007 (14:53)
- meta
- alexa, technorati, rojo
-
WEDNESDAY 10. AUGUST, 2011
-
17:30
Today's mystery bird for you to identify #birds #MysteryBirds
-
16:45
-
16:27
-
13:42
-
13:02
-
12:53
Scientists at the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp have carried out an intelligence test which pitted bonobos against chimpanzees
-
12:50
Jeremy Hunter has spent 35 years documenting ancient rituals and festivals in 60 countries. Here is a small selection of photographs that will appear as part of Let's Celebrate 365, a major retrospective of his work, taking place on BBC Big Screens next week across the UK
-
10:00
-
09:00
Trying to split an atom in your kitchen is rather extreme, but great things may come from strange and private passions
"When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion," wrote Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, "– or in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows headstrong – farewell cool reason and fair discretion!"
These cautionary words on the dangers of hobbies were reaffirmed last week, when a Swedish man was arrested for indulging in his rather singular pastime – he was trying to start a nuclear reaction in his kitchen. Richard Handl said he just wanted "to see if it was possible to split atoms at home".
To that end he had gathered up small stores of radioactive material (some of it recovered from old clock hands and smoke detectors); his regularly updated blog contains a photograph of the "meltdown" he created on his hob when, as he puts it,
"I tried to cook Americium, Radium and Beryllium in 96% sulphuric-acid, to easier get them blended. But the whole thing exploded up in the air."
In a rare moment of cool reason and fair discretion, Handl rang up the Swedish Radiation Authority to check if his project was illegal. Shortly afterwards, the police turned up.Traditionally, hobbies are meant to keep you out of trouble, to make harmless work for idle hands, but sometimes odd pastimes have undesirable outcomes. That's what happened 10 years ago, when a group of British plane spotters were arrested at a Greek air base and charged with espionage. Their case wasn't helped by the fact that the Greek authorities found it hard to believe that plane spotting was an actual hobby.
Then again, great things may come from strange and private passions. Many 19th-century scientists and inventors were essentially hobbyists – "scientist" wasn't really a job in those days. How much of Charles Darwin's work – a lifetime of collecting, cataloguing and obsessing – would be dismissed as a pointless hobby if it were applied to some less well-directed end? Is it the object of one's obsession that makes a hobby weird, or the relentless way one pursues it? If you're messing about with fissile material in your kitchen, then the answer is clearly both, but the line is not always easy to draw. Perhaps the best way to judge if your hobby is weird is to ask yourself whether you'd feel comfortable listing it in the "other interests" section of your CV.
There is, of course, something perversely noble in a truly original hobby, in a single-minded, out-of-hours devotion to something that no one else is remotely interested in. Nothing is more irritating that when an unattractive and long-nursed hobby – playing the ukulele, say, or arson – suddenly becomes fashionable. The great trick in life, of course, is to make your hobby your job, but even in those rare cases another hobby will often rise up to claim your free time. I speak as someone who is lucky enough to write for a living, and I'm sitting here in front of my computer with a banjo on my knee.
• This article was commissioned after a suggestion by afancdogge. If you have a subject you would like to see covered by Comment is free, please visit our You tell us page.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
08:30
-
TUESDAY 9. AUGUST, 2011
-
18:30
-
17:30
-
17:00
-
14:17
As people suggest closing down social media sites to stop rioters, here's what I saw on Twitter during the riots.
(This is a bit of an experiment in using Storify at The Guardian, don't forget to click 'Read More' at the bottom to expand the whole thing.)
- - - - - - -
Twitter: @mjrobbins
Facebook: facebook.com/layscience
Google+: mjrobbinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
13:34
-
10:00
-
09:00
-
MONDAY 8. AUGUST, 2011
-
22:00
-
21:00
Riots and the threat of financial meltdown haven't been enough to drag David Cameron and George Osborne back home. Does history suggest they've made a mistake?
Politicians on holiday just can't win. They're damned if they do take their full entitlement, like Tony Blair, and damned if they don't, like workaholics Gordon Brown and Margaret Thatcher. Damned if they wear black town shoes with no socks (smoothie David Cameron in Tuscany last week) or slope around Los Angeles like a scruffier sort of backpacker (George Osborne).
And when a crisis hits the fan in August they're damned if they complacently sink into their deck chairs ("crisis, what crisis?") and damned if they scuttle back to the capital and are promptly accused of spooking feather-brained financial markets. Denis Healey did it when he dashed back from Heathrow (heading for the IMF, not a holiday) in 1976.
This year has seen the whole gamut. Messrs Cameron and Osborne have stayed on holiday, arguing no doubt that a dash for home would heighten the sense of panic among City debt traders whose bosses are themselves on their yachts. (Osborne had the misfortune to be pictured riding a rollercoaster.) They can at least point out that clever William Hague, who knows more about markets than, say, John Prescott, is minding the shop (albeit in a low-key way), and that sterling isn't in the frontline, not yet. It was different in August 1931 when the sterling crisis forced the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, back (twice) from his usual six-week walking holiday in the French Savoy to shore up Ramsay MacDonald's government.
But as the eurozone gets over-excited by fast-diverging bond yields, Germany's Angela Merkel has refused to abandon her own walking holiday across the Alps. Her wise finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, remains at his beach house on the North Sea. "Let silly markets sort themselves out," murmur officials in Berlin, who privately regard Nicolas Sarkozy's telephone conference calls (he's on the French Riviera) as pointless grandstanding.
The real test is whether coming back will help the situation or merely provide some pictures for rolling TV news. Theresa May decided she should come home and show leadership over London's shopping riots. She is probably right – although Boris Johnson's belated decision to return may actually strengthen the prime minister in his resolve to stay put, rather than imitate his publicity-crazed rival.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
21:00
Why are Richard Branson and James Cameron, among others, so obsessed with the Mariana trench?
For the average billionaire, the trouble with the world these days is that it's just too small. After all, what's the point of having all that money if you have to share your personal space with the millionaires and chancers who have gatecrashed their way to both poles? Even outer space will soon be too crowded. Which is presumably why, before he has even realised his much-hyped Virgin Galactic dream of making a sub-orbital flight, Richard Branson now proposes to explore the depths of the Pacific in Virgin Oceanic.
Branson is not the only one with his eyes on the Challenger Deep, a rocky chasm in the Mariana trench, which marks the world's deepest money-pit. Film director James Cameron and Google executive chairman Eric A Schmidt are also each spending about £15m building their own submarines capable of withstanding many tonnes of pressure to reach the bottom of the ocean bed.
The Challenger Deep isn't totally unknown territory. Over the past few decades scientists have sent down unmanned submersibles to photograph the terrain. And very interesting it is too – new types of sea cucumber and other deepwater species have been discovered – though not quite interesting enough for any country to think it worthwhile mounting a manned expedition.
So what's in it for the adventurous billionaires? Apart from exclusivity. For Cameron and Schmidt, the answer appears to be curiosity; for Branson, it's money. Virgin Galactic is already advertising £250,000 two-hour trips to the sea bed. For that kind of money, two of you could book on Virgin Galactic. And the views may well be a lot better. The last time a manned submarine reached the bottom of Challenger Deep, in 1960, it stirred up so much mud the two occupants couldn't see a thing.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
-
20:59
-
20:23
-
19:19
-
18:30
-
17:30
Naposledy aktualizované zdroje
-
PhysOrg (dnes, 21:24)
-
-
Yahoo! (dnes, 21:15)
-
NYT > Science (dnes, 19:55)
-
ScienceNOW (dnes, 19:55)
-
ScienceDaily (dnes, 19:34)
-
CBC - Technology & Science News (dnes, 18:39)
-
Discovery (dnes, 18:32)
-
Sci-Tech Today (dnes, 17:29)
-
BBC Science/Nature (dnes, 17:15)
-
National Geographic News (dnes, 17:01)
-
TIME (dnes, 11:10)
-
EurekAlert (dnes, 06:00)
-
NASA (2. 2, 21:27)
-
Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories (16. 1, 22:07)
