It has been Doors Open weekend in Edinburgh and I took full advantage of this in the wonderful sun yesterday and found some real treats!
http://www.cockburnassociation.org.uk/default.asp?page=119
I started at the Kings Buildings, which house Edinburgh University’s faculty of science and engineering. First up was the Natural History Museum, within the old Ashworth building, then the Cockburn Museum of Geoscience, in the Grant Institute.
The Natural History museum contains somewhat more specimens in jars than I can stand, so I mostly avoided those and looked into microscopes set up with various marine exhibits. This was fascinating – a word I’ll make no apology for overusing in this account.
There was worrying information in the apiary exhibit about the threat to bees and, more optimistically, the research the university are conducting into preserving bee stocks.
Most interesting was the talk from an enthusiastic youngster on his work linking his engineering expertise with the biomedical research company set up to produce innovative procedures to identify cancer cells which don’t respond to drugs and use new methods to tackle this. He also gave a brilliant explanation of the uses of nanotechnology in medicine.
I moved on to the Grant Institute and while looking at the examples of rocks, a faculty member (Professor … oops, didn’t get her name) offered to show me the Ion Microscope in the bowels of the building. She left me in the hands of another enthusiast, this time a very experienced tech who knows everything there is to know about ion microscopes.
This was utterly fascinating! He had some terrific stories about these complicated machines, of which there are only 2 in the UK, both in this department.
He showed me what he is working on right now, which is some minute Russian diamonds, which reached him by the curious delivery method of being taped into the spine of a Russian book. He is uncertain of their provenance but hopes the work done to analyse their properties in the ion microscope will be paid for!
I became quite inspired and could easily have been persuaded to take up earth sciences and train for this kind of work, but I think it takes longer than I may have left to learn all this!
I’d left a couple of hours to see round the Royal Observatory – it wasn’t nearly enough.
http://www.roe.ac.uk/roe/support/pr/opendays2009/index.html
What a brilliant site this is, and to top it all they have really great coffee in their cafe!
A young astronomer gave a talk (oops, didn’t get her name either) on her work at Paranal in Chile on the VLT (Very Large Telescope).
http://www.eso.org/public/astronomy/teles-instr/paranal.html
I like astronomers; they must have a passion for plain speaking, the way they name their telescopes VLT and E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope). Um, I might be tempted to give a slightly more explicit title to a telescope that is 42 metres in diameter.
After this short tantalising talk, I wandered round some more and got my photo taken with an infrared camera. It was a warm day but my nose was still cold and showed up green on the image. It showed even greener when I rubbed it with an ice cube, while my hands got very red holding a cup of hot water.
Time then to climb up the stairs to the observatory. Half way up there is a door onto the viewing area where there was a telescope trained on the Nelson Monument at the top of Calton Hill. I managed to take a photograph of this by placing the lens up against the eyepiece. It is upside down for obvious optical reasons and I’ve left it so at the top of this post. As the Nelson Monument was also taking part in Doors Open Weekend there are people up there too.
In the education room off the viewing area, I waded past hordes of kids playing with various astrological things appropriate to their age-group. I decided I was too old for the ‘making a comet talk’, but muscled my way into the group of adults surrounding the ‘handle a meteorite’ display.
Finally, I made my way up to the old telescope and yet more informative exhibits, before coming back down the stairs and noticing a fascinating info board detailing the ‘bomb’ set off in the Observatory grounds in 1913 by Suffragettes campaigning for votes for women. Yikes, these women obviously got pushed so far that they really took things into their own hands! However, they made sure no one was hurt and there was not extensive damage.
http://www.womenslib.org/index_files/Page324.htm
The incident made the New York Times which quoted the UK Home Secretary who described it as a “… petty annoyance to frighten the government into giving the franchise to women …”
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F04E7D81F3AE633A25751C2A9639C946296D6CF
Thanks to the bravery and persistence of our foremothers, less than one hundred years later I can visit the Royal Observatory and listen to number of women scientists who have had the opportunity to travel the world and work as equals alongside male scientists and no one thinks anything of it.
What a way to end my afternoon!
http://www.cockburnassociation.org.uk/default.asp?page=119
I started at the Kings Buildings, which house Edinburgh University’s faculty of science and engineering. First up was the Natural History Museum, within the old Ashworth building, then the Cockburn Museum of Geoscience, in the Grant Institute.
The Natural History museum contains somewhat more specimens in jars than I can stand, so I mostly avoided those and looked into microscopes set up with various marine exhibits. This was fascinating – a word I’ll make no apology for overusing in this account.
There was worrying information in the apiary exhibit about the threat to bees and, more optimistically, the research the university are conducting into preserving bee stocks.
Most interesting was the talk from an enthusiastic youngster on his work linking his engineering expertise with the biomedical research company set up to produce innovative procedures to identify cancer cells which don’t respond to drugs and use new methods to tackle this. He also gave a brilliant explanation of the uses of nanotechnology in medicine.
I moved on to the Grant Institute and while looking at the examples of rocks, a faculty member (Professor … oops, didn’t get her name) offered to show me the Ion Microscope in the bowels of the building. She left me in the hands of another enthusiast, this time a very experienced tech who knows everything there is to know about ion microscopes.
This was utterly fascinating! He had some terrific stories about these complicated machines, of which there are only 2 in the UK, both in this department.
He showed me what he is working on right now, which is some minute Russian diamonds, which reached him by the curious delivery method of being taped into the spine of a Russian book. He is uncertain of their provenance but hopes the work done to analyse their properties in the ion microscope will be paid for!
I became quite inspired and could easily have been persuaded to take up earth sciences and train for this kind of work, but I think it takes longer than I may have left to learn all this!
I’d left a couple of hours to see round the Royal Observatory – it wasn’t nearly enough.
http://www.roe.ac.uk/roe/support/pr/opendays2009/index.html
What a brilliant site this is, and to top it all they have really great coffee in their cafe!
A young astronomer gave a talk (oops, didn’t get her name either) on her work at Paranal in Chile on the VLT (Very Large Telescope).
http://www.eso.org/public/astronomy/teles-instr/paranal.html
I like astronomers; they must have a passion for plain speaking, the way they name their telescopes VLT and E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope). Um, I might be tempted to give a slightly more explicit title to a telescope that is 42 metres in diameter.
After this short tantalising talk, I wandered round some more and got my photo taken with an infrared camera. It was a warm day but my nose was still cold and showed up green on the image. It showed even greener when I rubbed it with an ice cube, while my hands got very red holding a cup of hot water.
Time then to climb up the stairs to the observatory. Half way up there is a door onto the viewing area where there was a telescope trained on the Nelson Monument at the top of Calton Hill. I managed to take a photograph of this by placing the lens up against the eyepiece. It is upside down for obvious optical reasons and I’ve left it so at the top of this post. As the Nelson Monument was also taking part in Doors Open Weekend there are people up there too.
In the education room off the viewing area, I waded past hordes of kids playing with various astrological things appropriate to their age-group. I decided I was too old for the ‘making a comet talk’, but muscled my way into the group of adults surrounding the ‘handle a meteorite’ display.
Finally, I made my way up to the old telescope and yet more informative exhibits, before coming back down the stairs and noticing a fascinating info board detailing the ‘bomb’ set off in the Observatory grounds in 1913 by Suffragettes campaigning for votes for women. Yikes, these women obviously got pushed so far that they really took things into their own hands! However, they made sure no one was hurt and there was not extensive damage.
http://www.womenslib.org/index_files/Page324.htm
The incident made the New York Times which quoted the UK Home Secretary who described it as a “… petty annoyance to frighten the government into giving the franchise to women …”
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F04E7D81F3AE633A25751C2A9639C946296D6CF
Thanks to the bravery and persistence of our foremothers, less than one hundred years later I can visit the Royal Observatory and listen to number of women scientists who have had the opportunity to travel the world and work as equals alongside male scientists and no one thinks anything of it.
What a way to end my afternoon!
Tedious disclaimer
Having posted all of the above, I reflected that I probably, for the sake of utter clarity in case anyone could conceivably think I was in favour of gunpowder, state that I am not. Duh!
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