BBC Focus Magazine

Alright, I've decided to go postal and post my entire literature review for my thesis about fracking here. It focuses on the situation in British Columbia, but much is widely applicable.
This is mostly so I can reference it if I ever post anything relate din the rest of the forum, but feel free to ask me about anything!
It's in two sections: On-the-ground environmental impacts, and greenhouse gas and climate change implications.

_____________________________________

The ...

For anyone wondering this is the third incarnation of the Focus Forum.
It all started way back in 2003 with the first post from Graham Southern (strange how things can turn full circle isn't it?) and we built up quite a following, so much so that it required a spill over site provided by MSN but sadly Microsoft decided to discontinue that service and then someone hacked the main Focus site and we suffered what ...

I had good fun researching and writing this piece for class (it's the background to my research) so I thought maybe I'd share it. Enjoy.

Figs here: http://s702.photobucket.com/albums/ww27/Flakkarin/Glacio-volcanic/
_______
The anthropogenic release of excess CO2 into the atmosphere is often termed the ‘human volcano’. But the volcanic release of CO2 is sufficiently slow to only cause climate warming on millennial time scales or longer. On shorter (decadal-centennial) time scales, large volcanic eruptions are responsible for ...

Making the right choice.

The mistake many people make when choosing a telescope is to assume that magnification is the most important factor, but it is actually the amount of light that is conveyed to our eye from the distant objects that is of paramount importance. The average human eye has a light receptive area, or objective, in the region of only 2.5 cm which unaided covers some 67 degrees of sky and anything that ...

Introduction - "Pulses" and "Springs"

A few years ago I wrote a short science fiction story called "Pulses". Part of the story had my leading character travel amongst a series of space stations and a term I coined for them was "Spring Stations".
To me the term "spring" comes from the image of a spinning ring. A ring is used to create artificial gravity through centrifugal forces. I imagined that the term "spinning ring" would ...

Whilst we dream of flying to distant worlds in ‘warp’ powered starships protected by exotic deflectors, force fields and all kept in check with artificial gravity and inertial damping systems we must not lose sight of the reality that in the not too distant future we will hopefully be making our first tentative steps on a journey of manned exploration and colonization of our local solar system a journey which, save for some miraculous discovery ...

By Donald Jones. (posted by M Paul Lloyd)

How do you explain the quantum world's behaviour?
Jim Al-Khalili, BBCFocus - January 2009

The problems we have arise from our misunderstanding of the nature of light.

Twentieth century physicists failed to recognise the pivotal significance of two points.

THE QUANTUM WORLD AND THE NATURE OF LIGHT

How do you explain the quantum world’s behaviour?
Jim Al-Khalili, BBC Focus-January 2009

I use the term ‘place’ very loosely. ...

A very Brief History of Time.

For anyone vaguely interested this is a brief run down of how big bang theory is strung together, it’s not meant to be a definitive thesis but more a sort compressed and abridged timeline. After all how many of you have managed to read right through Steven Hawkin’s A Brief History of Time, let alone all the other stuff????
So, if you want a simplified version of a very ...

A quick overview.
For many years now I have worked with microwave equipment for the defence industries, mostly satellite telecommunication and radar systems but the principle behind the magnetrons used in these applications is much the same as you would find in your average microwave oven. Amazingly the people that ‘we’ make hardware for really don’t know everything about how microwaves do what they do. So a bit like electricity and gravity, both of which ...

The possibility of having a single stage to orbit vehicle with fly back capability is a very compelling idea but it does seem a lot to ask of current technology, or indeed anything presently being researched, to achieve this feat economically. Given that such a vehicle would have to have an airframe to payload ratio in the region of 1-5 poses some difficult engineering challenges, and the demise of the American X-33 (prototype for the ...