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Tag archives: architecture
Taking a peek inside the UK’s National Graphene Institute
Look, no dust – National Graphene Institute architect Tony Ling showing off the PVC blackboards (Courtesy: Physics World/James Dacey)
By Matin Durrani in Manchester
Do an Internet image search of the word “physicist” and you’ll come across countless pictures of physicists posing in front of blackboards covered with bewildering looking equations. That’s because blackboards are traditionally a common sight in physics labs and research centres – in fact, they’re everywhere at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where my Physics World colleagues Hamish Johnston and Louise Mayor are right now.
But over at the UK’s new £61m National Graphene Insitute (NGI), which I toured earlier today, blackboards are very much verboten. It’s the chalk dust you see, which is a no-no for health-and-safety bosses at the University of Manchester, where the NGI is located. Incidentally, Manchester is also currently home to Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for isolating graphene for the first time.
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‘Death ray’ reflections from skyscrapers modelled by scientists
by Michael Bishop, who is the IOP’s press officer
(Courtesy: EJP)
The designer of London’s Walkie Talkie skyscraper has come under scrutiny this week as reports of flaming bicycle seats and melting cars have resulted in a temporary scaffold being erected at street level to block the intense reflection of the Sun’s rays as they beat off the curved building.
One thing you can’t say is that nobody saw this coming.
In a study published last summer in the European Journal of Physics (EJP), two researchers from Germany performed a number of experiments that gave an in-depth explanation of why some skyscrapers have these undesired effects.
In addition to a number of computer simulations that investigated the reflecting effects of a building’s height, width and curvature, as well as the angle and position of the Sun, the researchers also performed experiments on a scale model (right) of the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas.
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