1

Just Chat! / New Forum theme

« on: 16/04/2014 11:55:12 »

I hope you like it, I think it is cleaner than the old one, and fits with the rest of the site better.
If there are any problems can you put them in here
  cheers
    Dave

2

Just Chat! / Slight change to the forum

« on: 14/08/2012 14:28:30 »

If you hadn't noticed, I have slightly changed the images to the left of topic titles in the forum, they are now purple if you haven't read them, yellow if you have, and open if you have posted in them (how it used to work before christmas)

Hopefully that is helpful and not too ugly.
  Dave

3

Just Chat! / sorry for teh problems

« on: 18/12/2011 02:07:44 »

Due to sleep deprivation, and some odd commands I managed to delete yesterdays data, but have restored the previous two weeks, really sorry.
   Dave

Should be the end of the problems now... plus hopefully this server is faster

4

Just Chat! / Server down 7am?

« on: 30/09/2010 23:32:54 »

Our hosting company is taking the server down for less than 30mins tomorrow at 7am (UK time) to try and work out if some errors I have noticed are connected to do with a dodgy hard disc or RAID controller. With any luck this might be related to the random outages you may have noticed recently and they can fix it.
  Sorry for any inconvenience
     Dave

5

Just Chat! / Site maintanance wed 4th Aug

« on: 04/08/2009 15:20:11 »

Hi
  I will be doing some maintenance tomorrow morning to upgrade the software that runs our main site. This will involve locking the forum for up to an hour tomorrow morning (UK time).
  Sorry for the inconvenience.   
     Dave

6

Just Chat! / Site downtime

« on: 24/05/2009 00:31:51 »

Sorry about the site problems about half an hour ago. We have had a lot of interest in:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/to-sit-or-not-to-sit/
and it found some bugs in the server setup which shouldn't really have been there.

Hopefully it should be ok now.
  Dave

7

Just Chat! / Forum offline this morning

« on: 22/10/2008 09:40:40 »

At some point today I am swapping over the server which drives the site, there will be a period of a couple of hours where I won't be able to tell which server you are going to be able to see, to avoid loosing posts I will lock the old forum. You will be able to post as soon as you can see the new server.

So it won't affect you except you won't be able to post for a couple of hours

  thanks
     Dave

8

Just Chat! / Crash this morning

« on: 06/08/2008 12:37:25 »

Sorry about the outage this morning.

The server crashed for some reason all of its own, and then it didn't come back up cleanly so crashed all over again... It shouldn't do it again for the specific reason it went down the second time...

9

Chemistry / Why does adding ash enable sugar to burn?

« on: 30/04/2008 17:53:35 »

I have a query about a possible kitchen science. The original experiment was that you can't set light to a sugar lump with a  match (or even easily with a blowtorch) normally because it just caramelises, but if you add a little ash to the surface of the sugar, it will burn leaving a black charcoal like residue (very like the standard school, conc sulphuric demo), so it seems to be just burning the water off the sugar.

I have done some more experiments and found that it works in exactly the same way with sodium of potassium carbonate (which should be in the woodash) - I got the idea after seeing a yellow powder explosion in Pete Wother's talk and thought it might be something special about potassium carbonate, but sodium carbonate and hydrogen carbonate work too.

All the references I can find on the web just talk about something woolly involving metal ions acting as catalysts - I tried it with NaCl and unsurprisingly it has no effect...

I have thought of a mechanism, but I'm a physicist so in my experience it is probably wrong...

I thought that if you heat Na2CO3 it will break down to form Na2O and CO2 The sodium oxide will then rip water out of the sugar to form NaOH, making the sugar molecule unstable so the rest can break up and burn, releasing enough energy to dry out the NaOH and form Na2O again, in order to restart
the process.

If you have any better ideas I would love to know

10

General Science / Butter side up or down?

« on: 13/12/2007 23:11:25 »

Is it just an urban myth that a piece of toast normally lands butter side down? In this week's kitchen science we are going to find out, so we want you to do the experiment.

We want you to try pushing a buttered piece of toast, gently off a table (probably onto a piece of newspaper.
Repeat it 5 times and then just tell us how often it lands butter side down by filling in this poll.

11

Guest Book / Site Problems

« on: 25/06/2007 10:00:39 »

Sorry about the site problems last night, we got featured on digg, and the default server settings were not very well set up for it. Hopefully we will manage better next time.

12

Guest Book / Sorry for the slight interruption of service

« on: 01/05/2007 22:59:59 »

Sorry about this, we had a spike in bandwidth this evening when publishing the podcast which seems to have caused numerous problems, it should be ok now though.

13

General Science / Fire piston

« on: 01/05/2007 13:40:11 »

Here is a shameless plug for last week's kitchen science I have just finished writing up. I just think it benefits from a video.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/fire-piston-1/

14

General Science / Sory for the recent problems

« on: 14/03/2007 19:40:09 »

I apologise for the problems with the new site, the migration had a le lot more complecations than I was expecting. I think now might be time for breakfast....

I hope you think it is worth it though.
   Dave

15

Guest Book / Signature Length Limit

« on: 07/03/2007 19:51:38 »

I have installed a fix that limits the length of signatures to 80 pixels, I think this makes the threads a bit easier to read. What do people think? Is this a good idea? Should I make the limit shorter or longer?

You may want to edit your signatures to make them look better with the new format.

16

Physiology & Medicine / Do humans sweat underwater?

« on: 16/02/2007 14:37:35 »

If you are swimming with part of your body above the water, that part does sweat, but what about the part of you thats underwater? Obviously it would not serve the cooling purpose, but if you are hot or swimming hard, can the body tell that it is underwater, and therefore shouldn't waste energy sweating?

17

Guest Book / New Forum colour scheme

« on: 26/01/2007 13:47:04 »

I have been working on a complete site redesign for the naked scientists, you can have a sneak preview at:
http://typo.nakeddiscovery.com/
This is going to involve reskinning the forum to fit in with the new site. Each section of the new site has a different colour, and seeing as you guys are going to have to put up with whatever is chosen, I thought I would ask for suggestions.

Each colour scheme is based on a dark colour and 3-4 lighter versions of it. Colours in the #RRGGBB eg #fc3f2a format would be most appreciated, but I can probably find them from images or descriptions.

I hope you will like it.
   Dave

18

Guest Book / Sorry if the forum was down today

« on: 16/01/2007 23:47:31 »

Sorry, I think there were podcast issues... and I was out recording so it has taken me until an hour or so ago to fix it.
I will endevor to stop it happening again in the near future.

19

Guest Book / Biography feature

« on: 03/01/2007 12:47:25 »

This disappeared in the change of software a couple of months back. It has now returned. Your old bio should be on your profile now. If you wish to, you can change it there too.

20

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Photons attracting planets

« on: 17/12/2006 12:12:41 »

I got asked this quesiton on e-mail:

Have you tested that photons attract a planet? If not, why do you think they do?
 I hope you can answer my questions,

I personally haven't, I was never that kind of physicist, however astronomers have noticed gravitaional lensing, this is where light is deflected by a massive body, like a planet or a star producing a distorted view behind.

I am fairly sure that the gravitational force from a bunch of photons has not been measured but

A photon has momentum so it it is changing in direction it must have experienced a force, and as far as we know forces are allways equal and opposite, as otherwise all sorts of strange things could happen. like you could build a rocket that needed no reaction mass and thus created energy.

eg If you had two mirrors with light bouncing between them attached onto one side of a mass, the photons are definitely attracted to the mass so they will hit the outer mirror less hard than the inner one creating a net force, if the mass is not attracted to the photons the whole object will experience a net force and accelerate.
[diagram=46_0]
This seems unlikely and I am sure it has consequences that could be measured. So the odds are photons attract masses the same amount as they are attracted to the masses.