In the summer last year I remember hearing about Senedd Economy Minister Vaughan Gething blowing the horn about an advanced United States-based engineering company expanding its presence with a new centre of excellence at Cardiff Airport, St Athan, in the Vale of Glamorgan. It immediately set off alarm bells but, as events in Gaza took…
Just four months ago, towards the end of September 2022, a NASA DART successfully changed the orbit of Dimorphos, the smaller member of the binary asteroid system Didymos. Named after the Greek for “twin”, Didymos is about a half-mile across and has a smaller companion orbiting it… Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”), approximately 20 metres…
Sat down at an Ohio Cracker Barrel restaurant with his brother and two potential investors in his revolutionary water-powered engine, Stanley Meyer took a slug of cranberry juice and immediately rose to his feet, his hands clutching his neck. The 57-year-old inventor rushed out into the parking lot vomiting violently, collapsed to the floor and…
In the middle of last month the South Pacific island of Tonga was reportedly hit by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake following the eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on 15 January. The eruption, and subsequent earthquake, caused tsunamis in Tonga, Fiji, American Samoa, Vanuatu and along the Pacific rim, including New Zealand, Japan,…
In December 2020 United States president-elect Joe Biden announced that Susan Rice was being appointed to a top policy position in his new administration. She was coming in as director of his Domestic Policy Council, which would give her broad influence over the incoming administration’s approach to immigration, health care and racial inequality. A woman…
A week ago today it was the 59th anniversary of John Glenn becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times during a five-hour mission, almost a year after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space and the first to orbit the earth. Glenn, a lieutenant colonel in…
With so many distractions in the modern world to occupy our time it’s easy for events to pass us by, but when pubs are shut, offices closed and there’s no football on the box it presents an opportunity to catch up with all the things we’ve been meaning to do but never found the time…
By the time I finished secondary school in the UK, seaborgium had become the latest element to be added to the periodic table. A synthetic element with the symbol Sg and atomic number 106, seaborgium was first produced in 1974 when a few of its atoms were created in laboratories in the Soviet Union and…
Mark the dates in your diaries, the Wales National Airshow returns to Swansea Bay from 6-7 July this year… with breathtaking aerobatic displays, state-of-the-art military aircraft and vintage planes soaring above the seafront. In 2018 the airshow had another brilliant year with hundreds of thousands of people descending on the city to enjoy the country’s…
Housing two rockets in a 42-metre tower, the National Space Centre in Leicester is also home to the UK’s largest domed planetarium and features six galleries crammed with space memorabilia from suits and rockets to satellites and meteorites. A museum and educational resource covering the fields of space science and astronomy, the centre is the…
