Sam Talks About...

The inspiration for this article came from a meme I saw online saying that Flat Earthers are worried that social distancing measures will push people over the edge!  Obviously they are referring to the huge psychological and economic hardship that billions of us are facing after enduring weeks of social distancing (I am currently on week 6 of working from home). But it got me thinking, how much room do we currently have to keep up social distancing guidelines, and what countries have the most room for social distancing?  First, t o keep at least 2 metres away from the next nearest person, each person would need 4 m 2 . What would the world look like if you were to keep everyone exactly 2 metres apart? Based on a rough calculation, that would mean you could get up to a population density of 250,000 people per km 2 . The most densely populated city in the world is Manila, at  46,178 people per km 2 . So there's no need for the Flat Earthers to worry.  In fact...

This is a long standing request that I have been waiting to do, although I wasn't quite sure I had that much to say about it at first. But before we get to why the sea is salty now and how salt is left behind when water evaporates, lets talk about how all that salt got into the sea in the first place. Better yet, how did we even get seas for there to be so much salt in anyway? Cast your mind back say 3.5 billion years, give or take, when the world was just forming into a huge molten rock. In those days,  Earth's early atmosphere contained a lot of hydrogen and probably quite a lot of water vapour too, as oxygen and hydrogen bond readily to form water. But, as the earth was a giant volcanic molten mess at the time, the surface and atmosphere were far too hot for liquid water. As you may know, boiling points are subject to conditions such as pressure (that's why rapid boiling tubes use a high pressure, like in a coffee machine) but also the composition of the atmosphere, wh...

There's something about solar energy that I just find fascinating. Maybe it's the because it could be our saviour and the key to practically endless free energy, or it could be that it's the mission to mimic one of life's most complex and fundamental biological processes (photosynthesis). Whatever it is, it's got me hooked!  That said, I am no physicist and I do not pretend to be one! What I am, though, is someone who is very interested in watching the technical advances in solar technology and who takes pleasure in telling the story of solar energy.  This article sparked from a conversation with one of my housemates about solar energy. We talked about  how solar energy could power california 5 times over without using up any additional space  and then went onto  the possibility of "paint-on solar power" . Then we got to talking about how cool it would be if we could have transparent solar cells, so you could replace your windows with "solar w...

Over the last 20 years or so, renewable technology has come on leaps and bounds. However it is still not quite competitive enough to become more economically viable than fossil fuels. The US Department of Energy has estimated that solar panels will need to cost about 50 cents per watt to be able to compete with fossil fuels, it currently averages at about 75 cents per watt. Although other countries, such as Spain have actually already reached the point where solar is cheaper than fossil fuels (although the plummeting oil price may have reversed this situation). For more background I wrote this article explaining a little more about what the future holds for green energy in general. Records for solar panel efficiency are broken on a regular basis by various research institutes and have increased from about 20% in 1989 to over 40% and climbing. The solar panels on NASA satellites for example work at about 45%, however these are terribly expensive and most household solar panels get betw...

Now there is little doubt in the world of rational people that climate change is real, and it's already happening. Yet many people are still opposed to wind farms or solar farms or really any other green source of energy.  Now there used to be a very valid reason why many of these technologies haven't been adopted, and that was price. As these technologies were very new a decade ago, they were incredibly expensive and not very efficient. However, things have come along dramatically since then, and as these technologies begin to mature it makes more and more economic sense to start using them more and more.  This is only really here because it looked cool :) With numbers like 65% growth in solar power over 5 years, US solar costs at 97% less than in 1975 and the recent  news  that solar power is now the same price as conventional energy in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Australia and Spain, clearly solar is the current golden boy of the green revolution. The...