Giant freak waves - seriously, that is what oceanographers and physicists call them - are called that because they can appear on the open sea out of nowhere. Researchers from the Ruhr-…

Cooks want to tell you grilling is an art or a craft.   We know better.  Grilling, like anything worth doing, is a science.   Anything that has been around for a million years is a…

If you hadn't noticed before today, the impact of the Gulf Oil spill may have been understated.  Sure, sure, I know what you are thinking; in the Internet-plus-24-hour-news-Age everything is…

I went to the Scottish Games in Woodland, California last weekend, two young boys in tow.  They weren't remotely interested in Scottish women doing traditional dances and they were vaguely…

Inkjet Printing Technique Inkjet printing is a liquid deposition technique, by which the droplets of the ink were ejected with the same volume and printed on the substrate. It is a low cost, material…

Why Anchors Don't Work From earliest times to today, from boat safety pamphlet to engineering treatise on marine architecture: all are agreed that the anchor does the work of keeping a boat or ship…

Spaceship Earth: Entropy Factor #1 We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace…

Engineers from the University of Florida and Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea have developed what they call a 'nearly perfect hydrophobic interface' by reproducing, on small bits of flat…

Getting More Bang Per Buck In The Steam Age Once the physics of steam engines began to be understood, engineers were able to focus their minds on how to get more power for the same fuel, or the same…

Pushing The Moon Away With Victorian Machinery This is a further article in my occasional series about coal, engines and energy, heat and thermodynamics.  In this article I am going to show you…