What do swallows stuffed with eggs, arsenic and lemon have to do with herbal remedies and beauty products? Perhaps not a lot these days, but you might be surprised at the concoctions used and the reasons behind using them several hundred years ago. According to herbalist and ethnobotanical researcher Anna Canning, our knowledge of our [...]
Tables, chairs, sideboards, chests of drawers – all of them off to the dump and buried in landfill when we redecorate the house. Not so, says the owner of one creative Moray business: old furniture can have a new life. Deb Wright of FunkyFurbish in Forres sands it down, paints it, reshapes it – into [...]
When Eric Walker asked his wife for a telescope for his birthday back in 2004 he got just a little more than he bargained for. Instead of the small portable item he had envisioned – something he could stick in his backpack when he went hill-walking – he was presented with a large astronomical telescope. [...]
Night skies above us and the latest developments in space science are the subject of forthcoming schools and community presentations in Orkney. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh are joining together with staff from the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh’s visitor centre to visit several schools and give a public presentation in Kirkwall on the evening [...]
Generating electricity from kites is a developing technology. Hands up if you visited the original 3MW wind turbine on Burger Hill, Orkney in the 1990s. In its day it was the biggest wind generator in the world. Today that lumbering, two-bladed monster on its tapered concrete tower has gone the way of Homo neanderthalensis, superseded [...]
A northern aircraft and astronomy centre is opening again for Easter. One of the attractions of Morayvia is that you can be shown round by some of the crew who flew the actual aircraft. Mary Leonard enjoyed a preview. While it may at first sound like a small European principality nestled somewhere near Monaco, Morayvia [...]
Nosing (or smelling) whisky is a very important part of the distilling industry. Nosing takes place when the new make spirit is produced, as the whisky matures and as the final product is prepared. When we are appreciating Scotch whisky we use lots of our senses, with smell being one of the most important; I [...]
Iwas standing at the summit of Cairngorm thinking about what I would do when I retired from science teaching. Behind me were a stone igloo and a steel tower. Suddenly there was a grinding noise and an array of meteorological instruments rose slowly from the Heriot-Watt igloo. There is another array of instruments on the [...]
The Museum of Communication of Burntisland in Fife collaborates with Orkney Wireless Museum in putting on presentations in the annual Orkney International Science Festival, and the theme for the two museums this year will be early radio, with a lecture/demonstration on ‘Maxwell’s Waves’. Prof. Tom Stevenson from Orkney, who has spoken in every Orkney Science [...]
Simple mathematical rules can be used to create the most unexpected shapes and patterns, and nowhere is this more evident than in the world of plants and shells. In their 2013 project Botanica Mathematica, artist Madeleine Shepherd and mathematician Julia Collins have collaborated to explore how different mathematical knitting rules can mimic the growth of [...]
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