On World Whisky Day, 16 May, we send greetings to a friend of many years, Dr Tim Dolan in Aberlour, Moray, whose impact on the distilling industry has been immense. He is one of the few people to have been awarded the Horace Brown Medal by the Institute of Brewing and Distilling (IBD), the highest [...]
Bill Graham, a chartered engineer and inventor with various patents to his name, has come up with an idea to assist fire safety in high-rise blocks like Grenfell Tower. He explains his thinking. The natural reaction in the case of an impassible fire below is to head upwards but in the Grenfell case there was [...]
Dreaming of Mars It’s just on fifty years since the first footstep on the Moon. At the time it seemed that the Moon landing would be the first of many journeys that would take us across the Solar System. But there were just six more crewed landings on the Moon, the last of them in [...]
Whenever the poet George Mackay Brown reorganised his library, getting rid of some of the overspill, some books from younger years would always remain. There was the first Penguin book from 1935, a biography of Shelley by André Maurois; and Penguin number 3, Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater. And there was also a book on [...]
Let’s go to the stars! Human interstellar flight is a problem with significant challenges. The possible approaches to an interstellar journey range from “slow” travel, at 1% of the speed of light or less, where journeys will require hundreds or thousands of years, or “fast” travel, at 10% of lightspeed or higher speed, where journey [...]
Among her many community activities in North Ronaldsay, Kathleen Scott coordinated events each year for Orkney International Science Festival and the British Science Association – talks, workshops, night sky photography competitions, and an astronomy weekend. She led the ongoing work in the island to attain international dark skies status and with all her commitment and [...]
Three men are recognised as the pioneers of the LIGO system for detecting gravitational waves, one of the greatest physics discoveries of all time. And it turns out that one of them has Orkney ancestry – as Patricia Long reports. 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes spiralled into each other at almost two-thirds of [...]
When the “yellow lights” first arrived in Kirkwall more than 40 years ago they began in Palace Road, King Street and School Place, and gradually spread all over town. Children were fascinated not only with how much light they provided, but also how they changed the colour of clothing and skin. They were a novelty. [...]
How did a controversial subject like parapsychology come to find a home in Edinburgh University? The story begins rather darkly, with the death of the terminally ill writer Arthur Koestler and his healthy wife Cynthia in a suicide pact in 1983. Koestler had a lifelong interest in dualism and the paranormal, and had written books [...]
The first Orkney resident to cross the Pentland Firth by air was The Orcadian’s young reporter, 18-year-old Agnes Shearer, who would later become the writer Ann Scott-Moncrieff – and in a short life produce acclaimed work that included stories of adventure for children and those of every age with a feeling of the open road [...]
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