Representatives from small islands across Europe will gather in Orkney to share ideas about areas of common interest. The European Small Islands Federation (ESIN) has chosen Orkney as the venue for its annual meeting, which will bring together delegates from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Their visit will include talks, meetings and a study tour [...]
August 30, 2017
Howie Firth
Summer Issue 2017
A new hydrogen project is being launched in Orkney to utilise peak energy outputs from renewables through production of hydrogen fuel for transport. In a way, this will be reviving an old wartime industry, as Michael McLaughlin explains. In 1939 a decision was taken by the War Office to form a balloon barrage in Orkney [...]
August 12, 2017
Michael McLaughlin
Summer Issue 2017
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. [...]
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 [...]
December 12, 2016
Patricia Long
Going Further, Summer Issue 2017
Till well into the 1960s the yole played a major part in the lives and livelihood of most Orcadians. No pictures or examples go back beyond the late nineteenth century but we know from references in old papers that it had its beginnings long before that. We know that 200 years ago the young John [...]