To mark the 75th birthday of the Scottish composer Eddie McGuire, all five of his astronomy-inspired works will be performed in this year’s Orkney International Science Festival. They will be brought together on film, with...
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Video postcard from Orkney : Summer 2023
The poet’s song and the fish in the sea
It was the perfect name for a poet, and it was his own. The surname Singer came from his father, a...
Sinking carbon in the spring
The bluetits are busy popping in and out of the nest box. They took residence on 15th March. Then...
Sea and Land
The Horizontal Oak
The new book by naturalist/author Polly Pullar, The Horizontal Oak, is a personal one, looking at...
The wonder that is Slime Mould
We watched a television programme about Slime Mould titled The Blob: A Genius...
Scotland’s lost branch lines
Climate change is adding to road congestion and vehicle pollution in bringing to the fore the case...
A lesson from the dandelions
Nature could well be our anchor over the next few months. Such a special time of year… it...
The darkness of the winter solstice
Winter stayed well into April, and as I dug holes for apple trees T. S. Eliot swirled in my head:...
Haar
Low cloud is quite frequent in Orkney, especially in the winter. Coming from the West, it rolls in...
Deploy the drones
We are now all familiar with how the ROV, the remotely operated vehicle as it is called, is...
The Ram on the Rock
Like a Nordic port of old, the Faroese capital of Torshavn smells evocatively of salt and tar. As...
Riches from the sea
A mile or so up the coast from the farm, a whale corpse is decomposing in a ‘geo’ (the Orcadian...
How governments can achieve complex goals
Professor Iain Alasdair MacLeod was an outstanding clear thinker, designer, researcher and teacher...
Ada Lovelace, Enchantress of Numbers
The numbers came from her mother. From her father, Lord Byron – poetry and passion. The future Ada...
The disputed discovery of insulin
2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for the...
A solar mirror of whitening light
Imagine a beam of energy so powerful that it can melt iron or steel – or even titanium. Picture how...
Changing our thinking to bring about meaningful environmental...
Broad-leaved trees can grow almost anywhere sheep and deer are largely excluded. You can see...
Transition to the future
Globally we face massive problems. There is often general agreement about what we want for the long...