Soft Robots

Recently, I had the luck to see the new ‘Robots’ exhibition at the Science Museum in London, described as ‘The 500-year quest to make machines human’. I found it fascinating, and often moving. Robots derive from our desire to fulfil and satisfy human needs, whether practical or emotional, and are, perhaps, better contextualised within the […]

A Step Too Bold?

Is there life on Mars? Or Rosetta, Europa, or even Pluto?  A dilettante hand-waving exercise follows. Once upon a time, most of the material that made all of our solar system was gathered from a cloud of gas and dust by gravitational effects, to form our sun and its extensive system of planets, asteroids, comets, fragments […]

What is Out There and the Cosmic Teapot

I haven’t quite  given up on my childhood dream of meeting an alien. The nice sort, a Vulcan like Mr Spock, from Star Trek  – not the nasty kind that Scully and Mulder always encountered in the X-Files, or those featured in lurid accounts of UFO abduction stories that I read as a wide-eyed adolescent. I […]

Curiosity and Oxygen Pills, Microbes and Men

Since I was a little girl I have been interested in space travel. I loved Fireball XL5, but struggled to understand how the cast (giving televisual ‘life’ to puppets) could breathe in space without spacesuits. I now understand that they took ‘oxygen pills’. (Decompression and radiation aside, even for puppets.) I have been reading the NASA posts about […]