How many ghosts surrounded us, anchored inside the remains of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches? — Tours of the D-day beaches are popular, but ours was a bit different. It was the summer of 2011, 77 years after D-Day. We sailed across on our 27' boat from the Solent in England. We didn’t quite follow in the wakes of all those ships and brave soldiers, sailors…

Reinvented and widened, arguably the US first experienced it in Vietnam. Is it just a fancy name for an old strategy? — The Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) is a military strategy that was first used during the Russian annexation of Ukraine in 2014. It is a form of asymmetric warfare that relies on small, highly mobile units using guerrilla tactics to fight a larger, conventionally armed force. …

This war has not only been about drones, cellphones and open source intelligence, it has been about satellites — In February 2022, wired.com reported that there were 50 satellites in use over Ukraine. That picture has changed somewhat since then and we’re over six months into the conflict. In this story I’ve taken a look at the subject of satellite usage in a bit more depth, covering government/military and…

I weighed up this fish scales story about carbon nano-onions and it passed the taste test — I thought that only two things smelled of fish and one of them was fish, but I could be wrong. When I first read about this new Japanese research it seemed that I might have to add carbon nano-onions to the list. It’s quite an apposite story today because I…

Lithium seems to be cropping up in news stories on a regular basis, so I thought I would take a closer look at the metal and some of its amazingly varied uses — I hated chemistry Chemistry was never my thing in school. I loathed it. It seemed to be an ‘imprecise’ science, mixing up liquids in glass jars. Physics turned me on. I loved the electricity experiments, pendulums and the physics of the world around me. How things worked, why things worked.

The Cossack people were reveling in new found freedom and I was welcomed with open arms… — It was 1994 and I was working in Russia. Boris Yeltsin was still running the country. At that time Putin was the First Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, working his way up the political ladder after retiring from the KGB as a lieutenant colonel. Of course I’d never heard of…

This printed material responds to stimuli — The fourth dimension in this new set of materials is, yes, time, but in the form of reversible changes such as colour or mechanical deformation. When first read about it I thought of hysteresis: Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a…

I didn’t know there was such a thing and now I’m going underground and losing it… — When I first picked up on this story about a quantum theory of consciousness and it being put in doubt by an underground experiment, the first thing that came into my strange mind was ‘Going Underground’. If you are of a certain age then you might remember this hit by…

A reader asked me about the efficiency of Russian armed forces maintenance of equipment and weapons, so I did some research — Any large organisation has its corruption, fiddles and ‘stock shortages’. It’s a fact of life. Some bureaucracies are better than others at controlling the impact of these almost normal human activities. Some bureaucracies are better than other at mis-reporting them. If you ever watched the record-breaking ‘MASH’ series then you…