Here’s an odd thing I learnt the other day about language. If you teach a young child two languages at the same time, they learn them both as fast as any other child learns one. I wouldn’t have believed this, but I have several bi-lingual work colleagues with young kids and it’s true. TheirContinue reading “The Mysteries of Learning Two Languages”
Category Archives: Science and Technology
What’s Really Happening With Wind Power
Researching the new novel, I had to look at the current state of UK’s electricity generation, because one of the main characters is building windmills. ‘Energy’ is an industry I worked in back in the Eighties and Nineties. I am well out of date, but once I’d read some of the research and the statistics, itContinue reading “What’s Really Happening With Wind Power”
More on the DNA Mystery
Another thought struck me today. It relates back to my previous post and it’s this: If evolution depends on random chance (i.e. on random mutations of genes which are preserved when they provide a positive effect), then what you need is a lot of those random trials, and the way to have a lot of those randomContinue reading “More on the DNA Mystery”
A DNA Mystery (in the context of evolution)
So, for the novel, I’ve been doing lots of research on the history of genetics and I’ve come up with an odd problem about evolution. Most of our DNA is junk. It does nothing, codes for no proteins, just sits there like a big lazy telephone cord in every cell carried by every living thingContinue reading “A DNA Mystery (in the context of evolution)”
Science? Pah!!
This week, one of the offspring comes home with the classical IQ test question: “What was the largest island in the world before the discovery of Australia?” The answer the expected is, of course, ‘Australia’ or if you want to get really technical about it, ‘Australia but it didn’t have a name before its discoveryContinue reading “Science? Pah!!”
