“Do fast-drying-towels actually dry faster? Can you build us a measurement setup to test this?” I was delighted when the crew of TV show "Kassa" asked me that question: partially because I think it can clearly showcase how science works and partially because I was really looking forward to [...]
I was recently asked to peer-review a scientific paper that introduced a novel platform for scientist to use in their work. A very important work but I found the review tricky: it does not fit in the standard intro - methods - results - discussion - conclusion mold that we force academic papers [...]
Have you heard about '/r/place' on Reddit? It was an art project where reddit users could change the color of a pixel on a large shared canvas by posting on reddit. Since you can only change one pixel at a time and the number of posts is limited, people needed to organise if they wanted to create an[...]
The hydrological community has an important choice to make. From September 28 to October 27 we get to choose a new president for the hydrology session of AGU. While the impact on society as a whole might not be as big as the election of that other president (register! Vote!), the impact on our [...]
Using internet to connect Rube Goldberg machine across the country! Because of the Corona outbreak we had to change our maker education course. The new assignment we gave our freshman students was: Build a physics demonstration that starts based on an online signal and finishes by passing the[...]
The LEGO Star Wars set "Imperial Conveyex Transport" has 622 pieces and sells for €99.99. Having recently spend time in three different LEGO shops in the same number of days, I started to notice that the LEGO Star Wars sets were slightly higher priced compared to equally sized "normal" LEGO [...]
On the television a scientist is interviewed, in a room with a massive collection of books: “Due to climate change, the once in two years flood now reaches up to...” “Flood?” interrupts my dad “We haven’t had a flood in fifteen years; how can they talk about a once in two years [...]
“Nice hydrographs! Can you now compare your model to ‘that other hydrology groups model’?” The phd student suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. Her supervisor is asking her to go back into code-hell. That other model is written in Fortran and she works in Python. It took her two months [...]
I try to make a point of looking on the bright side of life. But sometimes, I just ... can't. I also hate to say I told you so.... This morning I stumbled1 on recent research from Microsoft that showed that WiFi (and potentially Bluetooth and RFID) technologies can be used to measure soil [...]
This blog is based on my keynote presentation at the Fablearn conference in Eindhoven on September 28th 2018. My eyes twinkle when I see what my students have made. I'm looking at a coil that is powerful enough to light up a fluorescent tube. A second group of students connected two pendulums in[...]