The Somewhat Ambitious

Three cheers for terrifyingly misleading titles! A five-year-old girl, little Emelia Fawbert, has discovered a 50,000-year-old rhino bone during a fossil hunt with her family in Gloucestershire. Emelia (who is cripplingly adorable, even whilst grasping the petrified thigh-bone of a long-dead monster) found the 16-inch bone (hello vicar) with the help of her father, who [...]

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Is it wrong for me to pine for Bollywood in space? The implications zero-g will have on coreography are mind-boggling*. The launch was delayed for several days due to bad weather (on earth, not in space, obviously), but the Indian Space Research Organisation is feeling optimistic. My favourite part? The craft, named “Chandrayaan-1″, will orbit [...]

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I’m acutely aware of how little people care about vehicles on the moon. An unmanned buggy, painstakingly humping the idiotically barren lunar landscape like an octogenarian feebly pawing for a lightswitch? I couldn’t care less. Unless the moon has an ocean of coke syrup brewing inches beneath the surface, waiting to burst forth and change [...]

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Two planets over 300 light years from Earth have collided recently, and scientists are giggling with excitement (as are Red Dwarf fans. Remember when Lister played pool with planets? Anyone?). Various astonomers from UCLA and CALTECH said the crash ocurred between two stars in the Aries constellation. Apparently the planets exchanged numbers, although witnesses say [...]

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The world may very well end this week.
We here at The Somewhat Ambitious are a foolhardy lot, often seen dangling ourselves, pantless and giggling, over the slavering precipice of death (I once threw a sandwich at a police car). But the fact that the Large Hadron Particle Accelerator is getting fired up today has us [...]

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There was a really awkward moment back in Year 11 physics when we were having rainbows explained to us and the resident fundamentalist Christian in our class piped up with the fairly controversial suggestion that rather than rainbows being produced via the simple diffraction of light through water droplets, they were instead a gift from [...]

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By combining the forces of telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California (like some sort of Captain Planet knock-off sans the Equadorian monkey-toting douchebag), astronomers have taken the closest ever look at the black hole which resides in the centre of the milky way. Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the astronomers were [...]

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This morning on the Breakfast Show, I discussed:
- The moustache pint glass, and how using one to conceal a real moustache is a true mind fuck.
- How the invisibility cloak will revolutionise mischievious seamstresses, as further proof that when Lindsay sets me homework, I do it.
- The new earth-bound Borg Sphere, which is less a [...]

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Noah Goldstein, over at the Psychology Today has written up some helpful hints, all very subtle, for dealing with customer service consultants.
“To change their orientation toward you, try the following: If you find toward the beginning of your interaction that the customer service agent is being particularly friendly, polite, or responsive — perhaps before you [...]

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Here’s a very lucid and accessible, but nonetheless brain smashing explanation of the concept of ten-dimensional space. It isn’t the exact mathematical model that certain aspects of string theory rely on, but it’ll give you some vague idea of what they’re talking about.

The best part about sting theory? To prove or disprove any [...]

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