How Much of the Amazon Would it Take to Print the Internet?

This paper explores the idea of printing every page of the internet onto a standard A4 piece of paper, and how many trees, in terms of a percentage of the Amazon rainforest, would be required in the process. By making some assumptions about the size of the Internet, and the type of tree available in the Amazon, it is found that 2.1x10-6% would be required in order to print Wikipedia alone, 0.002% to encompass the entire non-explicit internet and 2% including the ‘Dark web’.

The Most Toxic Component of Chili Con Carne

In this paper, the toxicity of the three main ingredients chili peppers (capsicum), kidney beans and mince in the popular dish Chili Con Carne were investigated. It was found that all three components caused similar symptoms but had different measures of toxicity. Capsicum has a LD50 of 161.2 mg/kg in rats and 118.8 mg/kg in mice. Kidney beans have a hemagglutinin unit of between 20,000-70,000 hau and Salmonella poisoning in mince can be caused by as few as 4.89x1013 bacteria (assuming un-limiting conditions). As the measures of toxicity could not be compared, the most harmful ingredient was deemed to be raw/undercooked meat as it could lead to Salmonella poisoning which can result in typhoid fever, found to cause around 500,000 deaths per year.

Preventing the Incidence of Fusarium keratitis Infection in Contact Lens Wearers

Fusarium keratitis is a serious eye infection of the cornea that has recently been prevalent with contact lens wearers. In 2006, an outbreak of the infection was found to be mostly due to a certain brand of contact lens solution, ReNu with MoistureLoc®, which was withdrawn from the market. However, a very recent incidence of the infection that lead to blindness in the patient, has led to a necessity on educating contact wearers on the importance of proper handling of their contact lens. We highlighted the importance of not reusing contact lens solution due to the depreciation in its antimicrobial properties after one use. It was also recommended those contact lenses are stored in a barrel container which suspends the contact lens in its solutio

Development of an open-learning module in natural product chemistry

This article describes the author’s personal perspective on the design, production and delivery of an open-learning module in natural product chemistry. This 10 credit, level 6 module is delivered using three tutorial sessions and is assessed by three open-book tests. The study material is available to the students as both hard-copy and electronic copy

Understanding the different challenges facing students in transitioning to university particularly with a focus on ethnicity

A positive and successful transition into University is crucial if students are to stay the course in higher education and experience successful outcomes. However, challenges exist in ensuring a connected transition from secondary and further education to higher education that is inclusive and supports the diversity in our current undergraduate student body. We set out to explore the diverse experiences that first year students report about their recent transition to a post-1992 University. We were particularly interested in how these experiences and challenges differed by ethnicity. This is incredibly important given the disparity, recognised in the sector, in the attainment of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students compared to their White counterparts and particularly pertinent that this trend reverses attainment patterns in secondary education. This paper summarises some of our key findings in determining the challenges facing students from different backgrounds in their transition to university. It argues that Universities will have to change their transition and wider offer to ensure that diverse students feel welcomed and develop a sense belonging in Higher Education in order for them to achieve successful outcomes.Keywords: Transition, widening participation, ethnicit

Using audio for feedback on assessments: Tutor and student experiences

Recently we have been providing individual audio feedback to 1st and 2nd year undergraduate Chemistry students on a variety of assessments (posters, laboratory reports, laboratory diaries) with the aim of providing richer, more detailed and more comprehensible individual feedback than is possible within the same timeframe using written feedback. In this communication, various aspects of the use of audio for feedback are discussed including practical and technical aspects of the recording of audio files whilst viewing and assessing student work, the transmission of these files to individual students, our experiences as tutors of providing audio feedback and the experiences and views of students on audio feedback

S1_ 6 The Wings Of Christmas

According to traditional lore, each Christmas Santa Claus travels across the globe delivering gifts to all of the children on his ‘Nice’ list. In this paper, we calculated the velocity he would travel at to be 1.56×106 ms−1. Thus, if his sleigh had aerofoils they would require a minimum surface area of 1.26×10−3 m2 each to provide lift

A1_1 Tick, tick, tick... GRBoom!

This paper considers the possibility that a gamma ray burst (GRB) will cause a mass extinction on our planet. The distance over which a low energy GRB would expose a human to a lethal amount of radiation is calculated and found to be approximately 73 kiloparsecs. This indicates that we only need to consider GRBs occurring within the Milky Way galaxy. GRBs are also highly directional; the probability of a GRB striking the Earth is calculated to be 0.06%. From these calculations it is found that a lethal GRB is likely to impact on the Earth once every 328 million years

P4_7 Make a Brake for It!

AbstractThe paper investigates the plausibility of using a solar sail to reduce the orbital radius of a satellite around Mars instead of rocket thrusters. This is done by calculating the surface area of sail needed to lower the orbital radius from 3657km to 3517km by deploying the sail for a quarter of the orbit. The resulting surface area is 2.5x10 km2, which is impractical as a replacement for current methods

P1_10 Moving the Earth

Conservation of linear and angular momentum is used in this article to discuss whether human strength and power alone can move the Earth. It is found that the difference in mass between humans and the planet is far too large to have a significant effect