An introduction to 500 words

Every two weeks we will choose a different subject to each write 500 words about. This can be as random or as specific as that week's selector would like, it could be fungi or fresh water fish, toffee or Tennessee, or maybe the origins of the gin and tonic. The aim is to learn a little something about something we knew very little about, and to have fun while doing it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A dark Christmas in Iceland - Folklore

Image
  A dark Christmas in Iceland - Folklore   Deep within a dark cave, made from the lava set stones in Dimmuborgir, adjacent to the Mývatn area of north Iceland, lives a terrifying giantess named Grýla. She is thought to be half-troll, half-ogre, and her thirst for the blood of children is insatiable. Grýla doesn’t often roam from her cave, taking only an annual excursion to stock up on her feast for the year - a silent Christmas killer. Much like Santa, Grýla keeps note of which children have been naughty, however Grýla’s list is much more of an actual hit list. Whispers of naughty children are collected throughout the year, and when Christmas time comes around again she goes on the hunt, collecting the misbehaving youths in a sack and subsequently cooking them in a pot, creating a pot of stew of such great volumes that it sustains her for the entire year. Grýla’s latest husband is named Leppalúði, also a troll. Leppalúði is seemingly terrified of his wife and her homicid...
Read more

Frequently asked questions: black hole edition

As with any blog entry, when I sat down to write about black holes, I had a think about what I already knew about them, and how I could use this to inform what I wrote. But this time all I could come up with was the 2006 song ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ by Muse. It’s an absolute tune and, not going to lie, I listened to it for inspiration, but actually it tells us nothing about black holes. So instead, I have tried to answer my own set of FAQs that should give us all a bit of a better understanding of what a black hole is and does. What is a black hole? NASA defines black holes as regions in space where a great amount of matter is packed into a very small area. The result is a gravitational force so strong that nothing can escape. Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. Bigger black holes can result from stellar collisions. Are black holes really black? Yes, black holes are really black as no light can escape from them. They are...
Read more

Republic of Maldives

Image
The Republic of Maldives is a small south Asian archipelagic state.  It has a total land size of 298m2, and consists of approximately 1,190 coral islands, grouped in a double chain of 26 atolls, spread across roughly 90,000m2.  As well as being Asia’s smallest country, it is also the world’s most geographically dispersed country.  The islands were traditionally difficult to navigate and the first maritime charts were only produced in 1836, later maps have been produced with input from satellites.  The reason why the Maldives (as the country is more commonly known) is of interest to a 500-word blog on coral, is, of course, because the country is composed of live coral reefs and sandbars.   An atoll is a ring-shaped coral reef, surrounding a lagoon, with channels between islets connecting the lagoon to the open sea.     The Maldives landmass is of coraline origin – highly complex structures.      Most of the islands are flat and sandy,...
Read more