by Len Fisher | 20 Jul 2022 | Mini Stories from Science
My home village of Blackheath in Australia’s beautiful Blue Mountains boasts many beautiful gardens, none more beautiful than the fifty year-old rhododendron gardens, maintained by an enthusiastic group of volunteers who are mostly older than the gardens... 
by Len Fisher | 4 Jul 2020 | Mini Stories from Science
This mini story is about me and my last (maybe really my last) scientific paper. It is also a story of how science really works – through people, rather than structures or organizations or committees. It started with Twitter, which is a major way that I keep in... 
by Len Fisher | 2 Dec 2019 | Mini Stories from Science
Very proud to have been awarded a prize in the Royal Australian Chemical Institute’s competition for Stories from the Periodic Table. Here is my winning entry: Mercury, Shakespeare and me Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, and it... 
by Len Fisher | 30 Sep 2018 | Mini Stories from Science
This story of the generation of an ultra-strong magnetic field (https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/nanotechnology/magnetic-field-record-set-with-a-bang-1200-tesla) and the subsequent disaster reminds me of a story that I was told by a very prominent... 
by Len Fisher | 23 Jul 2018 | Mini Stories from Science
My good friend and cooleague (cool colleague) Anders Sandberg has calculated what would happen if the world suddenly turned into blueberries. I offer it as an example of how scientists think; one that might be used to help schoolchildren, and even beginning university... 
by Len Fisher | 17 Apr 2018 | Mini Stories from Science
Polymathic scientist George Whitesides, consultant to many commercial ventures, has written a beautiful essay on the power of curiosity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201800684 It begins with the story of how, as a child, he had heard that...