It was once one of the great unsolved problems of the early modern world: the calculation of exactly how far east or west a given point was on the surface of the Earth. Longitude was a challenge that sat at the intersection of science, navigation, empire and time itself. For cent ...Show more
Ireland’s Easter Rising
In April 1916, a small group of poorly-armed Irish radicals made a stand against the British Army, in a bid for independence for their homeland. Over six days during Easter week, almost 500 people died in the uprising, and thousands more were injured, leaving Dublin one of the mo ...Show more
Welcome to When It Goes Wrong, the podcast about disasters, accidents and when things fall apart. On this episode I discuss the the 1986 Chernobyl Disaster in which the reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl Power Plant suffered a full meltdown and explosion resulting in the worst nuc ...Show more
In April 1986 a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, in the USSR, causing the worst nuclear accident ever. Sergii Mirnyi was in charge of a monitoring unit which measured radiation levels in the 30 km exclusion zone around the plant.(Photo: The Cherno ...Show more
NOTE: IN THE PORTION WHERE I EXPLAIN NUCLEAR FISSION, I MIX UP NUCLEI AND NEUTRON! I realised this post editing but I think it generally makes sense, but when I explain how the nuclei is hit, I say it releases a nuclei, it actually releases a neutron, the neutron then hits the ne ...Show more