This is my cool hubby diving into lake Näsijärvi in Tampere, Finland with his brand new Go Pro camera.
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My lovely husband gave me the heads'up about a new mobile app, which is super, super pretty and I think everyone should try it out. It's called STELLER and certainly lives up to its misspelled name ;) STELLER allows you to create beautiful picture, video and textual stories in a flip-book style. You can create a story about absolutely anything. My first story features our recent trip to Iceland, which I thought was a good start because it covers travel and photography in a trip blog manner. Have a look for yourselves: ICELAND : The Land of Ice and Fire You can browse the STELLER community for topics you're interested in and create your own collections around them. You can re-publish other people's stories into your collections too. The UX design and functionality are just sublime! Go on, try it out!! So I went along to a science event yesterday evening which was held in the Curler's Rest pub on Byres Road in Glasgow. It was part of an annual 3-day science festival called "Pint of Science" which actually takes place simultaneously around the world. It's the first time it's been brought to Scotland and I found out about it through work (Glasgow Uni was a main sponsor). Having just returned from a super-awesome fantabulously brilliant trip to Iceland, I was pretty excited to find out the topics of some of the talks! There was a whole theme on Geology and Planet Earth. Within that I chose to attend two talks:
It turns out we do (!) but it's an extremely risky business as investors would have to put 47% of their investment down up-front just to do an exploratory dig and hope that they're in the right place. Obviously there are scientists who predict where the right spots are (around ancient fault lines etc) but you never really know until your 2km under! Glasgow has a tonne of old coal mine shafts which could be brought into play but first the government needs to be persuaded to invest in a couple of demo sites where investors could come along and see the types of projects they could fund with their own eyes first. You might be wondering how it would work? Well...I am a layman, so forgive me for glossing over the super technical details, but basically you would drill down to find the right layer of rock which is hot enough then pump the hot water up to ground level, pass it through a heat exchanger and harness the energy, then put the colder water back down into the hole, and so the cycle would continue! The heat could be used for district heating systems, which do exist in new estates such as the Commonwealth village in the east end of Glasgow. In Paris, 120,000 homes are heated using exactly this kind of geothermal heat! If anyone is interested in reading more about the Scottish government's plans then there's some light reading on their website:
A Study into the Potential for Deep Geothermal Energy in Scotland: Part 1 |
About meSports & Remedial Massage Therapist, language-geek, mum, Nordic at heart. Family, travelling, my bike, fitness and music make me tick. Archives
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