In Memory of ALL the people who Suffered from the Chernobyl Disaster: you are not forgotten… Today is May 26, 2011. Exactly 25 years ago. the nuclear power station in Chernobyl – a small town only 100+ km away from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, experienced one of the most horrible and tragic nuclear disasters… […]

I often listen to TED talks. Probably not as often as I would love to, but often enough to enjoy a few amazing minutes listening to the most interesting speakers of our times. Today, I happened to listen to the talk by Kathryn Schulz titled “On Being Wrong”. As I was listening to her, I […]

Kenya was not on my radar till very recently. I knew very little about Africa, especially Central Africa and the little I knew painted some very problematic pictures – AIDS, political uncertainly, genocide, starving people, kids whose parents got killed in wars,  not mentioning Uganda where an operation Entebbe happened on July 4, 1976 (where […]

On April 12th, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first cosmonaut (or astronaut if you grew up in the West) to orbit the Earth. This event will be celebrated all over the world and I will make a few posts about it as well. However, for now, I would like to post a short animation related […]

As I kept thinking about the water crystal pearls, I realized that I am ready to the next step – to try and understand how these superabsorbent polymers work. My first stop for information was an article in  Wikipedia (thanks to the people who wrote it!). Here is what I found there: Superabsorbent polymers (SAP) […]

It was interesting to see how this coin got stuck in “mid-air” – actually it was mid-water… You can do lots of interesting experiments with this simple equipment.

In a few short days I will be flying to Cape Town, South Africa to attend the 4h International Conference on Women in Physics organized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. It is a very special opportunity for me as I was chosen to be a member of the Canadian delegation with […]

Dedushka L’ova (that is how we called him, however his full name was Lev Iosifovich Bolotin or L.I.) was a real experimental physicist. He was my maternal grandfather and he worked in a very exciting place – Laboratory number 1 in the Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute (UFTI) in Kharkov, Ukraine. My grandmother (who was an engineer […]

Today I had a chance to preview a very interesting software produced by the Evident Point software company right here in Vancouver. The software is called ActiveTextbook. It allows a teacher to convert his or her materials into interactive courses while retaining everything that has been created already. For example, if you have lecture notes […]

I wanted to put a short comment on the presentation by Dr. Hunter Close from the Seattle Pacific University that I just listened to. Hunter spoke on how they use the idea of kinestetic representation to help middle school teachers to understand the concept of energy. It is part of the Seattle Pacific University Energy […]