Kazakhstan people are smarter than Irish people.

Amhran Nua wrote: »

A little background here, the "professor" in this case is from Ulster University, a fine institution last seen sending out detailed studies on why women are naturally worse than men in mathematics and should just shtai in the kitchen thar hai. I think it might have been the same professor actually. Did he also pinch off that study about how Africans naturally have lower intelligence than caucasians as well?

It's a nonsensical scientifically risible excuse for loyalist/whatever the hell they are standing for these days propaganda, of course. You can't take IQ tests across a wide geographical area and just sum them up, IQ tests have to be normalised per population, among many other things.

It's a classic example of 19th century scientific racism, which is about the level I'd expect from UU to behonest.

mtb_kng wrote: »

We've had a huge impact on science!!! We're just rubbish at supporting/promoting it.

John Philip Holland launched the submarine just a few miles away from me

There's loads! Ernest Walton, Robert Boyle, George Boole and Francis Beaufort is a start.

• Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth's atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, a.k.a. infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases.[8] He was the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapor strongly absorbed infrared radiation.[9]

• He devised demonstrations that advanced the question of how radiant heat is absorbed and emitted at the molecular level. He appears to be the first person to have demonstrated experimentally that emission of heat in chemical reactions has its physical origination within the newly created molecules (1864).[10] He produced instructive demonstrations involving what he called calorescence, which is the conversion of infrared into visible light at the molecular level.[11] Among his key laboratory tools were substances that are transparent to infrared and opaque to visible light; or vice versa. He usually referred to infrared as "radiant heat", and sometimes as "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" did not start coming into use until the 1880s. His main published reports of the 1860s were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872 under the title Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat.

• In the investigations on radiant heat in air it had been necessary to use air from which all traces of floating dust and other particulates had been removed.[12] A very sensitive way to detect particulates is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by particulate impurities in air and other gases, and in liquids, is known today as the Tyndall Effect or Tyndall Scattering.[13] In studying this scattering during the late 1860s Tyndall was a beneficiary of recent improvements in electric-powered lights. He also had the use of good light concentrators. He developed the nephelometer and turbidimeter and similar instruments that show properties of aerosols and colloids through concentrated light beams. Particulates suspended in air are visible to the naked eye in a darkened room with sunlight coming through a crack in the curtains. Mostly visibly that's light reflecting off large particulates which is not the same as light scattering off small particulates. But with dark background illumination and customized light beams, and without microscopes, very low concentrations of particulates very far below the threshold of visibility become visible and quantifiable because of light scattering. When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others. Tyndall is the founder of this line of instruments, which are based on exploiting the Tyndall effect.

• In the lab he came up with a simple way to obtain "optically pure" air. He coated the inside walls of a box with glycerin, which is a sticky syrup. He discovered that after a few days' wait, the air inside the sealed box was entirely particulate-free under examination with light beams (the box had glass windows for the purpose). The various floating-matter particulates had all ended up getting stuck to the walls or settling on the sticky floor.[14] There were no signs of floating micro-organisms ("germs") in the optically pure air. He compared what happened when he let sterilized meat-broths sit in such pure air, and in ordinary air. The broths were sterilized beforehand by boiling. The broths sitting in the optically pure air remained "sweet" (as he said) to smell and taste after many months of sitting, while the ones in ordinary air started to become putrid after a few days. This demonstration extended Louis Pasteur's earlier demonstrations that the presence of micro-organisms is a precondition for biomass decomposition. However, the next year (1876) some repeats of the exercise resulted in a surprising failure to reproduce it. From this he was led to find viable bacterial spores in supposedly heat-sterilized foods. The foods had been contaminated with dry bacterial spores from hay in the lab, he found out. All bacteria are killed by boiling but they have a spore form that can survive boiling, he correctly contended, citing research by Ferdinand Cohn. Tyndall found a way to eradicate the bacterial spores that came to be known as "Tyndallization". At the time, it affirmed the "germ theory" against a number of critics whose experimental results had been defective from the same cause. During the mid-1870s Pasteur and Tyndall were in frequent communication.[15][16]

• He was the first to observe and report the phenomenon of thermophoresis in aerosols. He spotted it surrounding hot objects while investigating the Tyndall Effect with focused lightbeams in a dark room. He devised a better way to demonstrate it, and then simply reported it (1870), without investigating the physics of it in depth.[17]

One of Tyndall's experimental apparatuses for showing that sound is reflected in air at the interface between air bodies of different densities.

• In radiant-heat experiments that called for much laboratory expertise in the early 1860s, he showed for a variety of readily vaporizable liquids that, molecule for molecule, the vapor form and the liquid form have essentially the same power to absorb radiant heat.[18] (In modern experiments using narrow-band spectra, some relatively small differences are found that Tyndall's equipment was unable to get at; see e.g. absorption spectrum of H2O).

• He consolidated and enhanced the work of Desains, Forbes, Knoblauch and others demonstrating that the principal properties of visible light can be reproduced for radiant heat, namely reflection, refraction, diffraction, polarization, depolarization, double refraction, and rotation in a magnetic field (Faraday effect).[19]

• When studying the absorption of radiant heat by ozone, he came up with a demonstration that helped confirm that ozone is an oxygen cluster.[20]

• Using his expertise about radiant heat absorption by gases, he invented a system for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in a sample of exhaled human breath (1862, 1864). The basics of Tyndall's system is in daily use in hospitals today for monitoring patients under anesthesia.[21] (See capnometry.)

• Invented a better fireman's respirator, a hood that filtered smoke and noxious gas from air (1871, 1874).[22]