By Hamish Johnston
Sports fans in the UK are spoiled for choice this weekend, with the Wimbledon finals in London and the kick-off of the Tour de France in Leeds. This is only the second time that the famous bicycle race has started in the UK and to celebrate, the University of Sheffield has created a huge image of a bicycle in a field near to the route. But as well as celebrating the passing cyclists, the image honours a very different cycle that makes the race and indeed much of life on Earth possible.
The Krebs cycle was discovered at the university in 1937 by the biochemist Hans Krebs, who shared the 1953 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for his explanation of how aerobic organisms convert stored nutrients into energy. So when the cyclists are fighting their way up the steep Buttertub Pass in the Yorkshire Dales, you can be sure their Krebs cycles will be working overtime!
Are you a climate-change sceptic? How would you like to earn a cool $30,000 for justifying your views on global warming? The physicist Christopher Keating has said “I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring”. The deadline for submissions is 31 July 2014 so get on your bike and get that proof to Keating.
First it was Stephen Hawking, whose appearance in a TV commercial for the price comparison website gocompare.com made us smile. Now the US string theorist Jim Gates has made an advertisement for the mobile-phone network Verizon. If he tires of physics, a career as a voice artist beckons – I would buy a phone from Gates! You can watch him in action below.
http://youtu.be/q1deo1QV8_k
