By Hamish Johnston
Fancy a Hubble Space Telescope T-shirt or perhaps a pair of leggings printed with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets? For pictures and links to these and other stellar fashions, check out the STARtorialist blog, which is run by two astronomers based in New York City and described as “Where science meets fashion and scientists get fabulous!”.
Pictured above is a T-shirt from the US-based firm Couth Clothing and if you must have it, you can order it here.
This week’s Red Folder contains a heartbreaking tale of physics, war and love lost. “A physicist’s lost love: Leó Szilárd and Gerda Philipsborn” is a lovely article written by Gene Dannen, who says he has “spent decades researching the life of Leó Szilárd”. The story begins in 1927 when the Hungarian nuclear physicist Szilárd rented a room in Berlin from the parents of Philipsborn, a talented opera singer. They fell for each other but were torn apart by the rise of Nazism because they were both Jewish. Philipsborn ended up being interned as an enemy alien in India during the Second World War while Szilárd was in the US working on the Manhattan Project. To find out more, you will have to read Dannen’s account.
Many here in the UK have been gripped by the inquest into the 2006 death of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by polonium-210 in London. The Guardian has published a series of chilling images showing “off the scale” levels of polonium contamination in a teapot that Litvinenko had drunk from. High levels were also found in the hotel room where an alleged assassin had stayed and apparently spilled some of the deadly isotope. You can find out much more about this lurid case in “Alexander Litvinenko inquiry: six things we’ve learned so far”.
