All posts by Tim Middleton

Tim is currently an undergraduate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University. He has a keen interest in science communication, in particular the public perception of science, and to that end spends an increasingly large amount of his time indulging in student journalism. He is President of BlueSci, Cambridge University’s science magazine, and also writes for the student newspaper Varsity.

Digging for answers: getting to the bottom of the Tohoku earthquake

On the 11th March 2011 the Tohoku earthquake struck off the north-eastern coast of the Japanese island of Honshu. An area of seafloor larger than Greater Tokyo moved eastwards by 5 metres and some parts of the fault moved by up to 50 metres. A total of nearly 19,000 people were killed, mainly as a result of the following tsunami. But the event came as a huge surprise to scientists the world over “This was a truly extraordinary earthquake and very unfortunately seismologists, including myself, did not expect this to happen,” said Japanese scientist Dr. Kiyoshi Suyehiro. Read more [...]

The research subject

I lay flat on my back on the table. Large foam pads were placed under my elbows and round my neck. I was given a pair of headphones and a restraining strap was fixed across my forehead. Then I was shunted backwards into a narrow, cream-coloured tube. The door was locked and the room was filled with an incessant humming noise as the machine started. Soon the humming was replaced by squealing and the whole machine began to vibrate. Read more [...]