To commemorate 45 years since Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to summit Mt. Everest, Community Action Nepal (CAN) created a Virtual Everest Challenge 2020 that anyone could take part in from the comfort of their home. In honour of this anniversary and CAN’s initiative, I documented myself completing the challenge in a short Youtube video, while also talking about some interesting Everest climbing facts. In this blog, I expand a bit more on the 5 surprising facts about Everest. Everest base camp, taken during my climb to the summit in 2018    1. Climbers make ..read more

Tom climbing Book of Ages E5 6b at Gogarth. Photo: Dan Lane In this interview, we spoke to climber and writer Tom Livingstone, about his career in climbing and the Young Alpinist Group initiative.  1. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do. My name is Tom Livingstone. I’m 30 years old and I would describe myself as a climber. My life has been dedicated to – and shaped by – climbing cliffs and mountains. This is both in my home country (UK) and around the world. 2. You’re a very accomplished climber – what are you most proud of in your career to date? What are some of your favouri ..read more

Earlier this year, I re-released my fusion book, Star Chambers: The Race for Fusion Power, as a 2020 edition with a ten-year update chapter.     Star Chambers: The Race for Fusion Power is a basic introduction to fusion using tokamaks and was written as a series of blogs for the Institute of Physics. Ten years ago I was their Schools’ Lecturer, and throughout 2010 I visited 30 different schools in a nationwide tour (and did a few extras besides!). As I went around the country I wrote blogs, breaking down my subject of fusion energy into bitesize chunks, answering questions lik ..read more

  Descending from the summit of Nelion, Mt Kenya In this interview, we spoke to Jeremy Windsor, a climber, mountain medicine doctor, and Consultant in Anaesthetics and Critical Care at Chesterfield Royal Hospital. 1. Can you tell us more about what you do and how you got there? Jeremy in PPE I am a Consultant in Anaesthetics and Critical Care at Chesterfield Royal Hospital. For many years I balanced my medical career with guiding, teaching and practising medicine in the mountain environment. But perhaps more than anything, I live for the outdoors – climbing, running and cycling quite ..read more

Nicholas Jones and I met in 2017 when he invited me to the exhibition of his new Aurora paintings at the Crane Kalman Gallery in London. He had seen my book Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights and realised that we had a shared passion—the Arctic, the light and the aurora. In my book, I talked about aurora in art. Before photography, it was only through art that the phenomenon could be captured at all. Historical works in the sixteenth century show the aurora in the superstitious light of the time, depicting it as flames or knives in the sky. Later, scientists often penned their own pict ..read more

It’s a new year, a new beginning, but we are all still in the same grip of Covid-19, wondering how much longer we will have to endure it. In mid-2020 my left retina detached from the back of my eye. I had eye surgery three times in six months to fix it (and I’m hoping that now it stays stuck). On the morning of my second surgery, the day after I had found out that the retina had come away again, I couldn’t help thinking about the ladders on Everest and how I had no choice but to do something that frightened me over and over again. I wrote this piece about how I was feeling as I waited for my ..read more

Aurora from Mark’s adventure. Photo: Mark Lewney Aurora Story by Mark Lewney, UK. One can only see major fault lines in a marriage in hindsight, I guess. An odd opener to an Aurora Story, right? Fear not, my hook here is not an attempt to connect ionization of charged particles whose trajectories have been changed by the magnetosphere to human relationships. That would obviously be silly. It’s why astrologers don’t just go down the bookies. My 40th birthday, 6 years ago. What do I really, really want to do? See the aurora borealis. But how, exactly? I wasn’t particularly well off. The only ..read more

卡普空近日发布了《怪物猎人崛起：曙光》违规修改存档数据的注意事项和判别条件，官方表示现在已确定有玩家违规修改怪异探究任务等游戏存档数据，使用这些内容可能将导致存档无法正常游玩。如果遇到疑似违规修改任务，官方建议玩家不要游玩直接删除。此外，卡普空也正在研究应对违规修改的办法。 关于违规修改存档数据的判别条件，官方主要注明了5 ..read more