SIRT and the BBC

Last year I was part of the Ask Yan team for the BBC TV science series "Bang Goes The Theory". I answered quite a lot of the questions in my spare time - almost as many as Yan! ...including one about why cork trees make cork.

The second series starts on March 15th...so if you have any tree or wood related questions you want to reach a wide audience do please send them in to Yan.

Keeping in touch with standards development

The new version of EN338 will contain a big change to the shear strengths of the timber grades. Related to this there have been changes afoot in the testing standard EN408 which includes an equation to modify global MoE to correct for shear stiffness G...a correction that is already taken care of (by a different equation) in EN384! Some of our thoughts on that topic are covered here.

Keeping abreast of changes on codes and standards isn't easy, but the British Standards Institute has just launched a new service that might help people do just that. As well as the subscription based BSIonline (which has live standards and drafts out for comment) there will be:

http://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com - Aiming to provide a more user-friendly way for people to access information relating to standards in development.

And http://standardsproposals.bsigroup.com - a public access area for proposals for new standards and revisions of existing ones.

Don't also forget that we now sit on the UK timber grading committee and BSI committee B/518 (structural timber) so if you have any concerns relating to standards about timber grading you can speak to us.