Regardless, it was an excellent conference, a great opportunity to meet a hugely diverse range of people. Some of them old friends known from previous career incarnations, including the delightful and enthusiastic Sunny Bains and ESF’s Sofia Valleley, newscientist’s Graham Lawton, C&EN’s Celia Arnaud, Nature’s Mark Peplow, Wilson da Silva of Cosmos, the Nobel Simon Frantz, Diabetes UK Jo Brodie, immuno expert and communicator Caroline Cross, fellow freelance Cormac Sheridan, The Guardian’s Tim Radford and Alok Jha, and many others.

Then there were the previously only virtual friends made flesh – Claire Ainsworth, Mun-Keat Looi aka @Ayasawada, the winning Ed Yong, Paul Sutherland, Richard Scrase, Martin Ince, Sonya Buyting, Jennifer Beal, John and Kate Travis, James Cornell, Oranjeboom fiend Arran Frood, Juliette Mutheu.

Not forgetting, looking very smart and professional in orange Emma, Jessica, Jacob, and many, many others manning the stands and allowing the hacks to lead them astray at the Westminster Arms. And, of course, the inimitable Sallie Robins. I’m going to stop before this begins to sound like an Oscars speech, so apologies to my other new best friends if I didn’t mention you here.

The coffee break, lunchtime and social discussions were often even more diverse than the scheduled plenaries, lectures and workshops. Chat among journalists usually degrades to rates, kill fees and booze. However, this meeting was different topics featured in both lectures and chats headed off to the rise and fall and the rise of science journalism, the heat, philanthropy, Bach, Saharan solar power, the heat, inexpensive bus rides, Scottish lasers and Mount Rushmore, the miniature hamburgers, the heat, nano-curlers, orange ties, blogging, the LHC, man bags, chiropractic, AIDS, and MrsSlocombesPussy, of course, and so much more…including rates, kill fees and booze.

A wonderful week everyone. Thank you.

Meanwhile, for Twitter fiends: We may not have trended our hashtag “#WCSJ” but we tweeted 2,494 tweets, there were 236 contributors (out of 800 or so delegates), We averaged 356 tweets per day with almost half of those coming from the most prolific 10 twitters. an eighth were retweets, a fifth were mentions, and just over 5% had multiple hashtags and so spilled into other areas.

Discussion on twitter using the #WCSJ hashtag really started to heat up on Thursday last week – you can read a transcript here and you can tweak the dates to home in on particular days for the actual conference.

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Synchrotron X-ray holotomography has revealed why size really does matter to the sex lives of some creatures. The researchers provide evidence of ancient giant fossil sperm and hint at a link to organisms alive today. Long version…

Cut-free brain surgery – A new approach to brain surgery avoids the use of the surgeon’s scalpel and instead exploits advances in magnetic resonance imaging to guide an ultrasound intervention. Dig into the full story here…

Luxurious edible oils – Researchers have developed a novel approach to the rapid assignment of NMR spectra to the major components of vegetable oils such as avocado, mango kernel and macadamia nut oils. The slick new approach could help improve quality control and detect fraud in the food industry. More…

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Iron proteins cast in surprising role – Iron is the most abundant transition metal in the human body. Its intriguing reduction-oxidation properties endow it with the active role as an essential cofactor in countless proteins. Some of these are involved in oxygen transport (haemoglobin in the blood), electron exchange for powering biochemical reactions and energy release (cytochromes), and the control of potentially harmful free radicals.

However, little is known about how the haem group that carries oxygen in blood and is the active centre of several enzymes is transported from where it is made in the cell to its host protein assembly. Now, UV-Vis spectroscopy has helped identify an enzyme that also functions as a haem transporter as well as protecting the fragile iron(II). More…

Aerosols all – Dust, sea salt, soot, bacteria, and pollutant particles all add to the mix of atmospheric aerosols that can seed cloud formation as water and ice condense on these tiny particles and ultimately lead to precipitation. Understanding future climate change might hinge on the analysis of all such contributing atmospheric aerosols. Now, infrared spectroscopy and mass spectrometry have revealed important clues as to the role of aerosols in affecting climate patterns. Full story…

Biggy smalls – Scientists in Israel and the US have demonstrated systematic differences in the Raman spectra of single molecules adsorbed on to small, as opposed to relatively large, nanoparticles. The discovery could open up a new approach to single molecule studies. Read on…

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A small follow-up trial for prostate drug abiraterone demonstrates quality of life improvements in patients with the aggressive form of the disease, the same drug might also be used in treating breast cancer.

German researchers “working at close to absolute zero” have formulated the smallest drop of hydrochloric acid, showing that four water molecules and one HCl are all that is needed.

In physical science the giant intrinsic electroresistance has been demonstrated in a conventional ferroelectric film for the first time and could herald the development of a new high-density type of computer memory. It’s the electrical equivalent of giant magnetoresistance exploited in modern high-density hard drives.

Finally, technical achievement in founding modern near infrared chemical imaging systems leads to an award for Malvern Instruments’ Technical Director E Neil Lewis.

The link is now here.

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A metre-square hole was dug on the edge of Cottenham Village Green and it was quickly discovered just what a near-history find this site is. Apparently, in the 1920s when one of the village ponds had become nothing more than a stinking, muddy pit harbouring disease, the Parish decided to fill it in and villagers were invited to carry out a mass spring clean and dump all their sold rubbish into the pit. Broken bicycles, bricks, unfixable tools, cracked bottles and storage jars were dumped and the site “landscaped” to turn the former pond into a village green.

The 2009 Festival’s monster sculpture competition had record numbers of entries from families making fiendish friends from household rubbish, broom handles, and pot plants. By an amazing coincidence, the Time-Team style archaeological mini dig on the Village Green unearthed a century-old bottle embossed with the word MONSTERS. Turns out to have been a bottle that would have contained local produced fruit juice.

Photos on this post by Mark Swanson. Other FEFF photography by Dave Bradley, Ralph Carpenter, Tim Eade, Liz Hill, Grant Norman, Rita Smith, Mark Swanson, Clive Thomson, Brian Whitehead, Dave Wigley, John Williams.

The Fen Edge Family Festival was established in 2005 and is run by the Fen Edge Community Association (FECA), UK registered charity 29392020, which promotes events, activities, and groups (including Cottenham Archaeology Group and Cottenham Village Society) in Cottenham and the surrounding villages of the Fen Edge Patch: Waterbeach, Willingham, Rampton and Landbeach.

Cottenham itself is a village situated on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, six miles north of the 800-year old city of Cambridge. Its population has more than doubled over the past 30 years, now standing at more than 6,000, but despite this rapid modern growth the village retains a distinctive character. Its landscape, settlement patterns and buildings show the marks of more than 1,000 years of history, although the mini-dig in our garden unearthed Roman pottery dating back to approximately the third century.

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Gauss works very well in theory. But, don’t mention wave theory and normal distributions to workers on a platform in the depth of night in a raging North Sea facing an extreme storm threatening to tear the artificial patch of dry land from its moorings.

Instead, you might want to tell them about a new approach to predicting extreme wave heights reported this month in the International Journal of Reliability and Safety. In his report, Francesco Fedele of the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, at Georgia Institute of Technology, accepts that nineteenth century mathematics is not enough even to address the timeless problem of extreme ocean waves.

He has now devised a formula for predicting possible outcomes given particular ocean conditions. The work could inform the design of ocean-based oil and gas platforms, marine wind farms and other large engineering structures at the mercy of the waves.

The Gaussian function works well with linear phenomena under ideal conditions and then only if it focuses on the most likely outcomes not the extremes. Fedele points out that ocean waves behave in a non-linear way and so don’t fit the Gaussian function well. Moreover, there can be extreme peaks that are not matched by extreme troughs and vice versa. It is more complicated a problem than Gauss can handle.

Fedele has now turned to an entirely different formula, Breitung’s asymptotic formula, that allows non-linear behaviour to be defined mathematically. The formula takes into account the random nature of ocean wave motion up and down, which can be affected strongly by wind, underlying currents, and the profile of the ocean floor.

Fedele and his colleague M. Aziz Tayfun from the University of Kuwait compared the wave data set collected at the Tern platform in the northern North Sea during an extreme storm in a recent article that appeared in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (2009, 620, 221-239). The predictions offered by the new formula are much more prescient than a Gaussian formula and confirm the validity of the twentieth century attempt at ocean wave prediction encompassed by the Tayfun model.

Francesco Fedele (2009). On the statistics of oceanic waves Int. J. Reliability and Safety, 3 (1/2/3), 258-266

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At the time, the team simulated the radiation conditions in laboratory tests and reported some rather worrying results. I have now followed up with team leader Alsu Dyukina a few questions that arose.

How did you decide on what dose to use in the tests?

The dose received by our experimental mice were decided based on really date that with an annual norm of flights of 2000 h the rate of the equivalent dose of space radiation is 1.7-6 microsieverts per hour, which makes up a radiation dose of 7–50 millisieverts. Radiation doses received by pilots and flight attendants are often greater than those received by traditional radiation workers in the heavily regulated nuclear industry, but until recently, little attention was paid to occupationally exposed air crew.

According to a report of the Federal Aviation Administration, the average dose rate in the contiguous United States from cosmic and terrestrial radiation is 0.06 μSv/h. At an altitude of 10 km, which is common for domestic air travel, the dose rate from galactic cosmic radiation alone is 6 μSv/h.

What about solar activity, is that an issue?

During a solar maximum, the numbers and energies of the solar radiation particles increase enough to affect the cosmic radiation dose to air travellers.

Do you think there is cause for concern for would-be parents?

We think that we can extrapolate to possible damage to the offspring of pilots as it is known that the mice are more radio-resistant in comparison with the human. We believe that revealed by us such negative consequences as the changes in radiosensitivity and the absence of adaptive response in the progeny of parents irradiated with low doses of high-LET radiation are evidence of genetic instability, which is transmitted via the sex cells of the parents.

What can be done to protect air crews?

It is an established fact that an increase in altitude means an increase in radiation levels therefore to protect air crew and travellers should decrease the altitude of flights.

The International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations (IFALPA) recognizes 20 mSv/yr as the cosmic radiation limit for airline flight crews as established by the National Council of Radiation of Protection and Euratom. It is further recognized that airline flight crew should be categorized as occupationally exposed radiation workers, likely to receive more than 1 mSv/y.

As cosmic radiation imposes a potential health risk to airline flight crews, it is highly recommended that national authorities make provisions for exposure assessment verification. Crew members should be made aware through extensive educational programs that high altitude flying exposes them to significantly higher ionizing radiation levels, with carcinogenic potential, than the general population and the scope of radiation protection legislation.

Crew members
should
be warned
that radiation exposure
above 1
mSv during the
course of the entire
pregnancy may cause an increased risk to the fetusCrew members should be warned that radiation exposure above 1 mSv during the course of the entire pregnancy may cause an increased risk to the fetus. In addition, airlines will be required to organize the schedules of crew members with the objective of reducing the doses of highly exposed air crew, educate the crew about health risks, and give special protections to women who have declared pregnancy.

But, these are still low doses of radiation, right?

It is important to remember that little is known of the radiobiological effects of low dose ionizing radiation, much less that of low dose ionizing radiation of the type and quantity which airline pilots and cabin crew are exposed to at altitude.
What’s more in the last decade it was shown by many researchers that the damaging action of low doses is more efficiently determined when compared with the damage that might be expected at linear extrapolation of results from greater doses to low.

What is the bottom line on this study?

The studies will expand what is known about the health risks of cosmic radiation in the near future.

S. Zaichkina, O. Rozanova, G. Aptikaeva, A. Akhmadieva, H. Smirnova, S. Romanchenko, O. Vakhrusheva, S. Sorokina, A. Dyukina, & V. Peleshko (2009). Adaptive response and genetic instability induced in mice in vivo by low dose-rate radiation simulating high-altitude flight conditions Int. J. Low Radiation, 6 (1), 28-36

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Cannabis blow back – A highly sensitive new chemical test has allowed European scientists to obtain “convincing evidence” that marijuana smoke damages DNA in ways that could increase the risk of cancer.

Toxic shock – Researchers in Spain are evaluating the “ecotoxic” properties of hazardous and toxic wastes for the aquatic environment. They suggest that the ecotoxic profile of a given waste stream can be derived from a novel battery of bioassays using statistical techniques that reveal whether dangerous levels of compounds toxic to frogs and fish are present and whether or not uber-toxins* like dioxins are at unsafe levels.

Chemical directors – Chemistry often all about activation. Now, UK chemists have found a way to control and direct the activation of important molecules used to synthesise pharmaceutical and agrochemical products. Their work also provides new insights into how bond activation works.

Enzymic activity – Researchers have obtained the first three-dimensional crystal structure of an enzyme that contains iron and helps soil microbes fend off invaders and rivals. The enzyme hydroxyethylphosphonate dioxygenase (HEPD) used by the Streptomyces soil microbe could lead to new agricultural technology, chemical catalysts, and perhaps even novel antibiotics that defeat bacterial resistance to conventional drugs.

*Yes, I know the word toxin applied only to compounds naturally derived and that attaching the uber mock prefix to this word is probably also misplaced as dioxins have a much worse reputation than they deserve, but I couldn’t help myself and they are very poisonous.

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Also in view, is the finding that hydrogen peroxide is more than a bleach, it’s a marshal for white blood cells to flood to the body’s injury sites. Solar-powered humidity on tap might help solve pure water shortages in some arid parts of the world.

Finally, the ACS has named its Washington DC headquarters after Clifford & Kathryn Hach Building following a $33 million donation.

More…

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Cloud spotting is almost on a par with training spotting or stamp collecting, you might think, but just a single hour spent on your back almost anywhere in the world staring up at a cloudy sky can be so good for the soul. At least, that’s the ethos of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

The CAS website is temporarily unavailable (503 server overload error) because of a surge of interest in clouds thanks to surprise bestselling author Gavin Pretor-Pinney who has made clouds his life’s speciality. And The Cloudspotter’s Guide topped the non-fiction charts for months.

So fascinated by clouds is Pretor-Pinney that’s he’s hoping to have a new cloud type classified. The launch of his campaign to get this choppy cloud, he has dubbed Asperatus into the annals of meteorology, neatly coincides with the publication of his second book, The Cloud Collectors’ Handbook, but we’ll forgive him that as a fortunate coincidence, eh?

I have to admit that, sitting behind a laptop from in my first floor office with a wide picture window over looking trees and a few single-story dwellings gives me a wonderful opportunity to watch the clouds unroll. I often see some unusual formations, and if I can grab my camera to capture them before they dissipate.

The photos on this post are all clouds seen from my office, but until I saw Pretor-Pinney interviewed on BBC TV, I hadn’t realised that this one had a special name. Apparently, it’s a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud, named for two of the godfathers of nineteenth century science.

According to scientists on the UIUC Weather World 2010 project, this cloud type appears between two layers of air of different densities, travelling at different speeds. If a warm, less dense layer lies above a layer of colder, denser air, and the wind shear across the two layers is strong enough, eddies will develop along the boundary. This gives the cloud an obvious rolling waves appearance, hence their other name “shear-gravity waves”.

My cloud photos above were all snapped from my office window. Some of those in the gallery may have been taken elsewhere.

Cloudy gallery

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