Month: October 2005

Earthquake Refusal

It’s the news that should set the press a tremble, but fellow science journalist Natasha Loder has had to resort to posting an item about the refusal of Pakistan to grant leading Himalayan earthquake expert Roger Bilham an entry visa on her blog. At a time when one would expect intellectual activity in this field to be desperately needed, apparently scientists are not allowed into the country because this is not a time for “intellectual activities”, reports Loder.

Bilham and his colleagues at the University of Colorado have been forewarning of a major Himalayan earthquake for years, but the Kashmir earthquake released only a tenth of the potential energy stored in the region and Bilham further expects geological unrest.

His expertise could provide critical clues to when and where that pent up energy might be released…surely such intellectual activity is not just desirable but essential.

Research into magnetic materials and frustrated magnets

Some time ago I wrote a feature article for EPSRC Newsline about frustrated magnets, the article is available on sciencebase.com and has attracted the attention of a fair few web surfers. Interestingly, the most recent of them hit the page in question while searching for “picture of a frustrated parent”. Odd, I thought. So, I did the search myself on the SE they’d used and found that very page at #3 in the search engine results page (SERP)!

Now, I know websurfing can be a frantic occupation, but surely the text that was displayed in the SERP didn’t point to any photographic evidence of parental frustration…

“The conventional picture of a magnet says each atom in a material … Harrison. In such a ‘frustrated’ lattice, the conventional forces … Harrison spotted the parent compound, potassium hydroxy …”

Whatever. I hope the surfer in question found their picture in the end. I could provide one of a frustrated webmaster easily…

Toxic Aftermath

The floodwaters that engulfed New Orleans after Katrina turned out to be less toxic than scientists predicted. But, the same floodwaters pumped back into Lake Pontchartrain nevertheless carried with them high levels of various metals, including copper and zinc. Researchers at Louisiana State University writing in the October 11 issue of ES&T suggest this might pose a long-term risk to the area’s aquatic life.

Genetic Google

Google is fast, you have to agree…it can somehow narrow down a search of billions of webpages and bring you a list of the “most relevant” within fractions of a second. Admittedly, sometimes that list can be long, but it’s still quite astounding how it does it. Anyway, it occurred to me that maybe its indexing method and algorithm might be useful to those who search DNA databases.

Chemists are slowly beginning to recognise how Google can be used to search for unique chemical structures using the INChI format, so maybe there is potential for DNA searching. Maybe DNA searching is already fast enough, but I somehow doubt it.

Nobel Prize for Physics 2005

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Roy J. Glauber “for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence” and to John L. Hall and Theodor W. H�nsch “for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique”. You can see a complete list of all Nobel Prize Physicists on the sciencebase site as well find links to their Nobel work.

Nobel Prize for Medicine 2005

The Nobel committee today announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2005: Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren for their discovery of “the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”

The winners made the unexpected discovery that inflammation in the stomach (gastritis) as well as ulceration of the stomach or duodenum (peptic ulcers) are the result, not of endogenous factors but of infection with a “corkscrew-shaped” bacterium H. pylori