Month: October 2006

Desktop bird flu test

It always come down to money. From Friday, the ability of London’s financial services industry to cope with a bird flu pandemi will be put to the test as money-oriented firms across The City (London’s financial district) check their metaphorical handkerchiefs and determine whether they are ready or not. So says a report just in from Reuters. In fact, Reuters refers to an “outbreak of a bird flu pandemic”. I’m not sure what that means, an outbreak of a pandemic…but you get the point.

The six-week desktop exercise will figure out whether Britain’s banks, insurers, stock exchange, traders and all the other suit-wearing types will be able to cope with the pandemic. It is important, of course, if a pandemic hits and no one can buy shares in the flu drug manufacturers there would be an immediate crisis. Probably best to stock up now, before they find there’s no way their braces not belt approach will be able to handle it.

Failing schools chemistry labs

School laboratory Almost £2 billion (about $3.7 billion) is needed to refurb school chemistry laboratories and help ensure British science remains viable, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. If the money is not ring-fenced vital plans to upgrade the labs will fall a quarter of a century behind government targets.

The RSC’s chief executive Richard Pike said today: ‘Our case for faster action to improve school labs, and to assign money to the task, is powerful and incontrovertible. Without something being done to address this slippage Britain could drift to the margins of world science as potential young talent goes unexploited.’ If the government fails to deliver, then this will harm the UK’s competitiveness, the RSC claims in a report on the state of Britain’s school labs, published today:

Pike adds that, ‘There is an acute national need to promote chemistry attractively and inspirationally at school. We have a duty to stimulate the science interest of young people and it is glaringly obvious that sub-standard, dull and bedraggled laboratories will sour the appeal of chemistry and deter them from engaging in the subject successfully.”

With many university chemistry departments hanging by a shoestring and most recently the physics department at Reading University facing closure, it seems timely to remind the government of the importance of science education. Without the much-need upgrades to school labs, our children will not gain the necessary skills so effectively, will not develop a love of science, and will opt for alternative careers. Ultimately, the UK’s science base and so its international competitiveness on many fronts will suffer.

Of course, with the government also intending to abandon assessed coursework for science, maybe we won’t need those labs at all.

Canary row

If you’re planning a holiday in the Canary Islands sometime in the next 10000 years you can rest assured that there isn’t likely to be a devastating collapse of the volcanic island of La Palma and an ensuing tsunami.

According to researchers in the Netherlands, La Palma is a lot more stable than is generally assumed. Jan Nieuwenhuis and his colleagues have cast doubts on pessimistic estimates of the effects of a collapse of the southwestern flank of La Palma caused by a volcanic eruption. Geologists had previously calculated that such a collapse would cause a mega tsunami that might roar across the Atlantic wreaking havoc on the US eastern seaboard, Europe, and Africa, with waves initially 650 metres high moving at 800 kilometres per hour. A tsunami on this scale could wipe New York, Boston, Lisbon, and Casablanca from the face of the map.

The findings are likely to cause something of a row among geological researchers a faction of which believe La Palma could collapse into the sea very soon indeed causing a tsunami big enough to engulf the US eastern seaboard, the exposed North African coast and countless Portuguese ports.

You can read the full story in my Spotlight column on Intute.

Teapots and the God Delusion

The God Delusion, Richard DawkinsRichard Dawkins told us in the 1970s that all organisms are nothing more than gene machines, robot zombies built by molecules we loosely know as genes to no end other than to ensure the replication of those very molecules. There is no purpose here, although Dawkins anthropomorphically endowed the genes with selfishness. Later, he extrapolated this concept of self-replicating entities to concepts, patterns of thought, that exist only in the organism we know as Homo sapiens and that are duplicated not by sex and reproduction but through communication via the systems we call culture. These self-replicating entities he referred to as memes.

It became apparent very early in the development of his meme theory that although a nursery rhyme or the concept that walking under a ladder may somehow bring one misfortune are persistent memes that can traverse the generations through repetition from parent to child and in playgrounds the world over, one meme in particular seems to have been with us since the beginning of human culture. The idea that there is a god, a creator, a supernatural entity that brought humanity and all the universe into existence purely for our benefit.

Dawkins believes this is a nonsense. Evolution teaches us that humans exist because as gene machines our ancestors were better suited to the environments they encountered and able to reproduce. Each one of us can trace our ancestry through a long-line of survivors all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion and beyond to the dawn of life on earth. However, consciousness brought with it the realisation of death, our emotional centres couldn’t cope with the death of loved ones nor the thought of our own mortality. It also brought with it curiosity about the very origins of the world and ourselves. Put the two together in the form of some kind of supernatural creator and the potential for this consciousness to persist after death and you have a good-feeling meme that explains everything and wards off the fear of death in one fell swoop.

Unfortunately, this simple meme, which may have seen our ancestors through many a dark night, spread and diverged into as many different forms as there are languages on the planet, so that today we have the Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Juddaic, Neopaganist, Jeddist, etc version of this meme and all the trouble its interpretation brings.

Dawkins wants to set the record straight, there is no “God” of the organised religions. That god is as real as the teapot that orbits the far-side of the Sun, he says. In The God Delusion he attempts to persuade the believers that the very thing on which their faith is founded is nothing more than a self-replicating cultural entity going by the name of meme.

His thesis wins him no friends among the religious and the specifics of his argument are not always accepted by science (but that’s the way of science). But, at least he’s honest. The death of religion itself, Dawkins says, would free us from the prehistoric or at best mediaevel, attitudes and rules that have shackled us for generations to the notion of an afterlife for us and our loved ones. He sees much more purpose in the beauty of life itself without resorting to a benevolent creator.

If deleting this meme from the gene machines we know as Homo sapiens were possible, we might truly see the dawn of an age of rationality in which killing because one’s imaginery friend advised one to do so was no more.

Red, red wine

How come it is next to impossible to get a red wine stain out of a white shirt, and yet as soon as inadvertently include a red shirt in with a white load in your washing machine you ended up with all those whites turning pink instead of bluey?

Can’t those dye chemists use whatever it is that makes red wine stain so well to fix the red pigment in that shirt so that it doesn’t come out in the wash?

Just a thought.

Nuclear North Korea Not

New Scientist and others are already casting doubts on whether North Korea really did detonate a nuclear device underground on Monday. The magazine points to discrepancies in the reporting of the size of the explosion as hinting that NK may have simply detonated a massive cache of conventional explosive in the hope of simulating the effects of a nuclear device.

The magazine says that the Korea Earthquake Research Centre in South Korea reported a 3.58-magnitude tremor from North Korea’s North Hamgyong province, which is equivalent to a 800 tonnes of TNT, but the Russian defence minister says the explosion was closer to 5000-15000 tonnes. By contrast, the Hiroshima bomb was estimated at 15 kilotonnes.

Scientists are frantically analysing the seismographic evidence and assessing whether or not this could have been a large conventional explosion, a failed nuclear detonation, or the claimed success that North Korea’s smiling TV correspondent claimed.

Running hot and cold

Julia Seymour, Assistant Editor at the Virginia-based Business and Media Institute emailed to tell me that despite blasting senator James Inhofe, CNN had him on ‘American Morning’ on October 3 in a debate with anchor Miles O’Brien.

According to the BandMI write-up on this debacle, “The spirited debate with Inhofe allowed viewers to get a rebuttal to O’Brien’s charge on the September 28 ‘American Morning’ that Inhofe was waging a ‘lonely battle’ against the ‘overwhelming’ evidence of global warming.”

Climate change has been a threat to sanity for decadeas, as long ago as 1895 people were warned of the coming ice age, by the 1920s a warm spell suggested the earth was getting warmer, by the 1950s, once again the earth was to be frozen. As late as 1975 we were all going to freeze according to the media hype. Global warming was on the cards as of 1981 but with a new twist, it could cause changes in the Gulf Stream as melting icebergs broke away from the frozen north and cooled the Atlantic leading to a mini ice age across the British Isles and Europe.

Today, every change the weather is blamed on global warming, every natural disaster including very dubiously earthquake-driven tsunami and even volcanic activity, and perhaps less dubiously the strength of hurricanes. By the way, if it’s a trend, why wasn’t there another Katrina this year? Could it be that Katrina wasn’t actually as powerful as it seemed and that most of the harm done was caused by inadequate defences against flooding?

AAAS is organising an online climate change debate this week. I’ve posted my questions online in advance and will report back on the results.

Trapped particles and solar energy

Spanish researchers have trapped tiny clusters of titania in the pores of zeolite. They hope to develop a new class of photovoltaic material for solar energy conversion. Ultimately, zeolite-entrapped titania will be less expensive to manufacture, tougher, and more efficient than conventional silicon-based materials.

Titania-based photovoltaics are soon to enter the solar energy market but they suffer from several drawbacks. For instance, the small size of the particles used to make the light-sensitive layer means that they are not highly electrically conductive. Moreover, at less than a few nanometres, titania particles can only be activated by deep ultraviolet light and so don’t exploit the full spectrum of sunlight. Hermenegildo García of the Polytechnic University of Valencia and colleagues hope to change all that, Although they need to improve the photo efficiency of their materials by at least an order of magnitude, the adaptability of zeolites means this should be possible.

Read on…

Women as fast as men, almost

Sexual arousalScientists in Canada have used a close relative of night-vision goggles to watch women and men become sexually aroused while watching videos. Their study reveals that arousal happens in women just as rapidly as it does in men.

“Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal,’ says Irv Binik of McGill University Health Centre.

Rather than using manual intervention or genital connections, Binik focused thermographic cameras on his subjects’ genitals while they watched a montage of material from pornography to horror movies to The Best of Mr. Bean to Canadian tourism travelogues to provide a base of control data.

During the arousal experiment, the male and female subjects watched separate sexually explicit films procured from the Kinsey Institute and determined to be sexually arousing to specific genders. They watched the images through special video goggles to minimize distractions.

Binik remotely monitored body-temperature changes to within a 100th of a degree via a computer in a different room. Both the men and the women began showing arousal within 30 seconds. The men reached maximal arousal in about ten minutes, while women took a minute or two longer.

‘In any experiment on sexual arousal done in a laboratory, there is some distraction,’ concedes Binik. ‘But compared to previous techniques involving invasive measures or electrodes, this is minimally invasive and the same measurements are used for men and women, which makes it very interesting that the data ended up being the same.’

He says they’re the same, but if women are lagging behind the men by a minute or two in reaching full arousal, that could make all the difference for some couples, surely?

Colleague Tuuli Kukkonen adds that ‘This will help diagnose and treat sexual dysfunction in women, such as female sexual arousal disorder, which is poorly understood.’ Details of the work will appear in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in January 2007.

Calcium, cola, and osteoporosis

I just posted a note over on the science news forum sciscoop about the latest research showing how women are at increased risk of osteoporosis if they are regular cola drinkers. Men don’t seem to suffer this increased risk and women are imbibe carbonated drinks other than cola are unaffected too. I suspect it is related to the high phosphoric acid levels in cola.

I remember Prof Bruce Tattershall telling his chemistry students that the only reason cola is manufactured with phosphoric acid is that adding the cheaper, and merely dibasic sulfuric, as opposed to tribasic phosphoric, acid to the ingredients list would reduce the market to zero.

It’s a shame, because it is apparently the high affinity of the phosphate ion for calcium in bones that is the underlying cause of the increased risk of osteoporosis. This doesn’t explain why men are unaffected in the study, but does point to an obvious solution for women worried about the risk. Buy cola made with sulfuric acid instead…no….stop drinking this pathological stuff altogether!