Month: June 2009

World Conference of Science Journalists in London this week, so here’s a sneak preview of the July 1 issue of SpectroscopyNOW from the David Bradley segments in celebration. Wish me luck in defending my corner against those who would smite the science writers from our midst…

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…

The Alchemist learns of a scalable cat this week as well as how the matrix is all important when it comes to identifying metabolites in a single drop of blood.

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.

Archaeologists were out in force in our village once again, this past weekend. This time their mini dig was part of our four-day Fen Edge Family Festival, for which I was one of the team of official photographers.

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.

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.

To predict the height of crests and the depths of troughs of ocean waves, scientists can turn to the well-known work of German mathematician and scientist Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. The so-called Gaussian function provides a mathematical formula from which one can determine the normal distribution of wave heights based on probability theory and statistics.

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

 

UPDATE 2022: Another sighting, this time in Wyoming, that got the BBC excited.

UPDATE 2011: Apparently, residents of Alabama saw giant “tsunami” clouds earlier this week. Well, I photographed the waves seen above from my home office window 2 or three years ago…don’t think they were heading across The Atlantic though!

Cloud appreciation…it doesn’t quite have the same image as other hobbies, rock climbing, sky diving, fell walking, fly fishing.

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 ooking 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”.

Many virologists, including Vincent Racaniello, have suggested that the threat of avian influenza (H5N1) was greatly overestimated and so distracted us from more serious threats. Back in early 2005, he suggested that another strain might underpin a pandemic, such as H2N2, it may yet do just that. In the meantime, he was essentially right in that H1N1, previously known as “swine flu” emerged in March this year in Mexico (not Asia). He suggests that we really shouldn’t underestimate viruses.

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in its weekly report on flu, suggested that the decline in infections during the last week of May in the US is important but the numbers still represent higher levels of influenza-like illness than is normal for this time of year.

Richard Besser, CDC acting director, announced on June 8 that H1N1 isn’t “going away” and suggested that some people might need to get two separate flu vaccines in the autumn. He added that the second wave of H1N1 might be more virulent than the current apparently weak phase. Of course, that’s a guess as to how the virus might evolve, there is a chance it could go either way.

As to actually getting hold of a vaccine…Hong Kong is promising that vulnerable citizens will get the jab. However, at the time of writing no vaccine against H1N1 is ready. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the end of May no vaccine was available and development could take five to six months.

Although the number of cases of the H1N1 virus has been declining in many places, health officials expect a resurgence this fall, possibly in a more severe form.

On June 5, the WHO held the third meeting of its emergency committee and agreed that future pandemic updates would include reference to the severity of an outbreak. Whether or not this would have a positive or negative impact on media reporting of any outbreak remains to be seen.

If you believe no news is good news, then the lack of updates since June 2 on the Pandemicflu.gov site has to be good, but it’s slightly worrying, from the technical point of view that the site has not added any new data or reports for a week.

More timely information for Europeans is available from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which reports 108 new cases confirmed from European countries, 284 new cases in non-European countries, and the first cases in Martinique (overseas territory France) and Dominica. (PDF report).

The first death in Pennsylvania associated with 2009 Novel Influenza A/H1N1 was reported in Berks County. Currently, the state has 269 confirmed cases and 101 probable cases of illness due to this virus. Nationally, there are 11,054 confirmed cases of A/H1N1 and 18 related deaths. Gantdaily

The BBC reported that the first case of “home-grown” swine flu in Northern Ireland had occurred.

However, the WHO has the last word explaining that it is once again on the verge of declaring a genuine pandemic as the disease spreads through Australia. we’ve been sitting at Phase V (the one below pandemic VI) for weeks now. But, even jumping to Phase VI doesn’t actually mean that the disease has become any more severe that it was.

Pandemic status is all to do with incidence and little to do with virulence. The WHO says that, “by going to phase six, what this would mean is that the spread of the virus continues and activity has become established in at least two regions in the world.” In other words the Americas and Australia. Nothing more, nothing less.

WHO has just reported that totals are 27737 cases of H1N1 one with 141 deaths in 74 countries, with Africa so far largely unaffected.