Month: March 2016

A press release that’s on the wires today talks about software that can create a realistic acoustic soundscape of Brazilian birdsong. It can peck at a feed from the microblogging platform Twitter, so it essentially tweets your tweets…here’s the software in action. It’s experimental, but has both artistic and aesthetic merit, perhaps in royalty-free, non-repeating acoustic architecture and ambient sounds etc…

It’s a quarter of a century since my wife and I snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef and learned about the biggest organism having the biggest orgasm (a concept that led to my first award-winning (runner-up that year, winner the next with an article about sperm and eggs) article back in 1990), seems things have changed for the worse Down Under though…

http://www.nullbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-35914009

Maybe one day, I’ll republish that early article of mine…it took so long to write, not including the four months touring Australia.

Here’s a scanned copy from the old RSC magazine Gas Jar of that article, which was entitled The Barrier Method.

No, it’s not April Fool’s Day just yet, scientists really have invented a solar panel material that not only generates electricity when it’s sunny but also uses the energy in falling raindrops to generate power too.

Qunwei Tang, Xiaopeng Wang, Peizhi Yang, and Benlin He describe a a solar cell that is triggered by both rain and shine in the journal Angewandte Chemie this week. It works by “combining an electron-enriched graphene electrode with a dye-sensitized solar cell. The new solar cell can be excited by incident light on sunny days and raindrops on rainy days,” the team reports. The concept, they say, will guide the design of all-weather solar cells.

Tang, Q., Wang, X., Yang, P. and He, B. (2016), A Solar Cell That Is Triggered by Sun and Rain. Angew. Chem.. doi:10.1002/ange.201602114

It’s not every day one receives a press release that drops the F-word, you know, the fourth component of the phrase Fight, Flight, Feed or…

But, this just in, according to Norwegian sexologist health psychologist, you’re apparently never too old to do what it is that the birds and the bees allegedly do. Bente Træen says “sixty is the new sexy” in an article of that title published in Universitas (Norway’s biggest student newspaper), the sensitive subjects of vaginal dryness and erectile dysfunction get a mention in the strapline, but so does the notion that seniors know about the art of coitus. Well, yes they do, it’s not like our generation invented it, is it? But, later in the article the ligatured prof is quoted as saying:

You are never too old to f*ck

Now, if the image of your parents or grandparents making whoopie has now sprung into your head unannounced, tough luck! Bente points out that the younger generation’s issues with older folk having sex in the twilight of their years is a broader problem for society, medicine, nursing homes… “Older adults are perceived as asexual, but have the same need for sexual closeness as everyone else,” she told Universitas. She points out that Viagra (and presumably other erotically helpful products) are far too expensive for infamously cashstrapped pensioners and says it should be available on prescription.

She also says that widowed silver surfers are out in force these days on the internet dating sites. Youngsters often imagine that the net is just for them, but this is not the case. The Internet has made sex more accessible than ever, she says.

For the record, the prof will be 58 in October this year…

Thanks to Vanessa Spedding for highlighting this article in my Facebook feed.

Among the perennially popular items on this blog over the years have been the items about the freezing point and the boiling point of water and how they are affected by dissolving salts or other solutes in it or raising and lowering the air pressure. It’s an evergreen topic on the science curriculum and I suspect a lot of the tens of thousands of visitors who hit the site searching for the topic are students hoping to get a grip on their chemistry homework or physics assignment.

Anyway, the wonderful infographic chemistry blog Compound Interest has done a nice chart on the topic too, which covers the important points about pressure and solutes. Do check out Andy’s graphic and the rest of his blog, and his book.

I recently (9th March) wrote about a new type of chemical bond for Chemistry World, specifically, the bond is a novel type of hydrogen bond that hooks up a B-H to the pi electrons in a benzene ring.

Interesting chemically, certainly.

But, intriguingly this news item has kind of gone viral, at least relative to the other news stories I’ve written for the magazine over the years (previous ones have been popular, but this is a notch above those as far as I can tell from the publicly available figures Twitter, Feedly, Muckrack and Facebook are showing me).

I will be discussing this in more detail in my forthcoming Comment column on Materials Today for those who are interested.

I wonder whether my original headline would have been less or more popular: Bond’s aromatic strength raises non-classical spectre”

You may have seen a blurb about how wonderful schools are in Finland, you almost certainly will have done it’s being shared widely on social media…again. The blurb talks of no uniforms, of no inspections, no tests, no fees. The Finnish question has been discussed endlessly since about 1996 when the first signs of the country’s success with it’s (then) 17 year-old reforms but it was in 2000 and then about three years ago when the OECD took a look at Finnish education that this particular blurb started to circulate. In 2011 The Independent was asking what we might learn from the Finns. The BBC reported that the UK was second in Europe and sixth overall in the world (reception to higher counted). South Korea, three other Asian countries and Finland made up the top 5 globally in 2014. But, just a year or so later it was suggesting that things aren’t quite the way they seem.

First off, the blurb’s inherent criticism of our education system of tests and inspections it is rarely mentioned that the school population in Finland is just 600,000 compared with 7 million in England and Wales. More worryingly though is that Finland’s position in the upper echelons of the educational league tables is apparently in a bit of a decline (not a sharp one but it has dropped, The Economist reported on PISA results in 2013 showing this) and there is really no way of knowing whether what it achieved at its peak was down to the reforms or a legacy of the earlier system. It might also be (unlikely though) that they simply have good genes. I remember similar discussions about the Romanian education system in the news back in the early 1980s, whatever happened to their success story with pupils not learning to read until they’re 8 years old.

But, if education with discipline, uniforms, tests and answerability doesn’t work, then how come the private schools outperform so many of the state schools across England and Wales? There is no utopian system that will serve all pupils perfectly, but complaints and comparisons don’t necessarily help…just look at the NHS and BBC, it’s almost as if they’re beint fitted up to be shut down by people who hate those institutions, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine that somebody somewhere doesn’t like the idea of a free education for all and would prefer to receive a dividend on their shares in a school to be remitted for every A-C GCSE received and a bonus on every A*…isn’t that what all this free school and academy malarkey is heading towards, analogously to the formation of hospital trusts and the like? Again, it’s as if somebody, somewhere doesn’t have any respect for teachers or doctors…

At least that’s one thing you can say about Finland, they do hold their teachers in high esteem as trusted professionals.

Viruses, trojans and other malware that infect your computers and mobile devices can be painful, putting your system out of action, using up all your system resources to act as a zombie member of a botnet etc, etc. They’re best avoid. Active and up to date antivirus software and a strong Firewall are key. Also scanning any file you download with a range of AV programs using VirusTotal is probably a good idea. No protection is 100%, but other than going unplugged and offline you’re always going to be at some risk.

One of the most insidious forms of malware is ransomware. This usually exists for criminal gain. Once your equipment is infected the ransomware will restrict access, disable system restore and locking up all your data files (your documents, photos, mp3s etc) with strong encryption. The only way out is to pay the ransom (which will inevitably make you a target for more unwanted attention). There are some ways to get your files unlocked without paying if you have been infected with an older strain of malware. But, you should assume in the first instance that generally you won’t get your files back without paying, and even then who’s to say that the crims will honour their side of the deal?

So, the prognosis once infected is bad. Prevention is the way forward. There is lots of advice online about not clicking on links in emails. There are notes about disabling the transfer of programs (exe files) in emails (default in Google Mail). And, there are instructions on setting your computer’s permissions and policies to stop files running from the specific areas of your machine in which ransomware is usually deposited. More advice here.

The best piece of advice though, before you get infected is to back up all your data, all your photos, your documents and spreadsheets, any file you created in whatever program that you don’t want to lose. This is general advice that will save you heartache if your hard drive fails too, of course. But, here’s the important thing, you must backup to an external drive and then unplug it, or backup to a network drive but make sure it isn’t mapped to a drive letter on your machine. And, just for a belt and braces approach, backup to a cloud storage service. Any files you modify and any new files you create should be added to that backup too.

Do it now. Go and backup your files!

Hacking isn’t all about some spotty dude in his dingy bedroom frantically tapping away at multiple computers and breaking into the Pentagon’s mainframe. Anyone with half-decent acting skills and a few fragments of your personal data could con your phone company or internet provider to hand over additional personal details.

They might then that extra information to escalate the social engineering to the next level. They might ultimately accumulate enough information – email, passwords, birthday, address, to break into your Facebook account, empty your bank account or even steal your whole identity. Given the potential gullibility of an honest and innocent staff member confronted by an agitated caller with a crying baby in earshot, what could you possibly do to protect against this kind of hack?

Complicated, hard to remember passwords, two-factor authentication and never telling anyone your pornstar name (Mother’s maiden name and name of first pet) isn’t sufficient to protect you against someone else’s gullibility to a vishing attack (voice phishing). Watch the video from about 2 minutes in for a classic bit of vishing.

It’s been a long time coming, and we’re still not quite there yet, but the Sciencebase Facebook page should reach 10000 fans in the next few days at the current rate of growth. I say “reach”, but as anyone with a Facebook page knows “reach” is an ephemeral thing. You can post a fascinating science news item with a wonderful photo and facebook sends it to just 1 or 2% of your fans, the people who like, the page, engagement is then essentially zero, with maybe one or two people “liking” the item, one or two comments and a handful of clickthroughs to the original piece (thank you if you’re among that number). By contrast, post something about bacon or cats with an awful, blurred photo and it will get to almost everyone and attract endless comments, although still a small proportion of total fans.

Now, your Facebook page gives you, as admin, some so-called insights. I can tell you that the total number of Sciencebase fans online on any given day of the week, including weekends, amounts to about 80% of the total fanbase. At any given time of the day, it’s between 21 and 32% and the numbers vary throughout the day with an almost identical pattern, the lower percentage being between midnight (Pacific Time) and 7am, with a minor spike from them until 8am and then a steady increase until 4pm and then a steady fall to midnight levels. I suppose this reflects daily lifestyle patterns averaged over all Sciencebase fans across the globe (23% USA, 21% India 10% UK, 5% Egypt, 3% Pakistan, 3% Mexico, 2% Brazil, 2% Philippines 2% Iran 2% Canada…) I see pretty much exactly the same daily proportions and global distribution on an unrelated page for which I am also an admin that has a similar number of fans. It’s almost as if all the activity is programmed and not real people…or simply reflecting when Facebook’s apps connect on a schedule.

The engagement, the number of likes and shares, the comments and such are usually very low…with an occasional spike. Maybe I’m simply not posting sufficiently interesting stuff that anyone cares about – recently infrared fibre-optic lasers, revealing ancient Romano-Egyptian mummy art, revolutionary pyramidal chemistry, news about fixing Parkinson’s disease and understanding stroke treatment…all sounds a bit tame compared to bacon and cats, wouldn’t you agree?