Mercury in Transit – Music

UPDATE: 11 November 2019 – Another transit of Mercury

My latest song, inspired by the recent transit of the planet Mercury across the Sun and the thoughts that evoked. Mercury, the winged Messenger of the Gods of Roman mythology (Hermes to the Greeks) has been there as a warning sign again and again, evolving, revolving in transition…the pressure is on, things are heating up, the mercury is rising, we must take heed for the sake of the planet and for the sake of the people.

mercury-in-transit-468px
Mercury in Transit

With wings on your heels and solar wind in your hair
You dance across the face of Sol, No time for subtle scares
A message to the world it seems, the one that doesn’t care
Will they listen to your warning in transition they appear

“What comes around, comes around,” you tell them as you fade
Evolving, revolving, spinning out your day
You wonder why nobody cares, nor listens to a word you say
Your message told above the clouds, it’s a price they’ll have to pay

In transition, in transition, moving on
In transition, in transition, counting on
a transition to a better world the journey comes undone
But the mercury is rising, so it’s time to look beyond the sun

No wind in your sails, and death around them draped
You travel ‘cross the ocean waves the torment to escape
The message from the world: a life you’ll have to scrape
And never heed the warning of transition taking shape

“What’s going down’s going down!” you cry out as a slave
Churning, returning, the sea becomes your grave
You wonder why nobody cares, nor offers any word to save
Your message lost below the sea a crisis for the brave
Your message lost below the sea a price no one should crave

In transition, in transition, moving on
In transition, in transition, counting on
a transition to a better life the journey comes undone
And the mercury is rising, so it’s time to watch
beyond the sun (look beyond the sun)


 

 

Mercury in transit

Wings on your heels, solar wind in your hair
You dance across the face of Sol
No message, no concern
for Earthly human cares

#mercurytransit

My astro buddy Paul Sutherland of Skymania.com got some spectacular shots from his home in Deal, Kent, England. This one shows the early stages of the transition, Mercury is the dark grey dot, as opposed to the pale blue dot towards the western edge of the Sun’s disc.

mercury-transit

Here’s another shot of the 9th May 2016 transit of the planet Mercury crossing the face of the Sun taken by Pete G with an 8″ Dobsonian telescope and a Canon G16 Power Shot digital camera.

May 9th Mercury Transit across the sun

Dunnock courtship

The courtship ritual of the Dunnock (Prunella modularis) is peculiar. I observed a pair on the lawn in our garden last week while I was sitting at the garden table working at my laptop. The female had raised her tail feathers and was fluttering them up and down rapidly while the male pecked repeatedly at her rear end, well her cloaca to be more specific. It went on for a minute or two until they both flew up quickly into a hedge, presumably to mate.

It’s not a ritual I’d observed before and Googled the bird to discover that female dunnocks are quite promiscuous. The pecking of the cloaca by the male is thought to stimulate rejection of sperm from a previous male’s mating and so increase the chances of the new mate fathering her offspring.

In my garden observations I could have sworn I could see something curved and white protruding from the female, an egg, perhaps. So maybe the male’s pecking stimulates her to lay an egg outside the nest before he takes her back to mate. Either way, it’s apparently not an entirely efficient paternity-assurance strategy as genetic testing of dunnock broods has revealed that the female can lay eggs fertilised by several males.

I only had my phone to hand so this is awful footage and the voyeuristic blackbird is a distraction.

Zika virus as a pale blue dot

Detailed animation of the Zika virus

Plenty has been said elsewhere as this visualisation has already featured in New Scientist, the Los Angeles Times and Mashable, but Visual Science asked me to take a look and it’s nice enough to share.

The model is part of Visual Science’s Viral Park project, which also includes models of HIV, influenza A/H1N1, Ebola, papilloma, and adenovirus virions.  It is the most accurate model of the Zika viral particle currently available based on structural bioinformatics and reflecting current understanding of the viral architecture with 360 distinct surface protein structures, the lipid envelope, and the likely structure of genetic material in complex with capsid proteins.

Native bluebells

Hyacinthoides non-scripta, the common bluebell is native to the British Isles and is now in competition with the Spanish variety. You can smell the difference as the native bluebell has a scent, the Spanish doesn’t, hybrids have some scent but it is not as strong as the native species.

native-bluebells

Visually, the petals of the bell in the native species are curled back at the tips and all hang from one side of the stem giving rise to a characteristic droop. This is not seen in the Spanish strain which are more erect as the bells emerge from around the circumference of the stem, the hybrids only droop a little. Pictured are native bluebells growing in our garden. Usually, this flower will carpet a woodland in Spring just ahead of the temperatures rising, the days getting longer and leaves emerging to form the perennial deciduous canopy of trees.

We have a few pink bluebells too and some white ones, not to be confused with the three-cornered leek, Allium triquetrum, apparently.

The Callendar Effect

In the 1930s,  an English steam engineer and inventor by the name of Guy Stewart Callendar had got wind of the possible manifestation of a physical phenomenon first mentioned a century earlier by French mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, global warming. Fourier and others after him including John Tyndall (who demonstrated the effect) and Svante Arrhenius (who quantified it) showed that certain gases, particularly water vapour and carbon dioxide, have a particular absorption pattern for heat – they are greenhouse gases, as we know them today – and could affect the way in which our planet absorbs and reflects energy from the sun.

callendar

An increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would, said Callendar in his 1938 paper, lead to an increase in the planet’s surface temperature. His calculations suggested a 0.003 degrees Celsius rise each year for the previous 50 years, but actual observations from 200 weather stations suggested that rise had in fact been higher, 0.005. Global warming was real, although not given that name until much later.

At the time, Callendar hoped that global warming, the Callendar effect would keep us warm when the next natural ice age emerged! Oh, the irony. From that time onwards, the coming ice age was our biggest natural threat until at least the late 1960s, soon after Callendar’s death, in fact. Today, Callendar’s calculations have held up and then some, global warming and its impact on climate are our biggest worries, with no sign of a new ice age. Indeed, we are still in the previous ice age so there may well be a natural as well as an anthropogenic warming to come.

You can read Callendar’s complete paper as a PDF here. Interestingly, the paper includes the dialogue between Callendar and his peers. I assume such inline peer review was standard practice back then and something science has lost since and is only just starting to reinvent through online discussion and post-publication peer review.

How to avoid mosquito bites

EarthSky has three tips for reducing your risk of being bitten by mosquitoes. The first is to recognize that mossies are most active during dusk and dawn and to make sure you stay away from the damp and humid places where they might be buzzing.

biting-mosquito

Secondly, don’t exercise or do anything strenuous during the periods the bitey critters are most active as they are attracted to carbon dioxide and will spot you puffing and panting and stick it to you.

Thirdly, wear light clothes, mosquitoes home in on dark surfaces more keenly than light colours. That said, I’d recommend not wearing yellow, which attracts other putative biters and flies and looks awful on 99% of people anyway, QEII excepted, of course.

My own tip, I also found that I got bitten less by mossies when I’d been drinking tomato juice on Mediterranean holidays…this is pure anecdote and anecdote does not equal evidence. Nevertheless, it’s a good excuse for a Bloody Mary or two. If you do get bitten switch to gin and tonic for the quinine…it won’t stop you getting malaria, but will make you forget about the itching.

The EarthSky feature can be found here.

The antibacterial world of steampunk

Brass is the well-known alloy of copper and zinc, enamoured of Victorian engineers and modern-day steampunk fans. If one is to be as bold as brass, one might say where there’s muck there’s brass. One might be brassed off or be courageously insolent having the brass neck to say what is on one’s mind. Yet, one might not be worth a brass farthing although one can get down to brass tacks when one gets down to business working for the top brass. Of course, if there’s a real chill in the air one would certainly know that it’s cold enough to cause serious dislocation of the orbs from a brass primate.

As bold as brass

Anyway…brass was with us for so many years that we have so many sayings is what I am alluding to. It was the “go to” alloy when we didn’t want a spark, in an era before steel had come and gone and come again. It was common when the “tin” of fizzy drinks cans aluminium, was still rare and still considered a relatively precious metal. The pyramidal peak of the Washington Monument is capped with aluminium and the famously misnamed Statute of Eros, actually Anteros, in Piccadilly Circus, London, is also aluminium. But, back to the brass, switches, cogs and wheels, all doused in a veil of steam, all hard wearing, handles and knobs, fitments and fittings, ornaments and much more. Like I say, the favourite alloy and ally of the steampunks who imagine a world where Victorian technology progressed to the state of technology today but bypassed the electronics age and clung to the clunking and clanking of regulators and relays…all gleaming brass and polished walnut and not a dot of silicon other than between their toes as silica sand when they step from their candy stripe seaside bathing machines.

metropolis-steampunk-lodestar

A conversation with musical friends whose surname is by chance “Brass” saw me double checking that brass is indeed Cu-Zn and not Cu-Sn (What was I thinking? They would know, for sure!) Of course, it is not pure copper and zinc, it can contain aluminium, arsenic, manganese, and phosphorus and have a varying formula that deviates from the three parts copper to two parts zinc standard. We were musing on a band name for when they perform together – CuZn, Copper-Zinc, Brassed Off, Brass Tax…but, in checking (on Wiki, where you only check facts you already know for certain) I re-learned that brass is not only a non-sparking alloy, but it is also an antimicrobial material.

Copper clue

It is the copper that endows brass with its microbicidal properties and it is lethal to many pathogens within minutes or hours depending on germ abundance. Although we had known this for centuries, it was not until 1983 that Phyllis J. Kuhn published details of the antibacterial effects of brass doorknobs. The copper causes membrane damage to bacteria, which is always a good way to kill them off.

Now, I thought I’d had a novel brainwave. In this age of bacterial resistance and hospital superbugs, might we not take a leaf from the steampunk manual and refit hospital doors, beds and rails, food trays and other equipment with brass handles to help halt the spread of MRSA and C difficile and their ilk. Well, it seems that in 2007, US Department of Defense’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) had already had this thought and tested copper alloys for replacement fittings in several hospitals with great success, particularly in intensive care units. Preliminary data published in 2011, revealed that the “coppered” hospital rooms had a 97% reduction in pathogen levels compared to standard rooms. More importantly though this translated to a reduction (40% lower risk) in hospital-acquired infections, a leading cause of subsequent morbidity and mortality in patients. The critical point to note is that bacteria are unlikely to resist the lethality of sufficient copper, it will, so to speak, always burst their bubble.

A brassy future

A quick scan of the biomedical literature reveals that copper alloys are being investigated widely now for antibacterial applications. And while titanium and other metals have also been investigated as alternative alloying metals to the zinc of our old friend brass, it seems that many studies show that coppering up and not relying on stainless steel and plastics which mostly lack antibacterial activity, could be the way forward. To my mind though, they should throw out the titanium, ban the silicon smart phone, and kickstart with our brass toecaps a steampunk revolution. I’m sure Lovelace and Babbage were on to something with their brass computers and their hands were always so clean.

Have we got the brass neck to try?

References

Kuhn, Phyllis J. (1983) Doorknobs: A Source of Nosocomial Infection? Diagnostic Medicine
Schmidt, MG (2011) BMC Proceedings 5: O53. doi: 10.1186/1753-6561-5-S6-O53
Eser, OK et al Curr Microbiol. 2015 Aug;71(2):291-5. doi: 10.1007/s00284-015-0840-8
Farraris, S, Spriano, S Mater Sci Eng C Mater Biol Appl. 2016 Apr 1;61:965-78. doi: 10.1016/j.msec.2015.12.062
Muller, MP, MacDougall C, Lim M, J Hosp Infect. 2016 Jan;92(1):7-13. doi: 10.1016/j.jhin.2015.09.008
Ma, Z et al, J Mater Sci Mater Med. 2016 May;27(5):91. doi: 10.1007/s10856-016-5698-1

You can read the news version of this blog post in my Research Highlights column on ChemistryViews.org. You can find out more about the pictured band Metropolis here and more about my C5 band, which features Rog and Jo Brass here.

Why we love music

Before I’d finished the first chapter two wonderful facts and interpretations had leaped out from the pages of Powell’s book. First, The Star Spangled Banner [shouldn’t it have a hyphen? Ed.] is sung to the tune of The Anacreontic Song, which is basically (second verse anyway) the 17th Century equivalent of Ian Dury’s Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll with its lines:

And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me to entwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine

And then Powell refers to the “gentle poetry” of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades and the “gritty realism” of Donny Osmond’s Puppy Love. Now, that’s class in non-fictional writing I’d say.

I cry each night my tears for you
My tears are all in vain

vs.

If you like to gamble, I tell you I’m your man,
You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me

Anyway, Powell’s book is a perfect match for the sciencebase site – songs and science – in John Powell’s latest book: “Why We Love Music: From Mozart to Metallica” out 5th May and available to order now.

From the book’s blurb: “Why does music affect you so profoundly? It impacts the way you think, talk, feel, behave and even spend money. With his conversational style, humour, and endless knowledge, scientist and musician John Powell showcases fascinating studies – for example that shoppers spend more money in stores that play classical music and, even more astounding, they are more likely to buy German wine in stores playing German music. With chapters on music and emotions, music as medicine, music and intelligence, and much more, Why We Love Music will entertain through to the very last page.”

Full review to follow…

In the meantime, here’s Dr Powell explaining wind instruments with beer, scissors and a straw

why-we-love-music