Month: October 2016

Forget season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…round these ‘ere parts it’s the season of sugarbeet mountains. Local farm just harvested 200 acres of these root vegetables and they’re sitting in a massive heap at the edge of a field waiting to be loaded up on to 30-tonners and dispatched to the sugar works at either Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk or Wissington in Norfolk, apparently; the latter being the biggest sugar refinery in the UK.

Roughly speaking, the mound of sugarbeets was basically a truncated cone with a base of approximately 30-40 metres diameter and about 3 metres high, at a quick guess 1500 cubic metres. As a guess, they’d pack in the heap at 100 beets per cubic metre…so that’s a pile of maybe 150,000 or so, 1 kilo each, 150 tonnes…so 50 lorry loads. Sound about right?

Ironically, given their name, sugarbeet aren’t particularly rich in sugar (compared to sugar cane), at least according to a couple in a Range Rover on the farm whom I probed to find out more about this sweet mountain. I’d assumed that 20 beets were needed to make a kilo bag of sugar, the woman reckoned two or three times that. So, that mountain would be refined to 3000 bags…with the residue being used as a bulking agent for livestock food.

We’d need tens of thousands of sugarbeet farmers to sate our sweet tooth, but imported sugarcane is about 90% of our sugar supply. The beet balance is probably a few thousand farms averaging 200-acres, although obviously some will be bigger and some smaller. British Sugar says there are actually 4000 farms producing 8 million tonnes of sugarbeet annually. So my Fermi calculation wasn’t too far off, I don’t think…feel free to correct my agricultural assumptions.

Security experts have discovered a way to inject malicious code into Windows 10, and presumably any other active version of the operating system. The process, which they have nicknamed “Atombombing”, does not rely on exploiting bugs or bad code in the OS and simply works through the way in which the OS is designed and functions. As such, it circumvents security software and there can be no way to patch the OS unless the vulnerable sections of code are redesigned.

Great.

This discovery reinforces the need for users to be more savvy about how they use their computers and to not stick USBs in their ports willy nilly, to make sure they have a malware-advisory plugin running to prevent them visiting dodgy websites and to not download software or other digital goods from pirate sites.

Ensilo explains the exploit as being associated with atom tables, this is an underlying Windows mechanism which allows applications to store and access data. Windows’ atom tables also share data between applications. “What we found is that a threat actor can write malicious code into an atom table and force a legitimate program to retrieve the malicious code from the table,” Ensilo says. “We also found that the legitimate program, now containing the malicious code, can be manipulated to execute that code.”

Malicious code might be software that renders your computer unusable, deletes your photos and documents, encrypts them and demands a ransom for their release, or makes your PC into a zombie running other malware as part of a botnet, such as those used to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the internet to shut down web sites or allow hackers to gain entry to password vaults or bank client lists.

Your home town is being ravaged by artillery fire from friend and foe alike, the outskirts have been littered with landmines, there are snipers and suicide bombers on almost every torn-apart street corner. Your significant other and your two middle children are buried under six feet of breeze blocks and rubble.

You’re scraping around through the heat and the dust trying to find food and fresh water for your surviving kids. Shelter, there is none. The refugee camp is miles away and the road is long and the hazards are many and potentially lethal.

Somebody offers an escape route for one of your children – just one – you have the dollars. Which child do you send with this stranger, the strapping 17-year old lad who will probably be able to fend for himself if only he can get to mainland Europe and maybe wonderful, hospitable Britain…or your 4-year old daughter?

Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Maybe one day your son will come back for you and your daughter, when the fighting is over…maybe.

Okay…as a wannabe rockstar and record producer, my ears are important…as are yours, of course. I’ve always felt that I could hear slightly better with my left ear (listening to music on headphones highlighted this) but in mixing music it’s not been apparent over the last few years, so maybe they evened out. I do notice that I sometimes struggle to hear conversation in noisy environments, but doesn’t everybody. Anyway, rather than taking a trip into town for a hearing test, I thought I’d some preliminary investigations online. There are lots of sites offering online checkups, although they all stress that none is a substite for a proper asessement.

The first one I looked at was from Beltone and played recorded voices saying words and numbers in each ear with varying levels of background noise (white noise or a crowd of people talking). I had assumed it would be different sine wave tones like in the schooldays tests from the 1970s). It told me my hearing was fine, although I misheard a couple of words spoken with the test track’s American accepts…cars distinctly sounded like cones, for instance. So, I searched for ones with an English accent instead.

The Hear-It site had a simple test (received pronunication of numbers in groups of three with varying background white noise levels) and I scored 97% with my right ear and 92% with my left (the opposite of what I’d expected). Either way, the site says no problems and no benefit to having hearing aids, which is good news although not entirely anticipated, to be honest. So two tests think my hearing is fine.

The third test asked a series of questions about whether you hear well in noisy places or when people talk quietly. The actual audio tests had an American accent again, and the word “pup” really did sound like she was saying “puh”, even when I recalibrated my headphones and turned up the volume. But overall the results were fine.

The next test from Amplifon played snippets of conversation with different background noise environments (restaurant, station, noisy home, concert hall) and all sounded clear. However, the mix of the voices and the background noise had too much separation and simply sounded like voices overdubbed on to sound effects, unrealistic in other words. The Widex test had numbers and white noise and some warbling tones that you had to adjust to as low as was still audible, again fine for me. UKHhearingCare tested hearing with a few questions, gets you to calibrate your headphones and then plays warbling tones at 1, 2, 3, 4 kilohertz (kHz), all good. Not particularly sophisticated though.

The Phonak site’s online hearing test is a bit flashier than the others and asks a lot of questions as well as playing test tones. Intriguingly, one of the questions is “Do you have trouble hearing high-pitched sounds such as birds singing?” Well, how would you know, unless you knew for sure there were active songbirds around? Nevertheless, the pitch tests came back good, no problems.

The NHS site recommends the test on hearinglosscheck.org from , so I did that one too. Numbers read out by an English, female voice against white noise backgrounds. Results were fine, no indication of hearing loss.

There are countless other sites, commonly from hearing aid companies, but from this quick survey they are mostly the same: a few questions (but not always) about your perception of your own hearing and then tones played or words spoken against background noise that you listen to on your headphones and click answers to get an assessment. Anyway, seems like my hearing is fine, although if conversations get sticky it’s any 50-something’s perogative to feign deafness isn’t it? Now, turning it back up to 11 and rocking out…

It’s 36 years since German-born John Bannister Goodenough (now 94 years old) demonstrated a practical rechargeable lithium ion battery at Oxford University the successors of which let you argue with people you don’t know on the other side of the world and look at blurred photos of their food while sitting in the pub with your wife…and for some reason he hasn’t won a Nobel Prize. Goodenough is currently (pardon the pun) a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at The University of Texas at Austin and still very much active.

He was interviewed today on BBC Radio 4 Today by John Humphrys and you could almost hear Humphry’s brain blow a fuse when Goodenough mentioned the word “electrolyte”. It’s as if such an exotic word is entirely beyond someone like Humphrys…it’s not…I wonder whether he was given a short brief explaining Goodenough’s invention in simple terms perhaps with a neat glossary, it wouldn’t have been so hard and it might be useful next time he has to banter with a battery prof.

I was rather hoping to hear Goodenough announce the discovery of an entirely new fundamental physical phenomenon that would recharge portable and vehicle power, he didn’t but he did say that recent iterations in battery understanding and materials would spark new technology in about five years time – longer charge times, longer lasting batteries, batteries that don’t come with the risk of burning a hole in your pocket (in the literal and figurative sense).

You should, if you’ve paid your TV licence, be able to listen to the interview on iPlayer.

Deep vein thrombosis formation of a blood clot (thrombus) within a major blood vessel carrying blood back to the heart.

DVTs often occur in the deep veins of the legs. Symptoms of the clot itself may not be apparent, although signs and symptoms of DVT from NHS website may include:

• Pain
• Swelling and tenderness in one of your legs (usually in the calf)
• A heavy ache in the affected area
• Warm skin in the affected area
• Red skin, particularly at the back of your leg below the knee

Any one of these symptoms alone, particularly if it is acute may be due to another cause, muscle injury, post-exercise soreness, insect bite, allergic reaction. Also, you’d expect a DVT to be present in only one leg in the same position so aching in both calves is more likely to have another cause. However, DVT is a serious condition and can lead to pulmonary embolism wherein a fragment of the blood clot breaks off into the bloodstream and blocks one of the blood vessels in the lungs, signs of which are chest pain and breathlessness. About 1 in 10 people with an untreated DVT suffer a pulmonary embolism.

DVT is more common in the over-40s although there are numerous risk factors that can also affect younger people: family history, long-term inactivity (hospitalisation, long-haul flight, illness etc), blood vessel injury, lifelong smoking, lack of exercise, cancer treatment, heart and lung disease, thrombophilia and Hughes syndrome, obesity, pregnancy. There are several diagnostics available to your doctor for DVT and once confirmed anticoagulant drugs might be prescribed of which there are several newer alternatives to the well-known warfarin. Your doctor may also prescribe compression stockings to reduce symptoms.

There is no evidence to suggest that taking aspirin will reduce your risk of DVT. However, the NHS has some tips on how you can genuinely reduce your risk of developing DVT.

Melanie Windbridge has put together a wonderful tome describing her search for the perfect aurora. A plasma physicist by trade, Windbridge is Business Development Manager for the fusion start-up Tokamak Energy, and believes that science and exploration go hand in hand.

In Aurora, Windridge explores the visual beauty, the ancient myths and legends, and, of course, the science. She also reveals what I’ve always known was something of a dirty little secret…as far as natural phenomena go you really do get the brightest view from behind a camera. Of course, you still have to find them to take the photograph, in the first place.

I first encountered Mateusz Mucha when he put together a website that let you track your blood pressure (a boon for both hypo- and hyper-tensives as well as hypochondriacs). He has now expanded his repertoire and built a collection of useful scientific calculators, here are just a few of them with Mucha’s own descriptions:

• Significant figures calculator performs math operations on measurements and produces results with a correct precision. Especially helpful in chemistry.
• Compound interest calculator shows the impact of exponential growth, which is often underestimated.
• Probability calculator shows how often events occur in real time. It’s even more fun if you realise the calculator solves for any value, so you can check for example “if A or B occurs in 15% of cases and B’s chance is 5%, what’s the chance of A happening?”
• Ohm’s Law calculator has obvious practical uses for the resistance movement.
• Volume calculator lets us quickly find out how large something really is.

  Apart from the science-oriented calculators, he also has several others, such as a gross margin calculator, a calculator to work out which addiction would most reduce your life expectancy, one to calculate how much weight you could lose by playing Pokemon GO or whether it’s better to buy a larger pizza or two smaller ones. Mucha confesses that, “surprisingly to some and just sadly to realists – the most popular is the percentage calculator, which…well…does exactly what it says.”

  There were a couple of others which Mucha recommends: One that displays what happens in the world every second or every century and one that works how much money you could save if you quit smoking (or indeed any of those other addictions that might shorten your life and empty your bank account).

I think I probably first knew the term “sun dogs” courtesy of a book by Robert Greenler entitled “Rainbows, Haloes and Glories” back in the 1980s, but it was in the Rush song Chain Lightning when I first took notice of the term and started spotting them in the sky. Sun dogs are sometimes known as mock suns or phantom suns, although the scientific term is parhelia (singular parhelion). They are an atmospheric (as opposed to astronomical) phenomenon and usually come in pairs, although often conditions mean you will only see one. Anyway, there was a single sundog visible not long after sunrise this morning, which I snapped from our bedroom window.

Sundogs are essentially bright spots (often resembling a fragment of rainbow) either side of the Sun and sometimes you will also see a luminous ring known as a 22° halo that rarely interconnects them fully. They can be seen anywhere in the world in any season and are due to the interaction of sunlight with ice crystals high in the atmosphere. You will most commonly see them when the sun is close to the horizon (after dawn and before dusk in other words), but sometimes you will ge a full halo around the sun when it is higher in the sky (Only ever seen that once, on Rhossili beach, Gower at about 2pm).

That Rush lyric:

Sun dogs fire on the horizon
Meteor rain stars across the night
This moment may be brief
But it can be so bright