Author: David Bradley

Rush Natural Science

Rush natural science, photo by David BradleyEarlier this week, I went to see “one” of my childhood musical heroes, progressively rocking Canadian three piece Rush. The band was on top form as ever and the crowd jostled to the music almost in synchrony like so many atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) as the band raised the energy levels. They played most of their latest album, covering themes of humanism and faith without religion as well as resurrecting some stonkers from their vast back catalogue including the epic Natural Science from 1980 album Permanent Waves.

It was just before that album came out, 78-79, that I first got into Rush, perhaps it’s no coincidence, that the technicality of their music appealed to my early noodlings on the guitar while the content of their lyrics, which aren’t so much sword and sorcery as science and nature, appealed to my inner geek. Not the more usual sex, and drugs, and rock & roll for the maturing Rush of late 1970s, more the cynical take on our place in the world, with tracks such as the aforementioned Natural Science discussing the balance between the natural and the synthetic world and how integrity of purpose could allow us to reach an equilibrium between control and understanding through science.

Science and Rush were always a likely match. They did a song called Chemistry, after all, and a two-part conceptual epic spread over two albums about the black hole Cygnus X-1, and guitarist Alex Lifeson is on record as being quite a science fan. I’m quite proud of the sheer coincidence that not long after I published an article about earthshine, drummer and lyricist Neil Peart saw fit to write about that very subject as an allegory of the public perception of our inner selves. But, it’s no coincidence that Rush generally top the ubergeek’s playlist.

In fact, just for fun here’s a few other scientifically minded fans of the band: Paul May, chemist, Bristol Uni, creator of MotM, Steve Sain, statistician, unfortunately also confesses to having seen Billy Joel in concert, Mark Lewney, physicist, and rock doctor (think Einstein meets Hendrix), Nicole Biamonte, Iowa University music theorist, David Muir, educational computing guy, Arvind Gopu, lead systems analyst for the Open Science Grid Operations group at Indiana University, Anthony Francis, artificial intelligence researcher and science fiction author, Jon Price, geotechnogeek at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Let me know if you want to add your name and link to the list.

Now, tell me what is the biophysics behind post-gig ringing in the ears?

Nobel Prize for Peace 2007

Oscar winning politician Al Gore and the hundreds of scientists of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change established by the United Nations) have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Peace for their work on raising international awareness of our responsibilities when it comes to climate change.

The award highlights the fact that climate change could have a significant impact on international relations and world peace. Indeed, former IPCC chairman Dr Bob Watson, said that, “What the Nobel Committee has done is to demonstrate to the world that climate change is not just simply an environmental issue but an issue of peace. Climate change can threaten security both at the national and regional level and has brought into sharp focus just how serious this issue is.”

Current chairman Rajendra Pachauri said that this is a prize for all scientists pushing for action against climate change. UN Secretary General said that the Prize, for them, shows that it is beyond doubt that climate change is affecting the world.

Solar Power, Japanese Hair, X-Rays, and Winning SONS

Japanese women

This week, The Alchemist learns of awards to two chemists funded by the European Science Foundation and undertaking cutting edge multidisciplinary work in solar energy and liquid crystals.

It turns out that when it comes to crystallography size no longer matters, thanks to developments in how well x-ray beams can be focused and the positioning of microcrystals for analysis by diffraction. Also this week, could an extract from bilberries be effective against certain types of tumor or even prevent specific cancers developing in the first place?

And, while water cannot burn, there is new evidence that a novel photocatalyst is getting solar energy experts hot under the collar in the search for the perfect hydrogen-production process. In inorganic chemistry, mercury shows its true mettle when confronted with plenty of fluorine and, finally, Raman spectroscopy can now see through even the most highly pigmented hair, revealing the secret of aging Japanese locks.

Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2007

Gerhard Ertl

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2007 goes to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. Congratulations Professor!

We have the semiconductor industry of the 1960s to thank for the emergence of surface chemistry. Gerhard Ertl was one of the first to see the potential of the new techniques and has pioneered methodology for different experimental procedures that give us a clear picture of surface reactions.

I wrote about Ertl’s work on several occasions for ChemWeb.com in its previous incarnation and reported on a catalyst surface science meeting of the UK’s Royal Society in 2004. There is a list of past winners on Sciencebase together with links and a brief summary of their research here.

Mapping Chemical Industry Knowledge

Joana Mendonça and Rui Baptista of the Centre for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research at the Technical University of Lisbon, working with Paulo Conde of Solvay in Brussells, Belgium, have examined how innovation occurs within the chemical industry, by examining the processes and activities undertaken by the Portuguese branch of a multinational chemical company. They have looked at the company’s formal innovation process and from that they have gleaned a map of the knowledge bases used in the search for innovative, new products.

Europe is a major player in the global chemical industry, but recently supply has begun to shift towards the Asian and Middle East markets. Demand from these regions is increasingly rapidly but their own fast-developing industries may not face the same high production costs and strict environmental regulations that increasingly make Europe a less attractive investment.

Couple this socioeconomic and geographical shift in production with a fall off in R&D spending in Europe and the exodus of skilled labour and on the surface it appears that chemical industry innovation within Europe is on the wane. Faced with this prospect, Mendonça and colleagues suggest that it, “is of crucial importance to analyse its processes within the chemical industry.”

Their analysis of the chemical industry has allowed them to produce a map showing the spread of the industry’s widely distributed knowledge bases and to demonstrate how knowledge flows between them and how it is used. They have found that the ability to generate value-creating knowledge is concentrated in the early stages of the industry’s lifecycle regardless of region. In contrast, the Portuguese industry is mostly concentrated on activities that have already reached maturity and, in some cases, are in decline rather than looking to innovation. “Owing to this asymmetry, disembodied knowledge flows are difficult to create, and other types of relationship should be pursued,” they suggest.

They also point out that multinational companies tend to rely strongly on internal improvements and do not seek new knowledge from outside sources that might lead to profitable innovation or improvements in efficiency. Indeed, any innovative activities that take place are actually focused on preventing “unwelcome surprises and to minimise risk” as opposed to facilitating the kin of “freewheeling, imaginative, and risk-taking approach that characterises entrepreneurship”.

All is not lost, add the researchers, “large multinational companies can have a decisive role in the innovation process by providing their market expertise to entrepreneurs and the case study presented shows a path other companies may follow.”

The original research paper, “A map of the knowledge bases for the chemical industry” can be found in the current issue of the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management (2007, 7, 245-262)

Nobel Prize for Physics 2007

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to Albert Fert (France) and Peter Grünberg (Germany), who share the prize fifty:fifty for their discovery of giant magnetoresistance in which a very weak magnetic change gived rise to a major difference in electrical resistance of a system.

This effect underpins the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to their discovery that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and mp3 players, for instance.

You can read more details on the Nobel site here

Ten Improvements on the ACS Website

The American Chemical Society (ACS) website got a makeover. They haven’t gone totally two-point-oh (thankfully) but they have made a few improvements (ten to be precise, at least according to their announcement), two of which are comprehensiveand at least 2 or 3 of which amount to the same thing. Still, it is nice a nice layout, albeit, a bit toooo web one-point-ohhhh and a little more 2005 than 2007. If you’ve used the features leave a comment and tell us about your experiences.

Anyway, here’s the top ten according to the ACS itself:

  • Consistent, global navigation
  • Unified look and feel
  • Ten comprehensive categories
  • Member focused
  • Home page highlights
  • Comprehensive search
  • Easier to read
  • Faster access
  • One stop for help
  • User Tested and Approved

Cutting the Cost of Watts and Soaking up CO2

Environmental research

In this month’s Intute Spotlight, I report on a new approach to carbon storage that researchers hope will allow us to reduce or stabilise atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, although I have my doubts.

Carbon sequestration is a well-studied theoretical approach to reduce carbon emissions by locking up carbon dioxide deep in the ground or on the ocean floor in various forms. Whether or not such an approach is tenable in terms of the overall energy balance is open to debate but experimental efforts at developing efficient systems to extract the gas from the emissions of electric power stations are underway. The latest effort was recently patented by researchers at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim.

A nanostructured polymer membrane that can extract carbon dioxide from a gaseous flow and convert it to bicarbonate ions could be the key to carbon sequestration in the fight to control levels of the greenhouse gas.

Also high on the green agenda, improving the efficiency per unit cost of solar energy panels, which seems a reasonable alternative and could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, with the proviso that making, installing, maintaining, and recycling such panels still costs energy and resources, despite the implications made by some environmentalists that they offer free energy. The work in question claims to have cut costs to less than $1 per Watt produced. Finally, there are some doomsayers who would say that we need not worry about the long-term threat of climate change and the decline of fossil fuel supplies because we are long overdue for a catastrophic asteroid impact. The European Space Agency’s “Don Quijote” mission hopes to tilt at asteroids and help give us a clear view of incoming.

Nobel Prize for Medicine 2007

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize website was offline at the time of writing presumably unable to take the strain of hacks and bloggers every scrabbling to learn of the winners. Anyway, Mario R. Capecchi (US) and Oliver Smithies (US) and Martin J. Evans (UK) have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for their work on gene targeting in mice.

Their research is being used to help scientists understand at the cellular level why certain diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, occur and why otherwise healthy people can succumb to cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and cancer.

The same threesome the Lasker prize in 2001, so in the absence of a Nobel website you can read more about the award-winning work here. Thanks to blogger Luboš Motl for bringing that link to my attention.

You can see a complete list of past winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine here.

Life Science Careers

Life science careersAccording to Toby Freedman, a university life “generally does not prepare individuals for careers in industry”. On the other hand, news this week that a freshman physics class just launched their own company, suggests he might on occasion be wrong. Nevertheless, an academic training is not entirely compatible with a move to the harsh realities of the commercial world and Freedman, who does hold a PhD, which she obtained from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has written a book to help life scientists make the transition.

Career Opportunities in Biotechnology and Drug Development provides a detailed overview of more than 100 careers in the life sciences industry, advice on carrying out a targeted job search, and useful guidance on making the leap from the ivory tower into the commercial lab or non-academic work environment. Of course, I use the phrase “ivory tower” with my tongue firmly implanted in my cheek, given the often equally cutthroat environment in which contract research associates work in academia.

Freedman writes from experience as a scientist who transitioned into business as a writer, recruiter, and entrepreneur, and recently launched a life sciences recruiting firm, Synapsis Search, which pairs job candidates with companies.

From the book’s blurb: “Topics cover 20 vocational areas, including research and development, regulatory and medical affairs, sales and marketing, business development, information management, law, executive leadership, consulting, recruiting, and finance. Each chapter includes a discussion of job security, future trends, and potential career paths; specific educational requirements and personality characteristics needed to excel in a chosen profession; recommendations of books, magazines, and Web site resources; and issues to consider regarding salary and compensation.”