Joel Rynes from the US Department of Homeland Security

An important symposium on the detection of nuclear material was held at Lancaster House from 1-2 November.  At the symposium I introduced Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt MP who spoke on the vital need to combat the illicit trafficking of nuclear material.

The meeting was organised through the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism and was organised by the FCO in collaboration with the AWE, the United States Defence Threat Reduction Agency and the Ministry of Defence.

The challenging problems associated with detecting special nuclear materials were discussed with emphasis on highly enriched uranium. The low energy emissions from nuclear isotopes are easily absorbed by surrounding material and this presents special challenges for detection. 

Both passive methods (i.e. detecting emissions such as gamma rays and neutrons) and active techniques (e.g. probing material with radiation) were discussed. In addition new techniques, such as observing the path of muons from cosmic rays through materials, were described.

The practical challenge of setting up detection devices at borders was considered as was the impressive detection programme applied in the London Olympics.

Representatives from 15 countries including the USA, Russia, Israel and Pakistan freely contributed to the discussions.

A very encouraging aspect of symposia such as these is the open sharing of information that would have been secret just a few years ago.  This is allowing real progress to be made in making the world safer through the improved ability to detect dangerous nuclear material.

The announcement of the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Sir John Gurdon (Cambridge University) has rightly been received with enthusiastic acclaim by the British science community. It is an acknowledgement of work done by a biological scientist who devised a decisive experiment which he implemented with great dexterity.

John Gurdon in his laboratory

As a young lecturer in the Zoology Department at the University of Oxford exactly 50 years ago Gurdon published a single-author paper describing his work on extracting a nucleus, just one hundredth of a millimetre in diameter, from a cell in the gut of a tadpole.  With considerable skill he injected it into an egg of a tadpole from which the nucleus had been removed and the result was a normal fertile frog.

Through this work Gurdon initiated the field of cloning out of which Dolly the sheep became a famous example.

Then 44 years later Shinya Yamanaka, the co-awardee of the Nobel Prize, devised an experiment in reverse. By putting just four genes into skin cells they were transformed back into primitive stem cells. Before this work, stem cells had to be obtained from embryos which resulted in many ethical concerns.

Thus Gurdon and Yamanaka helped create the new field of regenerative medicine which has great potential to transform the lives of patients with conditions such as Parkinson’s, stroke and diabetes. And it is important to emphasise that this major advance for human health came out of basic research started over 50 years before.

In the mid 1990s I was a colleague of John Gurdon’s at Magdalene College Cambridge where he had been appointed Master. Despite the intensive duties of that role he blocked out the whole of each Tuesday for research in the laboratory with no interruptions allowed. And often after dinner he would go back to the lab to check on an experiment. He has continued this dedication for his research to the present day.

There is no better example of a true ambassador for the best of British science.

The UK has around 35% of Europe’s total wave resource.  We now have the largest wave and tidal development zone in the world in the Pentland Firth and Orkney Waters Marine Energy Park, as well as the announcement of an Energy Park in the South West of England earlier this year.

The UK science and engineering community in our universities and companies has considerable strength and expertise in developing marine energy technology. Companies from all over the world are showcasing and testing their technology in our waters and benefiting from R&D links.

Earlier in the year the Government and the Technology Strategy Board created an Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult or technology transfer centre to develop offshore wind, wave and tidal technologies, announced in February this year with a headquarters in Glasgow and an operational centre in Northumberland. (The economic benefits flowing from these developments could be substantial.)

On Wednesday 12 September the Science & Innovation Network in conjunction with Supergen Marine organised a marine energy research event held at the UK Energy Research Centre.  Henry Jeffrey of The University of Edinburgh and the UK Energy Research Council, supported by SIN gathered together researchers and funders from around Europe to discuss the potential for future collaboration. Supergen Marine and UKERC  lead the European Energy Research Alliance in Ocean Energy, the only EERA initiative led by the UK.

The group discussed common challenges in testing devices across Europe from Portugal to Norway and how they could develop further European and bilateral joint working.

The seminar included participants from Ireland, Denmark, Norway, France, the Basque Country, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Flanders and Germany. A group of participants will work further to develop an ERANet funding bid to be submitted to the European Commission in the New Year.

Recently the UK Government comprehensively reviewed its Renewables Obligation mechanism to introduce a high number of Renewable Obligation Certificates for marine energy (5 ROCs/MWh up to 30 MW) to pump prime development from 2013.

More information: European Energy Research Alliance,  DECC Marine Energy site and Offshore Renewables Catapult.

On 4 July 2012 it was announced at CERN, the particle physics facility in Geneva, that there is very strong experimental evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson – the missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics.

Higgs boson announcement at CERN

Physicists claim that everything so far observed in the Universe is made from twelve basic fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how these twelve particles, and three of the forces are related to each other, is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particles and forces.

However, until this very new announcement, one of the particles, the so-called Higgs boson, had not been observed and has stood out as the challenging final piece of the jigsaw.

The particle was predicted to be observed from collisions between two beams of protons travelling nearly at the speed of light and so a very special experiment was needed for its detection.  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was set up for this purpose. It is contained in a tunnel the size of the Circle Line running across the border between France and Switzerland.

The total cost was about £6 billion and 20 different countries have contributed financially. It is the classic example of a science project that can only be done by many countries collaborating across borders. Indeed CERN itself was set up in 1954 partly to re-engage the countries of Europe in the scientific collaborations that had been destroyed by the Second World War.

The UK has played a central role in the experimental search for the Higgs Boson. 15 University groups were involved in constructing the highly sensitive particle detectors (I remember seeing some of these being designed in Oxford some ten years ago). Over 200 UK nationals are employed by CERN, including Dr Lyn Evans, the LHC project manager, and over 500 UK physicists and engineers regularly work there.

The UK pays 15% of the CERN budget (£95m a year). UK industry has been involved in the construction of the LHC – including Taylor Woodrow in the tunnel design, Tesla with the high-powered magnets and Caparo Accles and Pollock for beam screens.

Will there be a Nobel Prize coming out of this research? The particle has the name of Peter Higgs, a British theoretical physicist now working in Edinburgh, but the original theoretical work was published in three papers in Physical Review Letters in 1964 by him and five other authors. As the Nobel Prize for Physics can only be won by three people in any one year this may represent an interesting challenge for the Nobel Committee.

Is the Higgs Boson the end of the story? The answer is no. The Standard Model does not include gravitational forces and there are many fundamental scientific mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy still unexplained.

Only more major international science projects like the LHC will enable us to provide even deeper understanding of the building blocks of the Universe.

Colombia is developing into a modern and dynamic economy through investment in science and innovation.

I was a member of a delegation sent to Colombia to discuss opportunities for a stronger relationship in science and innovation with the UK.

The delegation was organised by Peter Bainbridge (UK Embassy in Bogota) and Tunde Idowu (Department of Business Innovation and Skills). It also included Paul Simmonds (Technopolis Group), Rafael Popper (University of Manchester) and Geoff Gregson (University of Edinburgh).

Rafael Popper and Edwin Carmona from the British Council on the Science Delegation in Cali, Colombia.

Highlights for me included meeting in Medellin with the offices of the Mayor and the Governor of Antioquia and a visit to Tecnnova, Colombia’s most forward-leaning innovation institution. We also had discussions at the EAFIT University and the University of Antioquia on their interesting research on biotechnology, nanotechnology and green chemistry.

In addition we learned how Ruta N, a public/private organisation, is bringing together key Colombian companies into knowledge networks.

A key challenge for Colombia is not only to strengthen their economy through investment in science and innovation but also to use technology to improve infrastructure, transport, security, communications and health services.

This presents major opportunities for science-based companies in the UK to contribute to progress in one of Latin America’s most rapidly emerging countries.

Guest blog by: Sara Cebrian & Fabien Deswarte, UK Science and Innovation Network in Europe.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to read this blog and find out more about the work of the UK Science & Innovation Network.

Our names are Sara Cebrian and Fabien Deswarte. We both work for the UK Government’s Science & Innovation Network (SIN) jointly funded by BIS and FCO. We are lucky to be based at the British Embassies in Madrid and Paris.

Today, we would like to talk to you about an exciting European workshop we have recently organised in collaboration with the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and its highly dynamic Knowledge Exchange Manager, Dr Jeff Hardy.

Why did we organise a workshop on Smart Grids? By 2050 we will need to produce more electricity than we do today but must do so largely without emitting greenhouse gases. To support these changes, we will need substantial investment in a modernised electricity grid or, as the experts in this sector call it, a “smart grid”. A smart grid is all that equipment required to bring electricity from suppliers (e.g. offshore wind farms, coal-fired power stations, biomass heated power stations) to consumers (i.e. you, us, the shop next door or the big company at the end of the road).

Whilst the smart grid requires an upgrade of the electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure it may also require an adjustment in the way consumers perceive and use electricity. The smart grid can provide consumers with strong pricing signals (e.g. when electricity is cheap or expensive) and consumers may chose to, or indeed the grid may automatically, adjust their behavior in light of these price signals. For example, consumers may choose to delay washing their clothes or charging their electric vehicle until the prices are cheap. There is currently a great deal of interest and activity from the research, policy and business communities on these behavioral issues.

Talking to experts like Dr Aidan Rhodes (UKERC Knowledge Exchange Associate and author of two recent reports on Smart Grids), it is clear that the major investment required to develop a UK smart grid (£32 billion of investment over the next ten years) needs to be supported by strong, clear and long-term policies and regulatory support. In addition, smart grids will inevitably have a substantive effect on our lives. Significant research on the social impact of smart grids is therefore required, including thorough testing and evaluation of how customers respond to implementation of various smart grid technologies and services.

Across Europe there is significant interest in the smart grid and most countries have a strategy or aspiration to develop a ‘smarter grid’ in the future. As a consequence, there is a diversity of policy and regulatory approaches to delivering the smart grid, and a wide variety of research into both the technical and social aspects of the smart grid. In response to this, we thought it appropriate to bring key European experts together in a workshop held in London, to discuss and compare the emerging best practices in the policy, regulatory and social dimensions of the smart grid. As far as we are aware, this was the first workshop in Europe to focus specifically on this aspect of smart grids.

Some key conclusions from the workshop are summarised below:

• The smart grid offers a number of benefits to society, including improving reliability of energy supply, enabling a low-carbon transition by incorporating low-carbon generation technologies thus assisting in climate change mitigation.
• Currently, consumers (and others) have a poor understanding of what a smart grid is.
• Whilst consumers are going to pay for the implementation of the smart grid, it is unclear whether they will perceive or realise any benefits. Transparency of information and education are important in unlocking consumer benefits.
• The smart grid offers new business opportunities, however, these may be limited by data access issues, a regulatory framework that prohibits them and a lack of consumer trust.
• There is no common forum all smart grid actors to share information, nor any agreement on how such a forum should operate. This workshop was seen as a positive first step in bringing the actors together.

For more information about the workshop including the programme, the presentations and the final report, please visit the EU Smart Grids page on the _Connect website.

Please note you will need to be a member of the Energy Generation and Supply Knowledge Transfer Network and the Future and Emerging Opportunities group in order to read the report. Don’t worry membership is free!

We would like to thank David Clary for giving us the opportunity to appear on his blog and for his support for the work of the Science and Innovation Network.

Links:

• UK Science & Innovation Network Europe
• UKERC 
• National Energy Research Network (NERN) newsletter

A major role of Scientific Diplomacy is to improve international relations through scientific interactions between countries. We have just held the Conference of the UK Science and Innovation Network in London and there were many discussions on Scientific Diplomacy. A highlight of the meeting was the emerging activity of “Scientific Digital Diplomacy”. From our point of view, this involves exploiting modern digital communication methods such as social network sites, video and blogs to communicate the excellence and collaborative aspects of UK science.

 
With the S&I Network based in 25 countries this is an excellent cost-effective method to communicate UK science to the younger generation around the world who are so familiar with digital communication.  Furthermore, since the digital world itself was created by scientific discoveries this gives such activities even more relevance.

 
At the conference I learned about the innovative digital contributions from S&I officers in many countries. Nicole Arbour (Ottawa) has been prominent through her FCO blog and interviews of top UK scientists in podcasts and video – the photo below from the Conference shows one of her slides emphasising the GREAT campaign. Others from the Network such as Otakar Fojt (Prague), Hazel Gibson (Stockholm), Adee Matin (Tel Aviv), Kevin Knappet (Tokyo) and Elizabeth Wallace (Berne) also described their recent digital publications and communications.

With the Diamond Jubilee of the Queen and the Olympics putting the UK in the spotlight this year, look out for many more  contributions in scientific digital diplomacy from the S&I Network.

Guest blog by: Hazel Gibson, UK Science and Innovation Network in Europe.

My name is Hazel Gibson and I am the Regional Manager for our Northern Europe team in Sweden, Finland and Denmark – part of the wider S&I Europe Network. The main aims of the S&I Network are to exchange science and innovation (S&I) policy best practice, and to boost international science and innovation collaboration. This drives growth and prosperity in the UK. The EU recently boosted research and innovation through its Horizon 2020 strategy.

The S&I Network (SE/DK) recently ran a seminar at UKTI’s event TechWorld at Canary Wharf. It was a chance for like minded businesses and researchers to find ways to innovate faster and better in the field of wireless technologies and bandwidth, including how to access European money to do so. The EU initiatives on the Digital Single Market are relevant here – more available bandwidth means more consumers, more devices and more sales and services online “all the time.”

The event took place inside the main UKTI TechWorld conference. The organisers are grateful to UKTI for their support

What does this mean for the rest of us? The event was about a more wirelessly connected world where many of the aspects of your daily life can be taken care of at the touch of a button, enabling time and cost savings and bringing lifestyle benefits.

Let’s suspend our disbelief and go on a journey for a few moments…

Imagine…your trip home from the office tonight. In a future of 50 billion connected devices, wired up to the internet around the world, how would that be different? Currently, you may or may not be able to use your phone to check train timetables or bus timetables and buy tickets in advance. Pretty soon you will be able to do not only this but also swipe your phone at the checkout in the newsagents to pay for your cigarettes or sweets on the way home…no cash or card needed!

Meanwhile, on the train, you can check to see whether the electricity price is low enough back at your home for you to remotely set off the dishwasher which you forgot to do before you left this morning… now you will have enough crockery ready for this evening’s dinner! You doze off for an instant and then the phone bleeps to show you that your elderly housebound parents are running out of medicine…maybe you’ll need to stop off on the way home and check on them.

Your car battery bleeps your smartphone to tell you that it is now fully electrically charged back home…you push a button to reverse the flow and sell the excess electricity back to the national grid from your solar panels and ducted wind turbines. The push of a button means extra pocket money for you! That is what the future will look like, if the innovators have their say.

Back at our event, we heard from technology leaders in this field: from Ericsson and ABB from Sweden, and BT R&D, NEC and Ofcom from the UK. We discussed the enormous challenge of releasing bandwidth in a sustainable way. For example, in the UK one particular slice of bandwith is owned by air traffic control all over the country. What will it mean if we open that up to other service providers for consumers? We will have to find innovative ways to prevent interference.

Stuart Revell from the UK's ICT Knowledge Transfer Network introduces the conference

How could TV “white space” – the extra bandwidth each of us will have “left over” within our digital TV packages after UK digital switchover – be put to good use to deliver extra services? How would we decide which connected devices to keep on in the future and which to shut down in a power blackout e.g. ventilators in hospitals, energy devices etc?

I would like to thank David Clary for giving me the opportunity to guest appear on his blog and for his support for the work of the Science and Innovation Network.

Useful links:

UK Science & Innovation Network Europe

UK ICT Knowledge Transfer Network

Guest blog by: Elisabeth Wallace, UK Science and Innovation Network in Europe.

Four days to go before I join a European delegation for a tour of the UK Nuclear

fission research facilities. It is a much anticipated event. Together with the

host organisations in the UK, I have worked hard on putting together a

programme which will both meet the scientific needs of the guests European

researchers and reflect the expertise and state-of-the-art infrastructures

available in the UK.

I

should start by introducing myself. I work for the UK Science and Innovation

Network in Europe. There’s plenty of information about what UK S&I officers

do on our website. I’m not an expert on civil nuclear, and I’ve never

written a blog before…so it’s all a bit daunting really. But I have been so

impressed with the level of commitment to this event from both the European

participants and the British organisations, that I thought it would be valuable

to share this experience with you, and I look forward to your comments.

So,

if I’m not a nuclear scientist, why am I organising such an event? The UK

government, my employer, believes nuclear should play a significant role in the

UK’s low-carbon energy mix. Since the decision in 2008 to commit to a number of

new nuclear plants in the UK, academic research activities have significantly

increased. But, and I’ll quote a colleague from the EPSRC, “it is clear that this expansion needs to occur with

reference to wider international activities and opportunities”. In other words,

the UK can’t do this alone. No one does actually. As Chris Huhne said recently, no more “secrecy” and no more

“we know best”. The UK is in the process of writing a national R&D Roadmap

for nuclear, for which it consulted widely (see the House of Lords Inquiry on

Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities in 2011). In Europe, the EU

Commission with the Euratom Framework Programme supports and funds joints

research activities and shared access to facilities. My small part in all this

is to create opportunities for experts’ discussions and visits, facilitating

new contacts amongst the wider nuclear research community and catalyse mutually

beneficial collaborations.

I

have already warned the European delegates they will have to help me with this

blog. They are the experts and I want to learn from them as much as you do.

They have a broad range of interests, from improving waste management,

developing future nuclear fuel or multi-scale modelling for safety research. I

won’t list them all right now, but let me know if you want this information.

Personally, I’m interested in the programme called “Europe’s Nuclear Powers

Plants – Growing Old Gracefully”, just a challenge I can relate to!

Future blog contributions will appear on the UK

Open Innovation Connect website, where an overview of the event is already available. I would like to thank David Clary for giving me the opportunity to guest appear on his blog and for his support for the work of the Science and Innovation Network.

India and Turkey are prime examples where investment in science, technology and innovation has become a major component of emerging economies. I was fortunate to make short visits to both of these countries last week to see these developments for myself.

India has several well-funded science collaborations with the UK facilitated by the Science and Innovation Network and organised by Research Councils UK. This includes research on global problems like solar energy and water technology.

In Delhi I visited several government science leaders including Ashwani Kumar (Minister of State for Science and Technology – see the picture below of my meeting with him), Krishnaswamy  Kasturirangan (leading space scientist and Member of the Indian Planning Commission) and Thirumalachari Ramasami (Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology). We discussed future projects and the UK-India Science Council to be held next year.

I also co-launched the UK-India Developing Talent in the Chemical Sciences Report which was produced by the Royal Society of Chemistry. This was held at the Indian Institute of Technology and emphasised how to develop opportunities for early-career UK and Indian chemists during the International Year of Chemistry.

I then flew to Istanbul where I spoke at the launch of the UK-Turkey Knowledge Partnership by BIS Secretary of State Vince Cable at the impressive Sabanci University. Turkey is emerging very quickly in science and technology and is providing excellent opportunities for UK science-related businesses – at the launch, representatives from companies such as Rolls Royce, GSK and BAE Systems were also present. It was also very good to hear about the substantial engagement Turkey is having with the EU Framework Science Programme.

I came away from these visits impressed with the essential role of science and technology in India and Turkey and the excellent opportunities for enhancing collaborative research between the UK and these rapidly emerging countries.