One Little Cog

British scientists grow part of a human heart from stem cells

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:09:00 +0000

Here's one of those "isn't-science-brilliant" stories, pure and simple. We've heard about the potential for stem cell research for soooo long now and work has been going reasonably steadily - everything from extracting stem cells from various sources, working out how to turn them into useful tissues to navigating a tricky ethical minefield.

A story I wrote for the Guardian this week describes work by Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub of Harefield Hospital and Imperial College. His research team has been working for more than a decade to grow heart tissue for transplants.

The follow-up to the story, by other newspapers and broadcast outlets, interviewed patients and scientists to guage how excited they were about the work - I heard someone on the Today programme this morning talking about how her daughter had just had heart surgery and that work like Prof Yacoub's gives her hope for her child's future. remarkable stuff, I though but I leave you to judge for yourself...

A British research team led by the world's leading heart surgeon has grown part of a human heart from stem cells for the first time. If animal trials scheduled for later this year prove successful, replacement tissue could be used in transplants for the hundreds of thousands of people suffering from heart disease within three years.

Sir Magdi Yacoub, a professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, has worked on ways to tackle the shortage of donated hearts for transplant for more than a decade. His team at the heart science centre at Harefield hospital have grown tissue that works in the same way as the valves in human hearts, a significant step towards the goal of growing whole replacement hearts from stem cells.

According to the World Health Organisation, 15 million people died of cardiovascular disease in 2005; by 2010, it is estimated that 600,000 people around the world will need replacement heart valves. "You can see the common pathway of death and suffering is heart failure," said Prof Yacoub. "Reversing heart failure could have a major impact."

Growing replacement tissue from stem cells is one of the principal goals of biology. If a damaged part of the body can be replaced by tissue that is genetically matched to the patient, there is no chance of rejection. So far, scientists have grown tendons, cartilages and bladders, but none of these has the complexity of organs, which are three-dimensional structures of dozens of different types of cells.

To crack the problem, Prof Yacoub assembled a team of physicists, biologists, engineers, pharmacologists, cellular scientists and clinicians. Their task - to characterise how every bit of the heart works - has so far taken 10 years. The progress of his team and that of colleagues around the world will be published in August in a special edition of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Prof Yacoub said his team's latest work had brought the goal of growing a whole, beating human heart closer. "It is an ambitious project but not impossible. If you want me to guess I'd say 10 years. But experience has shown that the progress that is happening nowadays makes it possible to achieve milestones in a shorter time. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some day sooner than we think."

Currently, many people suffering from heart valve disease have artificial replacement valves. Though they save lives, the artificial valves are far from perfect. They perform none of the more sophisticated functions of living tissue, children need their valves replaced as they grow, and patients need a lifetime of drugs to prevent complications after surgery.

"The way a living valve functions, it anticipates haemodynamic events and responds and changes its shape and size. It's completely different from an artificial valve which will just open and shut. The heart muscle itself will appreciate something which will make it free to contract properly," said Prof Yacoub.

Adrian Chester, one of the lead scientists at the Harefield centre, has focused on characterising the valves in the heart. "You have mediators in blood or released locally in the valve that can make parts of the valve contract and relax. That work has then extended into looking at the incidence of nerves in the valve - these can cause the types of contractions and relaxations in a very specific way."

By using chemical and physical nudges, the scientists first coaxed stem cells extracted from bone marrow to grow into heart valve cells. By placing these cells into scaffolds made of collagen, Dr Chester and his colleague Patricia Taylor then grew small 3cm-wide discs of heart valve tissue. Later this year, that tissue will be implanted into animals - probably sheep or pigs - and monitored to see how well it works as part of a circulatory system.

If that trial works well, Prof Yacoub is optimistic that the replacement heart tissue, which can be grown into the shape of a human heart valve using specially-designed collagen scaffolds, could be used in patients within three to five years.

Growing a suitably-sized piece of tissue from a patient's own stem cells would take around a month but he said that most people would not need such individualised treatment. A store of ready-grown tissue made from a wide variety of stem cells could provide good matches for the majority of the population.

Prof Yacoub's inspiration has come not only from other scientists but also from an unexpected source - the celebrated British artist, Antony Gormley, who has donated a sculpture to the heart science centre. "We need a lot of experts from different fields but we also need a lot of imagination and a lot of understanding of how form interacts with function," said Prof Yacoub. "Art gives a lot of inspiration and beauty. And beauty is part of science."

Mr Gormley, who has also contributed to the upcoming special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society with an article on the relationship between form and function in sculpture, said he admired the universalism with which Prof Yacoub approached his work. "He manages to do the Robin Hood job in a very important way for the benefit of all humanity. I found in him a fellow traveller in terms of trying to do things at the fringes of the possible with the highest levels of input in terms of technology and intelligence. Everybody breathes air, everybody pumps blood."

Squids!

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:26:00 +0000

It's been a while I know. The three of you who read these posts will be happy to know, however, that I've been busy on the work front and come up with a few extra bits and pieces for the Guardian's science podcast. That, by the way, is going from strength to strength. We have a new myspace page so please become our friend and leave us some lovely comments.

On the articles front, here's something I did for the paper at the weekend on people's fascination for monsters of the deep. The article in the paper is a shortened version of the piece below, spurred on by the discovery of a Colossal squid in the Ross Sea by New Zealand fisherman.

Before Google Earth come along, cartographers would often write three words on the edge of their maps, a shorthand for the mysteries that people were convinced lay beyond the edge of the known world: here be monsters. Fuelled by tall tales of mermen and sea serpents recounted by generations of world-weary sailors, the oceans of the world became a repository for legions of terrifying creatures.As sea monsters go, the Kraken is king. The size of a floating island, legend has it that the squid-like creature could cripple warships with its immense tentacles, dragging unlucky sailors into whirlpools and on to the dark of the ocean below. As Alfred Tennyson put it: "Far far beneath in the abysmal sea/His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep/the Kraken sleepeth”.

Fishermen found a real-life Kraken last month in the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. The largest ever Colossal squid ever seen, the 450kg monster was hauled off to Te Papa Museum in New Zealand. Though scientists are only beginning to study the animal - their immediate problem seems to be how to defrost the animal without damaging it - there is already little doubt that it will provide a remarkable insight into life in the cold southern oceans.

The fascination with big squid-like creatures, the real-life monsters of the deep, is nothing new. When Pierre Aronnax, the marine biologist on the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, sees giant squid hovering next to the submarine, he describes “a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed, watching us with its enormous staring green eyes...The monster’s mouth, a horned beak like a parrot’s, opened and shut vertically. Its tongue, a horned substance, furnished with several rows of pointed teeth, came out quivering from this veritable pair of shears. What a freak of nature, a bird’s beak on a mollusc!”

A gargantuan Kraken also made a guest appearance in last summer’s blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, dragging Jack Sparrow underwater as the credits rolled.

In the real world, only a handful of big squids are found every year, usually half-digested in the stomachs of sperm whales, or dead or dying near the surface of the ocean. No-one has much idea where they live, what they eat, how they move or how they reproduce. Almost everything written in books about the behaviour of these animals is educated guesswork.

When a group of squids attack the Nautilus, Captain Nemo is left holding back tears at the loss of a crewmate. In reality, giant squid are less diabolical: a large specimen might eat 50kg of food every day but probably does it by hovering quietly in the water, waiting for some unsuspecting smaller squid or large fishes hove into view. The Kraken described by Tennyson had more in common with the Colossal squid, which is thought to be a more aggressive predator that roams at depths of 2,000m. But so far, even they haven’t pulled any ships into whirlpools, sailors and all.

Whatever fear there is of these unremitting terrors that lie deep in the ocean, it’s worth talking comfort from something hinted at by Tennyson and which has been proved right time and again - the monsters of the deep probably aren’t meant to meet people. Most, like his Kraken, come to a withering end if they stray out of their comfort zones in the deep ocean. “In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”

Common cold virus may be new weapon to fight cancer

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:40:00 +0000

A good news story for a change - doubly so because it's from gene therapy. Leonard Seymour, based at Oxford University and president of the British Society for Gene Therapy, is leading work on using viruses to kill cancer cells, a completely new way to tackle the disease. When the human genome project was completed a few years ago, people thought that biologists would be able to play with genes immediately and we would usher in a new world of treatments and understanding of disease. Gene therapy, as it was called, would be our saviour.

It was all a touch overblown (much of it media hype to be honest) and it's taking a bit longer than expected but that doesn't take away from the value of the emerging research. Expect to see more from the gene therapists in the coming years.

To put Prof Seymour's work into a bit more context with other cancer treatments, I posted on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog about whether this was "the" cure for cancer.

Common cold virus may be new weapon to fight cancer

· Human trials begin this year
· Scientists say move is 'exciting'

Thursday January 11, 2007
The Guardian

The adenovirus is one of two cold viruses likely to be examined in the first trials.

British scientists are preparing to launch trials of a radical new way to fight cancer, which kills tumours by infecting them with viruses like the common cold.

If successful, virus therapy could eventually form a third pillar alongside radiotherapy and chemotherapy in the standard arsenal against cancer, while avoiding some of the debilitating side-effects.

Leonard Seymour, a professor of gene therapy at Oxford University, who has been working on the virus therapy with colleagues in London and the US, will lead the trials later this year. Cancer Research UK said yesterday that it was excited by the potential of Prof Seymour's pioneering techniques.

Article continues
One of the country's leading geneticists, Prof Seymour has been working with viruses that kill cancer cells directly, while avoiding harm to healthy tissue. "In principle, you've got something which could be many times more effective than regular chemotherapy," he said.

Cancer-killing viruses exploit the fact that cancer cells suppress the body's local immune system. "If a cancer doesn't do that, the immune system wipes it out. If you can get a virus into a tumour, viruses find them a very good place to be because there's no immune system to stop them replicating. You can regard it as the cancer's Achilles' heel."

Only a small amount of the virus needs to get to the cancer. "They replicate, you get a million copies in each cell and the cell bursts and they infect the tumour cells adjacent and repeat the process," said Prof Seymour.

Preliminary research on mice shows that the viruses work well on tumours resistant to standard cancer drugs. "It's an interesting possibility that they may have an advantage in killing drug-resistant tumours, which could be quite different to anything we've had before."

Researchers have known for some time that viruses can kill tumour cells and some aspects of the work have already been published in scientific journals. American scientists have previously injected viruses directly into tumours but this technique will not work if the cancer is inaccessible or has spread throughout the body.

Prof Seymour's innovative solution is to mask the virus from the body's immune system, effectively allowing the viruses to do what chemotherapy drugs do - spread through the blood and reach tumours wherever they are. The big hurdle has always been to find a way to deliver viruses to tumours via the bloodstream without the body's immune system destroying them on the way.

"What we've done is make chemical modifications to the virus to put a polymer coat around it - it's a stealth virus when you inject it," he said.

After the stealth virus infects the tumour, it replicates, but the copies do not have the chemical modifications. If they escape from the tumour, the copies will be quickly recognised and mopped up by the body's immune system.

The therapy would be especially useful for secondary cancers, called metastases, which sometimes spread around the body after the first tumour appears. "There's an awful statistic of patients in the west ... with malignant cancers; 75% of them go on to die from metastases," said Prof Seymour.

Two viruses are likely to be examined in the first clinical trials: adenovirus, which normally causes a cold-like illness, and vaccinia, which causes cowpox and is also used in the vaccine against smallpox. For safety reasons, both will be disabled to make them less pathogenic in the trial, but Prof Seymour said he eventually hopes to use natural viruses.

The first trials will use uncoated adenovirus and vaccinia and will be delivered locally to liver tumours, in order to establish whether the treatment is safe in humans and what dose of virus will be needed. Several more years of trials will be needed, eventually also on the polymer-coated viruses, before the therapy can be considered for use in the NHS. Though the approach will be examined at first for cancers that do not respond to conventional treatments, Prof Seymour hopes that one day it might be applied to all cancers.

Richard Sullivan, Cancer Research UK's director of clinical programmes, said: "We are pleased to be supporting this new and important research. Whilst this approach is still at an early stage of development it has exciting potential, particularly for the treatment of cancer which has spread, a notoriously difficult stage of the disease to treat."

Luddites and moralists

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:30:00 +0000

From time to time, the stem cells wars flare up. The US famously doesn't allow public money to be spent on this research (mostly because of George Bush's ideological objections) but I thought the UK was a always a bit more sensible. Well, not any more. The government wants to ban the creation of hybrid animal-human embryos as a source of stem cells in its new white paper on fertility legislation. Why? Because the public says so, apparently.

It's pig-headed ignorance from the government and, if their attempts to ban the work are successful, what a horrible mistake it will be. (An interesting addendum to all this - a new source of stem cells from amniotic fluid.)

A ban on the use of hybrid embryos will be the consequence of ill conceived pressure

Thursday January 11, 2007
The Guardian

The honeymoon for British stem cell scientists is coming to an end. What began as a model partnership between researchers and the government in how to navigate a controversial area is at risk of disintegrating into a messy divorce, a split fuelled by misconceptions, a Luddite fear of technology and more than a whiff of inappropriate political pressure.

Two research teams in London find out today whether they will be allowed to create animal-human hybrid embryos as part of their work. Informally, they have already been told by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) that their application is unlikely to succeed, despite it being allowed under current regulations. Last week several scientists got together to express deep concerns about the impending decision and delivered a stark message: banning the creation of hybrids will stifle development of treatments for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's.

In the US, where public funding of stem cell research has been curtailed by George Bush's ideological objections, such a move might not have caused much of a storm. But in the UK it is unprecedented. The HFEA's ethical stance on fertility and stem cell research is well respected and its decisions have always taken into account the latest scientific thinking.

The scientists' argument is one of necessity - to make any headway in stem cell work, researchers need raw materials. This means as many stem cells as they can lay their hands on and, typically, these come from the fertilised embryos left over from IVF treatments that are donated for research. But this resource is very small and animal eggs are much easier to come by.

In making the hybrid, the animal egg is hollowed of all genetic information and replaced with the nucleus of a human cell. The resulting cell is then induced to divide and eventually becomes an early-stage embryo. Genetically, the hybrid is 99.5% human and the embryo is terminated before it reaches 14 days' old, at which time it is a ball of cells no bigger than a pinhead. The stem cells exist inside this early-stage embryo, ready to be extracted for research.

But when public health minister Caroline Flint unveiled the white paper on fertility research last month, the clause on animal-human hybrid embryos flew in the face of all of the scientific advice, proposing that it should not be allowed. Flint cited a preceding consultation as justification for the government's reversal of support. But the extent to which these sorts of consultations can be hijacked by pressure groups is well known.

There are also inadvertent victims in this sudden government hostility. Last year, scientists created a model of Down's syndrome by fusing human cells with embryonic stem cells from mice. The resulting animals were hailed as a crucial tool in the study of a condition that affects 60,000 people in the UK alone. Were the government to get its way, the Down's mouse would fall foul of the new legislation.

If the HFEA confirms today that it will not allow scientists to create hybrids, the spotlight will shift to the authority. Why does an independent scientific agency feel the need to prevent hybrid research? Indeed, why is it going against its own advice on the issue?

The only conceivable explanation is that the HFEA is feeling undue political pressure from its host department. The Department of Health seems to have made its decision based on a misconception about public unease over hybrid research. It is difficult not to conclude that the HFEA is worried that funds will be cut off if it doesn't fall into line.

Rocket man

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 11:11:00 +0000

An interview with space doctor Kevin Fong. If we need someone to save the world from an asteroid hurtling towards us, he'll be the (British) man.

Kevin has been instrumental in coralling the UK's scientists and lobbying government to fund a British astronaut programme. I've talked about this before but Kevin is the man with the plan. Fortunately, it looks like the British government might be taking its head out of the sand on the issue for the first time in half a century.

The education argument is particularly strong. As Kevin says, if you rocked up to government with a cast iron plan that would reverse the decline in science in schools and univeristies, and for a cost of just £100m, they'd normally be falling over themselves to find ways to fund it. Forget silly education schemes and finding ways to make science wacky so that kids might find it interesting. Just send someone into space. Easy.

Kevin Fong has wanted to be an astronaut since he saw a US-Soviet mission on TV in 1975. Now, he tells Alok Jha, there are signs his campaign to put Brits in space could take off

Saturday January 6, 2007
The Guardian

Kevin Fong's earliest memory is of waking up in the middle of the night and sitting in front of a flickering television screen. The pictures he saw were coming live from hundreds of miles above the Earth - an American Apollo module had docked with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft - and, through the grainy black and white images, he could just make out flags floating between the two spacecraft.

It was 1975 and, in a slight thaw in the cold war, the superpowers had collaborated in space for the first time. He might not have understood the significance of the pictures he saw, but the spacemen made a strong impression on the five-year-old. "Hand on heart, that is what drove the entirety of my interest in science, all the way up to doing astrophysics at university," Fong says.

More than 20 years after seeing those floating flags he was floating too, inside a plane used by Nasa to give astronauts a taste of zero gravity. The vomit comet, as the Boeing 707 is affectionately known, flies as if it is a 10,000ft-high rollercoaster ride. After reaching a height of 25,000ft, the pilot throttles to full power for a 20-second, 45-degree climb up to 35,000ft, after which the engines are abruptly switched off and the plane begins to free-fall back to Earth. For the next 20 seconds, gravity inside the cabin seems to disappear.

He has told that story countless times, but even a decade later and sitting on terra firma in a cold office in University College Hospital in London, where he works as an anaesthetist, Fong finds it difficult to come up with the words to describe the sensation the time he felt gravity disappear. "All those dreams you have of flying, and you wake up disappointed that it's not true, suddenly they're real."

Those flights helped convince him he had found his calling. He was determined do the training for real and become an astronaut. There was only one problem: he was British.

The British government doesn't do astronauts - a position crafted in the 1960s with the cancellation of rocket programmes such as Blue Streak and honed by successive governments claiming sending people into space is too expensive. Helen Sharman, technically the only Briton who has been in space, flew as part of the privately funded Juno mission. The remaining three British-born astronauts - Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick - all became American citizens before joining Nasa's astronaut corps and flying in the space shuttle.

But the British resolve could be weakening. Next week, the British National Space Centre, the closest thing the UK has to a space agency, will detail plans for a review of space policy. And only two months into his new job as science minister, Malcolm Wicks hinted this week at a possible reversal in the policy not to fund an astronaut programme.

The steps might not sound like much but, for a community of scientists that has seen little movement in more than 50 years, the events of the last few weeks have had the effect of an earthquake. "This is our best and only chance - if we kill it here, we'll never do it," says Fong.

There are other stars in alignment. The Commons science and technology committee plans a policy review and early indications are that human spaceflight will play a big part in discussions. And last year, a report by independent scientists commissioned by the Royal Astronomical Society concluded there was a good case for sending people into space.

Fong was in his final year at medical school (he already had a degree in astrophysics) when he landed a month placement at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was awestruck. "You walk through the gates there and it's like Disney World for adults. We used to sit around in the evenings around pizza boxes saying, what a tragedy it would be if we walked out of here in a month's time and never came back."

His brief trip to Nasa got him so fired up that, when it was finishing, he called the BNSC to find out what Britain had to offer budding astronauts. "At the time there was nothing in this country," he remembers. "To realise that you genuinely can't do these things even if you're as good as you can be at your field is a bit upsetting. The temptation to shift country is massive." He faced a tough choice: admit defeat or give up his British passport and emigrate to the US.

Never one prone to settle for the most sensible option, Fong decided on a different strategy - to stay at home and think how to get Britain into space. Canvassing scientists, he began the task of building up a case for a new British space programme.

Thus began a one-man mission for the creation of a human spaceflight programme. He ran and advised numerous scientific committees and wrote papers and articles pushing the case for space. He even set up a space medicine course, the first of its kind in the UK, for undergraduate medics at University College London. And most of it happened during snatched moments between gruelling shifts as a trainee hospital doctor.

He found a like mind in Ian Crawford, director of the UCL-Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Science and Astrobiology. Together, they began fleshing out what a UK programme might look like.

Cost had always been cited as a big stumbling block. Launch costs shoot up when people are involved - Nasa's human spaceflight missions suck $6bn every year from the federal budget. Joining the European Space Agency's (Esa) proposed Aurora programme, which includes plans to send people to the moon and Mars, would come with an annual price tag of £150m for Britain.

Fong has an alternative. "The big thing that I've pushed over the years is to get away from the idea that, to get a British space programme with British astronauts, you need to rock up to one agency or another with a couple of briefcases with hundreds of millions of pounds. We need to do something strategic and at lower cost to evaluate the relative costs and benefits."

He says bilateral agreement with a foreign space agency to train and fly two British astronauts over the next 10 years is a better idea. At an estimated cost of £100m, it would cost a fraction of a full Nasa or Esa subscription.

Many of the UK's space scientists already benefit from agreements to share the results from Nasa exploration satellites, for instance, in return for instruments or technical help. Nasa's administrator, Mike Griffin, visited the UK last year and, in meetings with government officials, all but extended an invitation for Britain to join plans to explore the moon and Mars. It was a remarkable gesture, given Nasa rarely asks for help from other countries.

Fong's ideas go beyond basic science. A UK astronaut could become an important role model for children, he argues, helping to reverse the terminal decline in science at schools and universities.

After Yang Lee Wei became China's first astronaut in 2004, Fong was invited to give a lecture on why countries should send people into space at the Beijing School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The audience sat rapt, despite waiting for a line-by-line translation. "You got a sense that there was a feverish desire to embrace science and engineering by these kids because they wanted to be the next Yang Lee Wei. Russia have had that with Yuri Gagarin, America had that in the Apollo era. The UK has never used that chip."

In an ironic twist to Fong's decade-long campaign, he is due to leave the country just as his cause finally gains momentum in Britain. He will spend the next six months in Houston, working out with Nasa scientists the effects on humans of long-term space exploration, part of a research programme looking at ways of creating artificial gravity on long trips to Mars.

He has an ulterior motive - to sound out Nasa on how Britain could best plug into their astronaut programme. His goal is to deliver a detailed blueprint for a practical British space programme by the end of the year. "If someone gave you £100m tomorrow, how would you interface two British astronauts with the programmes that exist? What science would they do? How would they be trained? I would like to deliver a blueprint for how we could do it."

That blueprint will be Fong's testament to a desire ignited when he first saw those floating flags more than 30 years ago, a desire that still burns brightly today. "If we had an astronaut programme in this country, I would be the first to put my hand up for it. I've spent my entire career pushing this - it's something I would love to see and, if it was me, I would have to pinch myself every day. How many people can say, when I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut and then actually be an astronaut?"

Earthbound

The government cut off any chance of sending Britons into space in the decade Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong escaped the Earth's atmosphere. Blue Streak, a rocket programme that would have been a precursor to giving Britain its own launch capability, was cancelled in the 1960s. UK scientists did get involved indirectly in the US Apollo missions but there was no chance a Briton would fly to the moon.

Since the 1960s, British space scientists have worked with Nasa and with the European Space Agency on robotic exploration missions. Britain now has a healthy satellite-building industry.

In 1991, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space through the Juno programme, funded by the Russian space agency and a consortium of British companies.

In 2002, the government set up the microgravity review panel to consider starting research in space but made no mention of an astronaut programme. Two years later, a Royal Astronomical Society report put the scientific case for funding British astronauts.

UK-born Michael Foale first flew on the space shuttle in 1993. To fly with Nasa, he had to obtain US citizenship, as did Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick, for flights this year.

Imagine a world with no religion...

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:43:00 +0000

The end of religion is nigh: as television and internet make it easier for people around the world to get information and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers have argued that, within a few decades, people's fascination for superstition and religion will disappear.

The argument is part of the responses to an exercise by the web magazine, Edge, which asked more than 150 scientists and thinkers: "What are you optimistic about?" The responses included predictions of extended human lifespan, hope for a bright future for autistic children in the digital age, and a potential end to violent conflicts around the world. (The full list of responses is here).

Philosopher Daniel Dennett led the charge against religion with his argument that, within 25 years, religion will evolve into something that commands little of the awe it seems to instil in people today. "Of course many people, perhaps a majority of people in the world, will still cling to their religion with the sort of passion that can fuel violence and other intolerant and reprehensible behaviour. But the rest of the world will see this behaviour for what it is, and learn to work around it until it subsides, as it surely will."

He cited the worldwide spread of information through the internet, mobile phones and portable radios and television as a problem for guardians of religious traditions. These will "gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance."

Biologist Richard Dawkins added that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream to unify the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."

Part of that final theory will be formulated by scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a $8bn particle accelerator at Cern in Geneva that will be switched on in 2007. It will smash protons together in a bid to understand what makes up the most fundamental bits of the universe.

Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University said that the LHC will end the years of "sensory deprivation in the field of particle physics, during which much hallucination (eg. string theory) has occurred by theorists. We will finally obtain empirical data that will drive forward our understanding of the fundamental structure of nature, its forces, and of space and time."

His biggest hope is that the LHC will give unexpected data, forcing scientists to reformulate their basic ideas.

Meanwhile, Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University said that an optimistic trend had gone unnoticed in society: the decline of violence.

"Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the twentieth century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past fifty years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward"

In his book, War before Civilisation, anthropologist Lawrence Keeley estimated that, in the 20th century 100 million men, women, and children died from war-related causes, including disease and famine. If the rate of violence had been as high as the average primitive society, that total would have been 2 billion.

Prof Pinker said that, compared with centuries past, modern violent acts are generally hidden, illegal, condemned or controversial. "In the past, they were no big deal. My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them."

In his reponse to the Edge question, John Horgan of the Stevens Institute of Technology underlined Prof Pinker's point: "I'm optimistic that one day war-large-scale, organized, group violence-will end once and for all," he said.

Developing a better understanding of other people to prevent war could take some time. Understanding yourself, however, will come much more quickly, according to George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. Genetic sequencing technology is getting cheaper and will soon be within the reach of individuals. He said that 2007 would be the year that people finally get to grips with their personal genomes.

"We will learn so much more about ourselves and how we interact with our environment and our fellow humans. We will be able to connect with other people who share our traits. I am optimistic that we will not be de-humanized, but we might be re-humanized, relieved of a few more ailments, to contemplate our place in the universe, and transcend out brutal past."

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, focused his optimism on the lives of the rising numbers of autistic children. In 1978, the rate of autism was four in 10,000 children but today the figure is closer to one in 100. He said that, while no-one is certain why this increase is happening, many scientists put it down to a combination of environmental reasons and a better recognition of the condition. Prof Baron-Cohen argued that the outlook for autistic children was far from bleak. Indeed, there has never been a better time for them.

"There is a remarkably good fit between the autistic mind and the digital age. Computers operate on the basis of extreme precision, and so does the autistic mind," he said. "The inherently ambiguous and unpredictable world of people and emotions is a turn off for someone with autism, but a rapid series of clicks of the mouse that leads to the same result every time that sequence is performed is reassuringly attractive. Many children with autism develop an intuitive understanding of computers in the same way that other children develop an intuitive understanding of people."

Leo Chalupa, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Davis predicted that, by the middle of the this century, "it will not be uncommon for people to lead healthy and productive lives well past their tenth decade. This means that the high school kids of today who believe they will be forever young might well have their fantasy fulfilled, albeit in modified form."

He cited the advances in medical research that can manipulate cells to prolong longevity, in particular brain cells.

"We will be able to regenerate parts of the brain that have been worn out or damaged during the course of a lifetime, providing renewed capabilities to what are currently considered old folks," he said. "So better start thinking what you'll be doing with all those extra years of life."

Other respondents include Martin Rees, Jared Diamond, Susan Blackmore, Ray Kurzweil and Marvin Minsky.

Science stories of 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:52:00 +0000

It's been a year of little leaps. Nothing Earth-shattering or, at least, nothing the world has noticed yet. Someone once remarked to me that the most important scientific result of the year just gone wouldn't be recognised until several years later, when its implications were much clearer. For what it's worth, here's what James and I thought were the most interesting and noteworthy science stories of 2006. Perhaps the low-key year is an unconscious repsonse to the Hwang scandal - the Korean scientist faked research and papers on cloning and was discovered at the end of last year.

It was also a year of warnings: a worsening biodiversity crisis, the Arctic ice cap predicted to be ice-free in summer by 2040 and UK chief scientific adviser David King making his starkest predictions yet on the effects of climate change. One piece of good news (possibly) on the last front: with British economist Nicholas Stern's report on the potential cost of climate change, will 2006 go down as the year the world work up to the problem?

It wasn't entirely quiet on the discovery front: the spectacular Stardust mission to bring comet dust back to earth; the Tiktaalik fossil (pictured) that gave biologists clues on how animals made it from water to land; and flowing water on Mars. Here's to more brilliance in 2007...

Fish out of water, polar ice, and leakage on Mars

Tiktaalik

A crocodile-like fossil called Tiktaalik roseae, found on Ellesmere Island, Canada, sent scientists wild with excitement. A missing link between fish and land animals, it showed how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago. Tiktaalik - the name means "a large, shallow-water fish" in the Inuit language - lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, and had a skull, neck, and ribs similar to early limbed animals, known as tetrapods, as well as a more primitive jaw, fins, and scales akin to fish. It showed that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water.

Arctic ice

Sir David King, the UK's chief scientific advisor, warned that, unless governments around the world took urgent action against climate change, global temperatures would rise by 3C, resulting in global famine and drought and threatening millions of lives. Cereal crop production could drop by between 20m and 400m tonnes, 400 million more people would be at risk of hunger, and 3 billion would be at extra risk of flooding and without access to freshwater supplies. This year, scientists calculated the Antarctic ice sheet is losing 36 cubic miles of ice every year. They also made the startling prediction that the Arctic ice cap will lose all of its summer sea ice by 2040, given the accelerating rate of melting observed in recent years.

Cellardyke swan

The dreaded avian flu, H5N1, turned up in a dead swan in Cellardyke, Fife. The virus seemed to remain confined to wild birds, however, and the potentially deadly flu caused no human casualties in the UK. It does not mark the end of H5N1, however. Scientists predict it will be back in the coming months and begin to spread around the world again as birds begin migration. For it to become deadly to humans, H5N1 needs to mutate so that it can transfer easily between people. So far this has not happened.

Stardust

Nasa's adventurous Stardust mission brought the dust of a comet back to Earth. The mission was full of firsts: the first time a probe had been flown so close to a comet; the first extraterrestrial use of the advanced aerogel material - a hi-tech mousse made of glass and air sometimes called "frozen smoke" - to trap the grains of dust; and the first successful sample return to Earth since the moon landings. The first results were published in December and showed that scientists would have to rewrite the textbooks on comet formation. Not only are these objects more than simply dirty snowballs, as had been previously thought, scientists found materials in them that suggest they could have kickstarted life on Earth.

Pluto

The underdog planet, smaller than the moon, was kicked out of the planetary club by the International Astronomical Union. The 2,500 scientists of the union decided on a definition of a planet as a body that orbits the sun, is so large that its own gravity makes it roughly spherical, and, crucially, also dominates its region of the solar system. Their decision will force a rewrite of science textbooks because the solar system is now a place with eight planets and three newly defined "dwarf planets" - a new category of object that includes Pluto. The category also includes an asteroid called Ceres and an object bigger than Pluto, initially called 2003 UB313 but later named officially as Eris.

Messing about in space

2006 was the year for doing weird, risky and just plain daft things in space. In February, an old Russian space suit filled with clothes was shoved out of the International Space Station. This was the cosmic equivalent of taking out the rubbish and the zero-G Guy Fawkes eventually burned up in the atmosphere as planned. In July, a Las Vegas property magnate called Robert Bigelow launched an experimental inflatable space hotel. The unconventional inn in the sky was crewed by cockroaches and Mexican jumping bean moths. In November, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit the longest golf shot in history from the ISS. A Canadian golf manufacturer paid for the stunt.

Water on Mars

The universe may not be such a lonely place after all. Earlier this month, Nasa scientists revealed the first evidence for flowing water on Mars. By comparing images taken by the now defunct Mars Global Surveyor satellite in 2001 and 2005 they saw tell-tale grooves cut by water bursting out of a crater wall and flowing between boulders. Researchers had previously found evidence that ancient lakes once dotted the Martian surface and vast quantities of water are locked up as ice at the planet's frosty poles. The flowing water would have quickly boiled and evaporated despite temperatures ranging from -8C and -100C because of the extremely low pressure. But the fact that it was there ups the odds for life on the red planet.

Extinction fears

In July, scientists warned extinctions are happening at 100 to 1,000 times the natural rate in geological history. Nearly a quarter of mammals, a third of amphibians and more than a tenth of bird species are threatened. Climate change is expected to force a further 15% to 37% of species over the edge. In November we learned that the current rate of extraction from the seas is predicted to cause the collapse of all the world's fish and shellfish stocks by 2048. Another study suggested that tigers would become extinct in just two decades.

Mature mums

The bounds of reproductive medicine were pushed a little further in July when a child psychiatrist became the oldest woman in Britain to have a baby. Patricia Rashbrook, 63, had the boy by caesarean section after receiving fertility treatment in eastern Europe. The birth provoked criticism from groups who said that her age would mean she was not physically able to bring him up.

Neanderthal refuge

Neanderthals may have clung on in Europe until as recently as 24,000 years ago - 11,000 years later than scientists had thought. A cave that was perhaps their last European refuge was revealed in a study published in September. Gorham's cave in Gibraltar was home to 15 neanderthals.

The devastating climate effects of even a small nuclear war

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:46:00 +0000

The continent-hopping doesn't seem to stop for me. Am in San Francisco at the moment, covering the American Geophysical Union's Fall meeting. These Americans know how to work a man hard, so no time for any major sightseeing yet (though I did go out to Monterey Bay on sunday and got a stunning view of the surf).

An interesting story from the first day of the meeting concerning the climate effects of a small-scale nuclear war. The researchers say that less than 100 Hiroshima-sized blasts would have devastating long-term effects on the climate. Crops would be out of action for five years, average temperature around the world would crash for ten years and the ozone layer would be decimated.

It's sobering given the seeming indifference to nuclear proliferation these days from major governments. India has just signed a deal with the US, for example, to share nuclear technology, ostensibly for its civilian programme. Both countries have hailed it as a major diplomatic breakthrough. There were reports that George Bush said recently that small-scale nuclear weapons could justifiably have been used to quell unrest in Iraq if necessary.

The American scientists behind the report argue that smaller conflicts are far more likely now than any major armageddon-type event (using 1000s of warheads) between the US and the Soviet Union was in the 1980s. They add that a confluence of three factors makes now the most dangerous time in history for human civilisation: increased nuclear proliferation; the migration of human populations into megacities and increased political instability.

Ther papers modelling the effects on climate and the one on human impacts are both available for discussion online.

Nuclear weapons pose the single biggest threat to the Earth's environment, scientists have warned.

In a new study of the potential global impacts of nuclear blasts, an American team found even a small-scale war would quickly devastate the world's climate and ecosystems, causing damage that would last for more than a decade.

Speaking at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in San Francisco yesterday, Richard Turco of UCLA said detonating between 50 and 100 bombs - just 0.03% of the world's arsenal - would throw enough soot into the atmosphere to create climactic anomalies unprecedented in human history.

Article continues
He said the effects would be "much greater than what we're talking about with global warming and anything that's happened in history with regards volcanic eruptions".

According to the research, tens of millions of people would die, global temperatures would crash and most of the world would be unable to grow crops for more than five years after a conflict.

In addition, the ozone layer, which protects the surface of the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, would be depleted by 40% over many inhabited areas and up to 70% at the poles.

Alan Robock, the co-author of the study, told Guardian Unlimited: "Nuclear weapons are the greatest environmental danger to the planet from humans, not global warming or ozone depletion."

There are around 30,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, 95% of which are held by the US and Russia.

In addition, there is enough unrefined nuclear material to make a further 100,000 weapons.

Human costs
It was Prof Turco who coined the phrase "nuclear winter" in the 1980s to describe the potential apocalyptic global consequence of all-out nuclear war.

In this study he and Prof Robock led research teams to create models of the impacts from nuclear blasts.

They examined an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs (15 kilotons each) between two countries, a conflict they argued was well within the ability of many emerging nuclear states.

The results showed that the most densely packed countries would fare worst in the aftermath of a nuclear war. India and Pakistan could face 12m and 9m immediate deaths respectively, while an attack on the UK would cause almost 3m immediate deaths.

A single nuclear blast in a major urban area would kill more than 125,000 people in the UK, injuring a further 100,000.

"Most of the human population is moving into very concentrated cities. At the same time, nuclear proliferation is accelerating again: we have Pakistan and India, Iran and North Korea," said Profe Turco.

While human losses would be constrained by geography, the environmental impacts of the bombs would spread worldwide.

Black smoke
In the 100 warhead scenario, more than 5m tonnes of sooty black smoke would spew from the resulting firestorms. This smoke would float to the upper atmosphere, get heated by the sun and end up being carried around the world.

The particles would absorb sunlight, preventing it from reaching the surface, which would result in a rapid cooling of the Earth by an average of 1.25C.

"This would be colder than the little ice age, the largest climate change in human history," said Prof Robock.

The model also showed that the smoke would stay in the upper atmosphere far longer than anyone had previously thought.

Older models had assumed that the smoke would linger for around a year, as has been observed with the dust from volcanic eruptions. However, using improved atmospheric data the new study showed that the climate would still be suffering a decade on from the initial conflict.

"Far removed from the conflict, there would be large impacts on agriculture - there would be less precipitation and less sunlight; it would be a huge shock to agriculture everywhere," said Prof Robock.

There is a precedent for this sort of climactic change: major volcanic eruptions in the past have thrown global ecosystems into temporary turmoil.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 was the biggest such event on record. The resulting cloud of ash spread around the world and caused crops to fail the following year in North America and Europe, resulting in the worst famine of the century.

Shock to the system
The scientists said a sudden change to the Earth's ecosystem because of nuclear blasts would be worse than any of the effects predicted by global warming due to greenhouse gases.

"Global warming is a problem and we certainly should address it but in 20 years, the temperature might go up by a few tenths of a degree and it will be gradual," said Prof Robock.

"We'll be able to adapt from some of it. But the climate change from even the small nuclear war we postulated would be instantaneous and such a shock to the system"

He said that the results should act as a warning to the international community.

"Proliferation is very dangerous - even using a couple of weapons is so much worse than anyone can imagine. I think the world should be much more concerned about proliferation than we are."

Prof Turco said that the end of the cold war had taken people's minds focus off the potential dangers of nuclear war.

"Look at 9/11 - there were 3,000 fatalities in that attack and that's considered a watershed in terms of terror that can be inflicted on a country. But in fact that's really a minor event to what's possible," he said.

"I can't imagine what would happen if there was a detonation in London: people would head to the countryside, there would be fallout everywhere, the country would shut down."

Enemies of science

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 12:07:00 +0000

In Madras but I thought it worthwhile to write a few lines. The retreating monsoon makes it very sticky here in the afternoons, the warmth sort of creeps up on you. Heading up to a hill station in a couple of days but, while I have an internet connection, thought I'd update the blog with a coment piece that ran in the Guardian just after I left England.

About Tony Blair's recent speech on science (described in more detail below) I wanted to ask some questions about his government's attitude to science. In effect, they pick and choose their evidence and which bits of science they like and which they don't.

So Tony Blair wants to be a science evangelist? In a recent speech in Oxford, he outlined his plan to stand up for science and face down those who distort and undermine it. He singled out animal rights extremists and people who cause confusion over MMR and GM technology.

But encouraging scientific progress is not just about giving good PR to new gadgets or cures. Most important is protecting the principle of free inquiry, something on which he and his government are way behind. His call for politicians to stand up for science belies the fact that his own administration systematically attacks this basic principle.

The biggest threat to science doesn't come from a mother scared of what the MMR jab might do to her child, or the extremist who burns down farms in solidarity with research animals. It comes from those who claim to respect the way science creates knowledge, but then misinterpret, distort or ignore that knowledge.

On the surface, scientists might seem to have little to worry about. Starved of prestige and money by successive Tory governments, they have seen labs rebuilt and reputations renewed under Labour. Blair talked of having trouble with science in his early years until a Damascene conversion left him "fascinated by scientific process, its reasoning, deduction and evidence-based analysis; inspired by scientific progress; and excited by scientific possibility".

But last week the conclusions of the Commons science committee inquiry into the government's use of scientific advice showed that his good intentions were not being mirrored by his own advisers. The report said that the government hid behind a fig leaf of scientific respectability when spinning controversial policies in a bid to make them more acceptable to voters, and it called for a "radical re-engineering" of its use of science.

Furthermore, scientists are becoming concerned at the rise of creationism in the British education system. The geneticist Steve Jones, who has lectured on evolution at schools for 20 years, says that he now regularly meets pupils who claim to believe in creationism. The creationist interpretation of fossil evidence is even encouraged in the new GCSE Gateway to Science curriculum. In August, a survey of British university students found that a third believed in either creationism or intelligent design.

At the end of the last parliamentary session, the government agency charged with licensing drugs took the remarkable decision that it would license homeopathic remedies. These glorified bottles of water can now carry details of the ailments they supposedly treat on their labels. The remedies do not need clinical trial data and peer-reviewed research to make their claims (as every modern pharmaceutical does). Scientists say the new rules are an affront to the principle of basing healthcare advice on scientific evidence.

Science is a tough master. Use this method of uncovering truth and you are not allowed to be selective about your evidence. But innovation, the technological answers to climate change, and all Blair's "glittering prizes" will come, at some point in the chain, from the basic rules of free inquiry grounded in scientific method: think of an idea, test it with experiments, draw conclusions, refine your experiments, and so on.

A forward-thinking nation loses respect for that free inquiry at its peril. Children taught to disregard evidence when trying to work out where the earth came from; a scientific agency deciding to abandon basic principles; and a government twisting research to fit its ideological message - none of that respects free inquiry. And if you don't stand up for that, you don't stand up for science.

The post got a lot of comments on the Guardian's comment is free blog, which you can read here.

Long journeys

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:43:00 +0000

Not exactly sure how I'm going to update this blog over the next three weeks as I'll be in India. Catching the plane at 3pm on Saturday afternoon. There's something wonderful about the pregnant few hours before a long journey - bags packed, house tidied, in the airport reading a book. Just waiting.

The plan is to fly to Delhi, then straight to Patna to visit the folks and my grandparents and then south to Madras. India is always a bit of an adventure: the long flight, the trains, the people, the feeling of being part of something bigger. Also, no-one can make me do any work - in fact, I have no responsibilities whatsoever. All I have to do is get myself to the airport. Bliss.

How the UK government twists science

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 11:46:00 +0000

A new report by the House of Commons science select committee criticises the UK government for twisting science to its own purposes. Does any of this remind people of the esteemed George Bush? And just a week after UK prime minister Tony Blair made such a thing of standing up for science against those who want to twist it. Ouch, Mr Blair. According to my colleague James Randerson in the Guardian:

The government often hides behind a figleaf of scientific respectability when spinning unpalatable or controversial policies to make them acceptable to voters, according to a report by MPs critical of the way science is used in policy.
The parliamentary science and technology select committee said that scientific evidence was often misused or distorted to justify policy decisions which were really based on ideological or social grounds.
The report, the culmination of a nine-month inquiry, calls for a "radical re-engineering" of the way the government uses science. "Abuse of the term 'evidence based' ... is a form of fraud which corrupts the whole use of science in government," said Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats' science spokesman and a member of the committee. "It's critical that the currency of an evidence base is not devalued by false claims."
The investigation highlighted several examples of misuse of science, including a witness who told the MPs that his work on crime statistics had been twisted by the Home Office to give the best possible spin.
"I had pointed out prior to the Home Office publishing this that I thought their interpretation differed from our own and I had identified where I thought the difference lay," said Tim Hope, a criminologist at the University of Keele who appeared before the committee in May. "Despite that, they proceeded to publish their own analysis. The inferences from that analysis were, let us say, rather more favourable to the political interests in this programme than were my own."

Professor Hope added that several researchers at a conference in 2003 were told at the last minute not to present work paid for by the Home Office, even though they were already on the conference programme. He believed this was because the Home Office wanted to control the way the information was released.

Some of the worst examples of false claims, says the committee report, Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making, came in drug policy, which Dr Harris described as an "evidence-free zone". Magic mushrooms, for example, are classified in the most dangerous drug category, class A, even though there is scant evidence that they are harmful.

The committee also criticised government claims that the ABC drug classification system reduces crime, saying there was no evidence to back that up.

"Governments have a right when they are elected to make policy because of sociological reasons or because of political imperatives," said Phil Willis, the committee's chair, "but what they don't have a right to do is to say that that is based on sound scientific evidence when it isn't."

The report calls on government departments to state clearly when statements are based on scientific evidence, and when they are going against evidence for political reasons.

The MPs also recommend the creation of a government scientific service made up of independent expert advisers and that the government's chief scientific adviser, currently Sir David King, be given a seat on the Treasury board. The committee challenges the perception that industry representatives on scientific advisory committees are "frequently seen as less trustworthy" than representatives of non-government organisations. It said technical committees should not routinely have lay members.

The MPs call for change in the culture of the civil service, where a scientific background is often seen as a barrier to promotion.

A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry said it recognised there was room for improvement, but added: "The UK has rightly developed an international reputation for its world-leading use of science in government, for example in climate change, health issues and international development."

Facts and fallacies

The science and technology select committee found numerous examples of the misuse of science by government departments:

· Government claims that the ABC drug classification system reduces crime.

· Magic mushrooms placed in the most dangerous class A category.

· Over-zealous regulations proposed for medical technicians using MRI scanners with no evidence base.

· Homeopathic remedies allowed to be licensed by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency despite not meeting the same standards of proof as conventional medicines.

· Cost estimates on ID cards published before key technical decisions were taken.

· Wide misuse of the term "precautionary principle".

The future is quiet

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:05:00 +0000

Here's a vision of the brave world of tomorrow. An airplane that is so quiet that you wouldn't hear it outside an airport. Published in the Guardian today:

Engineers have unveiled what they hope is the future for commercial airliners - a radical "flying wing" designed to be so quiet that no one outside an airport will be able to hear it.
The SAX-40 would be 25% more fuel-efficient than modern planes and carry 215 passengers up to 5,000 nautical miles (5,750 miles) at a maximum speed of 600mph. The blended wing design concept, which could come into commercial service by 2030, is a result of the £2.3m Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI), a three-year collaboration between Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"It's got a bold aim - by starting from scratch to design an airplane that has noise reduction as a major design consideration - so quiet that its noise would be imperceptible outside an urban airport in the daytime," said Ann Dowling of Cambridge University, who led the British side of the project.
Though airliners have been in commercial service for more than half a century their basic design has not changed. A tube-like fuselage with engines hanging under the wings has been the default design because it can be easily scaled up and down in size and is easy to maintain.
Blending the fuselage and wing has been confined mostly to military planes such as long-range stealth bombers. Engineers chose this shape for the SAX-40 because it is more aerodynamic and produces less air turbulence over the body, hence less noise. Using hundreds of microphones, engineers tested the sound produced by many of the new components. Their simulations predicted the aircraft noise would be 63 decibels at the airport perimeter, the equivalent of standing on a busy street.
"It's the integral system design that enables the low noise and not one particular technology," said Zoltan Spakovsky of MIT.
The primary noise reduction idea has been to put the engines above the body of the aircraft. This allows the fuselage to screen the noise from the ground by reflecting sound waves upwards.
The wings have been simplified, removing the need for flaps and slats - a major source of noise when a plane lands.
"On approach to land the flow over the wings and the landing gear produces much of the noise," said Dr Spakovsky. Half of the noise an aircraft makes on its approach to a runway is produced this way, and the faster it approaches the more noise it makes. The blended wing of the SAX-40 means the whole body provides lift for the aircraft, allowing it to make a slower approach.
Other ideas include lining the engines with sound-absorbing materials and making them longer so that acoustic mufflers can be added on to the ends. They also have adjustable exhaust nozzles that keep noise down at takeoff but open up at cruising altitude to maximise fuel efficiency.
"We set a major target for low noise but at the beginning of the project we didn't know what the impact would be for fuel burn," said Prof Dowling. "This design has reduced fuel burn and noise but probably if we scrapped the noise we could go still further in terms of reduced fuel burn."
The engineers calculated that the SAX-40 would achieve 149 passenger miles per gallon compared with 121 for a Boeing 777. By comparison a Toyota Prius hybrid car gets 144 passenger miles per gallon.
John Green of Greener by Design, which promotes sustainable aviation, said he was initially sceptical of the silent aircraft initiative. "Three years on I have to concede that the SAI has surpassed my expectations by quite a margin," he said.
"The team has produced a high-risk but credible design."
The conceptual design will now be carried forward by the industrial partners in the silent aircraft initiative. Several dozen companies were involved, including Boeing, Rolls-Royce and British Airways.
Further development of the SAX-40 into a commercial airliner could take several decades - the new Airbus A380, for example, took 17 years to design and build.
"This is a conceptual design and there are many technological barriers that need to be overcome to introduce these technologies into commercial use," said Cesare Hall, an engineer at Cambridge University. He outlined challenges such as developing the strong composite materials needed to produce the oval-shaped hull and improving modern jet engines to work with the SAX-40 design.
Prof Dowling said: "What we've shown here is the kinds of technologies and trade-offs and advantages they might bring. There are significant technical challenges to be overcome if we're to see an aircraft based on that concept.
"Some of the individual technologies one might see on more conventional looking aircraft in the nearer future."

What's interesting about this is the way Cambridge University and MIT worked together with industry on a specified goal for a set timescale. Their budget was quite small but they showed that, if you want to solve a problem, their model is a good one. In the process, they involved lots of undergraduate scientists and funded several dozen PhDs and Masters degrees. A good example of how to make young scientists enthused by what they are doing.

Aviation is the bete noir of climate change so what's the point of this exercise?

At the launch of the SAX-40 design, I asked one of the scientists involved if they would be able to do the same sort of focused project to reduce fuel consumption in airplanes because, pace anyone living near an airport, climate change is a bigger deal than aircraft noise. He said it would easily be possible. They already got 25% more efficiency with this design - imagine what you could do with a focused project to cut down carbon emissions from airplanes.

What is your business doing about climate change?

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:29:00 +0000

A survey released by the Carbon Trust today suggests that most UK consumers want to know the carbon footprint of the products they buy, and are more likely to buy a product if they know it has a low ecological impact.

In the survey, 74% of UK consumers agreed that climate change was a serious issue but the same number thought businesses were not doing enough to tackle their carbon emissions; 66% wanted to know the footprint of the goods they bought with 67% preferring low-carbon products.

Euan Murray of the Carbon Trust said that a new type of low-carbon consumer was emerging on the back of rising concern over climate change. "These are people that want to use their spending power to make a difference and feel like they are making their contribution also," he said.

The consumers surveyed by the Carbon Trust said that environmental concerns came into more than half of their of decisions when buying cars, electronic goods, and food and drink.

"As people learn more about the issues, more consumers understand that this is something they can do that helps them play their part, then more consumers will differentiate based on carbon footprint and environmental performance of businesses."

The survey also showed that 64% of consumers would prefer to buy from companies with a low carbon footprint.

Last week, Sir Nicholas Stern published an analysis of the potential economic impacts of climate change. He forecast that, if left unchecked, the costs could cost the world up to 20% of its GDP.

Mr Murray said the report presented good opportunities for businesses financially and in terms of reputation. "By reducing your carbon footprint as a business, you're typically reducing your energy consumption and that means you save," he said. "Then, by working with other companies in your supply chain, that means you can work to reduce the carbon footprint of the products that ends up in the consumer's hands. We believe companies will be able to grow market share on that basis."

Michael Rea, strategy director at the Carbon Trust, said: "Now is the time to take action and Governments, businesses and consumers all need to work together to reduce carbon emissions and tackle climate change. We believe that the businesses that embrace the challenge will succeed. Inaction is no longer an option."

Don't try this at home

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:26:00 +0000

Here’s something straight out of a sub-Frankenstein story. By passing a mild electrical current through the brain, you can improve memory, at least for words.

Scientists have discovered a surprising way of improving memory: passing electricity through the brain while you are asleep. They have found that mild electrical stimulation at the right frequency improved people's ability to remember words on waking up.

Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck in Germany who led the research, said the electrical current, applied via electrodes stuck to the scalp, seemed to enhance a part of the sleep cycle linked to consolidating word memory. Dr Born had 13 medical students learn a list of words and tested how many they remembered after a set time. He had them repeat the exercise after a nap.

The results, published today in Nature, show that without electrical current the volunteers remembered, on average, 37.42 words before sleep and 39.5 words when they woke. It confirmed research that sleep is important for consolidating learned information. After electrical stimulation the number of words volunteers remembered rose to 41.27 after sleep.

The researchers think their electrical stimulation enhanced the early part of the volunteers' sleep cycle called "slow wave sleep". During slow wave sleep there are regular electrical fluctuations in the prefrontal neocortex, which is linked to conscious thought and spatial reasoning.

In his experiment Dr Born's electrical current was tuned to match these natural fluctuations. When current was applied at a different frequency or during a different part of the sleep cycle there was no memory boost. How the electrical fluctuations in the brain lead to consolidation of memory is unclear.

One plausible theory, according to Dr Born, is that electrical currents of a particular frequency can make brain cells resonate. This strengthens connections between networks of cells, which are the physical representations of memories in the brain.

Guardian story here. An interesting note Dr Born made in the Nature paper: “This improvement in retention following stimulation is striking considering that most subjects were medical students, who were highly trained in memorising facts and already performed well in the sham condition.”

Tony Blair: Save the world, become a scientist

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:15:00 +0000

I like to think that I’m well on my way to becoming a wizened, cynical hack that holds public figures to account (stop sniggering at the back – I said I like to think). But there are some things that still secretly impress me.

Last week, I interviewed British prime minister Tony Blair on the eve of a talk he was due to give on science. The fourth in a series of speeches on securing Britain’s future, many pundits are saying that this is his goodbye tour, where he points out how wonderful he has been and show that he still cares about real issues. Rather than leadership battles and invading other countries, I assume.

Political press officers are a hard-nosed bunch so I didn’t get a huge chunk of time with Blair, to be honest. Fifteen minutes of very stage-managed time on a train to Didcot, to be precise. He previewed the main points of his speech, which I wrote up for the paper:

Irrational public debates and scare stories about science will damage the development of research in Britain if left unchecked, the prime minister believes.
Speaking to the Guardian ahead of a speech on science, Tony Blair said that he would stand up for science against the distrust engendered by historic problems such as the BSE crisis and the scare over the MMR vaccine.
"We've got to understand the importance of science to the future of the economy and to the future of society," he said. "In my view, for the next generation, development of science is as important as economic stability for future prosperity."
His talk in Oxford today is part of a series of speeches on securing Britain's future. Mr Blair will raise issues on public trust in science and what he sees as hurdles to attracting more young people to subjects such as physics, chemistry and engineering.
"I want to stick up for science and say why it's important and why we have rational debates about scientific issues rather than allow irrational debate," he said. "We've made that a very strong part of what the government's about and will continue to do so. The damage it can do otherwise is rather frightening."
He cited the scare over the triple vaccine, MMR, in recent years and the BSE epidemic among cattle in 1990s as examples. "Scientists got the blame [for BSE] and I think that's ludicrous. It wasn't scientists feeding rubbish to the animals, it was scientists who had to investigate and finally did discover what was going on."
Upcoming technologies such as genetics would throw up plenty of ethical issues, which would need careful consideration by a scientifically-literate public.
Public distrust in the past had led to a loss of research expertise in genetic modification. "The GM thing shows you can very suddenly lose a whole swath of the public ... [but] if you look around the world at the moment, bioscience is obviously where we should be heading."
Mr Blair argued that the potential for GM crops in Britain was limited for practical reasons. "If you look around the world to where GM crops are being developed most, it's where you have vast farming tracts. The future agriculture for this country is more likely to be in organic niche farming."
But he added that this should not prevent the UK from taking a lead on research in the area.
The speech will also outline how to encourage young people to consider taking science subjects at school and university. "There is a point in getting people enthused and saying, this is where the glittering prizes are. A lot of young people are interested, but they don't see it as a career except as a boffin. They don't see it as a career in which you develop one of the leading edge companies. They see science as what you do in a laboratory."

I also asked him about the Stern report on the economics of climate change, published last week. I wanted to know whether he would be taking that personally to George Bush and arguing that now, America had even less reason to avoid acting on climate change.

Blair’s too used to this question to give a straight answer, of course, but he did infer that it’s a long game with the US on climate change. He mentioned talking to Schwarzenegger about joining the EU carbon-trading scheme, of engaging with companies and other states in the US.

He also said that, while the Bush administration’s priorities are based around energy security, American companies will move quickly once they recognise the economic benefits involved in developing technology to tackle climate change. Indeed, many US companies are already spurring ahead.

I also raised the issue of a British astronaut with him, as per my last post. He laughed at this and said he could see himself as the first Brit on the Moon when he retired. Unfortunately, his mind was too stuck in the paradigm of his forthcoming speech and his messages were all about climate change. He called that the new Moon landings in terms of the inspirational effect they could have on the young. Save the world, he was saying, by becoming a scientist.

It's strange that a government so famously good at PR can't see the problem with that. The nitty-gritty of climate change is hardly going to inspire legions of kids today, a generation of people bred with MTV attention spans. Getting anyone to the stage where they see the genuine beauty of science will take something profoundly exciting. The prism through which today’s young see the world needs more than worthiness to inspire them. Sorry to say it and I wish it weren’t true. I'm sticking with astronauts. At least to get them through the door.

Evan Harris, the Lib-Dem science spokesperson will give his thoughts on Tony Blair’s speech on Monday’s Guardian science podcast. Worth a listen.

Hooray for Hubble

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:47:00 +0000

The Hubble Space Telescope is saved. This is one of the finest pieces of kit we humans have floating in space at the moment. Not only because of the science it has enabled but the pictures, like the one above of the Trapezium cluster.

An old man of the telescope world, it's expensive, it's ancient, it's falling apart and it was short-sighted when it first went up. But, boy, has it been worth it. Nasa decided to abandon the telescope after the tragic Columbia accident of 2003, arguing quite fairly that risking lives to repair Hubble further was not worth it. But, there's been a campaign amongst scientists and Hubble fans to keep it going somehow and, with the recent successful shuttle missions, Nasa director Mike Griffin has reversed the initial decision.

The next repair mission will install a new camera, replace broken gyros and carry out other repairs. Why spend $1bn to repair an ageing telescope when you have a space agency starved of money? Well, no doubt Griffin recognises that, if he wants more money to do the things he needs to do (get to the Moon and Mars), he'll need polish up the public face of the agency. Like it or loathe it, Hubble is that face. Here's to a million more brilliant pictures.

The case for a British astronaut

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:46:00 +0000

Aaaaand we're back. What no-one teaches you at blogging school is that it's tough work maintaining an interesting blog and working for a living. Fortunately, I've managed to combine the two in this latest post.

The more I think about the decline in science at schools and university, the more I wonder why all attempts to deal with it are so conservative. To some people, the solution is very simple: the apathy is caused by bad teachers. Pay them more and watch the students flock back. But that's like saying that we know carbon dioxide causes global warming so why don't we all just stop producing it? No doubt it's a problem and it needs addressing but why don't we get a bit more creative? After all, there's more than one way to crack a nut. Here's an idea I'd like to to throw into the mix, published in today's Guardian.

It's a quandary: Britain's supply of scientists and engineers is dwindling. Hi-tech companies are bemoaning the shortage of good graduates, the Treasury is getting twitchy about the economic implications, and government education advisers are left scratching their heads.
If only there were something inspirational that could turn children on to physics or engineering. Something that could demonstrate the excitement, adventure and sense of discovery that is at the core of science.
Here's a radical idea: send a Briton into space. Not on some half-hearted tourist trip to watch the Earth for a few days from the International Space Station, but a research-based programme with a specific mandate to inspire budding scientists. The dividend is clear. A generation of children jumped into science thanks to the American moon landings in the 1960s. In the US, the number of PhDs awarded in technical fields rose steadily during the Mercury and Apollo programmes from 1961 to 1972.
Britain's less-than-progressive attitude to sending people into space was neatly summed up by the science minister Lord Sainsbury in a 2003 speech. "There is no doubt that manned space exploration has a special excitement for people, and a particular attraction for young people," he said. "It does not, however, make a great deal of sense either commercially or in terms of doing world-class science."
In claiming there is no world-class science to be done with humans in space, he ignores the fact that almost all of the world's major economies think enough of the scientific return to invest heavily. Europe and the US have announced bold human space programmes spanning the next few decades; Russia, China, India and Japan plan to follow suit.
And commercial opportunities? Perhaps Richard Branson could have saved himself the trip across the Atlantic to buy his hardware for Virgin Galactic if Britain's space industry had come up with the goods.
Britain's decades-long rejection of the idea of human space flight was supported by a major review commissioned by the Science and Engineering Research Council in 1989. In looking at how research could benefit from sending people into space, it concluded that, because microgravity research was in its infancy, there was little point in spending the money. It cemented the view in government circles that sending people into space cost too much and had no scientific benefit.
Times change, and science marches on. A year ago, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) published a report that confounded the sceptics. Its nine-month investigation into the scientific case for human space flight concluded that the profound scientific questions relating to the history of the solar system and the existence of life beyond Earth could best, and perhaps only, be achieved by human exploration on the moon or Mars. It was all the more remarkable because the scientists leading the investigation started off being sceptical about the value of human space flight.
The report finished with a passionate plea: "It is hard to conceive that the UK, one of the world's leading economies, would stand aside from such a global scientific and technological endeavour. We therefore regard it as timely for Her Majesty's government to re-evaluate its long-standing opposition to British involvement in human space exploration."
A year on, Her Majesty's government has paid no attention to this golden opportunity to revitalise British science. Its head remains buried the sand.
Cost is obviously the sticking point. Getting into space is expensive, sending humans there doubly so. The RAS report suggested full membership of the European Space Agency's (Esa) Aurora programme, an ambitious initiative to send humans to Mars by 2030. For Britain, Aurora comes with a price tag of £150m a year for at least the next two decades, and membership doesn't guarantee a British astronaut. It's not a proposal that is likely to fly with the Treasury.
The answer lies in a more limited plan. A couple of flights with a set of experiments and an extensive programme of education would be enough to give Britain's emerging human space flight science community a chance to prove its value. Schools could be involved and science undergraduates could take part in competitions to design experiments. It's already done across Europe.
Initial calculations suggest such a programme could cost as little as £50m over 10 years. By investing less than a tenth of the amount spent on the Millennium Dome, Britain could cut its teeth on the next stage of human exploration and get a return - scientific, industrial, educational and cultural - worth several times the money put in.
There is little time left to decide: Esa and Nasa will both finalise their plans for the moon and Mars in the next few years. If we want to get involved, we need urgent action. By continuing to opt out, Britain will lose its best chance to show children how exciting science can be. We will also lose to the more ambitious nations those scientists who see space as the future. In the next decade, the question may no longer be whether we can afford to send people into space, but rather, can we afford not to?

The people leading this resurgence of interest in human space flight include Kevin Fong at University College London and Ian Crawford at Birkbeck College. They've put together a summary of the scientific case for a British astronaut here. What this needs is a consistent campaign or a more regularly-maintained web site or blog to keep people up to date and to suggest ways to lobby government. Any ideas welcome.

Atlantis and ISS drift across the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 12:04:00 +0000

What a stunning picture. It shows space shuttle Atlantis (left) just after it detached from the International Space Station (ISS) on September 17. Taken from the ground in Normandy by astrophotograher Thierry Legault. Distance between Atlantis and the ISS is 200m and that white background is the Sun. The two spacecraft drifted across our star for barely a second, so this photograph is a technical masterpiece. As well as being, well, just awe-inspiring.

The full-sized picture is here, showing Atlantis and the ISS against the full backdrop of the Sun.

Design this, suckers

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 09:53:00 +0000

Stories like this are great. Published in Nature today, details of new fossil remains found in Ethiopia - 3.3 million year old bones that belonged to a child of the species Australopithecus afarensis, the same as Lucy, the famous adult female discovered in 1974 and believed to be a direct relative of the human genus, Homo. It has been nicknamed Selam, meaning "peace" in the local language and is a critical fossil in showing how humans first branched off the larger ape family.

There's a wonderful sense of discovery in knowing where and how humans evolved. But a discovery like this also serves another, more viscerally satisfying, purpose: it's another in the beautiful catalogue of pokes in the eye for intelligent design.

Exposing the lies of the climate change deniers

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 23:37:00 +0000

The Royal Society (the UK’s academy of science) has written to the oil company ExxonMobil to insist it stop funding climate change deniers. These groups (nothing more than PR fronts for the oil industry) have created so much doubt and confusion about limate change that the environmentalist George Monbiot argues they have set back action on the issue by a decade. And, all the while, the world desperately runs out of time.

A key passage from the Royal Society letter to ExxonMobil reads:

I was very surprised to read the following passage from the section on Environmental performance under the sub-heading of “Uncertainty and Risk” (p.23) in the “Corporate Citizenship Report”.

“While assessments such as those of the IPCC have expressed growing confidence that recent warming can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases, these conclusions rely on expert judgement rather than objective, reproducible, statistical methods. Taken together, gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human action”

These statements also appear, of course, in the ExxonMobil document on “Tomorrow’s Energy” which was published in February. As I mentioned in our meeting in July, these statements are very misleading. The “expert judgement” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was actually based on objective and quantitative analyses and methods, including advance statistical appraisals, which carefully accounted for the interplay of natural variability, and which have been independently reproduced.

And there you have a good example of how these PR firms create confusion. On reading ExxonMobil’s report, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the IPCC were a bunch of astrologers plucking ideas on climate change out of the air. If you had never heard of the IPCC before, would you believe that they their judgements were scientific and proper?

Do just a moment of Googling and it's easy to discover that the IPCC is an august group that sets the scientific standard in climate research. But how many people will bother to look that up? And, of those that don't, how many will be left confused?

Is there really a debate amongst scientists about the reality of human-influenced climate change? The answer is no. But the damage done by ExxonMobil (among others) done by creating the doubt in the first place is tough to repair.

Big oil has a lot to lose with any cutbacks on carbon emissions imposed by legislation to deal with climate change. So it’s no surprise that they have a vested interest in sewing doubt about whether climate change is really a problem. They do it by labelling any research that doesn’t support their proposition “junk science” and labelling anything that doubts climate change “sound science”.

The anti-climate change lobby groups (mostly US-based) have a range of impressive-sounding names meant to instil the idea that they are academic think tanks or grassroots citizens’ organisations: TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change and the Congress of Racial Equality, for example.

Why scientists haven’t got more riled about this, and earlier, is anybody’s guess. Much of Monbiot’s thesis is well-known, if not in well publicised. Relying on the slow and steady scientific method to convince the rest of the world that climate change is happening isn’t a good idea - perhaps scientists (and journalists) need to use the same campaigning tactics used by big oil, as described by Monbiot in an extract from his new book in the Guardian. The Royal Society should be applauded for using its clout (there are many climate scientists in its ranks) to point out the hypocrisy and lies touted by climate change deniers.

Most surprising (and sinister) is the description of how the climate change denial industry sprung from Big Tobacco’s desperate attempts to discredit research suggesting that smoking caused lung cancer.

Read Monbiot’s new book (called Heat and published by Allen Lane) and open your eyes to the distortion that is possible with a sinister PR machine that will vociferously argue for anything as long as the price is right.

Guardian science podcast for September 18, 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:23:00 +0000

The latest podcast from the Guardian’s science team is up today. This week’s show, presented by science correspondent James Randerson, features a report on the Neanderthals’ last stand (a cave on the rock of Gibraltar), a treasure trove of science papers released by the Royal Society, and an interview with the roboticist Mark Tilden (the man who invented the Robo Sapiens toy).

Fossil hunter Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum tells Ian Sample how it felt to be sitting in the final resting place of the last known human species other than our own. Stone tools dated as young as 24,000 years ago litter the floor of the cave and there’s a possibility that underwater caves nearby will provide even more information on how these humans lived – and why they died. Until now, it was thought the Neanderthals died out more than 30,000 years ago.

Interested in the history of science? This Royal Society archive is for you. Librarian Keith Moore talks about the Society’s initiative to let people trawl through its vast archive of scientific research, a massive collection of papers dating back to 1665. Amongst the gems are Arthur Eddington’s proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1919; and the first ever descriptions mammoth bones; and the tale of a musical child prodigy – Mozart. Hurry though, the archive is only online free for the next two months.

An interesting theme that runs through the archive is how science emerged as a discipline from a bunch of well-heeled people carrying out crazy experiments. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, where much of its fellows’ work was published in the early years shows how people wanted to design repeatable experiments so that others could test their ideas. It’s a powerful testament to the strength of science that this method has survived for so long and, let’s not forget, has brought us some incedible advances in knowledge.

The types of experiment that people have tried over the years is interesting too – Charles II mocked members of the Royal Society when they wanted to weigh air, obviously thinking that there was nothing there. A hundred years ago, the American physician Duncan MacDougall tried to weigh the soul in the name of science – he got a figure of 21 grams. We all know which one of those proved the more useful activity, though MacDougall’s work did make it to Hollywood as the title of a 2003 movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

And finally, if you grew up in the 1960s, you probably thought we’d be living in the Jetsons by now – flying cars, honeymoons in orbit and robots in the home were all just around the corner. Unfortunately, robotics has been a big disappointment in the years since. Computers have become phenomenally fast, efficient and useful but modern robots can’t do much beyond simple tasks such as spray-paint cars or repeat simple recorded phrases on cue.

Former Nasa scientist Mark Tilden, the rock star of robotics, talks to technology correspondent Bobbie Johnson about his dream to make robots in the home a reality. He reckons that robots are at the stage now where cars and airplanes were 100 years ago. But he is convinced that things will move fast – in the next two years, they will be doing things that will be useful to people beyond just entertainment.

You can download the show or subscribe via iTunes. There is also an archive of previous science podcasts covering everything from the best science books to high-altitude telescopes.

Science doesn't need gatekeepers

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:58:00 +0000

Ever thought there was a media conspiracy going on, something meant to twist information beyond all recognition? You're probably not alone. Does it happen in science reporting? For the most part, any blind twisting of data or research is the domain of a few mad columnists. News reporting tends to fair and accurate. But things can go tits up sometimes.

Here's an interesting example from the British Association festival of science, which ran last week in Norwich, normally a treadmill of stories ranging from anthropology to nanotechnology. But one tale grabbed more attention than most - a controversial Cambridge University biologist called Rupert Sheldrake who said that he had uncovered evidence for telephone telepathy. If you haven't come across Sheldrake before, just know that he has some very strange ideas about psychic pets and whether animals will wake up if you stare at them.

Telephone telepathy is the phenomenon whereby you supposedly know who is calling before you pick up the phone. Normally banished to the realm of nonsense pseudoscience, it's mostly a harmless pursuit. But Sheldrake had done some experiments and came to Norwich to tell the world. This got some of the press pack in Norwich very upset.

Ted Nield, chair of the UK Association of British Science Writers, writes a colourful account of the day when science journalism began to eat itself on the ABSW blog.

Peace reigned at the University of East Anglia. Bunny rabbits hopped in newly mown grass. The lake, undisturbed in the September sunshine, reflected the angles of Sir Denys Lasdun’s famous ziggurats. Meanwhile, deep in the concrete jungle behind them, the British Association Annual Festival of Science was feverishly connecting, engaging and outreaching. From the Broad’s tranquil shore, you would never have known.

But the British public had only 12 hours to wait before quite a different picture would emerge in the pages of The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent, from which you would think that the shining lake had been a seething morass of angst and bile. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the whole edifice of science was apparently being assaulted and insulted - at the hands of an organisation founded to promote it. Scientists’ screams and moans were drowned only by the occasional sound of breaking glass, as various defenders of scientific rectitude – Lord Winston, Prof. Richard Wiseman, Sir Walter Bodmer, Prof. Peter Atkins and “A Royal Society spokesman” – apparently ripped their heads off in protest and threw them out of the windows. “Uproar at top science forum” thundered the Thunderer. “Festival attacked” screamed the Telegraph. “Scientists angry” asserted the Independent.

Interestingly not one of those allegedly indignant luminaries was anywhere near Norwich at the time.

Read the full article here

I was in the press room in Norwich while the saga unfurled and I was also at the press conference where Sheldrake presented his research.

The sentiment guiding the journalists behind the ensuing witch-hunt was impeccable. Telephone telepathy is a nonsensensical idea that doesn't fit any part of the scientific canon. The best reaction would have been to ignore it, as journalists do every day with flimsy stories. But, by overblowing it (the Times, Telegraph and Independent did several pages of telepathy-knocking between them) into a supposed row over whether the BA should host an event to showcase such research, the only thing they achieved was to give lots of coverage to an issue that didn't warrant it. Even I wrote a very short story.

The explanations proposed by the Sheldrake for telephone telepathy (including quantum entanglement and morphic fields) won't hold up. But it's not because the media points out that he is talking rubbish.

Instead, it will be the scientific method - rigorous experiment, peer review, publishing a paper - that will be his downfall. His pilot study of a few dozen people might have given interesting results (and, statistically, they are interesting, no journalist in that press conference could dismiss that) but bigger studies will no doubt prove him wrong. The work will wither away by itself. If Sheldrake's work holds up in bigger studies then things will certainly get interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.

Science doesn't need human gatekeepers to guide its progress. If anything, it's the human element that is science's biggest weakness. Whenever things have gone wrong, you can usually trace the mistake back to a person. The ego of the principal researcher, the war between competing institutions, corruption in funding or downright fraud - that's where inaccuracy comes from.

By definition, discovery is about walking into the unknown. Many of our greatest discoveries came from counter-intuitive thinking from great minds. Sheldrake shouldn't be stopped from researching his telepathy ideas or even presenting them at the festival of science (which, by the way, is a public engagement forum, not an actual science conference where scientists present results to each other). Apart from the obvious moral scenarios it is, in fact, a little sinister that anyone should suggest that certain areas of study are out of bounds.

Sheldrake doesn't need the media to dismiss his research. The scientific method will do that all by itself.

Ah, the pleasure of big machines

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:59:00 +0000

Nothing like a dose of hard physics first thing in the morning. Even if you don't get the point of this post, just wallow in the numbers.

The world’s biggest magnet reached full power yesterday. This 10,000-tonne beast generates a magnetic field more than 100,000 times higher than the Earth’s and stores 2.5 gigajoules of energy. That can melt 18 tonnes of gold, in case that fact is useful to you one day.

The magnet is part of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (another example of scientist hilarity as this huge machine is several stories high and more than 13m long – not too compact, really) that will run on the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator being built at Cern laboratory in Geneva. It will help work out where mass comes from and what the “missing” 96% of the universe is actually made from.

The LHC has been underconstruction for several years now and is the most advanced bit of kit that particle physicists will have to work out how the universe came to be as we see it today after the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago.

From the Wikipedia article on the LHC on what physicists will use the collider to find out:
Is the popular Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model violated? If not, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses?
Will the more precise measurements of the masses of baryons continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?
Do particles have supersymmetric ("SUSY") partners?
Why are there violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?
Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?
What is the nature of the 96% of the universe's mass which is unaccounted for by current astronomical observations?
Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces

The LHC is one of the most exciting projects in physics and, let's not beat about the bush, a marvel of engineering. Here's a film of how the CMS is put together and how it works. Here's an article I wrote on the LHC a while back.

A problem far bigger than global terrorism

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:42:00 +0000

Jonathan Freedland's clear and persuasive writing is always a rewarding read. Today, he turns his attention to climate change, arguing that former US vice-president Al Gore's new film, An Inconvenient Truth, finally made him realise what the biggest political issue of our time is. About time, too.

The UK government's chief scientific adviser, David King, has made climate change a central plank of his tenure, saying famously that it is a bigger problem than global terrorism. And he's dead right.

The amount of carbon in the atmosphere (in the form of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane) is currently around 380 parts per million (ppm). Various countries want to limit future emissions so that no-one gets above 450ppm, but this is proving difficult. And anyway, no one country lives in a vacuum, so controlling the UK's emissions does nothing to combat the huge rise in CO2 predicted from rapidly-developing countries such as India and China. No-one can rightly deny their desire to industrialise and raise large parts of their population out of poverty. But that does involve building lots more CO2-producing power stations.

The critical figure is 550ppm. If we get to this much carbon in the atmosphere, global temperature will rise, on average, by 3 Celsius. Doesn't sound much but Prof King said that this would lead to a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20m and 400m tonnes, put 400 million more people at risk of hunger, and put up to 3 billion people at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies. And that's a best-case scenario. There are more details in an article I wrote for the paper earlier in the year.

Climate change is happening, like it or not. Exactly how far it will go might be the cause of some debate amongst scientists but there's no doubt that it is happening. And we can't consider the arguments at leisure anyway. Peter Smith, a professor of sustainable energy at the University of Nottingham argued recently that we only have 10 years to come up with climate-friendly solutions to generating energy, for example. By 2026, he says it be too late to do anything substanstive in slowing global warming.

If it took a film by Al Gore to persuade someone as informed as Freedland that climate change needs immediate attention, we've obviously got a longer way to go than I previously thought with getting the general public on board.

The problem is that a lot of climate change news tends to be so negative that people slip into despair. What can we do, they ask. We need to get more pro-active with solutions in the climate change message, something Freedland says that Gore does in his film. It's something the Guardian's new environment web site is trying to do. For now, I say get militant - drag everyone you know to go and watch this film. Details of show times here.

Come dancing

noreply@blogger.com (Alok Jha) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 23:23:00 +0000

I've always wanted one of these dance floors in my house. Something that changes colour as you pull complex disco moves.

This picture (copyright Karl J Kaul) is part of a special edition of the Guardian's weekend magazine where comedians re-created iconic poses. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal did the classic Saturday Night Fever routine while I chatted to them about Goodness Gracious Me, The Kumars at No. 42 and a myriad other projects they had been involved in. I don't regularly interview celebrities, so this was way out of my comfort zone. But they made it very easy: both were warm and intelligent. Sanjeev, in particular, was disarmingly self-deprecating.

"Sanjeev Bhaskar is standing, arms impossibly outstretched, on a dance floor that is pulsing lazily between blue, purple and red. His two-inch platforms seem to have left no room for toes. To his right, Meera Syal is poised, middance step, caught between nonchalance and awe.

"It's less Saturday Night Fever, more Airplane!" says Bhaskar as he strives once more for that iconic Travolta pose. He might feel a little out of his skin vamping in a white nylon suit, but there's no question that his most successful comedy creation, Sanjeev Kumar, the ever-so-slightly-desperate star of The Kumars At Number 42, would slide right into it.

Syal reveals to the assembled crowd that her first dance with Bhaskar at their wedding last year was to Nat King Cole's There May Be Trouble Ahead."

Read the full article here

You can also see the full slide show of the pictures of the comedians in the magazine. It includes Johnny Vegas as Demi Moore, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant as Lennon and McCartney and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Gazza and Vinnie Jones.