BlueSci Film: Wanted – Scientists in the field

By admin | Published: January 27, 2012

We are interested in showcasing the work that scientists here at Cambridge do when away from the city. So if you’re interested in sharing your experiences, contact BlueSci Film Editors Nick and Alex at film@bluesci.co.uk.

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‘Great Lake’ on Jupiter’s moon may harbour life

By admin | Published: January 25, 2012

Scientific analysis of the surface of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, suggests that warm water rises from its deep oceans to form shallow nutrient-rich lakes that could support life.

Europa's icy surface

Scientists suspect that Jupiter’s icy moon has a salt water ocean 10-30km beneath the ice crust that contains more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. However, Europa is so far from the Sun that its surface is covered with an ice sheet thought to be tens of miles thick. A thick ice layer makes aquatic life difficult as energy and nutrients can’t circulate between the moon’s surface and its ocean.

Now a team lead by Britney Schmidt from the Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, has been using images from the Galileo spacecraft to analyse circular, bumpy features on the surface of Europa called ‘chaos terrains’. Chaos terrains are seen on Earth in ice shelves and glaciers that cover volcanoes, and indicate an area of thinner ice. The team have now developed and published a model in Nature, which may explain these phenomena on Europa’s thick ice sheet. They theorise that plumes of warmer water rise from the moon’s depths, melting and fracturing the ice sheet and enabling Europa’s icy crust and ocean to mix vigorously. This allows the transfer of energy and nutrients that favour life.

The model resolves previously conflicting observations of Europa’s ocean; some of which had suggested that the ice shell is thick, others that it is thin. As the current model depends on the analysis of images of the surfaces of Europa and Earth, however, the existence of these plumes can only be confirmed by a future spacecraft mission to probe the ice shell.

Written by Joanna-Marie Howes

DOI: 10.1038/nature10608

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Using antibodies to help prevent HIV infection

By admin | Published: January 22, 2012

Researchers in California have developed a novel form of gene therapy for preventing HIV infection. In a recent Nature paper, the group showed that mice treated with a single dose of this therapy produce long-lived antibodies that fight off HIV and help maintain a normal immune system.

Electron micrograph of HIV-1 (in green) budding off the surface of white blood cells

Thirty years since the first reported case of AIDS, effective treatment for the prevention of HIV transmission has yet to be found. The increasing prevalence of HIV worldwide has made such a discovery even more pertinent today. In 2009 alone, 34 million people were infected with the virus, and nearly 2 million people died.

While many researchers in the field are attempting to confer immunity through vaccines, this new method involves immunization by gene transfer. It actually manipulates the genetic code of muscle cells to enable them to produce stable antibodies that target HIV for destruction.

The researchers who developed this novel therapy at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles, have termed it “vectored immunoprophylaxis.” It uses an adenovirus, delivered intramuscularly, to encode for neutralizing antibodies that recognize a protein expressed on the surface of the HIV virus. This protein, known gp120, plays a vital role in helping HIV infect the CD4 T cells of the immune system.

Mice given a single dose of the adenoviral therapy sustained higher levels of CD4 T cells than those not given treatment. Additionally, these mice sustained production of the gp120 antibody for a minimum of 52 weeks and at serum concentrations 100-fold greater than levels achieved with other vectors. The mice’s spleens also showed no staining for antigens expressed by HIV.

This work demonstrates that it is feasible to translate the existing repertoire of neutralizing antibodies into functional HIV therapy for animals. In humans, the antibody’s half-life is even longer, so its effects may be even longer lasting. Future clinical trials will prove how efficacious this novel therapy may be for humans.

Written by Leila Haghighat

doi:10.1038/nature10660

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BlueSciFilm: We are Sitting in the Mollusc Store

By admin | Published: January 21, 2012

Snails, clams, squids and octopoda… Dr. Richard Preece took BlueSci film editor Nick Crumpton behind the scenes in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge to see the 100,000 specimens of bivalves, gastropods and cephalopods kept behind the museum’s closed doors. For the past year researchers in the museum have been taking stock of the collection, photographing historical specimens and making the resource available to the public online. Dr. Preece talked to BlueSci about why this was undertaken, what the collection holds and why the Cambridge material is so important.

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Weird and Wonderful

By admin | Published: January 18, 2012

A selection of the wackiest research in the world of science

The brain-burning smoke alarm

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Scientists from japan have discovered how to wake the hearing impaired in the event of a fire, and in doing so have won themselves the 2011 Ig Nobel prize.  The ingenious “Odor Generation Alarm and Method for Informing Unusual Situation” is a standard fire alarm with a difference. Instead of relying on sound as an alert when a hazard is detected, it sprays an unpleasant scent.

In the design of their alarm, the inventors made use of wasabi, a relative of the horseradish. Commonly served with sushi, the condiment is given its pungency by the chemical allyl isothiocyanate. The scientists discovered that this odourous chemical can stimulate pain receptors in the nasal passages. In fact, this stimulation occurs to such an extent that inhalation of the optimal concentration of airborne wasabi can wake a sleeping person in under two minutes.  Because smell perception changes during sleep, scent alone is not enough to rouse a person, but the brain-burning sensation produced by wasabi is, since pain receptors continue to function normally during sleep.

The researchers suggest that the alarm could be further developed into an alarm clock or even a doorbell. Nicola Love

It’s a wrap!

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Ever wondered what happens after death? For Alan Billis, a taxi driver from Torquay, the answer was on-air mummification in a Channel 4 documentary entitled “Mummifying Alan: Egypt’s Last Secret”. Alan was mummified in the style of 18th dynasty Egyptian pharaohs using techniques developed by the archaeological chemist Stephen Buckley.

Buckley’s team began by making an incision in Billis’s left side and removing all internal organs but the heart, which was thought to be the seat of intelligence and wisdom by the ancient Egyptians. They then packed his body cavity with linen bags and covered him with sesame oil, beeswax, and resin. This mixture protected his skin while he was immersed for five weeks in a bath of concentrated Natron salt. After drying his body, the team wrapped Billis in linens containing family mementos—important tokens for his journey into the afterlife.

CT scans showed that Billis’s body was well-preserved 93 days after starting the mummification process. His body will remain ‘entombed’ for further scientific observation. The team’s success makes Billis the first person to be mummified in this way in 3500 years. Described as “shocking” and “not an easy watch” by reviewers, the documentary sparked considerable controversy.  Jordan Ramsey

Could you live on caffeine?

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University of Iowa scientists have identified bacteria that can live on caffeine. One, known as Pseudomonas putida CBB5, was even found lolling in a flowerbed on the University campus.

Caffeine is found naturally in more than 60 different plants. Its molecular structure features three clusters of carbon and hydrogen atoms, known as methyl groups, enabling caffeine to resist degradation by other bacteria. Human liver enzymes, which have the task of breaking down caffeine and other drugs, can only get part of the way. This bacterium uses four newly identified digestive enzymes to chop down caffeine into a carbon dioxide and ammonia molecule. Through this process, the bacterium harvests energy, achieving things with caffeine that humans are unable to.

Ryan Summers, the doctoral researcher who led the study, said no previous research has located caffeine consumption in any other microbe species. He and his collaborators also noted that this finding could someday have implications outside of the highly caffeinated Petri dish.

The bacterial digestive enzymes could be used to develop new medications to treat heart arrhythmias or asthma, or to boost blood flow.  They could also be used in large scale processes to help break down excess caffeine, which is often generated as a by-product of decaffeinated coffee and tea processing. Mariana Fonseca

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A Day in the Life: The Science Diplomat

By admin | Published: January 18, 2012

Ian Le Guillou interviews David Clary

Prof. David Clary, Chief Scientific Advisor to the FCO

David clary is a Professor of theoretical chemistry and President of Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2009 he was appointed the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). In an interview with Ian Le Guillou he discusses what this role entails and how science is involved in foreign policy decision-making.

The FCO was one of the last major government departments to appoint a Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA). Why did it eventually decide it needed one?

There are several departments in the FCO that deal increasingly with matters linked to science, so having a Chief Scientific Adviser was a useful step to take.  There’s climate change and the science behind that, which has to keep in communication all the time. There are new renewable energies coming forward and the debate about whether to have nuclear or not, to have wind or not, the importance of shale gas and so on.  Counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism are obviously of great interest; I can’t say much about that for confidential reasons but it really is a major concern of the FCO. Also there are territories that are still administered by the FCO and there are major scientific aspects of several of these.

What is your role within the FCO?

Some government departments have a very large budget and staff for science but not the Foreign Office, where the emphasis is more on influence with other countries. A very important part of the work that I do is to build partnerships to encourage collaboration between UK science and overseas science. I also work to promote UK public science and the FCO’s role in that, and to strengthen the science and engineering capacity in the FCO. In addition, I engage with the cross-government group of science advisers and provide advice to the Foreign Secretary, ministers and officials on science, technology and innovation.

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Arts & Science: Writing the Future

By admin | Published: January 18, 2012

Matthew Dunstan investigates the role of science fiction in shaping science fact

The american philosopher and psychologist John Dewey once wrote, “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination”. Creativity within science and technology is not limited to scientists — we are used to seeing fantastic and seemingly impossible inventions in literature, films, art and theatre. Are these inventions confined to the realm of science fiction or, in hindsight, are they surprisingly accurate predictions?

Consider something as simple as the automatic door. It was first invented by Lee Hewitt and Dee Horton in 1954 and is now commonplace in offices, shopping centres and even some public toilets. However, the idea was imagined first by H.G. Wells in 1899. In his novel When the Sleeper Wakes he writes, “…A long strip of this apparently solid wall rolled up with a snap…”. Admittedly, the leap from door to automatic door isn’t that impressive, and Wells gives no description about how this device actually works, but his forward thinking is still quite incredible considering he wrote this more than 50 years beforehand.

ipods and RADAR are just two of the many inventions pre-empted by literature

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History: Science’s Royal Beginnings

By admin | Published: January 18, 2012

Nicola Stead takes a look back at the origins of the Royal Society and its founding members

The current global economic turmoil, and its resulting austerity measures, are increasingly putting pressure on scientists to improve the social impact and application of their research. Whilst this can turn into a bureaucratic exercise for modern scientists, it was this very same necessity and desire to apply science that was at the heart of the formation of the Royal Society—the world’s longest continuously running scientific society.

One late November evening in 1660, against a backdrop of a country beginning to recover from great political divides caused by the civil wars, twelve eminent men gathered in London. Putting aside the differences in their pasts, these gentlemen met at Gresham College to hear a lecture given by the young astronomer, Christopher Wren. Many of those present were already members of the so-called ‘Invisible College’—a group of notable men including Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, who met in the gardens of Wadham College, Oxford. They used their meetings to perform experiments and discuss natural philosophy, or as we now call it, science, and they were very keen to expand their group.

The gentlemen who met that November night were also ardent followers of the Baconian method of science. This method had recently emerged from Cambridge alumnus Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, published in 1620. Bacon encouraged abandoning the Aristotelian method of science and suggested placing emphasis on cooperative research, using empirical methods to gain knowledge about the natural world. Driven by a key Baconian principle that ‘knowledge is power’ and a genuine desire to deliver applicable science, these gentlemen set out to formalise their ‘Invisible College’. In signing their names in a ledger, they became the first fellows of the ‘Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’ (sic). Effectively, they accelerated the movement of science away from the somewhat amateurish hobby of the aristocracy, performed in country manor house laboratories, to a more centralised, open and collaborative affair.

Christopher Wren (left) and Robert Hooke (right) two of the founding members of the society

The motto of the ‘Invisible College’, ‘Nullius in verba’, loosely translates to ‘Take nobody’s word for it’, and it reveals the Society’s desire to be at the frontline of science. Each week at their meetings at least one experiment would be performed, ranging from dissecting a dolphin to transfusing blood from a sheep to a human and looking at slides under the newly designed microscopes.

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Behind the Science: Computers, Codes and Cyanide

By admin | Published: January 18, 2012

Jordan Ramsey explores the persecuted genius of computing pioneer Alan Turing

Described as the father of computer science, a code breaker in World War II and a pioneer in the world of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing was a remarkable man. He was also a proud homosexual and a runner of Olympic calibre. His untimely death at the age of 41 leaves us wondering just what more he could have achieved. This year marks the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth; celebrations are planned at King’s College, Cambridge, and throughout the world.

Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, in 1912. His father was a member of the Indian civil service. As a result, he and his brother John spent a good deal of their youth in foster homes while their parents returned to India. Like many other geniuses both before and after him, as a young boy Turing felt misunderstood and isolated. His loneliness only finally evaporated when he left home for Sherborne School and met Christopher Morcom. Alan idolised his new-found kindred spirit, finding reasons to frequent Morcom’s favourite libraries, exchanging letters and collaborating on scientific projects with him. Morcom’s death during his last year at Sherborne had a great impact on Turing, fuelling an ambition to fulfil his friend’s legacy. There is even speculation that Morcom’s death influenced Turing’s work on artificial intelligence as he analysed the relationship between the material and the spiritual.

Morcom’s death solidified in Turing a determination to improve his grades and earn a scholarship to Cambridge. After two failed attempts to get in to Trinity College, Alan finally received a scholarship to his second choice, King’s College, in 1931. While reading for a degree in mathematics, Turing pursued rowing and later running, while also coming to grips with his sexuality. During this time, he completed impressive work on the central limit theorem in statistics and secured a fellowship at King’s in 1935.

Alan Turing memorial at Bletchley Park, where he helped crack the Enigma code

It was then that he turned his attention to a problem posed by a fellow mathematician, producing the Turing machine, which forms the foundation of our modern theory of computation. The Turing machine is a theoretical device able to solve any computable mathematical problem given the appropriate algorithm, or set of instructions. His extension of this concept to a ‘Universal Turing Machine’ arguably paved the way for the modern stored-program computer, in which program and input data share the same memory. Prior to this, computers were either constructed with a single hardwired program or reprogrammed with an external punched tape that had to be fed into the machine.

After obtaining his PhD at Princeton University in 1938, Turing was recruited to work as a cryptanalyst for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. His eccentricities were noted by colleagues. In the summer, Turing would cycle to work wearing a gas mask to prevent hay fever. He also tied his teacup to the radiator to prevent his co-workers from stealing it. Despite his bizarre behaviour, Turing nonetheless emerged as a brilliant cryptanalyst. He devised plans to build a machine called the ‘bombe’, after the original Polish ‘bomba’ machines, to decipher messages from the German encryption machine, Enigma. The bombe was much faster than its predecessor and eventually led to the construction of the Colossus, another successful decoding machine. Towards the end of the war it is said that Churchill would read Hitler’s messages at lunch, while Hitler himself would read them later that day at dinner.

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Science & Policy: The Race to the Edge

By admin | Published: January 18, 2012

Beth Venus discusses the future of manned space missions

November 2011 saw the quest to send humans to Mars take a step forward with the launch of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt probe. The intention was not only to return soil samples from the surface of the planet, but to test whether living organisms could survive the journey in a biomodule on board.  Together with the success of Mars500, in which six men were isolated in a mock spacecraft for seventeen months and Barack Obama announcing his ambitions to send humans into deep space, touchdown on Mars’ rust-coloured surface could be celebrated by mankind as soon as 2030.  The inspiration of a new generation of scientists could be captured, and a greater understanding of the environment and evolution of Mars attained.

The many problems associated with space travel and survival will need solutions before this can become a reality, but the research is already under way. 2014 will see the testing of NASA’s Orion spaceship, designed to carry humans beyond low-earth orbits. It is this craft that could get humans over the moon and out to asteroids, Phobos (Mars’ largest moon), and Mars itself—all potential destinations for space crews. Its first test—where Orion will be flung into an elliptical orbit taking it to an altitude higher than any human has previously reached—will be unmanned. Yet it will provide crucial knowledge on how to safely return humans home from a voyage. How Orion performs on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere will guide us in designing a spacecraft to survive re-entry at greater speeds from further afield. All being well, the first manned attempt will occur within the next two decades. However, such a test relies on the outcome of debates currently occurring in the United States Congress about financing NASA.

A model of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt probe

It is possible that any financial limitations to our exploratory power can be resolved by uniting globally. The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA may be joining with Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, to launch their ExoMars satellite to learn more about the atmosphere of Mars. This international effort to increase our knowledge of Mars using rovers and satellites gives hope that a similar effort will succeed in seeing the first people to the planet. This summer is a case in point, as representatives from the United States, South Korea, Europe, Japan and Canada gathered as part of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group. In their recently published Global Exploration Roadmap, the group laid out two technological routes that would advance plans to set foot on and eventually set up home on Mars, or elsewhere in the solar system. Either another moon-landing or grappling with an asteroid would sufficiently hone technologies for missions further afield.

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