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Science beyond the bell curve
Frank Swain is a science writer and blogger. He is based in the UK.
February 1, 2012
Category: General
Dear scientists,
Why do you study, the thing that you study? What is it, and why did you choose to study it over all the other possible things you could have studied?
Best
Frank
Posted by SciencePunk at 10:57 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 15, 2012
Category: Awesome
Toward the end of last year, being in possession of two novelties - a girlfriend and a steady job - I decided to spend my free evenings crafting a very special piece of jewellery. I was inspired by a visit to Barometer World in the late summer, where I discovered the curious material known as storm glass (tragic backstory recounted here).
In short, a storm glass is a weather divination tool so old that nobody really knows where they came from. It's likely they were borne out of alchemy experiments performed during the medieval period. Inside a sealed glass tube, crystals bloom, wither and vanish spontaneously, apparently spurred on by weather fronts. It was a thing of wondrous beauty.
Nobody knows what exactly makes storm glasses act this way. I've read in many places since that it is pressure changes, as with a barometer. This clearly isn't true, as the fluid is sealed inside a solid glass chamber. Others cite temperature fluctuations - far more probable - or, more exotically, electrical discharge across the glass (again, unlikely, glass is a very fine electrical insulator). Even spooky quantum forces get a mention.
It was around then that an idea hatched in my head: if it was really heat that caused a storm glass to sigh and sway from one condition to another, then why couldn't it be turned into a pendant? One that would react to the body heat of the wearer? I would make a storm glass - not one that predicted the passing of nature's cold fronts, but one that signalled the tempests of the heart! A crystal that would melt in the heat of my girlfriend's passions, and grow hard in the cooling of her mood. It would be easy, right?
Posted by SciencePunk at 9:23 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2011
Category: Art
This weekend I visited the Trauma exhibition at London's GV Art gallery. The pieces all relate in some way to physical and psychological trauma inflicted on the body, by a range of artists working alone and in collaboration with medics.
Some of the items are underwhelming verging on irritating - placing histological slides on a plinth does a disservice both to art (because there is no emotional narrative contained within) and to science, because it implies that the inherent wonder and beauty of science is absent unless it is repackaged as a gallery exhibit. (Hello? Museums present objects of science all the time, and they are spaces filled with wonder and beauty).
There are, though, some wonderful pieces that make the trip to West London worthwhile: the annual self-portraits of a man suffering Alzheimer's that chart the destruction of his talent with terrifying effect; and (pictured above) the exquisite glass sculptures of microbes - both real and imagined - created by Luke Jerram.
Trauma is free and can be seen at the GV Art gallery at 49 Chiltern Street, London, until February 18.
Posted by SciencePunk at 12:11 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 20, 2011
Category: General
Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been pondering for a while now.
"It's called," he told me, over the noise of the pub, "an information diet." It seems like an odd concept, even a heretical one. I am by my own admission an information glutton. I suck up huge volumes of information like a baleen whale, sieve it, swallow it, gulp again. I have a cascade of feeds I never have time to read, and I'm getting serious indigestion. Seeing and sharing is easy in an always-online world, and addictive to boot. I'm not the first one to turn a critical eye on my sources of information - the phrase "information diet" was coined long ago; prior to the internet there was no shortage of voices railing against the popular medium as an unfit and corrupting influence, whether it be comics, video games, television, MTV, books, and, we must presume, scrolls and slates in some early day.
Posted by SciencePunk at 6:35 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2011
Category: Falling Walls
Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Paul Chirik: How Modern Alchemy Can Lead to Inexpensive and Clean Technology
Professor of chemistry Paul Chirik is on a mission to turn lead into gold. Or, to be more precise, to make lead act like gold. Precious metals are instrumental to some of the most widespread and important chemical processes in our world, such as the osmium needed to synthesise fertiliser (so valuable that BASF bought up the entire world's stock at one point), and the platinum needed to make jeans bendable, shoes sturdy, and envelopes sticky. The problem is that precious metals tend to be, well, precious. Not only that, but turbulent markets and rampant speculation cause huge fluctuations in their price, impacting on the products that depend on their use as catalysts.
Precious metals tend to operate in the realms of two electron transfers, while "base" metals only operate a single electron transfer. Two electrons good in this case; single-electron transfer is responsible for all the chemistry you hate, like the free radicals in your body and the rust in your car. To get around this problem, nature engineered complex electron transport chains carried out by enzymes to produce the molecules it needs without relying on the rarer elements. Chrik is following in these footsteps, developing ways to get cheap metals like iron work like platinum, replacing the more expensive of the two in common industrial reactions.
The technique offers huge advances for sustainable chemistry. A molecule Chirik developed, when added in 1% solution to herbicide, forced it to spread over leaves instead of forming droplets. This meant 90% less was needed to treat the same area! It's not always simple of course - a replacement envelope glue designed by Chirik was rejected because nobody wanted to lick a black gumming strip (a more appeasing colour was developed).
Posted by SciencePunk at 4:18 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Falling Walls
Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Robert E. Horn: How Visual Language Supports Decision Making About Wicked Problems and Social Messes
Let's face it, having "messes" listed as a research specialism on your business card is pretty neat. But Stanford's Robert Horn is exactly that, a man who studies messes, or more accurately "inter-related sets of problems", particularly because business and government strategies are often hatched in the midst of messes. Starting out with the war on drugs, Horn shows how the issue is fed from a dizzying number of sources: everything from the rate of high-school dropout to war on the streets of Mexico. And this leads to Horn's mantra, writ large on the towering screen behind him: "Don't treat a social mess as a regular problem".
To make sense of messes such as these, Horn creates visual aids. But these are no ordinary powerpoint presentations. Commissioned to help develop Britain's 12,000 year plan for the disposal of nuclear waste, Horn and his team created a mural that spanned fifty years into the past and a million into the future, containing hundred of images and word boxes. A similar mural was created for the World Council on Sustainable Development, to illustrate a roadmap for achieving a more equal society by 2050. In "backcasting" (a technique Horn describes as imagining the ideal future and looking backwards, year by year, to visualise what would need to be in place to lead there), the final mural was 40 14 feet wide and contained 70 measures of success, 350 milestones and 250 visual elements.
Horn says this kind of mega-infographic can illustrate multiple points of view, patterns, and context that helps to facilitate the type of group processes needed to solve some of our most intractable - and intricate - problems.
Posted by SciencePunk at 2:26 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Falling Walls
Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Robert Schlögl: How Heterogeneous Catalysis Can Replace Fossil Fuels
Robert Schlögl is Director of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, discussing our reliance on fossil fuels. The problem isn't simply that they are a fast-diminishing resource, but that fossil fuels still represent the world's best energy storage system. We need to find new ways of generating energy, but just as importantly, we need to find ways of storing it. Currently the only way of efficiently storing energy is inside a chemical bond.
Nature has its own storage molecule - sugar. But it is a difficult molecule to work with. Schlögl wants to design new artificial solar fuels, that are stable and easy to build. Collecting the light that falls on just 0.17% of the Earth's suface - an area 2.5x the size of Germany, is enough to meet global energy demand. Chemicals forged in a solar plant could then be manufactured into useful fuels in a solar refinery. The difficulty lies in designing something better than what nature produced in 4 billion years.
Generating hydrogen from water is one idea, but the platinum plates needed as a catalyst are not only expensive, but destroyed in the process. Schlögl says we need to develop new catalytic technologies. Nano-engineered materials that physically cradle the water molecules can help reduce the massive amount of energy needed to split them apart, and even operate as a production line for fuels, built molecule by molecule. (it's at this stage his slides start to look like something from SpaceChem). The discovery and development of these materials will drive the creation of synthetic fuels.
Who determines the price of energy? asks Schlögl, and here I think he's hinting at the massive subsidies fossil fuels enjoy that makes developing alternatives so difficult. To close, he challenges the audience to support the implementation of new energy options. "The starting point is here," he says. "Now is the Big Bang in our energy systems."
Posted by SciencePunk at 10:41 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Falling Walls
Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Mary Kaldor: How Human Security Makes People Safe in a Global Era
The day's first speaker was Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics Mary Kaldor, who proposed the creation of a "global emergency services". During an exercise with the army (discussing the optimal way to retake a block of flats in Southampton that were occupied by a fictitious insurgent group), Kaldor discovered that although most present supported the use of soft tactics of conflict resolution - political and economic measures - those present felt that their business was fighting wars.
The trouble, Kaldor opines, is that these tactics are poorly suited to so-called "new wars", where battle is the decisive encounter. More and more, conflict is perpetrated by actors with vague state ties and is perpetrated against civilian populations, and resembles violent crime and disorder on a national scale. The solution was to build a taskforce whose role was not to defeat enemies, but to protect civilians, from both internal and external threats.
Posted by SciencePunk at 8:37 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 8, 2011
Category: General
Google is celebrating Edmund Halley's birthday today, so it seemed like a good time to mention something that's been on my mind. It's about life, wonder, and celestial bodies.
Posted by SciencePunk at 7:52 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
aardvarchaeology 02.08.2012
respectful insolence 02.08.2012
the pump handle 02.07.2012
starts with a bang! 02.07.2012
erv 02.06.2012
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