Thursday, September 21, 2006

Atlantis and ISS drift across the Sun


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.

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Design this, suckers

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.

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Exposing the lies of the climate change deniers

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.

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Monday, September 18, 2006

Guardian science podcast for September 18, 2006

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.

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Thursday, September 14, 2006

Science doesn't need gatekeepers

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.

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Ah, the pleasure of big machines

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.

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A problem far bigger than global terrorism

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.

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Come dancing

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.

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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Meet the Indiana Jones of conservation

Now this is a story and a half. How a conservationist managed to, Indiana Jones-style, persuade a murderous rebel army in Uganda to stop killing the endangered white rhino.

Lawrence Anthony, founder of the South African environmental group the Earth Organisation, went alone to meet the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) - the leaders of which are wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court. Colleagues told him he was crazy but the man had one goal in mind, to protect the rare rhino, of which there are only four left in the wild.

"The LRA is notorious for its use of child soldiers and has been accused of numerous atrocities including rapes, mutilations and the mass murder of civilians. Its 19-year fight has left tens of thousands of people dead and an estimated 2 million displaced. Conservation seemed far from its priorities - particularly after its members shot dead 12 of the park's game rangers and then eight Guatemalan UN soldiers sent to the region to keep order this year.

'It was a desperate, impossible situation,' Mr Anthony said. 'The UN then withdrew entirely from the area and the LRA de facto controlled the park. From that point on the fate of the rhino lay entirely in the hands of this rebel army. That was a conservation disaster. If this species goes extinct they will be the largest land mammal to die out since the woolly mammoth.'"
Read the full article here

David Adam, the Guardian's environment correspondent, told us the story in the office a while back and you couldn't move afterwards for gaping mouths at the story. It's hard to believe this sort of stuff happens outside very improbable Hollywood films starring the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme. I won't say any more, just read it and marvel at Lawrence Anthony's stunning bravery.

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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Many sides of London

I don't know why but I feel compelled to share this picture. The sign was on the front of a house on a quiet mews in Soho. More than a decade in London and this city's still got the ability to surprise. And make me laugh like a shoolboy.

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That difficult second post

I thought that the second post, like second albums, might be terrifyingly difficult. Fortunately, I seem to be on a (mini) roll. So here's something for you to listen to.

The Guardian produces a weekly science podcast, which I sometimes present. We discuss that week's science news, interview scientists about their work (and sometimes about other people's too) and try to have as much fun as possible in the process. We figured that if we're having fun making it, it might make it more fun to listen to. That's the theory anyway.

When we started doing the shows back in April, we were making things up as we went along to some extent. But we did have one thing clear - to try and reflect some of the relationship that the science and technology correspondents on the Guardian (that's me, James Randerson, Bobbie Johnson and Ian Sample) have in the way we decide what goes in the daily science page and in the other bits of the paper. We might all be interested in science (two of my colleagues have PhDs and I did physics a long time ago) but we never assume anyone else is. And, anyway, quite often we don't 'get' the stories at first ourselves. We'll sometimes grope around to find the story or the top line in a densely-written paper. In the podcast, our intention was to reflect some of that process, to ask the questions that an intelligent observer might have about a topic that seems, at first, alien to them.

Anyway, here's the September 11, 2006 podcast. Presented by Ian Sample, there's an interview with the neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Cambridge University, who has demonstrated, for the first time ever, a way of communicating with a woman in a persistent vegetative state. His work was published in Science last week. Sarah Franklin at the London School of Economics debates whether women should donate eggs for research. And there's also a report from James Randerson and myself on the British Association festival of science in Norwich.

All the past science podcasts are still available in our archives, so do listen away and send me or the Guardian podcast blog your thoughts. You can also listen to all the other Guardian podcasts here, including news, politics, arts, media and books.

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The excitement of something new

This is a first post, a test really but it might as well be fun, right? So why not extol the virtues of broadband? (You could, just as easily, ask why extol the virtues of broadband but let's not go there for now).

I had it installed two weeks ago and, wow, the world in my home has changed. I've been transported back to 1994 when I discovered Mosaic, the first ever web browser, in the library at college. Thinking back, it was rubbish but I remember finding it remarkable that I could just type in a few words into a box on a screen and I'd get a whole world of links, pictures and articles. I used to spend hours reading uninteresting web sites (the first site was just a dry set of links on the Cern web server) and being amazed that someone in another part of the world had written this on their computer and here was I, reading it in London. And I did it, well, just because I could, really.

As the web got inevitably more complicated, I didn't keep up at home. Accessing the latest flash-enhanced, multimedia enriched, tech-enabled pages was hampered by my 56k dial-up at home until recently, so a rapidly-increasing amount of the web was becoming a no-go area. That or wait for a veeeeery looooong download times. That and missing out on this blogging lark and things like Skype.

But no longer. Here I am, broadband always on and ready to go. It's brilliant. As Obi-Wan might have said, I've taken my first steps into a larger world. So far, I've spent several hours downloading stupid amounts of music and large files that I have no use for...just because I can. Maybe the novelty will wear off soon, but I also thought that about checking my email every 30 seconds at work.

I'm a sucker for getting emails or letters. Harks back to the childhood days of getting excited by letters. But that's another story...

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