Squids!

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.”

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Science stories of 2006

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.

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Enemies of science

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.

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How the UK government twists science

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".

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The future is quiet

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.

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Don't try this at home

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.”

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Tony Blair: Save the world, become a scientist

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.

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Hooray for Hubble

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.

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The case for a British astronaut

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.

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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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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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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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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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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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