Domestic Science

Getting into the Christmas spirit.

2011-12-18T11:17:00.001Z

I've promised various people that I won't go on about the nice summer weather I'm rapidly getting used to over here, especially with the reports of storms, squalls and snow from back home in the UK. But all the sun and warm weather has made it really hard to feel remotely christmassy, so inspired by the Wellcome Trust's Festive Tree of Life, I decided to try and make some spacey baubles to adorn our new Australian Christmas tree.

For me when I see hanging baubles my mind goes to the giant orbs of our solar system, the planets. So why not make the most of that and make a solar-system inspired Christmas tree? First job, to the local stuff shop to locate some spheres of different sizes.

Two sizes of Baubles and a few ping-pong balls to start with.

Whilst out I armed myself with some packets of play-doh in order to get some nice bright colours to the tree. I'd originally only planned to make the gas giants - but perhaps Uranus and Neptune were too easy?

I covered the medium-sized bauble with a layer of green play-doh to be Uranus.

So I got really stuck in and inspired to represent the clouds of Jupiter, ending up with this, complete with it's giant red spot.

I wasn't sure how much detail I could squeeze on a ping-pong ball, but I'm pretty happy with my representation of our little planet Earth.

Each of the play-doh baubles I covered with a layer of 50/50 mixed PVA glue and water to finish them off and to stop the dough from drying out. Here are the final products.

The gas giants, from top Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

And the terrestrial planets, from top Mercury, Venus, Eartha and Mars.

I'm afraid I couldn't resist the more nerdy details - the asteroid belt (which is between Mars and Jupiter and has thousands of bits of rock swirling thought it), the ice line (the point where water ice could form out of our early solar system, which meant that giant planets like Jupiter could be formed) and the Kuiper Belt (the spread of objects beyond Neptune where lots of icy dwarf planets live).


Glitter balls are my asteroids and the Norwegian flags are my ice line

The snowflake beyond Neptune, standing in for the Kuiper belt.

We've topped the whole thing off with some solar powered Christmas lights (only in Australia, huh!) and with a few parcels arriving from overseas I'm really beginning to feel seasonal. I wonder how mulled wine is at 30 degrees?

The 'Office'

2011-12-09T05:40:00.000Z

Since I've started at the synchrotron I've been really looking forward to the Open day. The day we turn off the machine for the day and invite the public in to look about (after all they do pay for it!). I was pretty determined that Aus_Pod would be one of the highlights of the day so I set too looking for some ideas that would help us bring some of our science to life. It's also given me a great excuse to introduce where I work these days!

Me outside the experimental hutch, sporting my new hair-do for the public

When you boil down what the beamline does it come out that we're a very big, expensive and powerful wave machine. In the optics hutch, locked away behind tonnes of lead, are a couple of crystals which filter the light coming from the synchrotron to one very precise wavelength. The crystals are kept under a super vacuum which takes three days to pump down, which unfortunately meant that we couldn't open up the vessel for the public to see for themselves.

The crystals sitting inside the drum, when it was all opened up during shut down. This is our 'filter' which lets us choose the wavelength of light we need to study each material.

With all this talk of waves, it's always good to have a wave machine for a hands-on demonstration. A bit of searching I found great inspiration in this video. Such a simple, and cheap idea that can show so much, it was constructed in the first half hour of the open day (we were at the end of the self-guided tour), pretty happy with the result!

Science and food - always a winning combination

Once we have a beam of light at the right wavelength, we pass this into an experimental hutch where we can place a sample into beam to study it. The technique we use for this, diffraction, acts like a super-microscope letting us construct models of where the atoms and molecules are actually sitting in the sample. This structural information has a great range of uses, from working out how a material conducts electricity to how a material gets bigger when we heat it.

So that's my 'office', where I'm lucky enough to work. There are the laboratories too where as my research cracks on a pace I'll be spending lots of time in preparing sample for the beamline. I've been lucky enough to be granted time for a couple of experiments in the run after Christmas, so that will be keeping my very busy. (To use the beamline, you have to write a proposal of an experiment and send it to a review committee - it's nerve racking but a great feeling when you get granted time).

As well as the 3000 visitors the synchrotron got, there was a live broadcast on the 3RRR radio station and you can download a podcast of the program - you may recognise one of the guests!

Making a good brew

2011-11-28T10:16:00.000Z

You know you've landed on your feet with a job when the latest staff activity is a microbrewing competition. Soon after I started at the synchrotron the St Arnold project was launched and in an effort to get to know some others who worked at the synchrotron I whole heartedly joined in. The object of the project is to find a brew for the Christmas party, with help from a local microbrewery. Appropriately enough I joined the McBrewers team, who'd chosen to brew up a Scottish brown ale (yum). The whole process is now complete, I write this knowing that there's a cold beer in the fridge for when I'm done, and I've have a bit of a wizzy introduction into the science (and craft) behind beer brewing.

The first stage was to boil up some water in an enormous cauldron and once it was hot add some sugar in the form of maltose syrup.

The malt syrup being measured out.

The marvellous cauldron with the maltose being added

Essentially all you need to make beer - water, yeast and a source of carbohydrates to feed the yeast. In addition to the maltose sugar, as our source of carbohydrates while the brew was hot we added a sort of tea-bag filled with malted barley. The hot water helped extract out the starches from our barley.

The sugar and barley in the liquid is the feed for the yeast, in this case we plumbed for a dark sugar like maltose to give the final beer a nice dark colour. It's important to not add the yeast into the pot while it's too hot. Yeast is a microorganism and boiling water will kill them off!

Yeast ready for action!

The whole brew is sealed up and contained for a few weeks to allow for the fermentation process. During this time the yeast eats away (metabolises) the sugar in the liquid to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. It's the same process that yeast gets up to in bread making (or even baking powder in cake making), with the carbon dioxide in that case causing the dough to rise. In the case of beer making the yeast picked to more efficiently convert the sugar to alcohol.

Hops all measured out and ready to go.

The first beers brewed would have followed this simple recipe, only in the time things have been added to enhance the flavours. A very common ingredient are hops, which are tight-bud like flowers of the plant Humulus which is pretty common in the Northern hemisphere. These give a bitter flavour to the beer, and also add some preserving power to the brew.

Once the brew has cooled down and the yeast added it was all put into a large bucket - where it was kept while the fermentation process got going.

Great colour from the start

Sealed up and fermenting away. The valve at the top is to let the build up of carbon dioxide escape - other wise the beer may have quite a bit of energy to it.

There's an even happier ending to the tale. Not only do I have some of the brew left in the fridge (it was delicious) but my colleagues at work judged our teams beer to be one of the best - so it's being brewed again for the Christmas party in couple of weeks!

A growing issue?

2011-10-30T09:16:00.000Z

I've been drawn, this week into reading The Conversation's series on 'The science behind weight loss'.

Drawn, but in a sort of unwilling way as it's an issue I really don't like to confront. Like the majority (in fact I imagine all) of women I've struggled with my body image all of my life and I've never really felt completely at ease with it at all. (For those who don't know me I've got a figure akin to Nigella, and probably for the same reasons) I've been there with the fad diets, most memorably (aged 15) with the 'cabbage soup' diet which spelled the end for my mothers food processor. My most recent experience was the 'breakfast cereal' one, and yes I loss weight. But with it, I felt tired, uneasy in myself, messed up my bodily cycle and put the weight back on within the month.

One thing I've always noted is that it's so hard to find impartial advice on loosing weight, and so that's why I was very interested to read what the Conversation had come up with. (The Conversation is a new web-based newspaper who's content comes mainly from academics and researchers - people have to declare if they have a financial interest in what they are saying). The series is in the light of the national debate here about bringing a 'fat tax' to counter the fact that Australia (like most western nations) has a growing obese population.

The first article, written by Rosemary Stanton from the University of NSW, 'Diets and weight loss: separating fact from fiction' set out to dispel various myths. The article set up what I interpreted to be a theme through the series that there is no magic bullet 'cure all'.   This is the heart of the matter for me, we are all different, our bodies cope with food in different ways. The only proven way to loose weight on a long term (that researchers who aren't making money from a product agree on) is to make gradual changes to your lifestyle and stick with them. No one is saying it is easy, in fact they acknowledge it is hard, but I'm personally not convinced a 'fat tax' would be the right encouragement (the experts seem split on this).

The other article in the series that I'd encourage people to read is more on the perceptions of body shape/image. In 'Feel manipulated? Anxious? Tune out the hype and learn to love your body' - written by a professor of psychology Susan Paxton - on the pressure that are brought on us to conform to a certain body type. She explains some of the measures her and her colleagues are taking to counteract the unrealistic images portrayed by mainstream media.

For me, the acceptance of my shape was definitely a step along the road to a healthier lifestyle. Having identified of late that I did need to shed a few pounds I've started to cycle to work and only snack between meals on fruit. Just small things, but I'm seeing the difference already, and they've made me happier that eating cereal all the time!

Shades of the North

2011-10-30T03:40:00.002Z

I haven't written much about my yarn projects in a while (in fact I'm pretty conscious that I've not written about much in a while - I've been struggling with the work/life balance a bit). But I'd like to chat about the inspiration behind my first Australian-yarn project.

I've named the project 'North Atlantic' and it's my first go at a big crochet project. I was inspired to give it a go when I saw a good friend's take on the Granny stripe blanket. She'd picked out the most amazing miscellany of colours for it and had made them work very well. (If you're on Ravelry you can see it here). I wasn't feeling as bold, but went out on a stash enhancement exhibition and came across these colours that instantly attracted me.

In one of the episodes of 'Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy' one of the characters tells us that we all like to congregate at boundary conditions, where sea meets land, where air meets water. I wanted this project to reflect that, so instead of picking colours that would blend together I wanted ones that had definite boundaries - inspired from some of my travels. I say some of my travels, but I realised (and hence the name) that all the 'boundaries' in this project are from Iceland and Orkney.

Red to blue was my first pick and can only be the amazing sunsets that the North Atlantic does so well.

Blue to white is where the sky meets the blanch white glaciers that spread over Iceland's interior.

White to green is where massive power of a river breaks to forms a waterfall, this I admit is only one aspect of a scene such as this from Gulfoss.

However, in the Gulfoss photo is the next boundary too, the green grass giving way to the grey rocks underneath.

Lastly there's the grey to red next to the blue, perhaps a strange set of colours for a natural boundary but this was inspired by the iron-rich scoria rock next to the deep blue of a lake in Landmannalaugar. Putting those colour back together put me in mind of the peace that I felt whilst sitting at this lake.

It's not that I'm homesick - but when you're far away and in a bit of a unfamiliar environment I think it's good to blend good old memories with that of the new ones. The blanket is progressing pretty well, and was the ideal project for to take along to a new knitting group here in Australia.

A mint situation

2011-09-28T09:54:00.000+01:00

In my recent enthusiasm for gardening I found myself pulling out quite a bit of mint, and it seemed a bit of a waste to chuck it all in the gardening bin. I stripped off the useful leaved and washed them all, but still was a little taken aback by how much there was...


What to do?

My first though was to blitz it all up (rather than chop it by hand) and freeze it into lumps. Should keep for quite a while and then would be easy to add to potato salads and into lamb stews, but I soon filled my ice cube tray!

Idea #1 freeze in ice cube trays

My next thought was to make a batch of mint sauce. Making up mint sauce brings back for me cosy memories of helping out my grandma with Sunday lunch. I've gone for a bit of twist though inspired by finding a couple of chillies in the fridge.

Chilli and mint sauce

One large handful of finely chopped mint
2 large chilli's, also finely chopped
25 g caster sugar
50 ml of boiling water
75 ml of white wine vinegar

Combine your finely chopped mint and chilli's into a heat-proof bowl and add the sugar and mix well. Add the boiling water and stir until the sugar has all dissolved. Then add the vinegar and mix well before putting in a sterilised jar with lid. Kept in the fridge should last two months - great with lamb steaks and stirred into tangines

The ingredients

The final result

Even with all that made, I've still got some left. I'm going to investigate making mint jelly but until then I've freezed up the rest of the chopped mint. Very much looking forward to my lamb steaks tonight!

Tokyo a go-go!

2011-09-25T09:19:00.004+01:00

Where else in the world can you share a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate cake with a giant cuddly Moomin?

No, your bit - I insist!

Tokyo, that's where! I spent a mad 10 days helping put on the RI Christmas lectures in Japan, which this year are going to be shown on NHK on Christmas eve (so no extra pressure then!). It was a hectic and pretty tight schedule, but thanks to a great local team the resulting lectures went pretty well. It was my first visit and I absolutely loved Japan, the food was amazing, the people very friendly and always happy to help a confuzzeled tourist and there were so many quirky things to take stock of!

Firstly - the buildings. Arriving in Tokyo is like turning up on the set of Bladerunner, with the city stretching out further than you can see from the 43-floor. It's quite overwhelming, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see a flying car pass by me. There are some pretty nifty buildings about, such as the Tokyo Sky tree Japan new tallest building:

What a whopper - 634 m high!

I noticed that the Japanese haven't really gone in for very massive skyscrapers (sensible in an earthquake zone I suppose) but the Sky Tree was needed as a broadcast tower to get round the number of buildings over 10 stories!

These were my favourite buildings:

The Ashanti beer building.

The headquarters of the Ashanti beer company, apparently the gold building is a pint of beer with the foam on top, and the weird gold structure is a bar snack (nut?) of some sort. Completely nuts, but seems to work in Tokyo.

Mark and I got out to Ginza in search of material and knitting yarn. With help from the locals we were working with we found a fantastic shop for these, but on the way stumbled upon this in a jewelers window:


What's going on here?

Closer..


Actual diamonds in a kaleidoscope, genius

Amazing stuff, my last picture doesn't quite do it justice but there was even a pink diamond in there. Mark and I counted that there were probably about five of the gems in there, perhaps we'd all get more enjoyment from diamonds if we surrounded them all with 3 mirrors! Has definitely given me some good ideas for the up coming synchrotron open day, but I'm not sure the budget will run to diamonds.

The food was incredible, and not just sushi. I was a bit adventurous, even partaking in chicken hearts which were really quite yummy. The heat was the only big challenge, 32 degrees had a massively zapping affect on my energy, but had an interesting effect on the favourite demo of silly putty:

Massive silly putty flowing freely in the heat!

Springing into gardening

2011-09-25T08:40:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure that I'm completely convinced that it is spring here, it is very disorientating knowing that we are now in late September. Perhaps its the lack of having Easter round the corner? Either way we're taking full advantage of the weather and trying to find out if we have green fingers or not. Having never had our own patch of land before it was a bit of a must when looking for a place to rent here in Oz. The new place has a large patch of lawn at the front but the patch that took my fancy was this bit by the back door.

My new herb and veg patch - before.

It's a sheltered and very sunny patch, so the potential for my long-awaited herb patch was pretty high. The soil is very thin, so my first thought was to pull out the weeds and scattered flowers, put down some bark and plant things up in pots (which have the distinct advantage that we can take them with us when we leave the place!). Although the patch has gone to seed somewhat there's quite a bit of mint around, growing all over the place even seemingly out of concrete. I'm going to pull up quite a bit tidying the place up, will have to think what to do with it all.

I'm also inspired to see how I can get on growing an avocado from seed. I've only in the last few years started eating them, and I really can't get enough of the green soft fruit. So I've saved my the seed from my last one and popped it into a pot of soil... Watch this space for what happens I suppose!

Yum yum, but can I grow a new one from this?

So after a busy weekend and three trips to the garden centre (which is luckily only a short walk down the road as we are now sans car) I'm pretty happy with the results. I've sowed some basil seeds along with the avocado one. We picked up a lovely rosemary plant, and I re-potted some of the mint from the bed. I've also tried a foray into vegetables, with two tomato plants and some pepper plants (oddly in Oz peppers are always called capsicums). I'm pretty pleased with the results of the weekends work!

... and after the weekend's work. Happy Helen with lots of space for more veg!

The joys of cheap furniture!

2011-09-04T03:29:00.001+01:00

While we save up for a sofa, yesterday we bought a couple of bean bags to chill in of a evening. The bags came seperate from the balls, and as we filled them up a few escaped. We had a bit of fun wafting them about, with little sucess in gathering them up...

Think they will be turning up all over the house for the next year.

An answer to one of those tricky big questions

2011-08-30T14:40:00.002+01:00

Anyone who's tuned into Domestic Science from the mumsnet blogging network - hello! Hope you enjoy my blog, feel free to poke about and comment on old posts, am always happy to answer questions.

Things are still up in the air at the Domestic Science pad, we've moved into our new home but my baking and knitting things are yet to clear Australian customs. I'm dying to do some cake making, it's amazing having my own kitchen again. And we've got extra space in this new place for me to make a proper knitting den!

But I thought I should just write about some big science news. Last week scientists came up with an answer to a question five-year olds (and perhaps a few others of us) have been asking for a while. Given that there seem to quite a lot of different animals - just how may different types of animal/vegetable/bacterial live on Earth? Well we have a number now - it's 8.7 million (give or take a million that is).

.... said one bacteria to another

I'd read about this story on the twittersphere, but only got to grips with the magnitude of it when I caught up with this weeks Material World podcast. In it Quentin Cooper interviews Dr Derek Tittensor, one of the people who counted all the species in the world, and asked him what assumptions they've made to come up with the number. Derek explains that counting the animals was relatively easy, it's the bacterial life that was a bit harder - as it's not well understood what makes a separate species!

The interesting thing I found about this, is that we have only actually charted 1.2 million of all living things on Earth, so by this estimation we still have many amazing creatures still to discover. Though the sad thing, that the researchers point out, is that many of these will probably be extinct before we find them.

Some things same and some things different

2011-08-17T06:09:00.003+01:00

We made it! Through cyclones, thunderstorms, aborted landings and a 14 hour delayswe eventually arrived in Melbourne. Then jet lag set in, and it took be at least a week before I had anynotion of what time of day it was never mind where on Earth I was.

It occurred to me just before I jumped on the plane in theUK that I had a golden opportunity to dispel an old science myth that waterspirals down the sink in different directions depending on what hemisphere(North or South) you live in. Butactually you don’t need to go to a different hemisphere to convince yourselfyou can do it at home – all you need is a sink with taps at opposite sides ofthe bowl and some oats to sprinkle on to convince yourself which way things areflowing.

So first fill up your sink with water from the right-hand tap, sprinkle on some oats (or something else that will float - I did try food dye, but that didn't show the flow very well). Leave it for a bit then pull the plug and this is the sort of thing you should see, the water spiralling in a clockwise direction.

Next, fill your sink with water from the left hand tap, and again sprinkle on the oats. Leave for a little bit then pull the plug. This time you should see the water spiralling down in an anti-clockwise direction.

Both of these videos were shot in my parents bathroom, in Cambridgeshire, UK, Northern Hemisphere! I originally intended to do an identical set of videos from here in Melbourne, but realised after I got here there was little point!

The reason that water can spiral both ways is because it's pretty a pretty slippery materials, by pouring water from the right side I was introducing tons and tons of energy for the water to slip in one particular way. Even if we left it to stand for a while, chances are this energy in the form of vortices would still be in the bowl somewhere.

There is some truth in the way that water spirals in a different way from North to South Hemisphere - only you'll have to have a bath the size of an ocean to show it. As the Earth rotates it throws around water differently in the North than it does in the South which is part of the Coriolis effect. Because the Earth really rotates quite slowly, the Coriolis effect is actually quite small, which is why the effect that it has on your bath water is pretty minimal compared with the energy to add when you run the bath!

Wee beasties

2011-07-27T11:48:00.000+01:00

One thing I'm going to miss about the UK is the ability to look at a bug, and not be at all worried that it could kill me. That said I suppose the bugs in Australia will be quite interesting, once I learn which ones to keep my distance from. We had a great jaunt to the seaside this week, and in the dunes I found literally clouds of these guys;

The humble ladybird. Definitely my favorite insect of them all, though I often wonder if that's because of the cuddly image they've been given in popular culture? This guy and his friends were 7-spot ladybirds (think you can make out 4 of the spots in the photo). Contrary to what I had always thought as a kid, the number of spots don't tell you how old the ladybird is - different numbers indicate different species! A bit of googling on the subject showed up that there's a new species in town, the Harlequin ladybird. These guys are pretty invasive, so it has become really important to moniter the spead of them about the UK. In fact if you spot any type of ladybird in the UK you can report where you found it to the UK ladybird survey.

On the edge of the sand I came across this fella;

I'm really not much of an entomologist, so I have no idea what he is! But he seemed pretty happy wandering on the pier next to the sand, not a place I thought I'd find insects. We called him Ringo.

A change in climate

2011-07-21T16:05:00.003+01:00

So the one-way flights are booked, it’s for definite – I’m moving to Melbourne, Australia. Land of sun, bbq’s and cricket here I come. If all moves go to plan, from the 1st August I will be a post doctoral fellow at the Australian Synchrotron. I'll be working on the powder diffraction beam line, a fabulous and diverse instrument able to undertake all sorts of exciting experiments. It's particularly great because, as I'll be working at a central facility, I'll get meet and hopefully work with a great range of other scientists. However, I am a little daunted about one thing, the weather.

There was a very good reason I moved to Scotland to do my PhD – I like wearing winter clothes. I’ve always found it easier to dress in a way that suit my figure in the winter – nice dark colours, hopefully figure hugging in the right places. Growing up in the UK and spending the last six years living (and mostly because of the student budget holidaying) in Scotland has left me pretty clueless on how to look good in summer clothes!

I'm slightly concerned I'm going to melt though... look at this:

The graph shows the monthly high and lows of daily average temperature in both Edinburgh and Melbourne. But you can see that a Melbourne 'winter' is quite a different undertaking to the snow and ice we had in Edinburgh this year! Even during the Edinburgh summer the hottest daily average is only about 18˚C, but in the hottest daily average in Melbourne is closer to 27˚C with temperatures of nearly 40˚C not being unheard of!

Why is it hot in Australia? Well am a bit lucky to start with – Melbourne perhaps the coolest city on the continent. This is mostly because it is the furthest from the equator at the southern end of the country. Distance from the equator is measured in latitude and at 37˚S it means Melbourne is roughly equivalent to Spain at 37˚N. The closer you get to the equator, it means the more the Sun is over head in the sky and at its most powerful, making it hotter. But climate is a bit more complicated that distance from the equator, and Melbourne’s weather can be really very changeable, driven by weather coming north from the Antarctic.

There’s also the other disorienting thing about Australia, when we in the UK are shivering though winter they are sweltering in the peak of their summer. You can see that on the graphs, where the hottest weather in Australia is November to January. This is because the Earth is actually tilted so as it orbits around the Sun some places are closer to the sun at certain times of year, giving us the seasons. So in the British summer the North half of the Earth is tilted towards the sun, where Australia in the South half are tilted away- in our winter this is reversed leaving UK to snow and Aussies to BBQ season!

I’ve taken advantage of the summer sales here, and found some really nice pieces that I hope will work. My favourite so far was a very pretty top from Warehouse. It’s cotton too, natural fibres are best to stick to in hot weather as they are able to ‘breath’ a bit easier. It’s also flattering without being too tent-like summer clothing (the curse of those of us who aren’t a size 12).

Thanks to Mr Domestic Science for coming up with the graph - he may know nothing about how to find a flat on Melbourne, but can tell you loads about the weather there!

Also found this information is beautiful graphic that may be pretty useful!

An Orcadian View

2011-07-16T19:17:00.000+01:00

Not a bad outlook? I've been spending the last week on the Orkney Isles, a group of islands that are off the North coast of Scotland. I realised that I was going to have a family well-spread across the UK when I married a Scot and all my family hailing from London. But when my brother in law and family moved to the Orkney Isles and my little sister to Belfast things started to get a bit silly. As I've alluded too if a few posts and tweets I'm on a cusp of a big change, moving to Australia. So the last few weeks we've been literally travelling the length of the country to say good-bye to everyone. But a trip to the Orkneys, with it's amazing landscape, food, history and yarn, is never a chore!

Some of the spectacular weather we witnessed, the cow looks less than impressed!

In fact we had a double-reason for heading up to the far north, as Andy has been working for a renewable energy company up there for the last few months. Orkney is very much buzzing with this new industry, and is rapidly emerging as an important centre for developing wave and tidal power. The straight between Orkney and the mainland, the Pentland Firth, has some of the fastest tides in the world, reaching up to 30 km/h as the Atlantic ocean drains into the North sea. Tidal power still has a bit of a way to go before it's commercially viable, but Orkney is being a fantastic test bed for potential tidal machines.

With the number of islands there's also ample space to test wave power. In fact in the bay that the sunset picture was taken over, was a drilling rig installing the latest wave energy machine for testing. Here the giant 'oyster' machine will be connected to the national grid, testing how much of the wave energy it can harness. It's so encouraging that these types of machine and their use are becoming more and more a reality!

Hermit crabs! A bit 'crabby' about being contained in a bucket!

We had a fantastic week up there, and got a day out rock pooling with our niece and nephew. Our nephews main objective was to find as many hermit crabs as he could. The pools were teaming with them, as well as a flighty small cat-fish we spotted.

A trip to the seaside for me is usually also tied up with looking over the geology dramatically exposed by cliffs. The shoreline here didn't disappoint - great blocky layers that carved off in angular hunks (making it perfect to scramble on) with flaky mudstone in between. A real layer cake.

Even Aflie the dog appreciated the geology!

I'd urge anyone to consider a visit to the Orkneys, there really is something there that would interest everyone. The people are really interesting too, very worldly and not at all 'small island' like. In fact chatting to one Orcadian I got a story about a traveller who propped up a local bar with all his travel exploits, only to listen and realise that the locals were far better travelled than he. I suppose the intrepid nature of the Orcadians has it's roots in the isles being a major stopping place for the Hudson bay company on route to the Canada. This encouraged a number of famous explorers, of which John Rae is perhaps the most known, because of his expedition to find the Northwest passage.

This vacuum cleaner, it really sucks...

2011-07-06T16:55:00.000+01:00

In my current state of domestic flux, my belongings left these isles yesterday, I am currently undergoing every married women's nightmare... I am living at my mother-in-law's. Ok I really like my mother in law (*waves hello Sue!*) and also she and the father-in-law are away on a Scottish island celebrating their Ruby wedding (awww).

We're also heading away so I need to spruce the place up a little before I leave, and had to encounter my nightmare domestic appliance - the vacuum cleaner. I don't think I have ever recovered from the time one blew up on me, yes proper blow up flames and everything (and I thought work was dangerous!). The thing that really sticks in my memory of that event was the pervading smell of burning dust that hung about the flat for weeks after, and the fear of it happening again has got me out of lots of cleaning since :)

But I couldn't shy away this time - I had to face my fears and the cleaning. Now my mother-in-law has a pretty wizzy vacuum with this cyclone technology in it. After struggling to get the thing to work (I admit - I did utter the phrase 'I've got a PhD, how can this thing be defeating me?') it impressively did the job in no time. The cyclone within the cleaner works to separate the dirt from the air that it has been sucked in with. The air and the dirt together are forced into a cylinder which causes it to swirl downwards. The the bottom of the cylinder finishes in a cone, at this point the air is forced back up, but the dirt is too heavy and stays at the bottom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclonic_separation

Right, so the carpet is now clean! Now I need to do something about the 'turf circles' in the perfect lawn that got left after our bbq....

ooops...

Oooo shiny

2011-07-04T10:52:00.000+01:00

I should probably tell you all that when it comes to London museums that the Science museum is my favourite, or even the Natural History museum. I admit that as a child they very adequately fed my wonder apatite and even now I can’t go to South Kensington without popping by to say hello to Dippy. But really my preferred place to visit when strolling down Exhibition Road is (in a hushed voice) the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum. It’s so full of beautiful objects, and I love its mission to exhibit ‘Identity’.

So while waiting to have a drink with a friend I popped into the V&A for a little bit of a visual feast. This time I happened upon the silver galleries, I had never ventured upstairs to the third floor. It really had to be seen to believed, with priceless silver objects exhibited floor to ceiling. Objects from all walks of life, from religious artifacts to toilet door signs.

Silver as a metal had always been a bit of a poor relation to its contemporary gold, mainly because there is a lot more of it around. Like gold, it’s a relatively soft metal; meaning it can be easily melted and forged into elaborate shapes. Silver really took off as a household material when the process of electroplating was devised, you could have a cheaper metal making up most of the object and then have a silver coating to make it look expensive. But, perhaps more so that gold, objects that often look all silver can be faked. X-ray’s of one of objects in the collection showed that it wasn’t a fully cast object – but held together with a screw inside!

When it comes to jewellery some people shy away from silver because it can sometimes tarnish and leave a mark on the skin. Why does it tarnish? Although it doesn't react very well with oxygen, silver does have a vulnerability to sulfur which is present in tiny amounts in our atmosphere. This sulfur reacts with the silver making a material called silver sulfate which is the dark grey material you have to scrub off to get your jewellery gleaming again.

Personally, I’ve always preferred silver to gold – it somehow always feels sleeker and a little bit ‘spacy’ (hands up who didn’t cover themselves in tin foil to be a ‘spaceperson’? oh, only me…). Silver will always have a special place in science, the fact you can polish it to make good mirrors that reflect near perfect images enabled early telescopes to be made, and even now the fact that it’s a pretty unreactive material comes in very useful to the space industry.

One of the other many wonderful things about the V&A is their celebration of the new as well as the old. In their ‘Inspired by’ exhibit, by art students who drew inspiration from particular pieces in the museum. The colour and swirlyness really drew me to this hat,

and I really loved the capture of movement in the necklace – inspired by atoms!

NB sorry for the rubbish photos – only had my phone on me!

Popping out to Uranus.

2011-06-29T00:13:00.002+01:00

I have to admit that I never thought my PhD research would be all that useful. Don't get me wrong, if you are into understanding the fundamental intra-molecular interactions of a molecule that makes up a large proportion of our solar system, then it's the book for you! But I never thought anyone would be able to make money from it. In fact, I won an prize from a group of industry-types only they had to jointly award it along with someone who had done some industrial research. My prize then was to give a talk (and a bottle of fizz) and at the end of my presentation one of the questions was 'do you for see any industrial application to your work?' at the time I joked 'well if you ever need to mine Uranus, then give me a call.'

Uranus' atmosphere, as viewed by the wonderful Voyager spacecraft. Another fabulous picture from NASA's photojournal site

So I was rather astounded to stumble across project on the wired blog the other day. It tells of project Icarus (a bad name perhaps?) a possible re-incarnation of an earlier project Daedalus and details plans to head to Uranus in search of helium 3, to harvest it and use it to propel the spacecraft onwards and beyond our solar system. The beginnings of interstellar travel! All of the gas giants are rich in this illusive gas, but the justification goes that Jupiter's magnetic field is far too large, Saturn's rings will get in the way so the next one in line is the much underrated and joked about Uranus.

It's a ridiculously ambitious project, with quite a few massive technological hurdles to overcome, (also I hate to point out that all the gas giants have rings so even at Uranus these will get in the way). But it does indicated a bit of a sea turn in human endeavours, the fact that we are having supply problems of something on earth and looking elsewhere in the solar system to find it.

Helium 3 is a an isotope of the element helium, it acts the same chemically but has an extra particle in its centre. Because of this extra particle it is very useful in many branches of physics, not least the promise of fusion power. It's something that many people are working away on but fusion power has the potential to give a lot of energy to power our homes, with relatively little effort. Helium 3, however is a pretty vital component, and if we run out of that then there's little chance fusion power will ever spark. There was panic in the physics community last year when stocks ran a bit low and hence looking for helium 3 extra terrestrially is not new - one of the objectives of the India's mission to the moon, Chandrayaan I, was to look for the illusive isotope in lunar soil.

I'm pretty sure that Project Icarus won't come into being in my life time, if anything does happen before 2100 I'll be pretty shocked. To get into the depths of the methane-rich outer layers of Uranus we're going to need to know everything about how all the materials like helium and methane operate. This is where my thesis might come in, only hope that someone remembers it!

Knitting on the shoulders of giants

2011-06-14T15:48:00.001+01:00

What a weekend! Though a great stroke of fortune I got the opportunity to head to Cheltenham science festival, and I wasn't disappointed by the experience. Was great to catch up and meet loads of very interesting people.

Through a strange set of events, I found myself in the green room of the festival and had to wander past the adored Professor Brian Cox with a bowl full of profiteroles and chocolate sauce. Some of you may be aware of my views on Professor Cox, and I was pretty tempted to 'trip' and effect a collision between my desert and the professor.... Having said that I did go to a recording of the 'Infinite monkey cage', and got recruited into a 'we love Brian' fan club. Five 18 year old girls who were quite giddy at the presence of their idol (they were not impressed with my green room antics). After the show I spoke to them, and found out that they were all looking forward to studying maths and physics at uni.... maybe I've been a bit cynical about Brian?

Anywho, perhaps the most unexpected and rewarding experience of the weekend was on the Saturday taking part in the MS big knit organised by the society of immunology. Parking themselves in the book tent, there were patterns, yarn and needles galore and anyone could join in. Behind them was displayed the collective efforts of hundreds of knitter already in a lovely colourful tableau.

Vitamin D rich things!

Bits of the immune system

What was particularly great about this event, was that sat knitting along with the public was a great group of scientist who work day in day out researching this horrible condition. Speaking to them, and finding out about the work they did I found really inspiring. MS is a disease of the immune system, when the body turns on itself. In particular MS effects material called Myelin - which is in your body to protect your nervous system. When MS damages this, it effects the nerves ability to transmit messages. In the whole of the UK 1 in 800 people will affected by it, but the number is higher in Scotland with 1 in 500 being effected.

It's a very complicated disease and scientist think that there are a number of things that can make someone more susceptible to it. Some of these are genetic and can't be helped at present, found in the blue-print of you. But some of the factors may be environmental and there's quite a bit of evidence that getting more vitamin D can really help. Most of the vitamin D we receive comes from our skin being exposed to sunlight (and now we understand why there's a bigger problem in Scotland???). This may be because vitamin D has been shown to be important in policing the bodies response to infections.

I thought it was a fantastic idea, really presenting this disease, which is both complex and horrible, in a fresh and approachable way. I got stuck in with my knitting and soon came up with this:

Can you tell what it is yet?

Tempting isn't it!

Am really glad I got to contribute to the display. Things got really busy at the MS big knit when the rain started to pour in Cheltenham, which was a shame for the sun observers! The Sunday wasn't quite as relaxing as had the 'How big, how small' show in the morning before helping out with the Christmas lectures show in the afternoon (was crazy how everything for that came back to me so quick...).

Find the pattern for the fried egg, and others cute vitamin D enriched things here.

Or, if you want to try out the nervous system squishy things, find them here.

ISIS, matron of nature, magic and neutrons

2011-06-02T15:00:00.002+01:00

Wow, how did it get to be June already? Back on the road again this week, spent the first part with my parents in Northumberland, exploring Hadrian's wall and the beautiful coastline there. Then, yesterday morining I hopped on a plane South to end up in Oxfordshire, at the ISIS neutron facility. Sounds a pretty grand title, and a few years ago 'Isis' to me would have referred to an Eygptian goddess or a river in Oxford. But after hours of beamtime lots of late nights the name is well cemented in my brain, the facility is quite the grande damme of all the big labs I've had the pleasure to work at.

From the outside, it looks a bit like a big airplane hanger, and certainly not as sparkly and as wizzy as the Diamond light source which is next door. But step inside, and you feel you are on the set of a James Bond baddies cavern - gantrys, stairs and things chugging away all around you.

ISIS doesn't look much on the outside...

But on the inside there's lots going on!

What this massive machine actually makes are neutrons. ISIS is a neutron factory, producing lots of these tiny little particles that usually live in the centre of atoms. It takes a lot of energy to separate out the neutrons from the atoms they start out in, hence the really big machine. This is done by speeding up protons (slightly different, but similar sized particles) and then hurling them in to a target of neutron rich material. When the protons smash into this material it causes loads of neutrons to spray off in all directions.

These neutrons are then channelled up into beamlines, where we can focus them onto samples that we want to study. I've got a little video here of a model that they at the lab, it that nicely how the ‘atom smashing’ goes on through the machine.

The light pulse represents the protons as they are speeded up (round and round a pipe at the top) before being sent down to smash into the neutron rich target, releasing lots of neutrons in all directions. What is shown here goes on fifty times a second in the machine!

The neutrons that spray out are incredibly useful for all areas of science, in fact that’s one of the reasons I really like the central labs is that you have physicists, chemists, geologists, engineers, biologists all using the same machine. For our experiment we’re using the neutrons like an incredibly powerful microscope to find where all the atoms (pretty much the smallest thing you can get) are in some interesting materials called azides. Azide, refers to a unit of three nitrogens all in a row. This unit cannot exist as a solid by itself, so the actual compounds we have bigger elements like caesium and thallium in the sample too.

When I call an element ‘big’ I mean to say it’s towards the bottom of the diagram we use to understand the elements, the periodic table. As you move from top to bottom on the table the amount of parts to the element increases. For instance an atom of hydrogen (right at the top) only has one electron and one proton in it, whereas a caesium atom (towards the bottom) has 55 electrons, 55 protons and about 78 neutrons so is a much bigger atom!

The periodic table, and where you'd find hydrogen and caesium on there. I took the picture of the periodic table from the RSC visual elements page.

Azides are pretty useful materials, as they can release the nitrogen inside themselves very quickly and with a big pulse of energy. They used to be used to blow up airbags in cars – when a sudden jolt would set them off very quickly, protecting the driver. Nowadays they are still used in the mining industry and have a few military uses too. The problem you can have is that the bigger atom (in our experiment thats the caesium) can often get in the way of us studying the smaller nitrogen atoms.

The great thing about using neutrons at ISIS (rather than the more normal x-rays) to looks at a materials structure is that they interact with the atoms in very different ways, so it’s not so important if an atom is ‘big’ or ‘small’. We’re exploring what happens when you heat and cool caesium and thalium azide, so far we’ve already been pleasantly surprise what neutrons have told us that x-rays couldn’t.

Wobble-ology

2011-05-26T14:04:00.000+01:00

What's in a wobble?

I have to admit that 'wobble' may be one of my favorite words in the English language. It never fails to make me smile. I've needed a few smiles after complications from my wisdom tooth extraction - hoping that I'm well on the mend now!

Had some good friends round for dinner last night and after picking up some blueberries up from the shops I was suddenly inspired to bake with them (I much prefer baked blueberries to raw ones - I love the colour when they pop!). I recalled Rachel Allen's Baked Blueberry cheesecake from her 'Bake' book which fitted the bill.

I have to admit that I've been a little wary of this book for a while. For a start, when I was bought it for my birthday by my dear husband it was only after I had baked him a third pie from it I realised that it wasn't really a present for me! Plus there are a few discontinuities in the instructions, there are a few times she tells you to heat the oven - before telling you to soak something overnight. But that said the basics at the back are pretty useful, and has saved me some desperate phone calls to my nan.

So the result:

Plus two happy guests! (Last laugh on Andy as he is away in Orkney, and I reckon there won't be any left for him when he gets in later). It sunk a bit, but had a really good texture.

My big wonder was that, after 40 mins of baking, Rachel instructed the cheesecake should only have a 'slight wobble' to it. How do you quantify a 'slight wobble'? Is it a jelly-like wobble? or perhaps a bit stiffer? How much force do you need to put on it to really change the shape? I know in engineering there are many great terms, and precise ways of describing and measuring a materials wobble. But I wondered if I could propose a 'scale of wobble' for baking?

Stiff wobble - like a raw jelly cube, good for sponge cakes hot out of the oven.
Slight wobble - like whipped cream, good for baked cheesecakes. Will retain moist texture.
Standard wobble - Jelly (a good standard wobble, for you to refer to/from)
Severe wobble - or liquid - your cake needs some flour or to be baked :)

Any more suggestions?

Spectacular, spectacular

2011-05-19T13:08:00.001+01:00

So, it would seem it is time for me to stop hiding behind the scenes, and get on stage to talk about SCIENCE! (eeek) From Saturday I'll be taking part in a series of shows entitled 'How big can we go, how small can we go?'

The show is the brain child of Jamie Gallagher - a bright spark from Glasgow who I had the pleasure to meet on a course a few years ago. He is going to hate that I'm putting up this photo....

Pros from the start!

Jamie came up with the idea for the show and succeeded in getting funding and best of all got it sorted with dates! When his original partner couldn't continue on the project he asked me to get involved, (I suppose coz I'd helped a wee bit already on this topic) which I jumped at the opportunity.

So, in a nutshell, we're going to explain to a family audience how lenses enable us to see small and big things. Lenses have been some of the biggest enablers of science, allowing scientist of old to make really fundamental discoveries, and continuing to inspire new generations year upon year. From the humble lenses in your glasses, to the enormous ones in some telescopes you really can't escape the effect they have had on your life.

The first shows are this Saturday and Sunday (21st and 22nd May) at the Glasgow Science centre at 3.30pm as part of their 'meet the expert' series. From there we have dates at the Glasgow Science Festival, Cheltenham Science festival and the British Science festival. I'll keep the dates updated, so if you think you or your children would be inspired there a plenty of dates to catch the show!

In honor of this new event I thought I'd share two of my favorite images taken with lenses, both small and big.

SMALL

Real size of object about 1 mm

This is an image of a piece of a meteorite under a microscope. I was lucky enough in my fourth year of uni to take a course where we got to see these rare rocks up close. Here the sample is so thin that light can be shone though the sample. The bright colours come from the fact we are filtering out some of the light, allowing the subtle colours to be revealed. The bright colours are coming from the mineral olivine. Olivine, even though we don't see it around much, is one of the most common minerals on Earth, as much of the centre of the planet is made up of it. It was my early fascination of olivine, and what happens to this mineral as you plumb the depths of the earth, that led me into my current work in high-pressure science.

BIG

Real size of object 143,000 km Photo credit - NASA

Jupiter is probably my favorite planet, and I just love this image from the Hubble space telescope. Ok not strictly from a lens, (Hubble is a reflecting telescope that collects most of its light with a giant curved mirror) but in the show we're going to hopefully reveal why this has to be the case. I especially love this image because it shows shadows cast from three of the moons that orbit the planet, Io, Callisto and Ganymede. In fact if you can see a blue dot and a white dot, these are the moons Ganymede and Io themselves. I think this image, taken is 2004, is just wonderful - giving depth to such a massive object. I've always had a soft spot for Jupiter's moons, it was probably the TV programs on these guys that inspired me to science at university.

The tooth of judgement

2011-05-17T15:06:00.001+01:00

Apparently wisdom teeth in Mexico are referred to as your 'Judgement teeth', well one of mine in particular has being doing that to me for the last week. Soon after Andy and I arrived back from our travels I started to feel a twinge in my lower right jaw, and a swift investigation by my dentist revealed that one of my wisdom teeth was being trouble. Unlike the other three that had emerged relatively trouble-free, this one had decided to grow in sideways, decay and then in the last week get infected and cause me to resemble a hamster.

The problem tooth! You can see the brighter spots from the fillings I've had - the big one is because the wisdom tooth was bumping into it.

I'm not alone in this, I think It's pretty fascinating that our faces are sort of caught mid-evolution. We don't need such strong jaws, as we don't need to chew raw meat anymore, but we still have the vestiges of teeth to fill it. Some people have to have all four of their wisdom teeth taken out, I've been pretty lucky with only the one troublesome one.

It's gone now, am going to sit on the sofa for the rest of the day and do very little (dentist's orders). I've got lots of nice soup and squishy food in the fridge, my one big hope is that the swelling not so bad that I continue to look like a hamster for the science show I'm doing on Saturday!

Some more wisdom tooth/teeth trivia (cos I'm on the sofa not thinking of much else):

In Japan, they are known as 'unknown to parents' as they usually appear once a child has left home.
In Spanish, garlic cloves are referred to as 'teeth' of garlic

Oh, the temptation.....

2011-05-01T15:22:00.000+01:00

While you all enjoy the sunshine of this glorious bank holiday weekend, I've been stuck in a lead box where, similar to a Las Vegas casino, everything looks the same day and night. Yes I'm back at the synchrotron, helping out on an experiment with my old group. I has been re-assuring that I've still got all my experimental skills, plus hopefully I'll have some new data to play with.

The defining features of beamtime are very long hours (last night I worked the night shift - bed at 7am), bad food (worse because it's a bank holiday) but a satisfying feeling that you are really working at the coal face of science. But also there is a lot of expensive mechanical and electronic equipment about, and as a result - lots of tempting buttons to press.

I suppose it's my inner 5-year old that when faced with this,

wonders exactly what would happen if I pressed it? Luckily my outer late 20's self knows that if I did press it the whole synchrotron beam would be dumped, and I would have about 100 angry scientists after me as I had ruined their experiments....

At 5 am last night, between sample collections, I realised that I could show off a few buttons about the place! (This is how the long hours and light boredom manifest themselves).

Very important button, lets me out the beamline hutch!

Big twisty, heaty thing

Scary button like the emergency one, would have the beamline scientist very cross if I pressed it....

Slightly more friendly button.

So, a brief tour of synchrotron buttons - hopefully will have to use some proper clothes buttons soon, my latest chunky cardigan knitting project is going quite well with all these late nights.

My favourite button, so positive.

When bananas turn bad...

2011-04-28T17:17:00.000+01:00

Eddie Izzard does a great sketch about fruit in a bowl, he suggests it watches you and 'holds in' its ripeness until you look away - then goes through ripe to unedible before you look back. For me the perpetual enemy of 'bad' fruit is the banana.

Wrong type of bad banana

A familiar sight?

Bananas will turn brown and squishy as part of their natural ripening process, and is caused by enzymes which react with oxygen in the air. This produces sugar - which makes the banana taste good - but also a chemical called ethylene. This chemical keeps the reaction going, and once started there's no way of stopping it. The whole thing is a bit like the rusting process and will lead the fruit to turn brown. If you can keep your banana sealed away from some of the oxygen in the air, this will keep your banana a bit fresher. Lemon juice can also slow this process down, as it disrupts the initial enzyme, but then so does heating the banana. Hence my usual plan when confronted by an over ripe banana is to bake with it.

I've long had a great muffin recipe for using up bananas that are a bit past their best, but wanted to see if I could adapt it into a bigger cake to take to a dinner party. The best thing about this cake is that because some of the sugar gets substituted for mashed banana, so the whole thing isn't over sweet (or meaning you can add more nutella to it!).

You will need:

75 g Butter
100 g Caster sugar
450 g Over-ripe bananas, peeled and mashed (is approximately 4)
3 eggs beaten
300 g Self raising flour
1/4 Jar of Nutella

Pre-heat your oven to 150 oC and take two round sponge tins and grease them well (you can also line them with baking parchment if you like, but my tins are non-stick and so far I've been able to get away with it!). Next cream together the butter and sugar before stirring in the mashed banana. Then carefully fold in your egg before sifting in the flour. Divide the mixture between your two sponge tins and then place in the pre-heated oven for about half an hour - or until the top of the cakes spring back when poked.

It won't rise specatularly - but should spring back when poked if cooked through.

Then take a spreading knife and evenly spread around a layer of nutella on on half of the cake. Then pop the other on top.

Smother the middle with nutella, coffee icing would work well too.

Yum

I had to take mine on a walk to the dinner party, but if I hadn't I think I would have put another layer of nutella on top - and if there were any 'good' bananas sliced them and placed on top. Still I was very happy with the result.

Edinburgh in bloom

2011-04-25T11:17:00.000+01:00

Many people have asked that, given the adventures I've had in the last couple of months, isn't it a little disappointing to be back home in Edinburgh? Well I think we timed it very well, avoiding the long dark Scottish winter and arriving back in time for this.

The annual blossom event that even makes our dingy 1980's flat look a bit grand. It's just wonderful to see everything waking up after the winter, even if you managed to miss the winter. Blossom is the way many trees advertise themselves to insects for pollination, hoping that it will lead to a bumper seed crop later in the year.

A particularly 'Edinburgh' bloom event is very evident if you wander over the city's Southern hills, Blackford and Braids. You can't miss the wonderful yellowness of it all.

It's the gorse bushes, which flower profusely this time of year, and are the scourge of golfers plying the courses on the braids. I've always thought the brightness of colour it exhumes is little unscottish! Another strange thing about the gorse is the aroma of coconuts you get from the flowers. The other think I know about gorse is that it is very flammable, because of a high oil content, often being used in bread ovens when really high temperatures are needed. I wonder if the smell is coming from the oils in the plant?

Whenever I've been cooped up in the flat all day a wander over Blackford or Braid hills always cheers me up, even when the Edinburgh weather doesn't co-operate with the brightness of the gorse plants!

View towards the city, usually you can see to the Castle!

Geeks on tour #4 The day the Earth turned to jelly

2011-04-21T15:10:00.001+01:00

From the Fox glacier we made our way through the Haast pass to visit New Zealand's Southern Alps from the East side. We pitched our tent in the Glentanner campsite close to Mt Cook village. Now we were in real high country, with towering glacier topped mountains surrounding us. Only we couldn't see them. The weather had caught up with us, and there seemed to be a constant, and very annoying, layer of low rainy cloud that was stopping us from seeing the tops of the Southern Alps.

Undaunted (well we are from Scotland after all) Andy and I set out to visit one of the glaciers in the area, the Tasman glacier. To reach the glacier lake that is spilling from Tasman involves quite a long drive along an unsealed road (perhaps a bit ambitious for our Nissan Sunny!). The Tasman glacier is very different to the Fox and Franz-Josef, much wider and not as steep. We were expecting to see quite a static face of ice, like we'd seen at the other glaciers, but in fact there was quite a bit of pack ice floating in the water under the main face. It was quite far away and the photo doesn't do it justice.

In fact the other thing the photo doesn't get across is the amount of movement , bits of ice were breaking off bobbing about constantly. We sat transfixed with our binoculars, this wasn't what we had expected at all. Large chunks were falling in, making massive sploosh sounds and creating great big ripples. We stayed until the cloud came down further, then wandered along the shore of the glacier's lake to have a closer look at some large chunks that had floated down.

Very beautiful. The wonderful powdery blue comes from the ice that has been compressed whilst in the glacier, and the striping comes from the way the glacier has build up in layers. It was so quiet and peaceful sitting there, and although the rain got pretty strong we were too captured by these graceful bits of ice to move.

Eventually the rain soaked through out waterproofs and we made our way to Mt Cook village to warm up with a coffee. It was only then we saw the news. 200km to the East of us in Christchurch a massive deadly earthquake had struck, and a search and rescue effort was underway. After ringing our friends, who we were planning to visit there, we sat and watched the news coverage. Everyone in the cafe was chatting about it, apparently even at Mt Cook they had felt a large sway in the ground. We hadn't felt it because we were on the unsealed road to the glacier when it hit.

And this explained why the glacier was so dynamic, with bits falling off it. This news story which we saw later, tells of a boat of tourists that were there when the earthquake hit and the larger bits began to shear off.

The British geological survey have compiled this animation of the aftershocks leading up to the 6.3 Magnitude earthquake on February 22nd. Though it was not as powerful as the one that hit the city in September, it was much shallower so the ground moved much more. Plus it hit in the middle of the day, while people were at work and in the few multi-story buildings in the city (most homes in NZ are on one storey). It's quite scary how the animation shows the progression of a fault that, before the September earthquake, no one knew was there.

New Zealand was an amazing country to visit, and I would not hesitate for a second to plan another trip. Part of what makes it amazing is the fact that the processes that are sculpting the landscape, glaciers, earthquakes, erosion are all still ongoing. Contrast this with Scotland, where its mountain landscape is quite stayed and established. The tragic part of this is when the dynamic landscape impacts and takes human lives, as February 22nd did. But the more we understand these events, the better prepared we can be in the future.

Note: the title for this post came from a bottle of wine we picked up in an Auckland supermarket. It was a Malborough red that was made to raise funds for the rebuilding after the September 7.1 magnitude quake.

Geeks on tour #3 Spectacular bits of ice.

2011-04-17T12:33:00.002+01:00

Living in Edinburgh I’ve had the privilege to experience quite a lot of the Scottish mountains. Much of the drama and sculpture of that landscape is a result of glaciers which wound their way through the Scottish mountains thousands of years ago. One of the many fabulous things about visiting New Zealand is that glaciers are still hard at work carving out some of the incredible vistas the country is famous for. And what is better, is that you can easily visit them and see them in action.

Franz-Josef glacier in its setting.

Franz-Josef and Fox glacier are unique within NZ, as they spill from the mountains of the Southern Alps all the way to sea level on the West coast. I had never been so up close and personal to a glacier, and these two did not disappoint.

The face of Fox glacier, you can see the cave where the melt water from under the glacier flows out.

Glaciers are a relatively quick way of sculpting the landscape, making dramatic differences, gouging out steep sided valleys. It’s quite interesting how they move, they start as a snow patch at the top of the mountain, and have to collect enough snow, which compresses to ice before they can spill down the mountain and start shaping things up. They generally have two seasons, the winter where they collected up snow and ice and grow and then the summer where they melt back in the hotter weather. In the last ten years Franz-Josef and Fox have been growing slightly (about 50-100m since 1985), due to much more snow on the higher ground. But this growth is pretty small when you find out that 100 years ago they were both over a mile longer.

Cheesy glacier shot! Get it while you can.

However, people monitoring Franz-Josef and Fox can see that they are notably getting thinner and now think that they will soon stop growing and start retreating into the mountains. This is not an isolated thing, pretty much all of the glaciers in the world are retreating, which is quite scary. There are some very good videos that show how things have changed over time such as this, James Balog's Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss.
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All a glow

2011-04-11T17:42:00.002+01:00

Just going to take a quick break in my geeks-on-tour posting to chat about what I got up to this week. I’ve been surprisingly busy since arriving back, lots of people to catch up with and getting job applications on the go. While I look for things I’ve still got quite a bit of research that I’ve done to write up and publish. But putting my face about in the run up to the Edinburgh Science festival turned out pretty well as I picked up a little work for Dr Bunheads ‘Pyromania’ show. My main job was to help out breaking the world record for the longest glowstick necklace.

So how does a glow-stick work? Most glow-sticks you find in the shops you have to crack to make them glow. What you’re doing there is breaking a thin glass tube inside the plastic that separates two chemicals. The first is called an activator and is usually hydrogen peroxide (or what we know as bleach). The second is a special molecule which, when combined with the bleach, breaks down and releases a small packet of light. The reaction continues until all the molecule in the glow stick is used up hence why glow sticks only glow for a few hours.

The reaction in question, the star means that bit is glowing!

Now to make the world longest glow stick necklace, we couldn’t just take commercial ones and join them up (oh no that would have been too easy) as it needed to be a continuous loop. So we took six lengths of pvc tubing that were about 50 m, and I spent a great afternoon looping them up into necklaces that could be worn and making sure the tubing wasn’t tangled. My main contribution to the attempt was suggesting that hanging all these on a hat stand may be a good way to stop all the smaller necklaces getting tangled up.

The morning of the record I pre-mixed the chemicals to make a lovely glowing liquid (no mucking about with thin glass tubing) and used a small vacuum pump to pull the liquid through each of the tube lengths. Then I had to connect them up – which was a bit tricky as I needed to make sure I didn’t get any air bubbles sucked in.

As you can see the result was pretty spectacular – the only thing was that after it got all tangled up in the photo-shoot, me and a few others had to spend TWO hours untangling it so it could be measured. The man from Guinness was there with his trusty trundle-measuring device and confirmed the necklace to be 326.44 m long, very much a new world record!

And now if I see another glow-stick it may send me a little loopy… having said that I’m really interested to know if you can knit with PVC tubing…

Edited to add: A couple of nice photos of the event from Sean Bean

Me trying not to strangle 100 children......

Everyone wearing, really spectacular!

Geeks on tour #2 Mt Doom and friends

2011-04-06T22:19:00.000+01:00

It occured to me that I need to explain why I wanted to become a scientist. Much of it was from a childhood fascination with volcanoes, which always seemed both dangerous and beautiful. So it was a bit of a no-brainer that whilst in North Island New Zealand, we had to visit Tongariro National Park. It's the home of some of the most distinctive mountains in NZ, no more so than the sleeping giant Mt Ruapehu.

It's one of the most active volcanoes in the world, last blowing it's top in 2007. One of the biggest dangers from this volcano is not the red hot lava you would expect - but fast moving mud (called a lahar) that gets channelled into the river valleys. One of the big attractions of the national park is doing the Tongariro alpine crossing a spectacular one day walk that brings you touching distance to the parks other main features Mt Tongariro and Mt Ngauruhoe. There was a bit of steep climb at the start, taking us past lots of features like this:

I'm not sure what the New Zealanders would call this, but it looks really similar to features we saw in Iceland which are known as 'trolls' as they often sit on the skyline and look quite big and troll-like on a quick glance! They are formed by very thick larva, that can't travel very far and cools into these craggy forms. We climbed further, taking us past Mt Ngauruhoe, does it look familiar?

It had a starring role in the Lord of the Rings films, becoming Mt Doom - the final destination of the Ring. I can see why they used it, it really the classical child's drawing of a volcano. Steep sides and a crater on top. The cone of the volcano is made up of layers of larva and finer ash-like material (known as tephra, you may have got some of this on your car when 'that' Icelandic volcano caused lots of problems). The steep and loose material put me off climbing to the top, but it was fantastic to be so close to a beautiful volcano.

Geeks on tour #1 A bit of a fog

2011-04-04T15:04:00.001+01:00

You've probably noticed that the pace of my blogging had slowed down a little of late. This was because Andy and I went on a bit of jaunt, round the world! We're back now, but it was a fantastic allowing us both to see and experience loads of new things. I thought I'd do a small series of blogposts on some of the highlights of the trip.

We went the 'wrong' way round, so our first stop was San Francisco. An amazing city, with quite eccentric weather patterns. This was most apparent the day we went on cycle trip to the Golden Gate bridge. It's about 5 miles from the city centre, and for the first hour of the trip we were cycling through a light grey fog (which was quite refreshing). The only thing was we didn't get much of a feel where we were going, and were beginning to wonder where this bridge was. We stopped for a rest, Andy got his camera out, and then we noticed what was appearing at the top of the fog.

Can't quite see it? Well five minutes later things got a bit clearer.

The reason we couldn't see the bridge straight off was because of that morning's advection fog. This fog is created when relatively warm wet air rolls in from the Pacific ocean into the bay of San Francisco. When it hits the colder coastal area the temperature of this air drops to the point where tiny drops of water condense out, creating a thick mist. Because we'd started out in the morning, things were still cold enough for this thick blanket to hang around. But once the sun started warming things up, the tiny drops of water could evaporate back into the air, clearing up the bay for some spectacular views.

It was a great day, made all the better for our timing arriving at the bridge. A similar phenomena happens (a little less regularly) back home in Edinburgh. Here it's known as the 'Haar' and when it rolls in can seem very grey and dreary in the city. But if you can pop out the fog, often in the hills to the South, there's a beautiful sunny day waiting!

Velcro under the microscope

2011-03-25T06:18:00.000Z

Those of you who caught the christmas lectures - quite a while ago now - lecture two will perhaps remember the giant velcro wall that we had next to a number of priceless chandeliers and paintings. One of the points of the section was to understand that if you just made giant velcro it wouldn't work in the same way, but before we tackled that we had to understand what velcro is in the first place.

I like the story of velcro - it was invented by a Swiss engineer called George de Mestral who, after a walk with his dog found him covered in burrs. If you look close at the picture of burrs above you can probably see why this was, each of the spikes have small hooks on the ends. These hooks got tangled in de Mestral dog's fur, and gave him the idea for velcro!

Mark really wanted to see if giant velcro would work, but before we could make a model we had to try and understand how normal velcro works. Out comes the microscope! You can see the scale of the picture above by the human hair that we put with some of the velcro bits - along with a ruler (the black marks are 1mm divisions). We wanted to be accurate on the proportions between the 'hooks' and 'hairs'. You can see how they tangle together below.

Will giant velcro work though? The giant velcro will stick, and stick quite well, but we don't use it for trains because it's hard to unstick. This is because as the hooks get thicker, they can't bend to untangle themselves (giving the ripping sound we're so familiar with). It's only when they are small they they have the flexibility to bend to untangle themselves! With velcro, smaller is better!

Nano Yarn

2011-02-13T05:20:00.000Z

I have taken the plunge and started another lace knitting project. I've dabbled a little bit, have been quite please with some of my results (others went the way of the frog). Typically lace knitting is progressed with very fine yarn, which brings quite a bit of fidillyness to the projects.

But if you thought that was a fine yarn then I should introduce you to this stuff......


Nano yarn, each of these strands are 0.000000005 m across (picture from here)

Gravity was the main theme for the last of this year Christmas lectures, and one of things Mark wanted to chat about is future ways that we can escape Earth's gravity. At the moment we need tremendously big and powerful rockets, which are massively expensive (and not a bit polluting!). He posed the question 'could we build ourselves off the planet?'. Well as he explained that is may be possible, but to achieve it we need a material that is not only incredibly strong, but also very light as it will need to hold it's own weight over a very large distance. At the moment we don't have any materials that completely fit the bill, but one is getting closer and excitingly it's a YARN!

It's a yarn made of carbon nanotubes (which you can see in the picture above), which are rolled up layers of graphene which has got a lot of people very excited over the past few years. The nanotubes collect together in bundles and then these bundles are collected into fibres which can be woven into a use able yarn. While researching for the lectures I got to head to Cambridge to meet the people who are making this material and find a bit more about this incredible stuff. The most impressive thing I thought about the whole process was that they literally spin the fibres out of smoke.


The 'spinning wheel'

The picture above shows a massive 4 m high machine which is the 'spinning wheel' of the process. In the top they create a dense smoke out of a carbon rich molecule and in the bottom part they funnel it down and collected it. The very thin fibres get pulled out and collected onto a spinning top - allowing them to make about 50 m of fibre a day.

At the moment they carbon nanotube yarn only just beats more conventional carbon fibre in strength to weight ratio. But the reason it's a big leap forward is that you can tie knots in it. Normal carbon fibre (which is used for planes for instance) is actually quite stiff, and whilst a fibre can easily be broken by bending it. Carbon nanotube fibre is much more flexible, and withstand a greater amount of flex, making is more suitable as a cable for a space elevator!

More?
Science museum info on carbon nanotubes

A speedy way of making ice cream...

2011-01-26T12:13:00.000Z

Or any excuse to break out the liquid nitrogen. As part of the spectacular science fundraiser tonight, the plan is to serve the guests freshly made ice cream. Normal methods of ice cream making are a little long winded, having to churn every 30 minutes or so to stop ice crystals forming. One way to skip this step is to super cool your ice cream mixture with liquid nitrogen. Nitrogen is a gas which we come into contact with everyday - it makes up over 75 % of our atmosphere. It does us a massive favour as our bodies couldn't survive with a pure oxygen atmosphere. To make nitrogen into a liquid you have to cool it down quite spectacularly, to -196oC, then you get a clear liquid that is quite like water. Liquid nitrogen is used quite a lot in science, in the work I do it makes loading more volatile substances (like methane and ammonia) much easier if you cool them down to the solid or the thick liquid. I also use it when collecting data diffraction data, as when you cool down materials the atoms inside them wobble around less which means you can get a better quality of data.

See, very sensible usage of liquid nitrogen.

The big advantage to ice cream making with liquid nitrogen is that rather than freezing from the sides (like you would if you put it in a freezer) you can stir the mixture directly with the liquid nitrogen. If you stir quick enough you get a nice even consistency very quickly, and end up with a lovely whippy like quality! If you are lucky enough to be able to get hold of a little liquid nitrogen, how about trying some of my recipes! (Always only pour liquid nitrogen in a well ventilated room.)

Lemon sorbet (makes enough for 4)

200ml water
100g Icing sugar
50 ml of lemon juice
1 tablespoon of lemon zest
1 ltr liquid nitrogen

Add your icing sugar to the water and whisk until it's all dissolved in a high-sided plastic bowl. Then add the lemon juice and zest to the mixture, stirring in. Then take a wooden spoon and put on some cryogenic gloves. You'll probably need someone to help you here, as you need to slowly and evenly add the liquid nitrogen into the mixture WHILST stirring pretty vigorously. BE CAREFUL as liquid nitrogen will splash as bit and you really don't want to get it on your skin or eyes. Hopefully when the gas clears you'll have a perfectly churned sorbet in the bottom!

Chocolate ice cream (makes enough for 4)

200 ml of double cream
200 ml of milk
100g of dark chocolate
100g of icing sugar
70g chocolate chips
1 ltr liquid nitrogen

(My personal fave) melt your chocolate in your high-sided plastic bowl with a little of the milk then add the rest of the milk and cream. Then whisk in the icing sugar and stir in the chocolate chips. Then again take up the wooden spoon and cryogenic gloves. Add the liquid nitrogen steadily like for the sorbet, stirring well.

Eat and enjoy!

Hand made tales

2011-01-24T16:36:00.000Z

I had a lovely day on Saturday, meeting up with a couple of very good (and knitting oriented) friends. We've been meeting up for a knit and a natter every month or so since I've been down south, but we decided to widen our horizons and visit the Women's library 'Hand made tales' exhibit. The exhibit showcases domestic crafts in the home, with some donations from people and the stories behind them. I particularly liked the fact that they didn't limit domestic crafts to the obvious knitting needles and sewing - but the 'tools' section included woodworking and gardening tools.

Very appropriate EastEnd craft!

Oooo I do love a bit of quilted symmetry

The exhibit was much bigger than I expected and had a lovely scope to it. It examined the motivation of domestic crafts, from the need to have clothing to wear to the therapy that making something from scratch can give. Personally I really identify with this reason for crafting, I took up knitting in earnest during the dark days of thesis writing. I found there were times when I didn't feel I had produced anything - some coming home and progressing a few rows always made me feel a lot better.

Where everyone can make their mark

A very important message

There was also a good opportunity to put your own craft tips to the exhibition, thought this was a wonderful way to make the visitor included to the exhibit!

Hard drive blues...

2011-01-19T18:09:00.000Z

I was just innocently browsing a knitting pattern when I heard the 'click of doom'.....

...and my hard drive went like that. ARGH! When I started breathing again I remembered that I had backed up not too long ago, but at that point the back up was at the other end of the country (one of the perils of living between too places I suppose). I'm philosophical, there could be a worse time for it to crash on me and I was thinking of getting a new laptop anyway. The reason for my more efficient back-upping is that last time my hard drive crashed I lost everything. It was only when than happened that I learnt what fragile things most hard disks are!

The most important part of your hard drive is the shiny disk, known as a platter (and labeled 4 in the picture above from here). There are in fact quite a few of these disks in your hard drive, stacked one on top of each other. Your data is written and read on to these disks with the arm, bit like the arm on an old record player (the arm is labelled 6 on the diagram). The data is written on to the disk as they spin under the arm using magnetic fields. A copper probe at the end of the arm tells a part of the disk to magnetically point one way (position 0) or the other (position 1). This is where the binary notation (with all the 1's and 0's) come from. When reading and writing your computer spends most of its time converting the 1's and 0's into the data and words that you read.

Being pretty small and quick you can easily see that these types of disks are actually remarkably fragile. The biggest danger is when a small piece of dust gets into the casing or something causes the arm to wobble or get stuck. This can stop it reading or writing the data and even damage the disk, and is often called a head crash (probably what's happened to me).

I think when I first saw my computer all shiny and new it was hard to imagine anything could go wrong, or that anything was so delicate inside it. After my first head crash I learnt that although they are amazing technology, hard drives can go very wrong and that backing up to a DVD is the best way to make sure your hard work is safe!

Feeling crabby?

2011-01-17T17:26:00.000Z

Blue monday is a creation of a PR company, so why don't we make the last monday in January 'Novelty cake day' instead? Cheap, cheerful and always fun to do. Here's one I made earlier...

Crab cake
You can buy or (better) bake a simple round sponge cake about 5 cm deep. Then cut it as I've shown below - leaving you with the three pieces that the arrows point to. Then further cut the thin slices, like shown on the diagram with the large bit becoming the legs. The larger bit become the body of the crab, sit the legs (and the cut end) under the body, then stick (with Jam or nutella) the bit you cut off the leg to the end of the leg to compete the claw.

Cover your creation with butter icing, I think pink is particularly cheerful. Finish off the rest of your crabs legs with strawberry laces, and uses shorter lengths of the laces for the eyes - which I finished off with a bit of black icing. Then embellish with jelly sweets as you see fit then eat and be happy!

Making cakes like this are one of my families big traditions. Always about two weeks before a birthday my sisters and I would sit down with our 'creative consultant' (mum) who'd flick through the 'portfolio' (previous years efforts) and we'd come up with a 'strategy' (what bits of sponge we'd stick together and how much butter icing we'd need).

There's no place like home?

2011-01-11T22:10:00.001Z

The big science news this week is that a new planet has been found orbiting round one of the stars in our galaxy. Sound familiar? Very probably, as over the last few years we've been getting pretty good at finding planets around stars other than our own - at last count there were over 500. But the reason everyone is a little excited is because this latest find is a little different - meet our home from home,

Artists impression of the new planet from NASA

Yes, the reason that this planet has hit the news is that it is the most Earth-like one that has been found so far. So why, 500 in, have we not seen an Earth-like planet before? Well as you may recall, as planets go, Earth is a bit on the small side. Next to our biggest neighbour Jupiter, we're are quite a minnow. In our solar system it is Jupiter that exerts the biggest influence, through gravity, on the rest of the solar system - including to a small degree influencing our own sun. It's this gravitational influence, which causes a small wobble in the movement of the Sun, that first allowed us to tell if there were planets other than the one we know in our solar system. By watching a star very carefully, we can spot if it 'wobbles' because of this gravitational effect from another planet, but it took a very large planet to do this.

But as measurements got better, a new way of finding planets emerged. If we are lucky and a planet orbiting around it's star happens to do so in a way that every so often it gets between us and the star (like the moon does in a solar eclipse) then we can detect the light from the star in question getting fainter.

How the transit method works, when the planet (small smudge on the larger yellow star) passes in front, the light front the star we observe here on earth is reduced for a few hours, which is what the graph below shows.

You can probably now see why the first planets we noticed doing this were big ones, as these would cause the biggest dip in the light we are seeing. But, in keeping with the pace of technology, telescopes are getting better and better until now, where we have the Kepler space telescope. Free of Earth atmosphere, Kepler was designed to find Earth-sized planets from billions of miles away and yesterday it was announced that we had found the first!

So what is this planet, catchily named Kepler 10b, like. Well we know is is bigger than Earth, but more interestingly we know its mass. It's nearly 5 times heavier than Earth, and that more interesting because together with its size we know that the density of the planet is 8.8 g/cm3. That's more interesting as it gives us an idea what the planet is made from. If it were a gas planet, like Jupiter and Saturn, its density would be much less, more like 1 or 1.5 g/cm3 So we know that not only is this planet made of rock, but it must also have quite a lot of metal there too - to make it that heavy.

I'm not sure I'll be wanting to visit Kepler 10b anytime soon. It orbits its star much closer than we do - and NASA scientists estimate that the average surface temperature will be 1500 oC, about the melting point of iron, eeek!

Making a 1000 guests welcome

2011-01-09T21:47:00.002Z

I have leant many things over the last few months, but perhaps the most bizarre was how to make a home for some leaf cutter ants. The reason was so we could have them in the first lecture - as a follow up to the UK's strongest man. The plan was to show case their amazing lifting power, where a strong human can lift maybe twice their body weight, some types of ants can lift 100 times their body weight - and wander around with it! I was lucky enough to be put in touch with Karin Moll who's a PhD student finding out just how ants can achieve this. I went to Cambridge to meet Karin and the ants, when I first got to visit them the ants were hard at work!

Karin studies leaf cutter ants - who can themselves carry 10 times their body weight. It was pretty clear that these busy guys were exactly what we needed, as they forage for leaves continually until they've stripped what they have found. I thought that they ate the leaves them selves, but as Karin explained the leaf cutter ants are farmers, and they feed the leaves to a fungus that houses and feed their lavae. One other thing I thought was extraordinary about these ants were how clear they were. They like to have a rubbish dump, where they can take their waste as far from their nest as they can.

What we needed now was to work out was how to get the ants from Cambridge to the Ri in London.

For the ants to get used to their surroundings they had to come the Saturday before recording. My job in the meantime was to build an arena for them. I've always been a little wary of power tools - but some drilling, jig-sawing and constructing later, this is what I came up with.

I was pretty pleased with my efforts. To stop the ants climbing up the sides and under the platform, you cover them with a thin layer of clear oil. The other important thing to note, should you ever need to build an ant colony, is to avoid solvent-based glues, as the ants are very sensitive to the smells. The Saturday before filming Karin brought down the ants on the train, in a polystyrene box with a hot water bottle (the ants are cold blooded and get very sluggish when the temperature drops below room temperature). Although Karin came back down for filming, she couldn't hang about to look after the ants for the next few days so that became my job! I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of insects, the big soldier ants had quite mean looking jaws, but after four days I was pretty attached to the guys. The main task to keep them comfortable was to make sure they had enough water, and to rescue the one who had got curious and fallen off the platform. To pick up a number of ants you use a paint brush, as they get caught in the bristles and you can easily push them off back into the colony.

The ants (and me) got to star in one of the 'behind the scenes' videos that were made for the lectures.

(Slightly annoyed that I didn't get time to sort my hair out before filming!). Karin took the ants back to Cambridge after filming on the Tuesday, and I was pretty sad to seem them go. Very tempted to get my own ant farm now....

In a wibbly wobbly world....

2011-01-04T11:53:00.001Z

I've not really ever given much thought to Jelly (or Jello if you're in the states). I never liked it as a child, and used to pull faces when offered the usual jelly and ice cream party treat. But since starting and the Ri I've come in to contact with quite alot of jelly so I thought I should write a little about what I've found out.

Jelly is made of collagen. What we know as collagen within living tissue is very complex and the structure of it is not fully understood, but forms a number of different structures. What is known is that these structures are made up of a number of strands of molecules, bit like the strands that make up a rope. Jelly is a mixture of single collegen strands (that have been seperated by heating or broken apart chemically) and water. When the mixture is warm the strands of collegen are free along with the water molecules. As it cools down the collegen strands become stiffer and eventually trap the water in a 3d structure, this is what gives jelly its ability to stand up.

Many people note that some attempts of mixing fruit into their jelly ends with a big sloppy mass. This is because some fruit (like pinapple and figs) have an enzyme that can can cut the collegen strands and stop it from forming the 3d structure, keeping it a sloppy goo.

Why have I spend so much time with Jelly reacently. Well my first was in a bit to find something that flowed quicker than the mantle. This is to try and demonstrate the principle of isostacy. I had to abandon the idea after a bit of testing because jelly will only really deform elastically on reasonable time scales (minutes), if you push on it, it will pop back. To really take the place of the mantle I need something that will deform plastically (you press on it and it flows away). We think we've got something, but it's not as edible.... (humph).

But we've also been interested in jelly as a substitue for flesh (grusome I know). Below is what happens when you drop a balloon 6.5 Kg full of Jelly from 13m. This was all experimenting for the first stunt of the Christmas lectures - if you're quick you can still download and watch the first lecture here.

What we found was that sugar filled jelly liquifys on a shock impact (like dropping it 10 meters or so...). I suppose that when the balloon hits the floor, its kinetic energy is dissipated in breaking the links between chains (not the chains themselves), by shearing the gel (shear-melting). For the lecture itself we wanted to replicate what real flesh would do when dropped, and it certainly doesn't liquify. So we ended up using a thicker type of jelly, ballistics gelatin....

Thanks to Laurence Wilson for discussion and pointers on Jelly science.
Aslo see this New Scientist TV article that features more of the slo-mo jelly clips I filmed.

Day and night (a guest blog)

2010-12-10T14:42:00.002Z

I'm sorry for my absence reacently, things have got pretty hectic at the RI. Instead I've got a guest blogger, my better half, which is his views on the reacent Daylight Saving Bill.

Several times in the past 15 years there have been moves to shift the UK’s time zone one hour forwards, such that we would be on the same time zone as central Europe. Proponents of such a move claim a variety of economic and health benefits arising from this alteration. In this post I’d like to outline, from an astronomical point of view, some issues arising from such a move along with some of the quirks of time that become apparent at this time of year.

Sunrise and sunset in winter

The sunrise and sunset time changes through the year occur as a consequence of the 23.4° tilt of the Earth’s axis, which of course also drives the seasons familiar to those in the temperate latitudes. The further north you travel on Earth, the lower the Sun appears in the sky at noon, but also the angle that the sun’s path across the sky makes with horizon at sunrise or sunset gets progressively shallower. The Sun, Moon, planets and stars all trace shallower arcs around the sky at more northern latitudes, until at the most extreme, at the North or South Pole, everything travels in a horizontal circle once a day. On the equator, everything rises and sets vertically, taking 12 hours between rising and setting. For us in the UK, sitting at between about 50°N and 60°N this means that the arcs are closer to horizontal than vertical, giving long twilights all year round; additionally many stars never set, tracing tilted circles around the north celestial pole. These shallow paths give latitudes closer to the poles greater extremes of winter darkness and summer daylight. We are far enough north that the ranges are large – you only have to travel 6° north of Shetland to reach the latitude where the Sun does not set at midsummer and the Sun does not rise in midwinter, and consequently our days range from approximately 7hrs-17hrs long (±30mins).

The Greenwich Meridian

The Greenwich Meridian is the prime meridian for the whole world, 0° longitude. Trust us Brits to bag that sort of thing! It is defined so that at 12 noon the Sun is on average due south. For every fifteen degrees of longitude you travel east, the Sun will be due south an hour earlier (e.g. Austria, Croatia, Sweden are 15° east of the UK), and west an hour later (Canary Isles, Senegal, E Iceland). As Britain is tilted in a NW-SE direction, most of Britain lies to the west of this meridian, meaning that for most of us the Sun is due south some time after midday.

The equation of time, the analemma and why the earliest sunset is around 4^th December.

A lesser-known property of our latitude is that the earliest sunset of the year is not at the winter solstice, but around the 4^th December. Similarly the latest sunrise is not until around 4^th January. The reason for this is a little complex, but is all to do with the fact that the Earth’s orbit is not quite round (it’s elliptical), and also that the Earth is tilted on its axis. These two effects mean that at different times of the year the Sun is apparently moving faster and slower with respect to the stars at different times of the year. The Sun moves quickest in its eastward path around the sky at the solstices and slowest in its path around the equinoxes, due to the tilt of Earth’s axis. Additionally, the Sun appears to move quickly in winter when the Earth is nearest the Sun in its orbit in early January (think Kepler’s Laws of orbital motion here!), and slow in summer when Earth is furthest from the Sun. These two periodic oscillations are combined to form what is known as the ‘equation of time’, which quantifies in minutes the leads and lags of the Sun as it crosses the meridian. It was a very important thing to know in past ages, before about 1900AD, in order to correctly set your clock by measuring the transit time of the Sun and applying the appropriate correction based on the date. If you were to take a multiple-exposure photograph looking due south once a month for a whole year, the Sun would appear twelve times in the photo, tracing out an upright figure-of-eight in the sky, with the lower loop larger than the upper (Figure 1, Wikipedia). This is the analemma, and is a neat demonstration of the Sun arriving ‘early’ and ‘late’ at different times of the year.

And so the day is centred around noon, astronomically speaking, on the meridian. In London, this is next nearly exactly true on Christmas Day, with about 3 hours 55 minutes of daylight before and after noon, and again on April 18th. The oscillations that give rise to the equation of time mean that on 2^nd November the Sun transits 17 minutes ‘early’, and on February 12^th the Sun transits 15 minutes ‘late’, the two largest excursions of the year. In between times the Sun is playing ‘catchup’, moving remarkably fast across our sky. If the Sun moved at a constant rate throughout the year the earliest sunset and latest sunrise would be on the winter solstice and the analemma would be a vertical line on the meridian, not a figure-of-eight; the fast rate of movement between November and February means that sunsets and sunrises are pushed later and later. By 4^th December, while the sunset time should still be getting earlier because of the lower and lower declination of the Sun in the sky (axial tilt), our speedy Sun overtakes this discrepancy (orbital speed) and the evenings start getting lighter again! The reverse happens to sunrises after Christmas, as the Sun’s fast motion keeps it from rising earlier until into January. Therefore the darkest dawns are January dawns, while the darkest dusks are early December dusks.

On the Equator, the variations in the Equation of Time completely control sunset and sunrise times. The earliest sunset and sunrise is around 2^nd November and the latest sunset and sunrise is around 12^th February. Of course the difference between the two is only about 30 minutes, and the equatorial day is still 12 hours long all year round!

What’s all this got to do with Summer Time and changing Britain’s clocks?

All these variations mean that the darkest times of the year are not the same wherever you are, and neither are sunrises or sunsets. As well as the perturbations of the Equation of Time, latitude and longitude are strong controls on time of sunrise and sunset. The setting of the Sun to the southwest and the rising in the southeast provide another effect when combined with the orientation of the British Isles in a northwest-southeast direction. When you place these substantial variables into the context of a clock that reads the same time whether you’re a Hebridean fisherman or a Royal Institution researcher, your days can feel quite different.

When the Sun sets in the southwest in winter, it sets at nearly the same time for everyone: whether you are in Stornoway, Stockport or Southend, it sets within a few minutes of 15:50. The Sun rises in the southeast, but this time it rises at 07:43 in London, but over an hour later in Stornoway (and over 30 minutes later in Edinburgh). So the key point is that sunrises are the big issue for Britain, not sunsets, as they are what varies so dramatically across the country in winter. By early January, sunrise conditions are at their most extreme, with sunrises occurring close to and after 9am in northwest Scotland, while in southeast England sunrises still occur at a reasonably civilised 8am.

Daylight saving time is all about getting extra hours of light in the summer evenings for recreation, and for that it works well, with summer sunsets shifted from between 8-9pm to between 9-10pm. The orientation of the asymmetry is reversed in summer, with the sunsets showing the country-wide discrepancy, while the earliest sunrises are consistently 4:30-5am across most of the UK. Our northern latitudes mean that even in the southeast, the Sun sets after 9pm in summer months, and a much later setting of the Sun would arguably be detrimental to those wishing to go to bed from 9pm onwards. In winter, all we can do is make the best of the limited daylight we have on offer.

Issues with changing clocks a further hour forwards

Our days are controlled by dominantly by clock time, not by solar time. Human ‘clock’ days are asymmetric around noon, being approximately 8am-6pm. All the factors above mean that the days in northwestern parts of Britain are already asymmetric, with most of the daylight after noon, and especially so after Christmas, when latitude, the Equation of Time and western longitude force conditions to an extreme. To move the clocks a further hour forward would shift that asymmetry unpleasantly further, with sunrises occurring after 10am in parts of the UK, and large parts of the country essentially still in full darkness when the human clock-driven day is already moving into full swing.

It has been argued that moving the clocks forward would reduce road traffic casualties during the evening rush hour (about 3-6pm). This may be true, though research seems inconclusive on this point, but it must be offset by the observation that nearly all morning travel to work or to school will take place not only before sunrise, but in nearly full darkness. At present, children can walk both to and from school in daylight or bright twilight in most areas of Britain, even in midwinter. With the clocks shifted an hour forwards, children will have to travel to school in darkness or deep twilight right across the country, most notably in the northwest where it will still be fully dark at 8:30am.

We experimented with year-round daylight-saving time once before, between 1968 and 1971. It was sufficiently unpopular that the legislation was repealed in a free vote by 366 to 81 votes, so clearly it was not just the Scots who didn’t like it! Proponents of moving clocks an hour forward, including a highly biased study by researchers at Cambridge University, suggest road safety improvements, but fail to note such key factors as the introduction of a drink-drive legal limit in 1967 and breathalysers in 1968, which undoubtedly had a large effect on traffic accidents, particularly in the evening period. Suggestions of economic improvements by matching time with other European countries are laughable when you consider global economics (New York is 5 hours behind London, Tokyo is 9 hours ahead). In America, the two largest cities are separated by four hours of time, yet the American economy survives! Add to this the great cost of adapting electronic and other systems, and I would suggest leaving the clocks as they are and simply coping with the dark evenings that are merely the product of living at between 50° and 60° north latitude in winter.

The Man in the White Suit

2010-10-24T20:26:00.000+01:00

Definitely one of my favourite films ever, Alec Guinness plays a chemist who discovers a fibre that is everlastingly strong and repels dirt. It’s so repellent of stains that it is brilliantly white as no dye will stick to it. At first his employers and manufacturers think he is a genius, but as it dawns on them that his invention means that no-one need ever buy new clothes (they obviously hadn’t thought about the fashion industry) they turn on him and hound the young scientist through the streets. I won’t spoil the ending but this is a truly great bit of cinema.

There have been rumblings from Christmas lecture towers about re-creating this effect in some form. So the plucky young researcher (me) puts her thinking cap on as to how to do this with today’s technology. As ever I always like to start with the low-tech solution. So take one small lab coat ‘borrowed’ from the YSC, and a bottle of waterproofing spray from the nearest outdoor clothing shop. Spray liberally in one area – leaving the area on the other side spray free as a control – and leave to dry. Was pretty impressed after the first coat that there was no colour change, in fact worryingly the fabric seemed to not be affected at all!

The equipment

Only one side treated, the protected side is the 'control' bit.

The waterproof sprays that you buy are all based on Teflon technology, based on a polymer (long chained molecule) crucially with fluorine within it. Fluorine is crucial to the material as it’s the element that is able to bond strongest with others. In the molecule fluorine is surrounded by carbon which it bonds to very tightly. The strength of this bonding means it has very little energy to bond to anything else, the practical upshot of which will mean its non-stick and hydrophobic (repels water) but how do you get it to stick to the things you want it to stick too? (Like frying pans and clothing). There the trick is to make your surface very rough, to force the Teflon to sit in nooks and crannies that a rough surface will have without having to bond properly. On clothing, sometimes the surface is pre-prepared with a chemical that can interact with the carbon-fluorine bond – but this is only really used for waterproofs.

So on the third coat of waterproofing I brought out the test liquids... water and coffee. To my surprise (given how the fabric hadn't seemed to change in texture at all) it repelled water pretty well. In fact after a bit of shaking I the treated part of the lab coat was pretty dry. The control side (with no coating put on it) got pretty wet. So having established it was now water proof, could it also resist stains? Out comes some cold coffee. Unsurprisingly the coffee beaded in the same way, but after shaking out there was a little yellow patch where each of the beads had been. Some of the coffee had been transferred into the fabric.

Water repellent....

and coffee repellent!

The low-tech approach is not going to work I fear, not for stain resistance. To be fair the waterproof spray never claimed to be able to resist stains. So have be emailing some nice company people to see what modern industrial processes can do, think they may fair better than my amateur efforts!

Seeds for thought - can you tell 10 million from 100 million?

2010-10-17T18:53:00.002+01:00

I’ve long been a fan of the turbine hall at Tate Modern, a massive imposing space that has been used for larger installations since the gallery was first open. I think the first thing I saw there was Anish Kupoor’s Large red Trumpet things, graceful despite their size. The exhibition changes regularly and I got in front of the telly on Tuesday to see the news report on the newest one. ‘Sunflower seeds’ by Ai Weiwei is a carpet of porcelain seeds that fill the bottom of the Turbine hall, rather like the stones or gravel you put at the bottom of a fish tank. From above it looks like a large, fluffy grey carpet but examined from below you can see the individual seeds. Each seed has been hand-made and from porcelain and then painted to resemble a sunflower seed. Made in China’s Jingdezhen province (famed for it’s porcelain) it took a great number of people a great number of hours to complete. The statement it makes on people power is quite powerful and to my mind quite mixed.

A close up of the seeds.

Needless to say when I saw it featured on the news I emailed Mark, whatever you think on the interpretation of the installation I does just scream ‘SCALE’ and ‘SIZE MATTERS’. So after work on Friday we met up at the Tate Modern to have a look at it. Sadly the public is now band from walking over it because of the dust it kicks up. But viewing it from the balcony Mark wondered ‘How many seeds actually are there?’ A rather knowledgeable looking lady next too him mentioned that she heard that there were 10 million individual seeds. This presented a challenge to Mark ‘Can we convince ourselves that’s right? Do we really understand what 10 million of these seeds would look like?’ Out comes his trusty notebook.

Full view of the hall

Between us we estimated that the carpet of seeds on the floor of the Turbine hall measured 25m by 80m. I’d had a closer look downstairs, inching under the barrier, and reckoned that the carpet was about 10cm thick or 0.1m. This gives a volume of all the seeds to be 200m³. If we divide this number by the number of seeds there is thought to be it will give us a volume that should match to one individual seed. So, 200 divided by 10,000,000 is 0.00005m³, which sounds like a very small volume but is probably too big! Looking at the seeds I recon they are about 2.5cm tall (0.025m), 1cm wide (0.01m) and 0.1cm thick (0.01m). These give a volume for each seed of roughly 0.0000025 m3. Now even though we have overestimated these dimensions this number is still 10 times smaller than the volume we estimate from taking our estimate of the total volume and dividing it by the number of sunflower seeds the knowledgeable lady thought there was. So that suggests that there are in fact 100 million sunflower seeds on the floor of the Turbine hall! If there were 100 million, using the estimate of the dimensions of all of the sunflower seeds this would give us an individual sunflower seed volume of 0.000002m3 which is pretty close to the generous 0.0000025 m3 we estimated from looking at one.

It’s near impossible to look at a massive pile of small objects and tell definitively how many there are. But if you break the problem down a little bit you can get pretty near the right answer – good tactics for the ‘guess the number of sweets in the jar’ at the next summer fair.

Science is Vital

2010-10-17T18:39:00.001+01:00

I have been meaning to write this blog post for the last few days, but finding time has been very difficult. I've perhaps left it too late given this bbc report. It would seem that the cuts to science funding that many of us feared are about about to happen.

There has been a lot of numbers flying about attached to the spending cuts that are, enevitably, on their way. The point of the ‘Science is vital’ campaign was, essentially, to point out that a) science research in the UK is incredibly good value for money (though we spend less that 1% of our GDP on research across the subject we are one the of the best countries in the world at it despite many other countries putting much more of their annual spending to research). Hence any cuts in the science research are not going to save the government all that much money. But b) the massive thing to realise is the large economic benefit that science and the innovation it inspires brings to our country, It has been estimated that if you cut £1 billion from the research budget it will have a direct ecomonic effect of £10 bilion thorugh the businesses and skilled people that will leave.

Dr C trying to make a planet-sized point.

Once the cuts happen there is no going back – people will have left, facilities will have to close down and valuable knowledge will be lost. It would take a generation to rebuild what all of us in the science community have worked so hard to build over the last few years – our efforts will be wasted.

These arguments and thoughts meant that for me doing as much as I could towards the science is vital cause was a given. I attended the rally, which despite the ominous and joblessness hanging over us was quite jolly, and a wonderful atmosphere of pulling-togetherness. There were some excellence and motivating speakers, and the crowd of 2000 were left buzzing and full of some hope.

The politest rally ever...

A couple of days later I put on some ‘non lab’ clothes and I exercised some of my democratic rights for the first time, having written to my MP I had requested that he meet me at the lobby of parliament that was organised the following Tuesday. It was my first trip into parliament and I had to try not and be too impressed by the magnificent gothic building and focus on why I was there. In all there were about 120 of us that have requested to meet our MPs and attended the lobby. I thought it was a little shameful that most of the scientists there were below 40, the younger section of the community. This was reflected at the rally too; I’m slightly shock at how small the number of more senor colleagues visably in support within the masses.

I was able to meet my MP (Ian Murray, Labour Edinburgh South), a very pleasant chap who seemed very on-board with our concerns. As such it was a very productive chat and I was able to relay some of my experiences and the fact that to continue my work I will probably have to move abroad, perhaps a waste of the £150,000 or so that the UK has spent on my education? But even at the lobby the most visible and vocal of science supporting MPs were painting a picture of doom. We were teased with the possibility that cuts would not be so severe, but now in light of recent reports I think this is pie in the sky…

I suppose I have now come to earth with a bit of a thud – science will be cut despite the stupidity of it all. I find it hard to believed that it will happen (but them I find it hard to believe that the movie ‘highlander’ got made).

All change.

2010-09-09T20:47:00.002+01:00

I've been a tardy with my blog posts the last month and that's because I've been shifting about the country a bit. I was been pretty keen to widen and expand my experiences in the science communication world. Well after applying, interviewing and accepting I'm now working at the ROYAL INSTITUTION, on THE CHRISTMAS LECTURES!!! It's been a whirlwind couple of weeks, trying to tie up and pass over research in Edinburgh and getting myself to central London

The Faraday lecture theatre in all its glory

But am here now and have really enjoyed my first week. The lectures this year are going to be given by
Mark Miodownik (has only taken me a week to learn to spell that correctly, yay me!) on the topic of 'Size Matters' which is a fantastically broad scheme and is throwing up a lot of interesting paths to follow. Yesterday I had the privilege to visit Mark's Materials library at Kings College - where he is hoarding and archiving all manner of fascinating materials. It's a really unique idea, collecting up the bits and bobs left over from research that may otherwise be chucked away. Now people are sending him materials to keep in the collection. One thing that really caught my eye was something that looked like a delicate silvery lace weight yarn, which had been tightly knitting to a stretch band. BUT this 'fibre' was attracted to a magnet - what it actually is is a fibrous spun steel. I'd love to get hold of some to knit a garment to take to knitting shows.....

I'm sure that I will be writing more on the bits and bobs that I find out over the next couple of months, but I shan't be giving away the content of the lectures! (you'll have to watch BBC4 over Christmas....).

So leaving drinks in Ed were an emotionally affair - after five years I'd really got ingrained into CSEC! Suitably the drinks were gin and tonic plus popping candy. The cola flavour of popping candy (which is an extreme sweet as high-pressure is used to force CO2 gas into the sugar) complements the gin very well - and makes for an interesting, dynamic, cocktail.

Cover girl – How do scientists communicate to each other.

2010-08-16T18:35:00.002+01:00

So after hours, weeks, months in the lab, then some more hours, weeks and months analysing your data you think you have something, you are ready to tell the world. In the scientific world, the most common way to tell people about what you’ve done is to write an article describing and justifying your work. Then you submit this to a science journal, which is the equivalent in the science world to a newspaper. There are quite literally thousands of journals out there, from the big ones that you may have heard of (grandly titled ‘Science’ and ‘Nature’) to quite scarily specific ones (such as ‘Cement and concrete research’ and ‘Soil technology’). The big difference, however, between journals (the science newspapers) and normal newspapers is that before the article can be published it is sent to separate researchers in the field to read over and check that you have justified your conclusions, and to make comments and question what you have done. This system is called ‘Peer Review’ and is the self-regulation that science runs under. Like most forms of self-regulation it’s not absolutely perfect, for instance some reviewers make more thorough jobs than others. But, in general most people think that it would be hard to better this system.

So you can imagine that with writing, submitting, sending to reviewers, getting comments back, re-drafting the paper, sending back for comments before getting accepted and then proofing the text and pictures; most papers take a lot of work! The sense of achievement when they actually get published is really quite big! So I was really happy to see this paper from my PhD get published. Was quite nice that they even picked it out to make the front cover! What it describes is the crystal structure of a methane under high-pressure. My conclusions were that where many people had assume that methane would be rather simple under these conditions, in reality it isn’t and it is a much more complicated molecule in solids that we thought previously.

As a form of communication, though quite specialised, writing scientific papers is quite effective as later authors can use you work, comment on it and refer back to it relatively easily, You’ll see if you download my paper that there is a list of other people work at the end, where I’ve done just that. So this means that scientist can learn from each other and whole subjects can evolve with input from lots of sources.

Once you’re work is published then it’s often nice to present it at a conference. There are also lots of scientific conferences, big and small happening all the time. You’d probably be surprised how sociable science actually is, with the most effective researchers often branching out and working with others, to improve their skills and to make exciting new measurements. Most of these collaborations are fashioned at conferences, and people often head to present internationally to further the scope of their work.

To eat or not to eat, cloned meat.

2010-08-05T18:09:00.001+01:00

Before I start I should say that my biology education ended at 16. I was inspired to write this after a very interesting article on the radio. I was left thinking ‘would I eat cloned meat?’ and this is the result of my own, personal, mini investigation into the topic.

The press has been outraged, a farmer in the highlands left high and dry and many of us a bit baffled at the recent revelations that cloned beef has been consumed in the UK. In the UK, meat from cloned animals is treated as a novel foodstuff, where there is not a significant history of it being eaten in the UK, and a result is regulated and to put it in the food chain requires special authorisation.

What is a clone? A clone is a genetic copy of one animal. There are quite a number of ways this is done. Dolly the sheep, for instance, was cloned using a method that took the cell nucleus from an adult sheep’s cell into an unfertilised egg that had itself had its nucleus removed. The nucleus of a cell is where all the genetic information is held, so by taken the information of an adult cell into a cell that would later develop into an embryo (without being fertilised), the sheep that was born (Dolly) was an exact copy of the adult sheep.

Cloning animals for food production is now common in the US, and this is where the embryos that entered the UK food chain came from. The big advantage for agriculture is that for normal breeding you need two good animals to you’re your breading stock, when cloning you only need one and the results of a good animal are more guaranteed. The regulators in US have declared that eating cloned meat is safe, being unable to distinguish it from non-cloned animals. This is pretty rational, meat is meat, and chemically our stomachs are pretty destructive environments. Cloning may also have a benefit it terms of food safety as you can screen for many sexually transmitted diseases in cattle before the embryo is planted. In a world where meat eating is only becoming more popular, you can see why any method that would increase this yield would be popular.

So if a nice juicy steak were to turn up on my plate, from a cloned animal, would I eat it? Probably yes, but my reservations are not about the meat, but for the animal itself. Cloning is still a relatively novel progress, and will have progressed in the 13 years since Dolly. But there are still concerns that a significant proportion of the animals born in this way are adversely affected. The European Food Safety Authority is one of the bodies to cite these concerned and have also called for more studies on the issue to be undertaken. This is why, at the moment, cloned meat is considered a restricted foodstuff in the UK and Europe. My other concern is genetic variability. Animals, us included, have survived and adapted precisely because of our genetic variability. If we start restricting our herds to one genetic make up then the risks of them being wiped out as one is surely increased? My final concern is in at the level we eat meat. The methane by-product of cows has been shown to be a significant addition to greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing the number of cows will only add to this.

Don’t just take my opinion, here’s some places where you can read over the issues for yourselves.

European Food Safety authority

New Scientist special on cloning with Ian Wilmut

American food and drugs administration.

Diamonds in the big smoke

2010-07-14T18:49:00.000+01:00

I’ve had a couple of reasons to leave my Scotland and head back to the city of my birth (London) recently. First off was the Royal Society's summer science exhibition. This fantastic event, which is run by the society every year, is a great opportunity for groups of scientists to present their work to the public at large. In fact I think that’s what makes it quite unique among outreach opportunities, in that it is not aimed at one group in particular and you can find your self chatting to a 7 year-old in one moment and a Nobel prize winner the next!

This was my second time at the exhibition, this time I was representing some of science that goes on at Diamond Light Source. Diamond is a laboratory in Oxfordshire that is a synchrotron source of high-intensity x-rays. These x-rays come from accelerating electrons around a ring to the speed of light. When the electron get to these speeds the produce x-rays when they are bent in large magnets. I need to use the high-energy x-rays because my samples are very small (getting to high-pressures with large samples takes a lot of effort and can be a bit dangerous!).

David and Me, happy communicators!

It was a great idea for a stall, with people from Diamond who run the machine in the middle explaining how it works, and a number of groups around them explaining how they use the high-energy x-rays for their science. Diamond is used in many ways, from looking at hydrogen storage to how proteins bind to viruses.

Steve showing how pressure effects marshmallows!

This week I’m off to London again, but this time for an awards ceremony! A fellow post-doc Jenny and I decided to put a short movie into this year’s Sci-Cast competition. Sci-Cast is a sort of YouTube for short amateur science videos, it’s definitely worth a look through some really funny and informative things. We put in a movie about how you can use the large press that Jenny uses everyday to make diamonds if you want. Because diamonds are just made of carbon themselves, all we needed was a source of carbon like…. Burnt toast! The movie is now up online - http://www.planet-scicast.com/view_clip.cfm?cit_id=2908 and we were delighted to find out that it has been nominated for one of this year’s awards. So fingers crossed that Friday goes well!

More info?

Diamond have put together this amazing website that not only explains how a synchrotron works but highlights much of the science that goes on there. http://insidediamond.org/

Celebrating the 350^th Anniversary of the Royal society, the summer science exhibition this year was part of the larger ‘See Further Festival’ http://seefurtherfestival.org/

Other Sci-Cast movies can be seen at http://www.planet-scicast.com/

September Issue of EuSci will have an article on Synchrotrons…. I know I wrote it!!!

In harmony and not so harmonious…

2010-06-17T18:11:00.000+01:00

You can’t miss the world cup, it is here and invading our tellies and living rooms. I feel relatively sheltered, living in Scotland but have my England flag on display at home. But the talk of the tournament has not so far been the football but what the supports are up to. The constant buzzing sound, that rises as players near the goal like a swarm of hungry locus, it’s the vuvzela’s of course.

Honk!

The vuvuzela is an important part of South African football culture, so was always going to be a major feature of this championship. They work very similarly to a trumpet, where you have to make a rasping sound with your lips to make a sound. The length of them (the ones in the world cup are a little shorter than normal, about 60 cm) gives the note B flat. (For those of you that learnt elementary piano like me, that’s the black key to the left of middle C). I was always more of a clarinet player, which is tuned to the key of B flat, so recon that the vuvuzela would be a good accompanying instrument for the woodwind section….

All sounds are created by backwards and forwards movements (compression) of air that our eardrums are able to detect. These compressions of air move around us as waves, like those on the sea except we cannot see sound, just hear it. Vuvuzelas are aerophones, and produce their sound from vibrating air within the instrument; other aerophones are clarinets, flutes and trumpets. In the vuvuzela the sound waves can stack up, creating what is know as resonance. It’s this stack up of sound waves that makes the vuvuzela so loud.

About as annoying as a vuvuzela...

Weirdly enough this talk of sound has lead me to think of pigeons. The other day my dad was on the phone and I heard a pigeon call clearly over the phone. On asking my dad about this, I got quite an earful from him, it would seem the pigeon had been making his presence very much known! My parents have an oven with a metal flume that pokes out the roof, and a local pigeon has taken to sitting on there – probably because it’s a place to warm his feet. But when he calls out the sounds he makes travels down the tube and are able to resonate. As you may have guessed this mean that the pigeon call can then be heard very loudly in the kitchen. Dad said he’s been out to remonstrate with the pigeon, who doesn’t seem the least bit bothered. I think my Dad is now considering more draconian methods to remove he’s noisy neighbour!

The study of sound is called acoustics, if you’re interested have a look at the Edinburgh Uni acoustic groups website.

How a woodwind instrument works in more detail.

10 things the BBC think we should know on Vuvuzelas.

Strange Connections

2010-05-13T13:37:00.004+01:00

This week in May 50 years ago saw two quite separate leaps in science that have both had major impacts on our society. It’s strange but you wouldn’t automatically put the pill and the laser in one blog post together but here they are. The pill was first passed to be an oral contraceptive on the 9^th May 1960, and in a lab on the 16^th of May 1960 the first observation of laser light was observed from a ruby crystal.

Lasers as male contraception?

So why am I bundling them together? Well I think that they are both great examples where scientific advances have massively impacted on our everyday culture.

With the pill the advance was to produce and artificial hormone that mimicked the action of progesterone in a woman’s body. This tricks the body into thinking it is pregnant and prevents ovulation – no egg there then none can be fertilised. In the 1950’s progesterone could be extracted from natural samples, isolated from the urine of pregnant mares. But at $1000 a gram this was expensive and didn’t work as when natural progesterone is swallowed our stomach acid attacks it. Progesterone could be injected to prevent ovulation, but this wasn’t a very effective everyday answer.

The advance came when artificial progesterone could be synthesised. Called norethindrone this molecule is very similar in shape to progesterone but has a tougher bond so it can withstand the acids in our stomachs. The interesting thing is that much of this science was done in the early 50’s, but it took tireless campaigning and work by two women, Margret Sanger and Katherine McCormick, to change both social perceptions and laws on oral contraception before norethindrone (re-named Enovid) was approved for this use. This small molecule led to a social revolution, with women able to take control of their own fertility.

The impact lasers have had on our culture is perhaps less clear. References to laser-like devices have been in fictions for years before; HG Wells talks about an ‘invisible, inevitable sword of heat’. Lasers basically come from the atom, which we effectively ‘prod’ with a bit of energy to then release the extra energy as an exact type of light. Different types of atoms will give us different amounts of energy and colour. The control to produce this exact type of light, which is the laser light, has revolutionised physics and born a vast number of practical applications.

We all have had CD’s and DVD’s that use lasers to write and extract their information. Most important perhaps, is the implication that lasers have had on communications, they generate the light that is sent down fibre optic cables. Lasers, by rapidly increasing the speed of communications have provided us with yet another social revolution.

So, although they would seem to be advances from completely opposite ends of science, both the pill and the laser have had great implications on our everyday life.

Further reading

Physics world ‘The laser at 50’ free download of the magazine.

BBC article on the Pill at 50

PhDcomics 'ode to the laser'

A bit run down....

2010-05-06T12:19:00.006+01:00

I’ve been feeling quite under the weather recently, probably from a combination of work, cold weather and vociferous training for the half marathon. My approach when I am feeling like this is to eat as much vitamin C bearing foods as I can. But why? What is it about vitamin C that mean it’s suppose to help when we’re feeing run down?

The idea of vitamins dates from the early 1900’s to explain substances that were shown to be vital to the human diet. The way these were identified was by running studies where some patients were deprived of the substance in question and monitors to see what went wrong with them! Vitamin C was the third of these vital substances to be identified.

Vitamin C is also known as ascorbic acid and is relatively simple compound made up of 6 carbon atoms, 6 oxygen atoms and 7 hydrogen atoms. Us, as humans, are among only a handful of animals that need to get their vitamin C from their food. Cats and dogs can produce vitamin C in their livers and so don’t need to eat it.

But despite being a relatively simple compound, even after a hundred years of knowing that we need to eat vitamin C, we still really don’t need why! It is known that we need it to produce collagen (which is a protein that binds and supports other body tissue – why it is injected in to lips and faces for plastic surgery). The need for vitamin C to produce collagen explains the early symptoms of scurvy (severe deprivation of vitamin C), swelling of the limbs and softening of the gums. Scurvy many people think of as an old disease, only affecting sailors in the 1700’s who spent long voyages only eating worm ridden bread. But sadly this is all-too common among the elderly today who loose interest in cooking for themselves.

We need 0.01 g of vitamin C a day to keep scurvy at bay (a quarter of an orange). But will eating lots of fruit help me with my cold? Probably not unfortunately, as after we’ve had 0.15 g of vitamin C in a day (two and a quarter oranges) our bodies can’t process any more, any excess gets filtered out by our kidneys. But unless you are taking mega doses over a long period (four oranges) everyday it can do little to harm you. If an extra orange, like me, makes you feel like you are doing something proactive about your cold (when you can’t do anything really) then there’s no harm.

How to generate pressure

2010-04-02T13:52:00.003+01:00

I was asked to make a short video explaining an aspect of my work - so I've created this little piece about how to generate pressure.

Why study things under pressure? Well it's the biggest variable that we, as humans, have to play with. You think of temperature, which can extend from 0 Kelvin (absolute zero) all the way to 10 000 Kelvin, the temperature of the sun. (0 Kelvin is -273 degrees Celcius) But pressure can extend from the vacuum of space (0.0000000000000000000000000000001 of an atmosphere) to the centre of a black hole 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atmospheres) This can have dramatic effects on everything from the ice in your freezer to the most complex of molecules.

Ada day

2010-03-24T21:23:00.001Z

In the spirit of Ada Lovelace day (celebrating achievements of women in science and technology) I'd like to big up one of my heroines of science, Dame Kathleen Lonsdale. Born in 1903, she overcame the adversity of being the youngest of ten children in a non-academic family to win a scholarship to study before being invited by William Bragg to join his research team. An original working mum, she spent some of the four years at home with her children working through many of her calculations by hand. This itself often makes me feel bad, as these are the sorts of calculations that I now do with one press of a computer mouse, such things are only possible because of the pioneering efforts of this woman. One thing I really admire was her resourcefullness, on returning to the Royal Institue after having had her children she found no X-ray equipment. Using instead an electromagnet she showed the difference between types of electron orbitals.

She is most renown for pioneering crystallography, and I can cite her as one of my influences for my research career. Along with her many achievements (first women professor at UCL, first women president of IuCR, Davey medal, Damehood, First women president of the BA) I also respect her strong beliefs in pacifism, for which she spent a month in prison for during the second world war.

Travelling thoughts...

2010-03-13T01:22:00.000Z

This week I got a wee jaunt down to London, pretty pleasant – even managed to pop and see my grandparents for tea. But Edinburgh to London and back in a day is a lot of travelling. I was struck, whilst at terminal 5, by the shear number of moving screens, not only at the airport but also on the tube platforms and in the streets. All a bit Bladerunner.

Anyway, I had been stuck for something to read while I waited. I’d forgotten to take a book with me, forcing to me to read the more ‘educational’ stuff I had with me in the morning. But now it was the evening and I wanted something light and fluffy, or so I thought.

I went in search of a magazine, shoe-horned into the glamorous shopping mall that parades itself as an airport, I found smiths and started to browse the covers. I tend to yern for the celeb magazines, but never go as far as to actually buy one. So I usually turn to the thicker ‘marie claire’ type of magazines. Well in this case I actually picked up and scanned the latest issue of Marie Claire as the cover promised ‘SCIENCE’. ‘Science of how to find the one…’ ho hummm

I’m afraid that apart from the mention of a 15-year old study of T-shirt sniffing (conclusion that women are attracted to people with very different gene-make ups, which made me wonder ‘didn’t a chap called Darwin propose that?’) there really wasn’t too much science or even ‘science’. Most of the article was taken up by couples giving insight how they ‘knew’ other were ‘the one’. Forgive me if I feel more than a little cheated there. Ok, so I didn’t expect the most startling original science, but I did expect some!

There are more than enough ‘wacky’ and otherwise scientific studies to write an article about finding love, and perhaps even making it interesting to read. When did magazines just become a string of adverts that we are expected to pay for? Are we not capable of understanding? Is that not a little patronising? (OK so I’m jumping a little bit).

I did a bit of research, I looked at the top non-fiction in paperbacks at the moment – and they are not all celebrity autobiographies. Number one is ’13 things that don’t make sense’ and there are several other science books in the top twenty. So we, as in people and women in general, must be interested to some degree? I suppose that surely writing such non-articles, like that I ready this month in Marie Claire, are not really worth the effort?

Roving along...

2010-02-08T18:39:00.000Z

I’ve been captivated for a number of years now by the Mars rover missions, Spirit and Opportunity. The news last week that the plan is now to make Spirit a stationary science platform (two of it’s six wheels are bust and it has been stuck in sand for the last couple of months) I am sure is not the last that we will here from these plucky little roving geologists.

Spirit and Opportunity were landed on opposite sides of Mars in areas where it was though water once flowed. Finding evidence of water is really important, as it would explain the river-like features that we see on the surface today. There is no water on the surface of Mars today, the atmosphere is too thin and it is far too cold for it to be liquid. But if there was liquid water once on Mars then the planet must have undergone a big change in its environment. Opportunity was the first with a break-through on this count, it landed close to an outcrop of very interesting rocks. Within these it found the mineral jarosite, a salty mineral, which would have been formed from mineral rich-salty water. Opportunity also later stumbled upon the first meteorite to be found on another planet.

Spirit has not been without its own successes; it saw a dust devil pass by. These phenomena, which are also seen in the Arizona desert during summer, did Spirit a big favour cleaning off its solar panels and giving the rovers battery a new lease of life. Better understanding of the dust devils has really increased understanding of how dust is spread in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

But, over the last few months Spirit has been battling to get out of a sand trap, after breaking through the crusty surface into softer sand. The rover’s drivers have been trying to get it out, but now the Martian winter is approaching (it will start in May), they need to concentrate on pointing Spirits solar panels towards the sun. This would mean that it should keep generating enough power to communicate with Earth and to keep on doing science. So the plan is to now to use the fact that Spirit is still to carefully track the satellites orbiting the red planet. Little wobbles in the orbits of these, and of Spirit sat on the surface, will enable us to find out more on the Martian interior.

The Mars rovers, and their mission, have been a great triumph and have sent back hundreds of thousands of fantastic images. These, thanks to Nasa’s very open access policy, all online for you to see! My favourite is this one of Earth rise on the Martian surface.

Further info:

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/images.html - Link to the images from the Rovers.

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/index.html - main Nasa page on the rovers, live information and send the rovers a postcard!

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/14jul_dustdevils.htm - a lovely article on the Martian dust devils.

A different shade....

2010-01-25T17:55:00.002Z

...of grey.

Yes it’s official. At 26 I now am starting to get a significant number of grey hairs. I mean, yes I’ve had a few here and there for a while and have kept the numbers down by a plucking routine. But after brushing this morning, putting my front hair back I realised that quite a few of the remaining hairs in the bunch were grey, long ones that had avoided the pluck. Well I suppose it’s inevitable, so now to try and cover it up!

But how does hair dye work? My mother managed to dissuade me from indulging in it as a teenager (well actually my hair is far too dark for any of the shocking temporary colours to have an effect - I did try but no one ever notice....) The one thing I know is that the process of permanent hair dye always has an ammonia smell about it. (It is perhaps strange to note that I have more experience with working with ammonia proper than with hair dye).

Hair is actually a sophisticated material that is made up of a number of layers, a little like the layers on a tree. In order to permanently change the hair’s colour the dye needs to get to the inner core, called the cortex, past the outer layers. Hair is protected by a cuticle layer, which is a little like the bark of a tree. Ammonia is used to open up the cuticle layer and allow access to the inner core. Once open a ‘developer’ (which is usually peroxide) can remove the existing colour - essentially by bleaching it (peroxide is found in most household bleaches). By breaking the chemical bonds in the hair, the peroxide often releases sulphur, like when you burn it, which is yet another bad smell!

The colour in your hair comes from a molecule called ‘melanin’ (which is also what controls your skin colour). The peroxide in the developer bleaches the melanin by oxidising it - adding oxygen to the molecule - which removes the colour pigment in it. The developer will also have a new colour pigment as part of it - which gets to work on the bleached melanin molecules.

The last stage will be a little sachet of conditioner, this works to close up the cuticles and stop the hair from drying out and being frizzy. As you can imagine that if all the cuticles are still up the hairs cannot sit as close to each other, and hence they frizz out.

All a bit invasive! But, having said that even natural hair dyes can cause allergic reactions. I suppose it’s all a bit vain, but if it stops the shock every time I brush my hair then I’m all for it!

Crystal Growing

2010-01-19T17:53:00.004Z

Some of my own work!

During my PhD I investigated the crystal structures of methane at high-pressure. Part of this involved lots of attempts of growing good crystals to take to the synchrotron for collection. After lots of 'blind' growing I eventually worked out that watching what happened may be a good idea. So what the movie shows is a microscope image of the sample area (which is about 1/5th of a millimetre wide) which is cooling down. As it is cooling down the crystal grows in from the sides. Some of the other bits and bobs in the sample are ruby, which is used for pressure calibration (some of the rest is dust....).

So this is my first attempt at movie making!

Fame at last?

2009-11-12T18:12:00.001Z

As part of publisisng an event at CSEC, Jenny and I got interviewed by the Scotsman!

Read it here.

Have you heard the one about the chocolate bar and the sperm whale?

2009-10-13T16:49:00.001+01:00

So I haven’t written for a while, I've been job hunting. I suppose I never thought how difficult it is - you have to put your heart into every application to get anywhere with it only to have it ripped out when you don’t get it. But I can now put that behind me, as I’ve accepted a job in Edinburgh. It’s for a year initially (all research jobs at this stage are fixed term) and am pretty excited about it.

So I have been up and down emotionally the last few months and on the down spells, like most women, I seek solace in chocolate. I can’t say I have a favorite sort at all, some days its a sneaky bit of dairy milk and other days I’m up for treating myself to the luxury of green and blacks. I was pondering the properties of chocolate - it’s melting point in particular. Actual melting temperature varies according to milk fat content¹ (milk chocolate has a higher amount of milk fat and will melt at a lower temperature than dark chocolate) but approximately it melts about body temperature.

Melting at body temperature is one of the things that makes chocolate and other fat laced products pleasurable to eat, it melts in our mouths to be silky and easy to swallow. But are there many other foods that do this? There is also ice cream (which of course is fat laced as well as water laced) but that’s bit of an artificial effect (the melt in your mouth) as we store it below freezing and if we left it out it would melt anyway. So this lead me to thinking is there any inorganic substances (i.e. not fat or water dominated) that melt about room/body temperature?

To wikipedia I went and found a list of melting points of elements², only three elements melted about room temperature Francium (27 ^oC), Cesium (28 ^oC) and Gallium (29 ^oC). Not sure I would like a melt in the mouth experience with any of those. In fact search for yourselves, can you find an inorganic solid substance that melts at room temperature (which isn’t fat based). I bet it’s noxious and you won’t want to eat it....

But in my searching I did find one material that melts about body temperature, well about whale body temperature (also fat based but I thought it was interesting). I had always wondered why sperm whales are named so, but now I know why. So on hunting them years ago the sailors would harpoon near their heads and a sticky white fluid came out. This fluid was named spermaceti and it was allows sperm whales to dive to depths of about 400 m making them one of the deepest diving mammals. Sperm whales cycle the spermaceti between liquid and solid to adjust their buoyancy. They use cold sea water at the surface to solidify this wax like substance in their heads, this increases their specific density (in relation to the water they are swimming in) and allows them to dive with ease. As they out in more effort swimming under water this generates body heat which melts the spermaceti and allows the whale to surface without too much trouble. The downside for the sperm whales is that an extraction of spermaceti is very useful to the cosmetic industry, being a waxy pliable solid devoid of taste and smell. As a result sperm whales are now an endangered species.

References and further reading:

The chemistry of chocolate RSC publishing. Quite lot amount manufacture and the chemical responses of the body to chocolate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_melting_point

The magic and myths of baking powder

2009-06-08T22:29:00.007+01:00

I did some baking this week, just some chocolate chip muffins. As I placed the obligatory 1 tsp of baking powder I was struck by a thought, what am I adding to my cakes? I make an effort to buy organic and fair-trade ingredients and pride myself on making simple good food. But I routinely add strange white powders to my baking. What in essence makes these:

Become these?

Well after a bit of research I discovered the basic processes. Raising agents (yeast, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder) work by adding carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas to your mixture. This is produced as bubbles, which rise and add volume to your baking. Yeast works by a fermentation process; they eat the sugars in your bread and ‘breath’ out carbon dioxide. But this is quite a slow process, which is why to leave bread to rise, and not always suitable for cakes and lighter baking. Bicarbonate of soda, sodium hydrogen carbonate (NaHCO₃) is the alternative for cakes. This releases carbon dioxide when reacted with something acidic (like fruit, buttermilk or honey). This acts straight away, that is why you can’t leave your baking batter for long before you put it in the oven. If, like me, you’re baking something without the acidicness you’ll need to use baking powder. In your baking powder is an inbuilt acid – usually cream of tatar (potassium hydrogen tartrate KC₄H₅O₆) and when this released with moisture it reacts with the bicarbonate of soda to release the carbon dioxide. So, although the chemical names can sound daunting it is all relatively simple chemistry. Also now it makes sense when I would use each raising agent and why.

Armed with my new found knowledge I took a look at the back of my baking powder tub. This is what I found.

Ingredients there are: raising agents, diphosphate, sodium hydrogen carbonate and cornstarch. I was disappointed that two of the four (given what I’d researched above) didn’t make sense. Sodium hydrogen carbonate, which is bicarbonate of soda. Cornstarch is commonly used as an anti-caking agent; it soaks up excess water in the tub and keeps the baking powder a fine powder with no clumps. So those are fine, and expected but what about the other two? What are diposhpate and raising agents? I suppose I’ll have to assume the latter is a grammatical error, as the whole powder is a raising agent. Well it’s either this or there really is something ‘magic’ in the powder that the makers don’t want to tell me about. To understand ‘diphosphate’ I had to ask Anna, a friend who’s a chemist, she told me that this is a P₂O₇ group with a negative 4 charge. The high charge would make anything in the powder that is just diphosphate very reactive, so I’m not too sure that that’s right at all! I have to assume that this is the acid part of the baking powder; even after some mild googleing I couldn’t identify a candidate.

I’m disappointed with this lack of clarity and I think it is quite important. My research earlier suggested that there are two types of baking powder; single acting and double acting that depend on the type of acid. Single acting only requires moisture to activate it, and double acting also requires some heat (like the baking part) to complete the reaction and make the cake rise fully. The lack of full information about the ingredients annoys me somewhat, and for cakes baked at low temperatures the type of acid is important. Think I’ll be looking for some new baking powder on my next supermarket visit – if they are all like this there will be letters written!