Latest entry
- Tom Feilden
- Thu 5 Mar 09, 08:09 AM
Just how special is planet earth?
It's a question that's been asked since people first raised their eyes to contemplate the stars, one which touches on the most profound issue of existence: are we alone in the universe?
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It's a question NASA's Kepler Space Telescope - which blasts off from Cape Canaveral tomorrow - hopes to answer.
It's the space agency's first mission capable of finding earth-like rocky planets around distant stars. For the next three-and-a-half years Kepler will stare, unblinking, at a small patch of the Galaxy (actually incorporating some 100,000 stars between Cygnus and Lyra) waiting for the tell-tale dip in brightness as orbiting planets pass in front of them.
Bill Borucki, the principal Investigator on Kepler at NASA's Ames Research Centre, hopes to find hundreds of earth-like planets, and dozens in the habitable or "Goldilocks" zone, that's neither too hot nor too cold to support life.
"Although Kepler will not find ET we are hoping to find ET's home," he says.
If that sounds too good to be true, others are even more optimistic. According to the author of Crowded Universe:The Search for Living Planets, Alan Boss argues that earth-like planets may be the norm rather than the exception.
Extrapolating from the data we already have from ground-based telescopes, and combining that with what we know about the processes of planetary formation, Boss comes up with a figure of 10,000 billion billion earth-like rocky planets in the observable universe.
It has to be said that few at NASA are quite as optimistic as Alan Boss. But even if the Kepler Space Telescope only spots one tiny pale blue dot spinning round a distant star, that will still be pretty exciting.
Recent entries
- Tom Feilden
- Mon 2 Mar 09, 10:12 AM
Revolutionary breakthroughs - particularly when it comes to medical science - do seem to pop up with increasingly monotonous regularity.
So much so that you could be forgiven for assuming that there was nothing particularly revolutionary about the latest stem cell breakthrough reported today in the journal Nature Online.
But for once the hyperbole may be warranted. At a stroke this research sidesteps one of the most profound obstacles to the use of stem cells in human patients, AND signals an end to the use of cells derived from human embryos. Something of a double whammy as revolutionary breakthroughs go.
The research, by scientists at the MRC's Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, builds on the work of American and Japanese researchers who announced a new way to reprogramme adult cells, returning them to something like their embryonic state, last year.
The technique involved the use of viruses to transform the cells, but that modified their DNA, leading to an increased risk of cancer. As a result these IP, or Induced Pluripotent stem cells, could never have been transplanted into a human patient.
Now the Edinburgh team, led by Dr Keisuke Kaji, has found a way to reverse the DNA modification associated with the use of viruses in cell reprogramming. It means that IP stem cells - ones derived from an adult cell rather than an embryo - can now be used in the development of future treatments.
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Those treatments may still be a long way off - perhaps as much as ten years according to the head of the Edinburgh Centre, Professor Ian Wilmut. But the development of a technique to generate stem cells that does not rely on the destruction of a human embryo is one he warmly welcomes.
"This is the opening of a new era in biomedical research which over a period of time will provide treatments for some at least of the diseases which we cannot treat at the present time," he says.
- Tom Feilden
- Fri 27 Feb 09, 08:31 AM
The Prime Minister will deliver a ringing endorsement of British science later today when he gives the prestigious Romanes Lecture in Oxford.
"We have a scientific record to be proud of," Gordon Brown will say. "The question now is how we build on this strength to make Britain the best country in the world in which to be a scientist".
And there's the rub. Few in the invited audience of the City's great and good will dispute the Prime Minister's assessment of Britain's great history of scientific achievement. Few will find fault with his ambition to ensure we produce the great scientists of tomorrow. Fewer still will argue with his promise to protect science funding in the economic downturn.
The question hanging over the Sheldonian Theatre today is about what all this science is for, and whether Ministers can direct it to drive economic growth.
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It's a simple fact that the Government has transformed science funding over the last 10 years. By 2010/11 spending in real terms will have doubled to almost £6 billion.
But as the budget has swelled, so has the emphasis on tangible benefits and quantifiable results. Gordon Brown's vision, as both Chancellor and Prime Minister, has positioned science as a key driver of the UK economy, securing the country's place at the heart of a European knowledge economy.
The science minister Lord Drayson threw down the gauntlet at the Royal Society earlier this month when he claimed the time had come to make choices about the balance of investment in science "...as part of a clear economic strategy".
"Given that this global economic downturn is radically reshaping the economic strength of nations - and that other nations are making choices about which areas to focus on in order to drive future growth - shouldn't we do the same to boost the economic impact of our science base?"
For many this emphasis on applied research and measurable economic returns smacks of picking winners - the doomed industrial strategy of the 1970's.
It's notoriously difficult to predict the uses a scientific discovery will be put to before the research has been done, and without the speculative "blue skies" research to drive the whole process forwards there's a danger that scientific progress will grind to a halt.
- Tom Feilden
- Fri 13 Feb 09, 10:03 AM
The star of the show on the first day of the AAAS here in Chicago was undoubtedly a delegate no one has seen for more than 20,000 years - Neanderthal man.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have sequenced more than 60% of the genome of this extinct hominid - our closest relative - from fossilised bone fragments found at six archaeological sites around Europe.
This "first draft" of the Neanderthal genome shows that we shared a common ancestor as recently as 800,000 years ago (by comparison the split with chimpanzees occurred some 6.5 million years ago), and that Neanderthal man possessed many of the traits we regard as essentially human.
Professor Svante Paabo confirmed that Neanderthals shared the FoxP2 gene associated with language in modern humans.
"There's no reason to believe they couldn't speak like us" he said. "But of course there are many other genes involved in speech and language, so there are many more studies to be done."
While chimpanzees and other primates might not be able to talk, they can certainly do their sums.
Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina have been using videos featuring sets of items that disappear behind a screen to assess how good Macaque monkeys are at adding up and subtracting the total number of items.
Offered a choice between a right and a wrong answer the Macaques performed at least as well as human subjects, leading Dr Jessica Cantlon to conclude that arithmetic may well have been invented by our animal ancestors rather than the Babylonians.
- Tom Feilden
- Thu 12 Feb 09, 11:09 AM
The biggest science conference in the world gets underway here in Chicago later today, but already the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has warned we may have just four years to save the planet.
Professor James McCarthy was talking about the weight of expectation that now surrounds Barack Obama.
The new president, he said, had appointed an exceptional team of science advisors, and that presented a great chance to make real progress on issues like energy policy and climate change.
But if president Obama failed to seize the moment then we would have lost an extraordinary opportunity.
"The calibre of scientific advice that is close to this man is truly exceptional, and if in his first term, in the next four years, we don't make significant progress in these areas, then I think the planet is in huge trouble."
It was a barnstorming start to what promises to be an exciting conference. Later today, we'll be hearing about the progress researchers in Germany have made in sequencing the genome of Neanderthal man, and getting an update on the complex chemistry that's a vital pre-requisite for life swirling around the interstellar dust clouds where stars and planets form.
And all this on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a bicentenary he shares with Abraham Lincoln. While the majority of people across America will be celebrating their 16th President's birthday, here at the AAAS it's the Victorian scientist who holds court.
- Tom Feilden
- Tue 10 Feb 09, 09:35 AM
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
This sentiment, from John Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn", is one that many physicists would share - which is ironic considering that Keats regarded science (and particularly physics) as a destructive force, unweaving the rainbow of God's creation.
And yet an appreciation of beauty is central to Paul Dirac's understanding of the material world. Often referred to as the British Einstein, Dirac was one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, linking relativity and quantum mechanics for the first time and predicting the existence of antimatter.
Who? That's Paul Dirac: who alongside Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger opened up the field of quantum physics, and in 1933 became the youngest theoretician to win the Nobel prize at the age of 31.
Don't worry if you've never heard of him, you're not alone. Dirac was pathologically averse to publicity. Silent and retiring, even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. At Cambridge his fellow students invented a new unit - the Dirac - for the smallest possible number of words someone could utter in an hour.
All of which might seem to make Dirac a poor subject for a biography and until now, 25 years after his death, there wasn't one. Graham Farmelo's "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac" changes that, revealing for the first time what a remarkable man he really was.
Which brings us back to beauty. What Graham Farmelo manages to capture is how similar Dirac's methods seem to those of a poet. It was an intuitive sense of the beauty of his mathematical equations that convinced Dirac of their truth, and when colleagues ridiculed his description of the electron - because it necessitated the existence of an anti-electron - he persisted, arguing that the entire universe must be composed of equal parts matter and antimatter.
We know today, from experiments conducted in giant atom smashing particle accelerators, that Dirac was on the right track, and that the elegant simplicity of an abstract idea can be both beautiful and true.
It's a remarkable lesson coming from a man who had little time for literature, and who once remarked of an impressionist painting "this boat looks as if it was not finished".
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- Tom Feilden
- Thu 5 Feb 09, 01:21 PM
According to researchers at Edinburgh University we share the galaxy with at least another 361 intelligent civilisations, and there may be as many as 38,000 planets supporting alien lifeforms.
Something about the preciseness of the first figure (how can they be so sure it's not 362?) and the vagueness of the second, gives you a clue as to the nature of this research: we're talking statistical probabilities here - mathematical extrapolations - rather than hard empirical evidence.
Even so, that doesn't mean that the data being fed into the computer model is entirely spurious. The Edinburgh team combined the latest criteria on the conditions thought to be necessary for life - the so called "Goldilocks zone" around a star where it's neither too hot nor to cold - with the latest information about planetary formation from astronomical observations.
The researchers looked at three scenarios for how life could develop. In the first they assumed that it was relatively difficult for life to get started, but easy for it to evolve once established - that scenario produced the figure of 361 intelligent civilisations.
A second scenario assumed that life was a much more common phenomenon, but that intelligence was rare. In a third, they included the possibility that life could be transferred from one planet to another by asteroid collisions. That scenario produced the figure of 38,000 planets supporting life.
Duncan Forgan, who led the team, says: "It's important to realise that the picture we've built up is still incomplete, and even if alien life forms do exist, we have no idea what form they would take."
Still, it's an encouraging thought to know that, statistically speaking, we're probably not alone.
- Tom Feilden
- Sat 31 Jan 09, 11:23 AM
When Sir David Attenborough announced last year that Life in Cold Blood would be his last major TV series, somehow you knew it wouldn't be the last we'd see of natural history's dominant silverback.
Well, now 82-year-old Sir David is back and - if anything - feistier than ever.
Watching Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life you get the impression that "retirement" has been good for him. After a career spent studiously compiling and presenting the evidence, Sir David seems to have shaken off the straightjacket of scholarly impartiality. Finally we get to hear what he really thinks.
It's strong stuff. Like the invasion of England by William the Conqueror, evolution is a fact - if anything it's better supported by the evidence, because there's so much more of it.
"Above all Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world - we do not have dominion over it," Sir David says. "We are subject to its laws and processes as are all the other animals on earth to which indeed we are related."
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One by one, and using a fair amount of archive footage featuring a familiar - if somewhat younger - presenter, Sir David demolishes the arguments employed to refute Darwin's theory with his usual headmasterly charm.
It's a powerful piece of film making, and you get the impression that only a figure of such stature in the world of natural history could do it justice. Perhaps they should have called it Attenborough on Darwin and left it at that.
- Tom Feilden
- Fri 30 Jan 09, 10:41 AM
It's been a busy week on the programme, but I was struck by Lord Drayson's point that science may be too "elitist".
Science can certainly be hard - as I learnt trying to get my head round the basics of particle physics in the run up to the launch of the Large Hadron Collider last year.
Years ago I remember the neurologist turned arts impresario Sir Jonathan Miller admit that the ideas he'd had to grapple with as a scientist had "made his head hurt" in a way that the theatre never had, and it's true that the complexity of some ideas in science can act as a barrier making the subject fairly inaccessible.
But that's a very meritocratic kind of exclusivity....it doesn't matter where you were born, you just have to be clever.
Of course the point the science minister was making is about the image of science, and of scientists, as "nerdy" and somehow detached from everyday life. A government campaign to excite people about science and the opportunities it can create is surely welcome.
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One area of science that doesn't need any help drumming up excitement is geo-engineering - the idea that we might solve global warming by managing the climate on a planetary scale.
A whole raft of apparently hair-brained schemes - from seeding the oceans with iron to building giant sun shades in space - have been suggested, but no one seems to know which ones might work or how much they'd cost.
Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have conducted the first comprehensive assessment of 20 of the leading geo-engineering solutions to climate change, trying to work out how much cooling you might get, and how feasible they really are.
It turns out that stratospheric aerosol injections - spraying sulphates into the upper atmosphere - has the greatest potential to cool the climate quickly, but doesn't address the longer term consequences of continuing to burn CO2. Professor Tim Lenton suggested that increasing the capacity of carbon sinks - locking greenhouse gases away in biomass or on the ocean floor - might be a better long term solution.
None of which will do anything to stem the decline of the honeybee.
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Scientists remain baffled by the mysterious disappearing act of whole populations - named Colony Collapse Disorder in the US and Canada, and which now seems to have spread to Italy, France and Germany.
Here a succession of cold winters and wet summers has reduced honeybee numbers by about 30%, and even Jill Archer seems to be having trouble with the virtual bees of Ambridge.
But help may be at hand: Britain's biggest farmer, the Co-op, launched a ten-point rescue plan this week which included a ban on the use of eight neonicotinoid pesticides and £150,000 for research.
Interestingly the Co-op's Paul Monaghan told me they can't find any takers for the research money to investigate honeybee decline. So get busy with that grant proposal.
- Tom Feilden
- Thu 22 Jan 09, 08:42 AM
It's official: there's no place left on earth to hide from global warming.
Until today it had been thought that a large part of the Antarctic continent - the East Antarctic Ice Sheet - had actually been cooling while the rest of the planet warmed up - bucking the trend of climate change.
That view was given the official stamp of scientific opinion in 2007 when the IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) concluded there had been "significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent....except Antarctica".
But it seems this caveat had more to do with a lack of data than a lack of warming. A paper published in the journal Nature today argues that overall the continent has been warming at a rate comparable to the rest of the world.
The confusion stems from the fact that the majority of weather stations on Antarctica are based along the coast. In fact, there are only two stations in the continent's vast, inhospitable interior (an area bigger than western Europe) that have been supplying reliable data over the last 50 years.
It was the results from these two stations that - although statistically insignificant - had given rise to the idea that the central continental mass was cooling.
The latest study, led by professor Eric Steig at the University of Washington in Seattle, uses a combination of ground based measurements and satellite data to construct a new, and - he argues - more robust picture of temperature trends.
The researchers found that temperatures had risen dramatically along the Antarctic Peninsular and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but much more modestly across East Antarctica. Overall average temperature had risen 0.5 degrees in the last 50 years, correlating closely with the global average of 0.6 degrees.
It's bad news for climate change sceptics who have highlighted the anomaly of the world's coldest continent apparently getting even colder as a significant flaw in the global warming narrative. But of course it would also be bad news for everyone else.
A warming Antarctica completes the set. The evidence from all seven of the continental land masses now seems to point in the same direction.
- Tom Feilden
- Wed 21 Jan 09, 09:27 AM
Scientists studying bugs in the lowland rainforests of Peru have discovered a dung beetle with a difference.
This dung beetle, a well known species named Deltochilum Valgum, appears to have given up eating dung altogether and decided to eat the millipedes that live along side it instead - and it really is a voracious predator, using its hind legs to latch onto much larger millipedes, decapitating them, and eating them from the inside out.
Observing the beetle's bizarre behaviour in pitfall traps the team, led by Dr Trond Larsen from Princeton University, realised that subtle changes in the shape of its head and hind limbs had enabled this dung beetle to abandon traditional ball-rolling behaviour and make the leap to predation.
In subsequent tests, and using a variety of paired dung and millipede baits, Deltochilum Valgum "was attracted exclusively to millipedes, and strongly preferred live injured millipedes over dead millipedes."
Writing in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters Dr Larsen argues that intense competition amongst dung beetles (which occupy a highly specialised ecological niche) could be promoting speciation - the process by which one species evolves into something new.
"Ecological transitions such as these are important for understanding the evolution and diversification of new species and may help explain the disproportionately high diversity of insects".
It's a rare snapshot of evolution caught in the act. We may be witnessing the birth of a new species...the millipede predator beetle.
- Tom Feilden
- Tue 20 Jan 09, 10:44 AM
Great ideas don't simply pop into existence all at once, and although 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the development of the theory of evolution can be traced back over two centuries of natural history.
Darwin himself built on the pioneering work of earlier explorers and naturalists - men like Alexander von Humbolt, whose adventures in Mexico and south America demonstrated how little was known or understood about the world beyond Europe at the turn of the 19th Century.
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In turn, his "dangerous idea" inspired subsequent generations to brave hardship and deprivation in a bid to test and shape the theory.
The American geneticist Sean B Carroll charts the evolution of this revolution in Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species.
And a swashbuckling tale of derring-do it is. From Eugene Dubois' 30 year search for the missing link to Roy Chapman Andrews' staggering fossil hauls in the badlands of the Gobi desert, Prof Carroll tells the story of life on earth's three billion year history through the adventures and discoveries of the men and women who helped uncover it.
Having mined the fossil and historical records Carroll turns to the present, bringing this epic story up to date in the genetics laboratories - like his own at the University of Wisconsin-Madison - that have delved into the DNA record of life.
But what of the future? Perhaps the most important question - certainly the most exciting prospect - facing science today concerns the search for extra-terrestrial life. And if, or when, we find it Sean Carroll concludes, we'll realise Darwin has beat us to it. The theory of evolution by natural selection is truly universal.
- Tom Feilden
- Tue 13 Jan 09, 09:43 AM
As ecologists have discovered to their cost it isn't the mice you have to worry about...it's the rabbits.
Removing cats from the sub-Antarctic island of Macquarie, a World Heritage Site valued for it's complex tundra habitat and unique geological formations, probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
It's not hard to imagine how the argument ran: As an invasive alien species - and voracious predator - the cat (which was probably introduced inadvertently by sailors around the turn of the 19th century) was inevitably exerting a dramatic influence over the natural ecosystem. Removing it would allow the native flora and fauna to recover to something like their original state. QED the cats had to go, and an eradication programme began in 1985.
The last cat was killed in 2000, but far from resulting in the anticipated renaissance for native species, the outcome has been an unmitigated ecological disaster.
According to a study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology the eradication programme has caused an environmental catastrophe that will cost more than £11 million to put right. The study shows that between 2000 and 2007 widespread ecosystem devastation took place and substantial damage at both local and landscape scales had "compromised decades of conservation effort".
Some clue as to what went wrong comes from a closer analysis of those changes: "Complex vegetation communities..." had been reduced to "...short, grazed lawns or bare ground".
The culprit is the rabbit. Ironically another non-native species originally introduced by sealing gangs in 1878 to provide a ready supply of food. It turns out that the cats had been keeping the rabbit population at bay. Free of the pressure of predation the rabbits had done what rabbits do, and by the end of the survey period their numbers had mushroomed to over a hundred thousand individuals.
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It's a classic example of what ecologists call a "trophic cascade" - the devastating knock-on effect that changes in the abundance of one species can have across several links in the food chain. And as the report's authors note, it's a sobering lesson for conservationists interested in preserving native ecosystems from invasive aliens.
So what now for plans to eradicate Japanese knotweed, Chinese mitten crabs or the American crayfish from British habitats?
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