Croaking Frogs

One of the features of our new garden that surprised me when we first saw the design on paper was the pond.

I don't remember explicitly asking our designer to include one, yet once I saw it on the plan I quite liked the idea. We had a pond here when we moved in, but it was a sad little effort. Hidden under the large acer planted in the border between us and our semi-detached neighbour, it had clearly suffered some damage to its liner as it never filled up beyond half-way and the half that did fill was always choked with weed. Notable mainly for its brief occupation by a drunken party guest on the evening of our housewarming, the pond nevertheless proved to be home to a small population of frogs. When we dug it out and filled in the hole in April 2009 the frogs disappeared, only to reappear again one by one whenever we moved a large rock, wooden sleeper, or pile of twigs anywhere in the garden.

So I had great hopes that once garden construction was complete and the pond had become established it would attract back some of our original colony. As we moved into Spring and the water lost its winter chill this did indeed prove to be the case. We caught the occasional glimpse of a pair of eyes gazing at us from just above the still surface, and while watering the garden early one morning during the recent hot spell I disturbed four adult frogs with the hose as they slept in the damp patches under the leafier shrubs and bushes. It appeared we had succeeded not only in attracting back the originals but adding to the numbers. Until things took a turn for the worse.

We began to find bodies. One or two only at first - a dried-up husk on the path and a pale, mottled corpse lying on its back in the shallows near the pond edge - but having disposed of these they were soon replaced by others. The area is occasionally visited by a heron, so initially we wondered if this had been attacking the frogs. Or maybe one of the many local cats was to blame? But in all cases the frogs appear not to have been injured and in the majority of cases they die in the pond itself, their ghostly pale bodies often floating upright with their back legs resting on the bottom so they appear to be standing up under the water. One awful weekend morning I fetched four bodies out of the water.

These aren't pets, of course, but I must admit to feeling sad at their demise, along with a nagging feeling of guilt in case we're somehow responsible for the deaths. It's nice to have somewhere for the frogs to live, but I didn't expect or want it to become a death trap. I've started mentally referring to it as the Dead Pool.

The sides of the pond are fairly steep, and the exposed liner is slippery when wet. Added to this the recent hot spell meant water levels became quite low, so it occurred to me that the frogs may not be able to get out once they'd jumped in. Is it possible for frogs to drown? Amphibians breathe, at least in part, through their skin, so I guessed that if they were trapped in water that had a low oxygen concentration (which our pond almost certainly has, with no submerged oxygenating plants or other means of replenishing the levels) it could be possible they were effectively asphyxiating. As you will have noticed from the photo, I've added a rudimentary "frog ladder" to the pond to help them get out. They're still dying.

Brief research online suggests the problem may be a slow-release fertiliser in the baskets of the pond plants that is toxic to frogs. I don't remember seeing any dead frogs before the plants were installed, so this is a possible cause, but there again the plants arrived fairly early in the year, so I don't remember seeing any live ones before then either.

My research also pointed up that, since amphibians absorb much more than oxygen through their delicate skins, they are a kind of "environmental indicator" species that will be affected by any chemical pollution. So maybe it's that. Discussions with neighbours who also have a pond have revealed they too are suffering from frogs that croak in the less traditional sense. I don't take much comfort from the knowledge that we're not the only ones this is happening to.

100TWC - Day 5: Unbreakable

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Newton's Third Law of Motion has been embedded in the zeitgeist for almost as long as it has been codified. If you give a push, the world pushes back, only in most cases it's not as poetic as that.

Investigations and theorising at the quantum level have revealed a fascinating possibility that the Third Law has an echo right down at the lowest level humans can, at the moment, conceive. The level of sub-atomic particles, where infinitesimally small lumps of matter "carry" waves of force and where intuition must be left at the door. Because these particles behave in ways that sound crazy, and you almost have to make yourself crazy to think about them, or to undertake research into them.

One such craziness is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whereby an experimenter can never be certain of the position and momentum of a particle until it is measure, but the act of measuring it changes its state.

However crazy the lay person might believe the theories of quantum mechanics to be, the fact of their correctness is proved every day by people all over the world. People who use computers. Because computers rely on microprocessors and at their most fundamental level microprocessors are just enormous collections of microminiaturised transistors, and transistors were conceived on the back of quantum theory. A real-life creation based on some extremely counter-intuitive physics, that works perfectly everywhere, every day.

But quantum physics isn't done messing with our heads yet. Not by a long way. In recent times physicists have begun expounding the theory of quantum entanglement and have had some success proving this theory both mathematically and in the real world. This is the echo of Newton I referred to earlier. A condition where an action on one subatomic particle (for instance, inducing it to spin clockwise) will cause an equal and opposite reaction in a particle with which it has been "entangled" (it will begin to spin anticlockwise).

Thus the rudimentary building blocks of a communication mechanism are established at the quantum level. If you can introduce a signal at one end (clockwise spin) and measure the result of that signal at the other end (anticlockwise spin) then you have effectively transmitted one "bit" of information from one particle to the next. And where you have bits, you can have bytes and thenceforth characters, music and high definition video streams.

But the theory doesn't stop at merely transmitted the information. Quantum entangled particles will interact over any distance. A particle in the next room will still be affected by the spinning of its partner. So will a particle in the next galaxy. They are bound by an unbreakable bond that transcends distance. This has staggering implications for communication in space and brings to life the Star Trek concept of "sub-space communication". Life imitating art, once again.

As if it were possible, recently the theory has developed in an even more bizarre direction. Mathematically it appears the particles remain entangled even after they cease to exist. And before they existed in the first place. I warned you this stuff was counter-intuitive. But these early theories begin to shine the first faint light on the potential for real-life time travel. That's a huge leap from where we are today. But transistors were a huge leap in their day, yet here I am typing this on a computer, just as you are reading it on one. Truth, it seems, really is stranger than fiction.

Of Bosuns, Bosons and Bozos

The hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson has been much in the news this last week, as the particle physicists at CERN pore over the latest outputs from the Large Hadron Collider and believe they may have seen tantalising hints of its existence.

Sticking with my recent theme of poor science coverage by the nation's media, this has largely been reported as a search for a totally different entity. Something apparently called a Higgs Bosun. Now I'm not overly familiar with the subject, but to me a bosun has always been something to do with sailing. The oldest rank in the Royal Navy, more properly rendered as boatswain, and the chappy who supervises the deck crew. He also, optionally, may have a locker. But he's got absolutely fuck all to do with particle physics.

Now I know it's an unfamiliar term, but you radio and TV Johnnies really mustn't use that as an excuse to fall back on something you ARE familiar with. It's a BosON. Phonetically: BOSE - as in the world-renowned purveyors of high quality audio equipment - and ON - as in the opposite of off.

I really don't see what the problem is. You never see or hear of people referring to protuns, or neutruns, or electruns. Surely even the densest of media hacks must have noticed by now that sub-atomic particles generally, with some notable exceptions, have names ending in -on. And that this not pronounced un.

I know I shouldn't really get so wound up about this stuff but, well, I do. It's just not proper.

Supermassive black hole collapses Radio 4

There's been a scientific discovery. One that deserves a modicum of awe, along with a pinch of excitement and a sprinkle of gravitas. Instead, the matter was subjected to the usual treatment on the Today programme this morning. That is, amused disdain and wilful missing of the point.

Oh, those scientists! What have they gone and done now? I don't know. Something about a large hole or whatnot.

Humphreys - and don't get me wrong, when he's up against a politician, that is to say firmly in the middle of his comfort zone, he can still deliver an illuminating interview along with the occasional barbed question or withering put down - is always totally out of his depth when attempting to cover science. In fact Radio 4 in general seems to have a schizoid approach to science in all its guises. Material World's guests have to fight with Quentin Cooper's attempts to squeeze a bad pun into every sentence, while in the same slot on a different day we have to endure, in The Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and some other equally populist drivel merchant trying to out-do one another to find the needle of comedy in the haystack of current science. Dumb, dumber and even dumber than that, science on Radio 4 is already a joke and recently it's been presented (it seems) by nothing but jokers.

But outside of the science programmes themselves, any current affairs reporting of matters scientific - especially by the channel's headline anchor men - is inevitably accompanied by an obvious embarrassment at their total lack of understanding, or even interest. So their stock compensation for that is to make fun of it, or make light of it. Faced with the news of the largest black hole ever discovered, we get the usual re-runs of guff like "we thought at one time the LHC was going to create a black hole, didn't we? Chortle, chortle." No, we didn't. "Do I remember reading that a teaspoonful of black hole material would be so dense that if you dropped it, it would fall right through the Earth?" Well... where to start. The teaspoon wouldn't be dense enough to pick the damned stuff up in the first place. Even if it could, it would be way too heavy for you to lift, so the idea of dropping it never arises. And so on. Pathetic.

One a related but different topic, the dinosaurs on the Today programme never did, as far as I'm aware, pick up on the story of Kepler-22b.

For the first time, astronomers have found a planet smack in the middle of the habitable zone of its sunlike star, where temperatures are good for life. We can't yet determine if the planet has a surface, but if it does it would have a temperature around 21°C. What we do know is that it's about 2.4 times the size of Earth, orbits its (smaller, cooler than our) sun every 290 days, and is unlike any planet in our solar system. Could be rocky, could be icy, might even have a global ocean. No idea. But at a distance of 600 light-years we won't be visiting any time soon.

Happy Birthday!

It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.

One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.

The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.

Comestible confusion

As usual on my way to pick Nikki up from work today I was listening to Radio 4. The pundits were discussing research into links between diet and prostate cancer and when I joined the programme one guy was going on about how he has recognised that dairy foods carry an increased risk and that he's eliminated them from his diet completely.

Now I'm as worried about prostate cancer as the next man. Well, actually, it's probably the examination to check me out for prostate cancer that me and the next man are worried about, but anyway... a life without dairy? No butter? No ice-cream? No CHEESE? No thank you.

As the programme continued, the alternative viewpoint came from a lady researcher, who shot the guy's argument down in flames. That's my spin on her arguments anyway. "Dairy hater obliterated by gorgeous cream-loving temptress." Or something. Her counter-argument was beautifully executed as a pincer movement. From the North came the revelation that this "increased risk" to dairy-eating prostate owners was only 10%. So if 1 person in every 1,000 is at risk on average, among the dairy eaters the risk will be 1.1 people in 1,000. Or, to put it another way, 1 person in 900. (Presumably. Stats was never my strong point.) Wow. I'm so scared. But she wasn't done. Remember the pincer movement. From the South came marching the second offensive. That dairy foods have positive effects too. In particular their calcium-related compounds have been proven to reduce the chances of suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

So there we have it. In stark, tabloid terms: go mad and keep your man gland, or stay sane but lose the juice.

But of course it's not as simple as that. These things never are. Foods are remarkably complicated chemical and biological agents, which often have beneficial AND deleterious effects in combination. And as if that weren't hard enough to get your head around, those effects can be reduced or exacerbated by your individual susceptibilities, whether genetic, environmental, or behavioural. Research continues into the complex interplay of all these factors, but increasingly I find myself asking: what's the point?

I don't want to live in a world where I have to eat exactly this much of this and not more than that much of that, not more than once a week and certainly not after consuming the other. Where I'm instructed to have five-a-day, exercise three times a day for twenty minutes at something that elevates my heart rate by 50%, avoid dairy, saturated fat, barbecued food, strong alcohol, sugar, cholesterol, and on, and on, and on. Jeez I'd be so stressed with worrying whether I was doing the right thing at the right time, the very act of trying to stay healthy would make me ill!

No, the research is all very interesting an' all, but I'll carry on doing what I like, when I like, and avoiding what I don't like, when I don't like it. If that approach has consequences then that's no different from any other approach. There's more to life than how long it is. It may be an overused phrase in these days of multi-forwarded emails, but it's still true that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

I must go down to the sea again...

Everyone has their own favourite places to hang out on the net. I think I'm more conservative (with a small c) than most, and certainly not as widely travelled (surfed?) as my brother-in-law, who's well known for finding the weirdest (and funniest) shit in existence. But wherever you go, sooner or later, you're going to come across an interesting snippet or two.

For instance today, while I was reading an article about the reporting bias (or otherwise) of the BBC, I came across this comment from another reader:
"When it comes to bien pensant issues such as Climate Change, I would definitely NOT trust the BBC. The International Commission on Sea Level Change (INQUA) has just dismissed as scare mongering the IPCCs claim that sea levels are rising. No study in the real world confirms their rigged and speculative computer models. For 35 years the INQUA has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe and their results show that it has not risen at all in recent decades. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu which such scientific luminaries as Prince Charles and the Archbishop of Canterbury tell us due to vanish, repeated surveys by the INQUA confirm that sea levels have not risen in half a century. Do not expect to see news of this report on the BBC!!"

And it's true. You can check it out for yourself on the INQUA website. I've seen a lot of footage recently of melting glaciers - with torrents of fresh water gushing their way to the sea - and heard a lot of debate about exactly how much sea level is going to rise, and by when. Seems it's not actually happening after all. At least, not yet.

That's not to say there isn't a problem. Just that it's a different problem than the one being reported. For instance, that much fresh, ice-cold water being dumped into the oceans at the poles could well disturb, or even stop, the Great Atlantic Conveyor (or "thermohaline circulation") with dire consequences for all marine, and eventually terrestrial, life. Still... look on the bright side, eh? At least Tuvalu - along with all its clever .tv Internet domains - is safe for the time being.

Bless the Press

I had to travel to Reading today to meet with a supplier, so over breakfast for a laugh I picked up a copy of the Daily Mail and read their article on the switch-on of the LHC. This event, as the whole world must have noticed, received blanket media coverage even though nothing much beyond calibration of the instrument will be happening for the next few weeks.

Tales of the end of the world abounded in the more reactionary papers and even the sober ones were asking questions that even GCSE physics students could have answered without pausing for breath. All very silly and diversionary, and all guaranteed to elicit sighs of exasperation from the particle physicists at CERN who must have been heartily sick of telling people that there was only an infinitesimally small chance of creating a black hole at all, and even if one were to be created it would evaporate again a split-second later. Oh, and far more powerful atom-smashing is going on right above our heads at the edges of atmosphere, and has been doing for millions of years, with no ill effects. That's assuming there would be any atom-smashing happening at CERN anyway, which as I said isn't scheduled until next month at the earliest.

So I wasn't expecting great things from the dear old Daily Mail, but even I wasn't prepared for the depths of incompetence their article plumbed. The writer couldn't even be bothered to research the name of the main particle being hunted for by the LHC experiment, referring to it as the "Higgs bosun." Presumably this mythical sea-faring particle was expected to pop out of the collider and declare "Har-har-harrrrr! Where's me grog you scurvy swine?"

It's a bosON you bozos.

What made this pre-school error even funnier was that they'd padded the article with a five-minute multiple choice quiz in which one of the questions - "What's the correct name of the God particle being sought by the LHC?" (or something like that) had "Higgs bosun" as one of its incorrect answers, along with boson, bosom and another. Pity the poor simple-minded reader who had scanned the main article for the answer!

Part of the article, and a good percentage of the letters page, was devoted to the usual fatuous rantings of people who just don't understand science, but see the cost of the project and set off into a red-faced orbit of indignation. "What's it for?" "What will we be able to do with it?" "Shouldn't we be making sure we can feed everyone before wasting money on this rubbish?"

Good grief. It's for science. Who knows what we'll be able to do with it? When quantum theory was proposed and investigated, it didn't have any known application, but it led directly to the development of the transistor. Where would we be without them, eh? What do you think powers the computer you type your ignorant articles on, moron? Open your eyes and look around you. Every single aspect of your life is the way it is today because of science. You should be thanking the pioneers of chemistry and physics for your mobile phone, your central heating timer, your television, sat-nav, low temperature washing powder, combi-boiler, and on and on and on.

When you're sitting on the wrong side, temporally speaking, of a great discovery, any predictions about what it might lead to sound inevitably like science fiction. Wind the clock forward and everyday life will have come to rely on whatever it is the LHC teams will unearth about the way the universe works. It might be anti-gravity, limitless free energy, instantaneous communications, the ability to transform matter, or more likely it will be something that we cannot even conceive now in our wildest imaginings. But the drive to discover it is the epitome of the human condition. If you're not interested, you might as well still be a monkey.

The human face of technology

The NeuroArm robot has been in the news a lot recently. I don't know why this has just burst into the consciousness of the UK media - so far I've only managed to catch the last few seconds of every news item on it - but we've been a bit slow to catch on. There's a news article on it here dated November 2007.

Still that's the British media for you. Quick off the mark with the trivial stuff, good at making things up for a catchy headline, but when it's something really interesting and important? Almost a year behind the times. Nice one.

The little bit of the news that I have caught seems to have been focussing on people's reaction to being operated on by a robot. Despite the fact that the device works with pinpoint accuracy in the kind of surgery where being a millimetre off at the end of a gruelling six- or eight-hour op can mean the difference between life and death, will people trust it? It looks like something out of The Terminator, which is bound to be a bit worrying.

Seems to me they missed a very obvious trick here. If they wanted to give the device a more "human" face they should just have called it...

Robot de Neuro.

Are you looking at me?

When science fails

In the news today: How biofuels may not be such a good idea after all.

I can't tell you how disappointing this is. How stupid was I to think that we could trust today's scientists to come up with a solution to the world fuel crisis and global warming? The more you hear, the more incompetent they seem. Apparently, the worst offender is fuel made from American corn, which is responsible for releasing 20% MORE CO2 into the atmosphere than regular fuel made from crude oil! How pointless is that?

But naturally, there's more money in biofuel than there is in selling corn to - you know - FEED people, so we're making the world hotter and hungrier at the same time. Great solution guys.

The 60-year-old Baby

Baby has been in the news this week. She'll be 60 on Saturday. Why am I excited? Well Baby, more properly known as the Small Scale Experimental Machine, was the world's first stored program computer, and so is the logical ancestor of every single computer on the planet, including the one you're using to read this.

Ten years ago, for Baby's 50th anniversary, a bunch of enthusiasts led by the men who originally worked on the project built a replica of the machine using all original parts. It's now on permanent display at MOSI. At one of our last-ever Engineering Conferences, one of the project members gave us an entertaining talk about the rebuild, the fun they'd had and the lengths they'd gone to to find the original parts to use. When Baby was first assembled, money was tight (when was it ever NOT tight for British science?) and they scrounged bits from all over, including buttons from Spitfire cockpits to use on the console. Naturally in 1998 these were pretty hard to come by! They managed it though. If you get chance, go and see Baby. It is a WORKING replica, and it's quite a challenge to think of a program you can write in only 32 instructions - the limit of Baby's memory space.

There's another interesting link that stems from this project. The next machine to be built in Manchester, developing the architectures and ideas used in Baby, was the Manchester Mark I. Two of the Mark I team - mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods - would later marry, and their son Tim Berners-Lee would go on to invent the World Wide Web.

I listened to the Radio 4 coverage of the anniversary today, on which the presenter mentioned that Baby didn't use transistors because they'd only just been invented and were very unreliable. Instead, the scientists used valves - much more common and reliable in those days. I was amused that he then had to go on to explain what valves were! Makes me feel old, realising that there are now more people in the world that have never heard of valves than have.

I've seen the future

Our weekly tech bulletin this week included this entry from an IBM think-tank style gathering. A handful of industry luminaries thinking Deep Thoughts about how life will look in 2050.

As some of the commenters on that entry have already observed, this is all a pile of tosh. It's not even yet 50 years since the last instalments of Tomorrow's World were predicting various social trends only twenty years out, and getting it wildly wrong. Mind you, they were never very good at it. Many of their articles were so far behind the curve we used to call the programme Yesterday's World.

But my point is, predicting this kind of thing is impossible, simply because the things we'll be using then haven't been invented yet. It's all very well extrapolating from technology trends, but all that tells you is what you'll be able to do with stuff we already know about. Yes, processor speeds will be incredible and storage capacities unthinkably vast. Someone once calculated that you could store your entire life's memories in high-definition video, with audio and notes, in about 26 terabytes. For those of you not familiar with the term, a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. Single terabyte discs for home computers are already available. By 2050 it's virtually certain that kind of capacity - 26TB I mean - will be available in a hand-held camcorder.

But being ABLE to do something with something is not the same as actually DOING it. Or wanting to. And predicting the future from a point before a life-changing invention just ends up being totally wrong. Look at the transistor, and the (now "humble") PC. And then go and watch a movie like Soylent Green, which is supposedly set in the future and which has its hero searching for information in piles of... what did they used to call it?... paper, all stacked up in a... you know... library. No Internet or desktop computers in sight.

This - this very blog you're reading and others like it - that keeps us in touch with people we have never/will never meet - is a phenomenon on the up. Web 2.0. Content created by real people for real people. Something that was not conceived of much more than 5 years ago. And something that may be almost dead 5 years from now. Bloggers may by then have realised that the effort of recording their insignificant lives is not worth the investment, or maybe the next sliced bread will have arrived fresh and hot from the bakery to take their interest, attention, and spare time.

Nanotechnology; biocomputing; genome manipulation; graphite sheets: these are all exciting new areas of research and many of them could be extrapolated with some degree of certainty. But it still won't give you the right answer. This time next year we could be hearing about something totally new - and there's still 40+ years to go until 2050. Think back 40 years - 1968 - and remember how you were spending your time and what the "hot new topic" was. The world would only need half a dozen computers (said the IBM think tank!!), the PC was yet to be invented, networking was in its infancy. Extrapolation was dangerous even then - we were about to land on the moon and the talk was of Mars being the next stop. Who predicted investment in space technology and exploration would be ratcheted back and we would be stuck on Earth for the next 40 years?

Those predictions by that small group of very clever people may look learned and erudite now, but when viewed from the perspective of the real 2050 they will look every bit as naff and silly as those offered by the people from Tomorrow's World.

Jodrell Bank shocker

Couldn't believe my ears this morning, driving back from taking Nikki to work. Jodrell Bank, Britain's iconic radio telescope, is under threat of closure after the Science and Technology Facilities Council cut funding for the Merlin array. Merlin, a linked network of 7 radio telescopes across the UK, has an effective aperture of 217km and a resolution slightly higher than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

So even though it was 50 years old last year, it's no slouch in the rapidly moving world of radio astronomy. Now all this is at risk because of funding problems. And how much money are we talking about? Must be significant, right? I mean if the government is trying to save money, it must be SERIOUS money. Think of all the billions they're pouring into pointless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Come on, how much money will they save by sacrificing the most well-known and instantly recognisable piece of scientific equipment in the entire country?

£2.5million.

Yep, you read that right. Two and a half million quid. There's probably as much as that rattling around in the expenses funds of our politicians, but you'll never know - they don't have to submit receipts.

What makes this even more ironic is that Jodrell Bank has just been completely refurbished, and the Merlin network itself upgraded in a project to install fibre-optic cables that has only recently finished, and would have allowed the array to process vastly more data than it could before. Closing the array down now means all that money - still PUBLIC money of course - will be wasted before any benefit has been gained.

When I worked in Kidsgrove I could look out from my desk across the fields to Jodrell Bank. When the dish of the Lovell telescope was in the right orientation it would catch the sun and gleam at me through the haze. An other-worldly reminder of the world-leading research that went on there every day. If we're to lose this awe-inspiring talisman then it's a sad day indeed, and another nail in the coffin of British science and engineering.

Thought crime

When I was a lad I read a lot of science fiction. Many of the classic SF stories revolve around increased mental faculties of some description, either natural or enhanced with technology. In others the technology itself can think, or read minds.

More recently the subject was explored by Hollywood in 'Minority Report'. Like so many blockbuster movies, this is based on a short story by master of the genre Philip K. Dick written in the year of my birth and, unusually for such films, bearing the same name as the story.

Over the years I've been interested to note how often science, although naturally lagging behind science fiction, has eventually caught up. The most well-known example of this is Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of geostationary satellites upon which the world's telecomms networks (including the Internet you're using to read this) now depend. Some scientists have even predicted that a warp-drive such as that used in TV's Star Trek is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

So it was with great interest that I heard a news item some weeks ago describing how scientists have developed a brain scanner that can detect what you're thinking. By interpreting the patterns of brain waves, electrical activity and changes in blood flow, the machine can differentiate between one thought and another. Still in its infancy the machine is crude at present, but will certainly become more accurate with further development.

This opens up some possibilities for colossal social change. Civil rights groups will be sure to take against it and the potential for misuse is clearly enormous, but at a simplistic level it could allow instantaneous democracy for the first time. Problems of security and fraud have always dogged any suggestion of electronic voting, but with ubiquitous brain scanning it would be possible for the reaction of the populace to any new government initiative to be measured almost immediately. No need to sign up for the whole of a manifesto when each of its parts can be tested individually. And if a majority of the people at any given time thought they disliked the incumbent party, out they'd go!

And right there is the reason it'll never happen! Nice to dream though. Welcome to 1984, even if it is about 25 years late!

Additive Behaviours

The UK Food Standards Agency recently commissioned a study into the effects of food additives on levels of hyperactivity in children. The study has completed and the report was made available today. Not surprisingly it made the headlines and radio news programmes right from the off, since it provides evidence of a strong causal link between the use of food additives (specifically those used to give food strong colours, and when used in combination) and incidence of hyperactive behaviour patterns.

These links have long been suspected, but the FSA has always shied away from imposing a ban on the most likely culprits, claiming it didn't have "sufficient evidence."

ADHD is a modern phenomenon. Pundits argue the toss about whether it has its roots in environmental factors (such as those additives, but also air pollutants, increased electromagnetic activity in the home, widespread availability of violent computer games, etc) or bad parenting, or both. Meanwhile the parents have to put up with unruly, often aggressive and violent children, and children have to put up with being chemically controlled (stunned, more like) through the use of drugs such as Ritalin, use of which has ballooned alarmingly over the last 10-20 years.

Well now the FSA has conclusive evidence from a study they themselves commissioned. So is a ban any nearer? Was that a pig I just saw flying past? On Radio 4 this morning the news presenter tried to tie down an FSA representative to exactly when a ban would be forthcoming. The guy was completely evasive, hiding behind the fact that the required legislation was a European-wide requirement (funny how "Europe" can be used as a shield to hide behind, a bludgeon to beat people with, or an excuse for doing nothing, as the need takes them); that there was a need for due process, and maybe a further need for YET MORE evidence before any moves could be made towards a ban.

I don't understand this.

When new drugs are developed, pharmaceutical companies have to jump through endless hoops for YEARS of trials and tests to prove them safe before they are made available, and even then only a very small percentage of the population will ever be exposed to any remaining risk, because the drugs are only given to people who are suffering from the condition they're intended to address.

Contrast this with food additives, which manufacturers ladle into our food by the bucket load, willy-nilly, are consumed by almost every person in the country, adult or child, and yet the approach taken here is that independent agencies (not manufacturers, note) have to jump through endless hoops for YEARS of trials and tests to prove them HARMFUL before anyone will agree to take them out!

And for the most part, they don't have ANY beneficial effect on our food except to make it more colourful! Can someone explain the sense of that to me?

Epigenetics, or "why I got fat"

So following on from the programme on graphene was another fascinating Radio 4 show, this time about epigenetics. There's a huge amount of material available online explaining what this is (try this BBC Horizon link or this news item on the link between epigenetics and obesity, or there's always Wikipedia) so I don't intend to go in for a huge long explanation here, but simply put epigenetics is the idea that it's not only your genes that control how you develop but also the effects of external environmental factors on your genes. These factors can turn genes on or off and are especially influential during foetal development or, in males, before sperm start to develop.

A boy's environment, behaviour, nutrition, etc can affect the gametes and effect changes not only on that boy's children but on his children's children.

Of particular interest to me was the statistical revelation that a father who started smoking before reaching the age of puberty was much more likely to have children that were fatter than average in later life.

So it's nothing to do with all the pies I've eaten! It's because my Dad started smoking when he was eight!

Graphene

There's an interesting science program on Radio 4 called The Material World that I often catch when I'm in the car driving from work to pick Nikki up. Today it was about something called Graphene, which I'd never heard of before but which sounds very exciting. I knew of Buckminsterfullerene (or bucky balls) which is made of a number of carbon atoms - 60 if I remember right - arranged in a sphere or ball shape and is one of the most stable carbon molecules to be discovered. It's named after Buckminster Fuller, the American architect who invented the geodesic dome, because the carbon atoms are laid out in hexagons and pentagons around the face of the sphere in exactly the same way as a dome is constructed.

Well graphene, it turns out, is a planar sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick - a bit like a bucky ball that's been unzipped and laid out flat. Actually that's not entirely accurate because to be a perfectly flat sheet the atoms must be laid out in hexagonal cells only. The pentagons that are necessary to achieve a spherical shape, if present in graphene, cause it to bend into other shapes. Carbon nanotubes, which have caused such excitement recently in the field of nanotechnology because of their potential use in building very small structures, are simply rolls (cylinders) of graphene.

The really exciting thing about this stuff is that electrons on a sheet of graphene act as if they have no mass. They move as if they were light waves. This makes graphene extremely conductive (I think the guy on the radio show said something like a thousand million times more conductive than copper) and hence a much better bet to use in microchips. Since its isolation in 2004 graphene has become relatively easy and cheap to manufacture (it looks like soot) and physics is now in the middle of an experimental phase learning more about its amazing properties before coming up with real-world applications. The potential for extreme microminiaturisation using graphene is high, and graphene-based transistors have already been made.

If you're interested there's more on Wikipedia (as always!) and some of the external links at the bottom of that page make fascinating reading too.