Talking Energy - an individual perspective

Today's the day when the Telegraph launches its "Talking Energy" feature in association with E.on, the energy supplier.

 One is invited to join the debate . Four of us bloggers are each given individual "home pages" on the website:    Christina O, SabinaA, the recently-arrived Robert  and myself.)

Whether, in the case of E.on,  one calls it a public consultation exercise or a PR campaign, does not worry this blogger unduly. Given the way that the AGW debate has been politicized and polarized, any new forum is to be welcomed if it allows the voice of reason and real science to be heard without all the personal aggro.

So this blogger  has signed up,  asking that any new forum be proactively moderated.  I suggested in an email that it could usefully take a leaf  from New Scientist about how to moderate.  (For example, the NS has no time or patience for those persistent conspiracy theorists who clutter up its comments, and a good thing too.)

"Reactive moderation", as one sees on My.Telegraph,  may be cost-effective, but it degenerates quickly into unseemly dogfights, ending with entire posts and comments - good as well as bad -  being deleted by the tardy moderators.

I received an electronic galley proof of the Telegraph/Eon opening gambit, scheduled for later today tomorrow, and submitted my 600 words yesterday, along with mugshot and bio' as requested. One waits with bated breath (more commonly rendered these days as "baited breath",  with visions of mouse traps and  Cheddar cheese*).

 I'm  not giving any secrets away by telling you that the central message of the exercise is that energy companies like E.on are confronted with what they call a "trilemma".  (A parallel campaign on YouTube   whence came my graphics is already underway with that questionable t-word neologism in prominence). The trilemma refers to so-called "conflicting" demands that future energy supplies be:  1. Green (low-carbon) 2.  Affordable and 3.  Reliable. 

Well,  one could be pedantic  and say there's nothing conflicting there - they are merely three desirable criteria that need to be met simultaneously.  Otherwise our lives would be burdened with trilemma, like where to live (it's got to be a nice area, affordable, handy for public transport).

Rather than nitpick, this blogger decided to focus on renewable energy, and how it might be made more reliable, given fluctuations in wind speed affecting turbine output etc.  Clue:  Dinorwig.

I'll let the Telegraph publish  first, then wait a day or two.

Watch this space!


* Cruel Clever Cat by Geoffrey Taylor:

Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

 This little ditty first appeared  in an anthology called Catscript, edited by Marie Angel.  However, it was first published in 1933 in a limited edition of Geoffrey Taylor’s poems entitled A Dash of Garlic.


Additional  reading  E.on powers down to cut carbon and costs 

Interesting to see the spotlight being put on our PCs - and rightly so, when you consider the heat that comes - not just from the laptop itself, but the charger too.


Energy-saving tip: when using one's laptop, switch off a light or other appliance that would normally be on, if it's superfluous to requirements when you are online.


Update:  Thur 5th November: Here's a C&P of my first post on the E.on site.  Having been up for a few days now,  it would not seem a terrible breach of protocol to add it here for archival purposes:


Who can doubt that the future lies with renewable energy, and that we Brits are blessed with the stuff – existing or yet-to-be-realized.
First, there are those wind turbines – not the stuff of Wordsworthian rapture I grant you - but they are increasingly being sited offshore.

 

Then there’s solar energy, with a choice of two panels for your roof – the older thermal, or the state-of-the-art PV panels that can feed the electricity you don’t use into the National Grid.
And there’s wave power – which is a kind of secondhand solar power, recalling that weather and wind are due to unequal heating of the Earth’s surface.

And there’s even the dear old man in the moon, not wishing to be outshone by his flashy big brother, who contributes the prospect of tidal power. Just wait until we have a hydroelectric barrage across the Severn Estuary, supplying maybe as much as 10 per cent (?) of our power supply. (Yes, there are downsides, needless to say, to any big scheme, in terms of amenity, effect on wildlife, capital cost, the carbon-footprint of setting up etc. But let’s stick with the broad brush today.)

The problem with most of the renewable schemes is that the end-product – electricity, that energy-carrier par excellence – is generated at scattered locations across the country, supply may be intermittent, or supply may not match demand around the clock or calendar.

Is there a solution? Yes, there probably is, though it’s not always a panacea. One is talking about big money upfront, and, more to the point, big commitment.

But unless or until fusion power becomes a reality – which may take decades, centuries even – then there is no Plan B, assuming one is not a unbudgeable climate change denialist who thinks the world's scientists in their droves have abandoned all reason in condemning those fossil fuels.

So what is the solution? Simply go to the wiki page on Pumped Hydroelectric Storage, and it’s all there.
Britain already has 4 PHS stations – two in Scotland, two in Wales, and now needs a lot more in different shapes and sizes.

The principle is simple. One has two bodies of water – a lower and upper level. When there’s a surplus of electrical power, say from wind farms during the night, water is pumped from the lower to the upper level. When there’s extra demand, and the conventional stations are struggling to cope, water runs back through turbines, generating electricity.

It’s the closest one can get to “storing” electricity as the potential energy of a head of water. What’s more, the efficiency is surprisingly high – 80 per cent or more they claim in a well-designed system.

Do read the article, to see the new and imaginative ways of developing the principle. The Japanese have used the sea on Okinawa as one of the two levels, the other being a reservoir at the top of the headland.

The Danes have a plan that does not even need two levels – the water is simply pumped into a giant bladder which gradually plumps up, creating its own head. Sand is laid on top to get extra oomph.

My favourite is the salt-mine idea. We have lots of worked-out salt-mines in Cheshire and elsewhere. You pump water down into the old-workings, and site your upper reservoir on the surface. Yes, the water becomes brine, so all the equipment has to be corrosion-resistant. But there’s an upside too: once the water becomes saturated brine, it’s 20 per cent heavier than pure water, so becomes a more efficient energy-transfer medium.

What is it they say – where there’s a will, there’s a way!

Can entropy decrease in a Big Crunch - without defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

The Universe, we're told,  is expanding, and has been from the beginning of time - reckoned to be some 13.6 billion years ago. Extrapolate back, and the Universe must have started as something incredibly small, hot and dense - a singularity. Something caused that singularity to explode, in a Big Bang.  So far, I'm telling you nothing you have not already heard or read many times.

Will the Universe go on expanding for ever? If you believe in Dark Matter and Dark Energy, then the answer is probably yes.  But so far, neither of those hypothetical entities has yet been detected. 

So there's another scenario that cannot be dismissed - that expansion will slow, and the Universe will cease expanding and then start collapsing  back on itself, ending in a Big Crunch.

 Some, myself included, are attracted to this idea, especially as it makes possible the idea of a new Big Bang, indeed, a never-ending series of Bangs and Crunches.

But some objections, or at any rate difficulties, have been raised with the idea of a Big Crunch. One of them is to do with entropy (eg  link to Yahoo forum) , and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is the one I intend to discuss briefly here today and tomorrow.

The essential idea conveyed by the Second Law is that while energy is never created or destroyed, energy is gradually dispersed, becoming less and less useful.  Engines use concentrated energy - fuel - to operate. The end product is waste heat - too dispersed for it to be recaptured and re-used. Indeed, the very act of trying to do that would be self-defeating, incurring a greater energy cost than that recouped.  Entropy - the spontaneous tendency for systems to become chaotic, more dispersed, has been successfully analysed statistically in terms of order/disorder, more specifically to do with numbers of possible arrangements. The example I used to give students was this. Imagine you have a neat and tidy bedroom, and there's a strong gust of wind through an open window. Papers get scattered, things fall off shelves etc.  Suppose one started with a disordered bedroom, and there was a gust of wind. You would be very surprised if you ended with a tidy bedroom.  The probability of a chance event - in this case the wind - producing disorder is hugely greater than that of producing order. Why?   Because there are relatively few ordered arrangements compared  to the number of disordered ones.

What's all this got to do with cosmology you may ask?  Well, we see entropy increase around us on a daily basis - eg salt dissolves in water. The ordered structure of a crystal is replaced with the chaos of dispersed ions in solution.  If entropy is steadily increasing, in accordance with the Second Law, then the entropy of the initial singularity must presumably have been minimal, possibly zero - a maximally-ordered  system it would seem.

There's a problem, then, with the idea of contraction back to a singularity - the Big Crunch. Why ? Because if the end result is the same singularity, then entropy would decrease steadily during the contraction. But that would be contrary to the Second Law, would it not?  Other objections have been raised. If we lived in a contracting universe, salt would presumably still dissolve in water, so we would still be seeing the Second  Law in action.

Some have tried to get round the conundrum by introducing the variable of time. It then gets very counter-intuitive, especially the concept of negative time, even history running in reverse!  Let's not go there. 

I believe there is a way of reconciling the concept of a Big Crunch with entropy and the Second Law.

I shall be posting it  here tomorrow!

Wed 21 Oct: Well, tomorrow has arrived, so here's the rest of the story.

It's all to do with the size of the Universe, and its fitness or otherwise to act as an entropy-increasing heat sink. While the Universe is expanding, there is abundant space in which heat can dissipate, or other forms of disorder can occur - eg dilution of gaseous end products etc. In the initial stages of contraction, things would continue much the same while there are still light-years between galaxies, or light-minutes between planets and their nearest neighbours, or even light-seconds between a planet and its moon with intervening space.

But imagine the process of contraction occurring continuously. There will finally come a time when one's perception of nature will change. Galaxies will collide for a start, but let's focus on events at a more local level. Previously there was almost limitless space for heat to dissipate. That will no longer be the case - for two reasons. First there is less space for any new heat to dissipate. Secondly, and more importantly, all the previous heat dissipated into the Universe - which is still out there- will become progressively concentrated. (Reminder; it's not just the contents of space that disappear into a black hole vortex - but the fabric of space-time itself- represented by the mesh in the graphic).

 Temperatures in deep space, presently a few degree above absolute zero, will start to increase. The so-called microwave background radiation,  a left-over from the Big Bang - will gradually shift and start to shorten in wavelength - first to normal radio frequencies, and then into the infra-red region. That's when things start to get interesting. Engines will no longer run so efficiently, because as background temperatures rise, they will find it progressively harder to dissipate exhaust heat.

Let's now look at the salt/water system. Yes, salt will continue to dissolve in water, suggesting that all is well - that the Second Law is still operating.  But as background temperatures increase, the water gets hotter, and if there were still observers around, a point would be reached when the water was no longer liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. In other words, salt could not dissolve in water - if there were no liquid water still in existence!

So there would in fact be a gradual violation of the Second Law as we know it, were the Universe to implode towards a Big Crunch, due to increasing difficulty in dissipating waste heat against a background of rising temperature.  In the final stages, the temperatures would become so great that no heat could be dissipated at all. In that situation, one has returned to a state of minimum entropy, but hugely elevated temperatures.

Had a classical thermodynamicist such as Carnot (of eponymous cycle fame) been born into a contracting Universe he would have enunciated the Second Law of Thermodynamics differently, methinks.  Quite how it would have been worded I would not care to speculate, except to say it would need to have been heavily qualified re differences between open and closed systems. Could a contracting Universe even be described as "open". Only when the system under study was small, with a sizeable temperature difference between it and everything else "out there"?

What then?  See my earlier ideas in the margin (scroll down) which have now been appeared in the MSM - so far with no serious objections being raised. I do not believe that the Big Crunch continues indefinitely. There comes a point when, through frictional forces, the plasma reaches the maximum possible temperature - when its constituent particles (strings?) then  moving/vibrating so rapidly that they reach the speed of light,  and then transform into massless photons. When that occurs,  the system ceases to be a superblack hole, and spectacularly flies apart, creating a new Big Bang...

Update 16th Dec 2014 (5 years later!)

It's temperature that is the key to the conundrum, and the kind of world it creates for those seeking evidence of order/disorder.

In our relatively low temperature world (relying on radiated heat from a single sun that is 92 million miles away) we see lots of evidence of order, notably as the presence of substances as liquids and solids, when at higher temperatures (say in the laboratory) they becomes gases, and at thousands or millions of degrees would be in the plasma state.

But the latter are the temperatures that attain when a Universe contracts down to a black hole,  and then singularity, hypothetically or otherwise. So it's useless to go looking for the kind of ordered, low entropy signatures that we are accustomed to. We have to ask ourselves what the signatures are when temperatures are hugely elevated, such that subatomic particles are travelling at speeds close to those of light, and colliding with each other. Those collisions break down the order of associations, but progressively a simplified plasma emerges in which there are the ultimate particles only, whatever they happen to be, all crushed together. The  original translational energy across sizeable distances now becomes progressively constrained to vibrations about fixed positions (as in a classical earthly solid), obviously with enormous oscillation frequencies. Thus a kind of high-temperature/highly ordered/low entropy state does  (paradoxically perhaps) become finally achievable, but through initial fragmentation, rather than clumping association. In other words, there's more than one route to a low entropy state, depending on temperature.

What went wrong with NASA's moon crash?

The idea was to crash a spacecraft into the Moon at a chosen spot where ice might be lurking. Hitting the Moon at twice the speed of a bullet would send a plume of debris miles high that could then be analysed spectroscopically for water.

But there appears to have been no plume - only a brief white flash. Why not?  Here's this blogger's explanation for what it's worth, published first on New Scientist and now the Times.

From the latter:

"Maybe a plume was formed but settled too quickly to be seen by the following probe, 4 minutes behind. Don't forget that although gravity is lower on the Moon, making things slower to fall, there's no air to slow the descent - even of dust particles or those hoped-for ice crystals.

There's a classic lab experiment in which a stout glass tube has all the air pumped out. A feather inside then falls as quickly as a ball-bearing.

Let's hope the NASA scientists did not forget their school physics."

Update: Sunday 18 October   Well, halleluja, a plume was captured on camera after all, although the photograph in New Scientist ("Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all")  was somewhat disappointing. I mean to say - given it was said to be 6-8 kilometres wide, why show us a mere smidgeon of white on a so-called "zoomed image"? Small wonder the conspiracy theorists began falling out of the woodwork!

The fact that a plume was briefly formed lends support to the hypothesis I've ventured above. The plume didn't last long, because the particles fell back faster than many might suppose (given that the Moon's lower gravity seems to dominate most thinking, with the absence of an atmosphere frequently overlooked).

The absence of an atmosphere alters the dynamics of an impact and its aftermath considerably. Dust and other particles (ice?) may well be ejected much higher and further than on Earth, due to absence of a cushioning atmosphere - no air molecules to be pushed aside- but their return to "earth" would look entirely different to an observer or camera. Initially the descent would seem gentle - due to 1/6th Earth's gravity- but acceleration would be continuous, without anything comparable to "terminal velocity" (approx 120 mph on Earth in "old  money"). A quick back- of- envelope calculation using school physics says that while it would take some 30 seconds for dust or ice particles to reach 120mph (which is our earthly terminal velocity), they would go on accelerating indefinitely until they finally hit the surface. There's another factor to consider - which another scribe on NS comments has pointed out :  much of the ice -if present- would be vaporised by the kinetic energy (heat) of impact. The  molecules would be unlikely to re-coalesce in the Moon's near-vacuum, and simply disappear from view - except perhaps to a highly sensitive spectrometer that was set up specifically to look for them - and certainly fail to drop back. Molecules generally don't "drop back" in a vacuum, especially in a weak gravitational field. They would simply spread out, ie diffuse rapidly.

The Times "Eureka" magazine - first impressions

I've just spent an hour leafing through the Times's most recent addition to its publishing platform. It's called Eureka, its cover is very green, with an unattractive graphic of a chap who's lost the top half of his skull, with a plethora of sciencey things bursting forth from the exposed remainder.

Personally I find it hard to conceive of an image that is better guaranteed to confirm in the layman's mind that science is a nerdy thing that reveals more than you really want to know - an autistic  lack of the light touch, to say nothing of discretion and good taste .

Well, I hadn't intended to start on so negative a note, but it's sitting there next to me in all its disturbing, stomach-churning  immediacy, so I want to get that off my chest. First impressions still count, do they not?

Second and subsequent impressions are a lot more favourable. One doesn't envy anyone the task of producing a digest of science for the general reader of a newspaper, not even a serious one like The Times. How does one define the target audience, given that a relatively small proportion will  have formal scientific qualifications much beyond GCSE - or O-Level?  Then there is the notorious antipathy that exists towards science and scientists in the UK - one that has produced what someone described some years ago as the "ghettoization" of science.

Scientists are partly to blame themselves - let's not go into all that right now. Suffice it to say that the finger hovers over the remote when a science programme appears on TV. Woe betide any presenter who attempts to get too immersed in detail, or who overdoes the gee-whizzery, pie-in-the-sky delivery. The British public is inured to that kind of thing, and is likely to say "Come back in 10 years when you know some more, or have a workable, marketable product."

The criterion for a good thriller is that it is un-putdown-able. So what should it be for a periodical that appears only once a month?  Not un-putdownable - that would be asking too much, in view of the subject matter. I suggest it should be put-downable, ie nothing too long and demanding of time, but so pick-uppable again that it escapes an early fate in the nether regions of a bulging paper-rack, or worse still the dustbin.  In that sense I believe "Eureka" is over its first hurdle. There's a good mix of light and serious, human and technical, visionary and realistic to make it worth returning to if one only has the time or inclination to dip in now and again.

I'll come back in a day or two with a closer look at some of the features. I do have one or two quite serious gripes with some of the detailed science. In particular the feature "Living in the City" seems to have some unrealistic chemistry and biology. Since when has carbon dioxide reacted with magnesium chloride to give magnesium carbonate? (The reaction proceeds fine in the opposite direction!) But let's not nitpick today. The line-up of writers is impressive - with at least three with solid research experience and qualifications - up to and beyond PhD - and amazingly the Times has secured the services of Martin Rees - President of the Royal Society- whose keynote contribution is worth a read, touching as it does on a host of the issues that confront scientists, and the perception (or misconceptions) re the scientific approach to modern life and the myriad questions it throws up.

 Update: Friday 9 October

The individual articles in Eureka are now online, including the one with the questionable chemistry. Have submitted this comment:

"Hmmm. While one welcomes "out-of-the-box" thinking on technology, the fundamental science has to stay firmly within the box.

It would not seem feasible, for example, to use "magnesium chloride" as a trapping agent for CO2. Magnesium hydroxide, certainly, but since that's made from magnesium carbonate, heating in steam to drive off CO2,  it's self defeating re carbon footprints. 

With magnesium chloride, one is trying to make the following (well known) reaction go in reverse:

magnesium carbonate + hydrochloric acid -> magnesium chloride + water + carbon dioxide


Not only does it prefer to go in the direction shown, but if one did contrive conditions to make it go in reverse one would release hydrochloric acid fumes into the neighbourhood! Hardly environmentally-friendly!

The bacterial illumination look improbable too. Yes, there are strains that react oxygen with luciferin, but the light-show is mediated by the enzyme luciferase, and that catalysis, like the rest of bacterial metabolism, requires an aqueous environment. I doubt whether bacteria would take kindly to being incorporated into coatings if that meant having to exist lichen-like in all weathers. Bacteria - excluding their resistant spores- are a lot more fussy about their environment!"

That so-called "Anglo-Saxon" treasure could have been of genuine British-manufacture

I'm going to stick my neck out here. Who's to say that the fabulous hoard of gold and silver craftwork, unearthed by that bloke with the metal detector in Staffordshire, was produced by Johnny-Come-Lately Anglo-Saxon settlers?

 Just 9 of some 1500 so-called "Anglo-Saxon" artefacts - a stupendous find,  regardless of provenance

OK,  so we are supposed to be proud of our admixture of Anglo-Saxon and other genes. We are supposed to take pride in being an allegedly mongrel race  (hybrid vigour an' all).

But have your read your Stephen Oppenheimer?  He's the Oxford scholar who analyses modern DNA to trace our genetic roots. I blogged about his claims some 3 years ago.  Oppenheimer rejects the idea that Anglo-Saxons supplanted the native Brits, sending us scurrying to the Celtic fringes. Oppenheimer reckons that the native Brits pre-dated the Celts, and indeed resisted numerous waves of invasion - the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, stubbornly staying put, and surviving - either by putting up resistance, or by assimilating the invaders.

Oppenheimer reckons that native Brits are derived from Basque migrants who recolonised Britain some 15,000 years ago after the last Ice Age, crossing the then still existing land bridge between the Continent and England.

So why is the treasure being described as Anglo-Saxon? Who's to say it is not native British - or, less probably, Celt?

OK, so it was discovered in a Staffordshire field, in central England, and is reckoned to be 7th century, when that part of England was in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia.  But that does not mean that it was Anglo-Saxon treasure. It may have been of native British manufacture, possibly from the era (mythical or otherwise) of King Arthur, Camelot, and the Knights of the Round Table. It may have been taken from our dead warriors on the battlefield  as war booty - or maybe our knights buried their finery (purely for show!) before facing the invader in battle wearing the equivalent of combat fatigues.

What's the evidence that Anglo-Saxons ever produced such exquisite artwork? I thought they were practical types, more concerned with clearing forest, ploughing, agriculture and animal husbandry? Their efforts went into producing axes and ploughs - not fine gold filigree ornamentation.

Yep, I'll put my head on the block. The "experts" have got it entirely wrong. It's not Anglo-Saxon treasure. It's British treasure. And no, I don't mean Celtic treasure - although that gifted if mercurial folk did produce fine arts and crafts - and are arguably more highly regarded in that respect than the Anglo-Saxons.

Nope, I reckon the treasure was produced by native "aboriginal"  Brits,  of Basque-derived stock  according to Professor Oppenheimer - the true Brits - the ones who re-settled the British Isles, and who have managed to survive and prosper despite waves of immigrants seeking a better life. Britain's geography permitted co-existence within probably quite confined geographical areas - a few hundred square miles for example - which could be a little as 20m x 20m-  thanks to our varied topography, the (then) more abundant forest cover, and, dare I say it, mutual tolerance and/or respect between native and newcomer. There was room for everyone who was prepared to work, and to "live and let live" - the British way.  Britain was, if you like,  the "New World" of the first millennium, once the Romans had left.

I repeat: the experts may have got it wrong. One cannot assume it is Anglo-Saxon treasure. It could well have been the exquisite handiwork of native Brits who  succeeded in maintaining their genetic, ethnic and cultural identity over thousands of years - standing firm and finally expelling - or assimilating-   the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons,  Danes, Vikings and Normans.

Update  Sat 26 14:31 : See the Telegraph article with its 23 comments - at the time of writing.

The "Staffordshire  Hoard" now has a wikipedia entry

No genuinely free water on the Moon, it would seem...

The ambiguity of "free" in my title is deliberate. The traces of water detected by that inspired Indian lunar probe are not of course  free water, in a chemical sense, but chemically-bound, non-wettening "water".

 Is that a water-diviner in his hand? If so, then happy-hunting..

Even my non-scientific wife was quick to realize that, watching last night's news, even if the media reports elsewhere conjure up visions of future moon colonists tapping into an abundant supply.  Moonshine!

Being chemically-bound, whether weakly or strongly,  it's hardly free for the taking either. The expression "getting blood out of a stone" springs to mind.

Here's what I sent last night to the Times in response to that  trumpeting  headline re there being a litre of water per tonne of lunar soil. (One feels that "water" should have been enclosed in quotation marks in the Times's article).

To say there is "water" on the Moon when it's there as the hydroxyl radical/ion is a little misleading, as others have pointed out. It's like saying that farmer's lime, calcium hydroxide, is a potential source of water. True, in a manner of speaking, but you would have to get it red hot to drive off water as steam, as in lime-furnaces, and then have a means of cooling and condensing to get liquid water. It may sound easy in principle, but the practical aspects of attempting this on the Moon are formidable. One would need an abundant supply of energy - probably tens or hundreds of square metres of solar panels to generate megawatts of electricity.

Why not get the Sahara green first - to create biomass and reduce CO2? Huge problems to overcome, yes, but if we can't lick that problem, what hope is there of colonising the Moon or Mars on a realistic timescale?

September 24, 2009 11:10 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Recommend? (7) 

"Hydroxyl", note, is not a molecule, as the report would have one believe. Being simply OH, with an unpaired electron, it would be a free radical, with no independent existence, and a lifetime of seconds at most if generated in the atmosphere by, say, cosmic ray bombardment. Most "OH" in rocks is, of course, present as negatively-charged hydroxyl ions, accompanying positively-charged metal ions, eg aluminium.

Aside: well done, btw,  Times for finally adding a time and date stamp to readers' comments,  and for a much-speedier moderation than before. The BBC-style facility for expressing approval is also cute.  It even survives cut-and-pasting here, apparently as a live-link - see the blue font above!  Shame though that one's comments are not accessible to search engines. The world wide web depends on linking, you know, if only for information-retrieval. Vanity has nowt to do with it, of course...

Update: Friday 15:15 pm.  Had some further  thoughts on the inconclusive nature of the chemistry after reading the New Scientist's feature:  Have just sent the following:


"Hmmm. So the signal could have come from water or from the "OH molecule". Leaving aside the faulty nomenclature - OH is not a molecule, but is either a free radical if electrically neutral, or a negatively- charged ion -  it seems a bit of a liberty to lump together two entirely different chemical species in this manner. The discovery of  H2O would indeed  be exciting, even if strongly adsorbed to minerals. But "hydroxyl", presumably as mineral hydroxides, would be an entirely different matter, requiring somewhat high temperatures in most cases if  desiring to drive off molecular water, which would then have to be cooled and condensed. Most of the hydroxides of predominant minerals in the Earth's crust - magnesium, calcium, aluminium etc-  hang onto their oxygen and hydrogen quite firmly, needing red heat or higher to dissociate into oxides and steam.

So it's somewhat premature surely to report that "water" has been discovered. On the basis of available evidence, none of which can be described as "hard",  what's been discovered are  oxygen atoms that are bonded to one or possibly two hydrogen atoms with a strong attachment to a mineral matrix given they are able to survive solar heating in a vacuum. Alternatively, and less usefully from the point of view of harvesting lunar water, the signal is picking up a temporary association, ie  the turnover model, which would explain why the discovery did not come earlier from study of Apollo-mission rocks"

Update  Sep 25 21:17 : See also "How could astronauts harvest water on the Moon" - latest article in New Scientist.

Flightless birds: why are they found on islands?

Whilst on holiday (see previous post) I've been reading Jerry Coyne's excellent "Why Evolution is True".
Here's a tip: next time you encounter an advocate of "intelligent design" or, perish the thought, creationism, ask them if they've read his book  - or something comparable. Ask if they know about 'devolution' (my term ) which is the loss of function, with vestigial traits still visible - like that  otherwise inexplicable "floating"  pelvis and hind limb of the whale.  If they haven't, then refuse to enter into any discussion - probably futile in any case - until they have apprised themselves of the impressive marshalling of evidence in Coyne's book.

I should probably stop here - not presuming to be on anything like equal terms with someone who has spent his entire career researching the mechanisms of evolution (yes, the latter is possible, after a fashion, using his experimental model of fruit flies with their relatively short generation times). But I can't resist floating an idea that may or may not be codswallop. It concerns "flightless birds" - an example of that so-called 'devolution'.

The kiwi (NZ) - archetypal flightless bird

Here's Coyne's rationale:


"The long and the short of it is this: flight is metabolically expensive, using up a lot of energy that could otherwise be diverted to reproduction. If you're flying mainly to stay away from predators, but predators are often missing on islands, or if food is readily obtained on the ground, as it can be on islands (which often lack many trees), then why do you need fully functioning wings? In such a situation, birds with reduced wings would have a reproductive advantage, and natural selection could favor flightlessness. Also wings are large appendages that are easily injured. If they're unnecessary, you can avoid injury by reducing them. In both situations, selection would directly favor mutations that led to progressively smaller wings, resulting in an inability to fly."

Well, maybe, but wings confer such an extraordinary advantage over us terrestrial landlubbers that one has to seek an equally extraordinary reason why birds would divest themselves of such an advantage - even if  in thrall to random mutation and natural selection.

Here's my explanation - for what it's worth.

Suppose the first bird to land on an island had been blown way off course by strong winds, and had landed exhausted on its new home with abundant plant life and insects, but no snakes and other reptiles, or other predators- notably birds and mammals. Suppose too the bird had found a mate earlier, and was carrying eggs, duly laid in the new home.

The fledglings would have developed into fully-grown birds in due course. What then? Would they have stayed in their place of birth - or would they have been adventurous, and ranged further and further over the ocean in search of their more 'natural' habitat, ie that imprinted on inherited memory from mother?

Those that explored further afield might be fortunate and make landfall. Alternatively, and more probably,  they sadly would not make it, and would fall exhausted into the sea,  or hopefully perhaps turn back in time and return to their island home-sweet-home.

Over the millennia, natural selection would favour birds that were content to "stay put". Mutants that had progressive loss of flying ability would gradually predominate. Flight-capable birds would continue to suffer attrition, at least where the island was concerned. In the absence of predators, the flightless mutants would gradually displace the gypsy wanderers, provided there was sufficient food available at ground level - seeds, insects etc.

Maybe Mother Nature pioneered the joys of indolent vegetating, with old birds and/or their partners marooned on islands,  long before late middle-aged expatriate human beings arrived on the planet...

Sciencebod takes a late summer holiday

Yes, having spent most of the summer looking after a friend's house in Bratislava - complete with resident cats - it's time to have a touring holiday,  with no bowls to be re-charged morning, noon and night.

Where are we going?  Well, here's a clue. These structures are megalithic (which sounds technically savvy until you realise the literal meaning - "big stones"- which is hardly a giveaway.

We'll work in a visit to those" big stones", then travel north and hop across the straits to another more mountainous island. I've been sampling its beer, which recently appeared locally.

Chestnut flour is a major ingredient of the brew, we are told.  It's not bad at all,  with a well-defined malty presence, but maybe a tad too strong for my liking (6% alc).

If our various hotels all deliver on their wi- fi promises, I'll be able to keep an eye on the science news, and try to post a short report on anything that looks tasty. There are also a couple of posts in draft that could be fleshed out if rainy weather sets in - which is not impossible in mid-September, even in a location noted for its sunny climate. Will report back in a couple weeks - if not sooner.


Update  24th September

Am back from a fascinating 13 night recce of Sardinia and Corsica.  Visited the world-famous Su Nuraxi site at Barumini (see first piccy above) , about 50km north of Cagliari - which thanks to an officious and frankly sub-standard local guide was a mixed experience.

Here is the lady guide who not only insisted we join her group, despite her not speaking a word of English, but specifically prevented us from tagging along with the other guide whom we later heard using both English and Italian.

Reminder, young lady: Barumini is a UNESCO World Heritage site. To accept a question in English, and to reply in Italian is just downright inconsiderate, not to say perverse, especially when your colleague(?) was talking fluently in both languages.

Su Nuraxi? To give some idea of its age, it was abandoned  by its inhabitants, about whom we know next to nothing, in the 6th century BC. Prior to that, it had been occupied for millennia!

Random - and irreverent - thoughts on the British Science Festival

 John McCririck: missed his vocation as an SC (see below)?

Uh, uh.  It's that time of year again.  With the first chill nip of autumnal air, and the sight of new back-to-school satchels, or their modern-day equivalent, the UK press should now be going cold turkey on its silly season reporting.  But our esteemed MSM eases itself back into "business as usual" mode gently.  Temporary methadone maintenance is provided by the annual September shop-window for that charming if somewhat quirky organization - the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Oops, I'm showing my age. It's abandoned that 19th century name,  conveying as it did an earnest desire to improve the scientific literacy of the muddled masses - and so cruelly satirized by Charles Dickens as "The Mudfog Society for the Advancement of Everything".

It now wishes to be known simply as the British Science Association.

I see that BBC correspondent  Sue Nelson is on the spot in Guildford for this year's jamboree - it's using the University of Surrey campus - and  is being suitably non-overawed by the occasion. Here's a delightful tongue-in-cheek equation she has "derived"  by which she rates  SC, the colourful "Science Communicators" she encounters:

H = the number of hand gestures

J = the brightness of a jacket

A = the number of times someone says "amazing"

F = the amount of facial hair

 
Well, we've had some quite memorable and sometimes colourful characters in front of our TV screens -  Sir Patrick Moore, Magnus Pyke,  James Burke. Maybe John McCririck should be drafted in, if only for his stratospheric SC rating (see graphic :-)

So what kind of science will be on offer this year?  Is science still capable of capturing the modern imagination?  Can we safely assume there will always be another "big idea" along soon, comparable to the DNA double helix,  genetic engineering, stem cells, plate tectonics, superstring theory etc etc. Or has science become so infected with quantum uncertainty that it is now dismissed as telling us more and more about less and less?  Will this year's Science Festival give us a taste of new insights, or is it a forlorn exercise in window-dressing, concealing an increasingly bare cupboard and shelves?

  (I choose my words carefully, having scanned the list of honorary members and sponsors, discovering names of people whom it would not be wise to offend, including an ex-employer who is now Something Big in Science Policy-Making.)

Religion seems to be flavour of the year at this year's Science Festival,  if the Telegraph Science page is reliable as a straw in the wind.

Well, it makes a change from  "Why future Moon colonists may keep bees" or similar  (OK, so I made that one up, but you get my drift).


Speaking of the Telegraph,  it seems to be on a religious kick at the moment. It's even spilled over onto its so-called Science Page. See the recent article by Christopher Howse:  "Do you Believe in Angels?"


 That "angels" feature incidentally provoked a quick riposte from your sciencebod   ;-)

"And to think this is the latest post in the DT's Science section! Is nothing sacred?"

One "getagrip" responded to this and similar sentiments with:

"The word angel occurs 194 times in the Bible.  My challenge to all those who have written sceptic comments is to go and read it for yourselves or just remain ignorant bigots."


Well, I guess that's  progress of sorts - the bible-quoters are now fighting fire with fire - quantitative data no less!

Incidentally: there are 64 occasions on which miracle(s) appears in the Bible. There's even a website for the benefit of the new breed of  Biblical number cruncher.  The most commonly used word,  not surprisingly, is "and"...


Update:  Scientist Lord May attacks BBC rejection of Planet Earth day


Thus reads the headline in the Times. It also needs to be read in conjunction with Lord May's somewhat  whimsical advocacy in today's Telegraph for a return to a God-fearing society (tongue-in-cheek methinks because he himself is described as a non-believer). Why? Because nothing less than religious commitment is likely to make people see sense on the need for urgent steps to prevent AGW.


Hmmm. There are some real characters in the upper echelons of the UK Government science establishment. Lord May, an ecologist, with wide-ranging interests and expertise in biodiversity etc,  was Chief Scientific advisor in the Blair government, and was President of the Royal Society for 5 years.  


My response to the Times:

"If I were religious, which I'm not, I'd be somewhat offended by the sight of a non-religious person (described elsewhere as an "atheist"), no matter how distinguished, telling me that my God was maybe a Good Thing after all, provided He is perceived as waving a big stick at climate change sceptics, bringing them to order.

I personally am slowly coming to accept at least some of the AGW arguments, but that's not because of politicians preaching about a so-called "scientific consensus" but in spite of them. Nothing is better guaranteed to turn off the enquiring mind than the claim that the time for debating is over, and that one must now obediently accept the nanny state's medicine like a good obedient citizen."

Fame at last!

 From today's New Scientist homepage

FAVOURITE COMMENT

Climate will cost much more than UN thinks

"Have you ever known anything to cost less than originally forecast? That would break an immutable law of grant-seeking." sciencebod

Here was my comment in full:


"Have you ever known anything to cost less than originally forecast?

That would break an immutable law of grant-seeking. Estimates are always pitched low initially, so as not to frighten off the fund-givers. They are then gradually and expensively racked up to take into account a host of hitherto unrecognized factors that no one could possibly have forseen, because their eyes were deliberately focused on the far horizon, and nothing so immediate and mundane as the nitty-gritty.

The maximum final/initial ratio is reckoned to be in the region of 3:1 for seasoned pros, who know how far they can push their luck. One notable exception are the organizers of the 2012 London Olympics, who are pushing the envelope, as they say, up into new unheard-of brass neck ratios. Hidden costs, like VAT for example, which no lobbyists, least of all at ministerial level, could possibly have forseen."

To global warming sceptics - other reasons for cutting fossil fuel consumption

 London photochemical smog - it begins with the burning of fossil fuels

Here's an article I would strongly recommend. It's written by Geoffrey Lean in today's Telegraph.
The strap under the headline  ("How's your carbon-footprint doing?") reads:

Cutting emissions of carbon dioxide makes sense even if you don’t believe in climate change.

And here is a quotable quote:

"Carbon dioxide emissions are turning the seas acid, and dooming the coral reefs, quite apart from their effect on global warming. Reducing fuel use would also cut other forms of pollution, such as the tiny particles, mainly from car exhausts, that EU research concludes kill some 30,000 Britons each year – shortening average life expectancy by six months – and the nitrogen dioxide which is increasingly implicated in the asthma epidemic that now afflicts one in seven British children... 

 ...   driving cars less reduces congestion and the building of new roads through the countryside. Walking and cycling are good for your health, as is eating less meat. Using water economically – and thus reducing the vast amounts of energy needed to pipe it around – helps tackle the water shortages threatening areas like the South East. Recycling paper saves trees. And so on."

Note regarding that nitrogen dioxide: it's a real insidious nasty. Why? Because the nitrogen does not come from the fuel, unlike, say, the sulphur in that other air pollutant - sulphur dioxide.  So there is no point in scientists seeking a low-nitrogen petrol or gas.  With the exception of coal,  fossil fuels have virtually no nitrogen to start with!

The nitrogen comes from the air. What happens is this: when our fossil fuels burn inside engine cylinders, gas boilers etc, the high temperature make some of the nitrogen  (normally considered chemically inert) to combine with oxygen to make nitric oxide, NO. That colourless gas then combines with more oxygen on cooling  to form nitrogen dioxide, NO2. That gas is no doubt responsible for most of the yellowish-brown colour of city smogs, and is highly damaging to our airways and lungs. NO2 is thought to be a major contributor to the increasing incidence of asthma attacks.

Here is a graphic showing the multiple sources of polluting nitrogen oxides in our air.

Source - same Camden link as above.

 So wherever you have fossil fuel being burned, you have toxic polluting nitrogen dioxide being formed. Sadly you can't have one without the other - no one's been able to find a way of uncoupling the two.

What a shame that nitrogen dioxide is not soot-coloured instead of being a light yellow-brown. Had it been so, one suspects that our burning of fossil-fuels would be much curtailed - voluntarily! 

Afterthought: Some of the pollution by nitrogen dioxide has admittedly been cut by the introduction of catalytic converters, now compulsory in new vehicle exhaust systems.  The platinum and other catalysts have been cleverly chosen to make nitrogen dioxide react with another dangerous pollutant -  carbon monoxide- to form non-injurious end-products:

nitrogen dioxide  & carbon monoxide react together on catalyst surface, and are converted to   nitrogen  & carbon dioxide

It helps, but there's still a hazard from NO2, which is not surprising since it's not just internal combustion engines that create it - see pie chart.

( Apol's btw for the divider lines. Not sure where they came from - some kind of formatting glitch)

 

Yes, it is theoretically possible to see into the past (to be taken with a pinch of salt)

 Safely home - and receiving calls?

It being a slow news day - at least where the science is concerned-  I was going to take a break. But I had an idea while shaving that I must share with you, dear readers.

They say it's impossible to travel back in time, right? I'm sure I don't need to remind you why (like what's stopping you from locating Hitler's grandfather,  pushing him under the wheels of a stage coach, thus preventing Hitler from being born? ).

But suppose I told you that it's theoretically possible to see what really happened in the past, say at Dallas, Texas in 1963, or to the Marie Celeste?  You'd say rubbish, would you not? Certainly I would have, up until a couple of hours ago.

Well think again.

Now you've heard of those distant exoplanets, right? They are outside our own solar system, orbiting their own stars. We know they are there - a few hundred have now been detected.  No, we can't see them directly, but they can be detected  by the small amount of light they block out when they transit their sun.

Suppose now there's an exoplanet called Zog, and that it is, let's say, 25 light years from Earth (our own Sun, by comparison, is 8.5 light minutes away, and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light years away).

Suppose the Zogians are far more advanced than we are, technologically, and have not only detected our presence, but have gone on to develop high-resolution video ( unlikely, but not theoretically impossible). Supposing Earth's history is being stored on Zogian video tape right now.  What it records right now is what took place on Earth 25 years ago - because that's how long it took the light to travel from Earth to Zog.

Now suppose we find a way of sending a radio message to Zog, saying "Hello neighbours. Please could you include us on your subscription list for Earth video footage?"  OK, so  it would take 25 years for Zog to  receive our message, and  - if they responded promptly-  another 25 years for the footage to get back to us. So Zog's most recent footage would show what was taking place on Earth 50 years ago,  albeit in Zogian "real time"!

For historians, it would be the equivalent of the "third umpire" in cricket - the video camera that is the final arbiter on what really happened... Now then, was there a second gunman, lurking behind that grassy knoll?

Who says artificial sweeteners don't help you lose weight?

 Is the love-affair over?

So who is saying that artificial sweeteners don’t help you lose weight?

Answer : Professor Soraya Shirazi-Beechey, who is a veterinary science researcher at the University of Liverpool.  She claims that "our bodies cannot distinguish between them and sugar."  So what's wrong about that, you might say?  We all know that artificial sweeteners - saccharine, aspartame etc - are no magic wands. But is the body totally fooled,  indeed traduced by them, even in the lower regions of the small intestine, as she claims?

Well, see the article by Chris Irvine in today’s Telegraph (Health Section) and judge for yourself. To say I read it with a growing sense of incredulity, indeed bafflement, would be a gross understatement. Little if any of it makes sense to me.

Let's  begin with the statement that “artificial sweeteners do nothing to help weight loss”. It does not appear to be a  finding of the Professor’s research. Indeed, from googling her other work, it would appear to be more by way of an article of faith.

Whilst I’m no expert on weight loss strategies – and am fighting a losing battle – that statement offends the most basic scientific principles. If somebody is on a dietary regime that just maintains body weight, and they then replace the sugar in that diet with artificial sweetener – then they are almost certain to lose weight, since their calorie intake is reduced. Now the cynics or defeatists may say differently, claiming, for example, that sweeteners increase one’s appetite for real sugars. But that does not permit the bald statement that artificial sweeteners do nothing to help weight loss. We all know, or should know, that any slimming aid has to be  part of a “calorie-controlled diet”.  We are constantly warned about that on the side of food packaging.

She then says that our bodies cannot distinguish between the sweeteners and sugar. Here’s where it starts to get scientifically a bit complicated, but bear with me, and see if you can follow the lady’s chain of reasoning.

We have at least two different sensor  locations for real sugars - sucrose, glucose etc - in our bodies. One is in the taste buds,  which detect “sweet”. These we know can be fooled, so that an artificial sweetener, with a chemical structure entirely different from real sugars, registers as “sweet”, making that cup of coffee more appealing to those of us with a sweet tooth.

But there's another place too -  down in the intestine -  where we have clever systems in the wall of the gut  concerned with selectively absorbing sugars into the blood stream. The important one where this post is concerned  deals with ordinary cane sugar ie “sucrose”, in our diet. There is an enzyme in the wall of the gut that recognizes and binds sucrose, and then cleaves it into two halves – glucose and fructose. There is then another system that recognizes and binds these sugars and then transports them across the wall of the bowel into the bloodstream. The glucose transporter works in conjunction with sodium uptake, and is called the sodium-dependent glucose transporter.

So where does the Professor’s research change our picture of this well-established digestive physiology?  She claims to have found yet another system in the bowel comparable to the one in our taste buds that recognizes “sweetness”.  In other words it  is activated not just by natural sugars but by artificial sweeteners. She herself has described that as “surprising”. Indeed, it is surprising. What’s a receptor for one’s perception of whether food is nice to eat or not doing way down in the bowel?  Down there one would expect molecules to be recognized purely by size, shape, chemical make-up – nothing so subjective as taste.

Now here’s where things start to get really bizarre. The prof' says that these new sweetener receptors are the reason why sweeteners don’t allow us to lose weight. She claims that the sweetener receptors fool our ordinary sugar-transporters into thinking there's an abundance of real sugar about, and send a signal to our sugar-transporters to work more efficiently. End-result – we absorb more glucose and other sugars from the diet than we normally would. Result: the sweeteners make our bodies more efficient at absorbing sugar calories, with the result that we fail to lose weight, and indeed are at risk of putting on weight

Hold on a minute. There’s a weak point in that argument – and that’s all it is – an argument – a far cry from doing  scientifically-controlled experiments.. It’s the assumption that sugar absorption from the gut is inefficient in normal individuals, and that sweeteners improve that efficiency.

Well, I personally know of no evidence that we are inefficient at absorbing sucrose. OK, it may not be 100% efficient – small amounts may reach the lower bowel where it would be fermented to hydrogen, short chain fatty acids etc. But if sucrose were just 95% absorbed,  with a "mere" 5% reaching the lower bowel, we would quickly know about it to our gross discomfiture, with bloating, wind, intestinal cramps – in other words all the symptoms suffered by those with the distressing and socially-embarrassing  "malabsorption syndromes".

Sorry, Professor , but your story does not make sense. To be honest, there seems to be just a little science, and a whole lot of conjecture. What’s more, it’s conjecture in an area in which consumers are already bombarded with a lot of conflicting information from scientists and health professionals. Someone has to act as watchdog. Who better than a retired biochemist/nutritionist with time on his hands? I would send a brief critique to the Telegraph, but there’s unfortunately no facility for doing so. But there is this ability now to attach comments and critiques to Google links. Tally ho!

PS   The Mail has opened a thread on this topic 


Update Sun 5th September. Who says that personal blogs are a waste of time, unless one is besieged daily by comments?

I've just been googlin', and find my humble observations as a "retired biochemist/nutritionist" have been picked up across the pond by an Atkins Diet/Low Carb forum.  Here's what "OregonRose" has to say:

"A few thoughts:

First, is this "real" research? There doesn't seem to be an actual paper or published findings associated with Shirazi-Beechey's alleged research; it's somehow "on display" at a Food Museum. That doesn't sound too awfully rigorous to me, although I might not be qualified to judge that. Also, in the articles I Googled up on her (Soraya Shirazi-Beechey + artificial sweeteners), I found lots of sound-bitey quotes from her but no mention of actual experiments and actual results. And there's this guy, a retired biochemist/nutritionist, who takes issue with what he labels her bald assertion, noting that there doesn't seem to be any experimental data to back up her claim:

http://colinb-sciencebuzz.blogspot....eners-dont.html

Second: As to the problem of where the "extra" absorbed glucose in a low-carb diet might come from--assuming for the sake of argument that her claim might have merit--what about glucose generated by the liver from protein? Supposing she's right, maybe somehow AS prods the liver to produce more?

And finally, the whole claim sounds weakly supported to me. Sure, I think avoiding AS is a good idea in general, along with any other frankenfoods, since we just don't know enough about them (heck, we know barely anything about our own physiology, and here we as a species are throwing hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated food wisdom away and eating who knows what...). Nevertheless, during my first year of LC, they helped assuage many a dessert craving, and I'm glad they were available."

I'd have left a comment, but not only is the site not open to those who are not registered, but I'm fundamentally opposed to the Atkins diet - not because it doesn't help lose weight - it almost certainly does - but because I consider it to be  misconceived - biochemically, physiologically and medically. The Atkins diet takes a huge liberty with one's cellular biochemistry - the subject of a forthcoming post.

Why is Moon dust sticky?

  This goddamned stuff gets everywhere!

I expect you have seen those close-up photographs of spacemen on the surface of the Moon. Have you noticed how they invariably have dust sticking not just to their boots, but higher up- often up to the knees in fact?  That dust is sticking to a vertical surface - in defiance of gravity - albeit weaker on the Moon than on Earth.

Well, there was an opportunity this morning on the New Scientist's website to mention that strange stickiness of Moon dust, and to speculate on what might cause it.

Afterthought: "sticky" is perhaps not the best adjective, since it may suggest "gooey". Maybe the title should have been : "Why does Moon dust stick to everything?"  If this were a scientific paper, which it's emphatically not, I guess one would be deploying terms like "adherent" etc. "Sticky" will do for now.

How come the mechanical engineers were able to steal a march on the Royal Society?

 The Royal Society HQ, London

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London

A few days ago the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was in the headlines - under photographs of highways lined with wind turbines and strange new "artificial trees".  The latter were poorly explained. In fact, even now, after diligent internet searches, I'm still not certain as to whether they are science fact or science fiction. More about the technological feasibility later.

For the moment, I'd simply say that I placed a comment on the Times, asking why a particular professional society with a mech' eng remit was hogging the headlines, given that solutions to global warming and climate change require an interdisciplinary approach.  I was careful to slip in a mention of the Royal Society in the list, feeling that it should be orchestrating the response from the UK's scientific, indeed engineering community too (since engineering solutions are only as good as the underpinning science).

Here's what I said...

"... one notes that these latest suggestions - which are by no means new - have come from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. Might it not have been better if proposals for saving the planet had come from a broader-based consortium of professional societies, that would have included the Institutes of Biology, the Royal Institute of Chemistry, The Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Royal Society etc etc? The underlying chemistry/biology in today's press release is hardly impressive, and regrettably less-than-authoritative."

August 27, 2009 12:45 PM BST on UK-TimesOnline

Note the date.  Today, just four days later, the Royal Society has come out with  its own position paper, with proposals that look remarkably similar to those of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.  Indeed, they ask for the same pump-priming Government support to the tune of of £10m. 

So, did the engineers jump the gun, one wonders, stealing the thunder of the senior service?   Did the latter wince on seeing its apparent inertia being pointed out by your humble blogger?  I guess we'll never know, but you have to admit that it's odd that two prestigious societies say basically the same thing within a few days of each other, with an apparent breach of the expected pecking order...

Newspaper sub-editors: bless them...

 Satellite photograph: Saharan dust, blowing westwards, carrying plant nutrients to the Amazon

There's an invited article in today's Telegraph by Steve Jones. His academic title is Professor of Genetics at University College London, but he's better known as a high profile author and TV presenter.  He is writing on Mother Nature's dust bowl phenomenon, scourge of farmers past and present, but tempered with the recognition that dust, stripped off land in one continent, can  provide nutrients thousands of miles away.This is a topic on which I blogged on the old Dreams and Daemons site.

Did you know that the nutrient-poor laterite soils of the Amazon basin are fed by dust blowing in from across the Atlantic - from the Sahara desert in fact, and from a relatively small part thereof (a  particular dried-up lake bed - the Bodélé depression- that is subject to ferocious sandstorms - or should that be dust storms?).

And what title has the Telegraph sub' used on the Home Page.  Wait for it: "View from the lab:  Beware of the dust".  The lab?  Well now, that's you pigeon-holed Professor Jones. Did they ask for a picture of you in a crisp white lab coat,  peering intently into a test-tube?

 Steve Jones

PS I see from Wiki we were both born the same year, but you already qualify for the State pension. This retired lab wallah still has a short while to wait.

Testing new Google comment facility on the Gareth Roberts diabetes story

Click to enlarge

I did a post yesterday on the amazing - some might say disturbing - report on the BBC's website about Gareth Roberts, the man who had  been on insulin injections most of his 32 years, and is now able to take pills instead - ones intended for what supposedly is an entirely  different type of diabetes.

Last night I googled *gareth edwards diabetes* to see what else was on the Web, and spotted not just a link to the BBC's story, but a facility to leave a comment. With my thoughts now hardening on Gareth's story, I immediately availed myself of that opportunity to say what I really think.  What you see above is a cropped image capture! The key words (final sentence) are  "He is now being presented as a medical miracle. NHS cockup more likely!"

It'll be interesting to see whether or not  this facility gives added audibility to one lone voice - moi- crying in that wilderness we call the blogosphere...

Scroll back 3 posts to see my own initial "take" on the Gareth Robert's story. Alternatively, click here.

One Diabetic: Diabetes and The Luckiest Man Alive!

One Diabetic: Diabetes and The Luckiest Man Alive!

"Am not sure how these links work, so I'll just insert the URL of my own post, on which I posted earlier today on the subject of Gareth Roberts. Medical miracle? NHS cockup more likely, if you ask me!"
Sciencebod

Confusing message? You betcha.  No, this IS NOT my main post on Gareth Roberts of diabetes fame. That's now two before this one.

So how on earth  did this one get here? Well, it's like this.

I had googled *gareth roberts diabetes* and found the link to the BBC's story. I then spotted a facility  I hadn't really noticed before, namely the ability to attach a comment to a Google entry, which I did so, asking  whether Gareth's liberation from daily insulin injections was really a medical miracle, or whether it was an NHS cockup. It'll be interestig to see if that added note  "makes waves" or not.

I then spotted another link lower down to the site of another diabetes patient, a genuine Type 1 patient this time,  and tried to leave a comment.

But  the "Leave a comment tab" was totally dead - why for heaven's sake?  Does he not want comments?  But there was a facility to link to one's own blog, and this new post  is the result. In other words, this post was generated completely automatically - by a robot-  without my being aware it would appear!  It's not what I'd intended, and I'm not over-enamoured with the result:  it's probably not really clear to you the reader how it came to be here, and could be confusing if you were looking for my main post.  But it may have its uses in future, now I now how it operates.

This blog-linking  facility is way of creating a shop window for someone else's post, which in this instance is the one at the top "One diabetic..." etc. But it's a tool I shall use with caution in future, since it has the potential to create confusion.

British plan to tackle asteroids

 One of these could really spoil your day

Have you seen that article on the BBC's website: "British plan to tackle asteroids"?

First, I have a confession to make. I know little or nothing about the detailed science - all I can offer is my gut feeling.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading the excellent Bill Bryson book : A Short History of Nearly Everything. He devoted a couple of pages to the threat from asteroids. It did not make for easy reading. It's reckoned that a relatively small asteroid, eg a kilometre or two in width - would be sufficient to extinguish life - or at any rate- most life  (certainly ourselves)  on Earth. What's more, its approach speed is so great that we would probably have only minutes - or seconds warning - of its approach.

So when the BBC article says that the threatening asteroid would have to be detected 15 years, no less, before its ETA,  time  in which for us Earthlings to mount our defences and  launch a so-called "tractor",  then it hardly inspires confidence.

But there's worse to come, at least where the science is concerned. The article says a space craft would be sent up that would park itself alongside  the asteroid.  It's mere presence would gradually make the asteroid veer off course due to the small amount of gravitational attraction between craft and asteroid.

Hold on a minute. The asteroid is vastly bigger than the craft.  The asteroid will pull the craft towards it with far greater force than vice-versa. The only way a small craft can act as a gravitational magnet would be if it had a propulsion unit that kept it at a constant distance, fighting the gravitational force. But that would surely require an input of energy - for 15 years or more. Is that why the article threw in a brief mention of solar power? Well, I say - that's one super Duracell battery.

I may be completely wrong, but my initial reactions are that this scheme is hare-brained - or maybe there's a lot more untried technology involved than the authors - or the BBC journalists-  are letting on. The BBC, to its credit,  inserts a little caveat - "No prototype have as yet been tested".   Pie in the sky?  Sci-fi hardware in outer space?

Tell me: are there any other kindred spirits out there who share my profound scepticism with what looks at first sight like silly season gimcrack "science".