Two hours before the original almost original moonwalker took to the stage, the queue was already snaking round the Royal Festival Hall. Not necessarily to watch the sell-out talk, or to meet the astronaut himself, but merely to buy a pre-signed copy of his autobiography Magnificent Desolation. Such is the pulling power of the second man on the moon.

Personally, I can’t be bothered to read it. The story of the first moon landing has been told so many times that another read-through, even from someone who was there, would seem tedious. Any fresh nuggets or insights worth knowing about will make it onto blogs and Twitter for sure.

Watching Buzz live at the Royal Festival Hall, though, is another matter. For a space nut like me it was almost a religious experience to be in the presence of such a person, and I wasn’t alone in that feeling. As he walked on stage the crowd of several thousand gave a sustained round of applause, with many people offering a standing ovation. And that was before he’d even spoken.

His talk was brief. A well-rehearsed potted version of his autobiography touched on early influences (including his aviation pioneer father), his time in the air force and at MIT taking a doctorate, his battle with alcoholism and, of course, his trip to the moon. There were few surprises. As always with these things, the most interesting section was the Q&A, based on questions submitted by the audience before the event. Host Andrew Smith (author of the excellent Moondust) pitched questions from the young and old. Would Buzz go back? No. Where else should we explore? Mars. Was he ever nervous? No, what would be the point? OK, on refllection, these weren’t too insightful either. If only they’d chosen my twin flatulance-related questions: ‘What did Neil’s farts smell like’? and ‘If you fart in a space suit, how long does it linger?’.

So, few real surprises, but how glorious to watch someone whose name will still be remembered long after that recently deceased ‘moonwalker’ falls into obscurity. Or will it? I’ve been excitedly talking about this event ever since I booked my ticket. More than once, a friend has commented “Buzz Aldrin? Don’t know him, but cool name.” How sad is that?

Mention greenery in central London and you’re probably envisaging Hyde Park or Hampstead Heath. But now scientists at Imperial College have created a futuristic £1 million rooftop ‘greenhouse’ on the top of a five-storey building on their South Kensington Campus.

The new GroDome, as it’s affectionately known, will allow scientists to grow large quantities of plants for a wide range of experiments. The greenhouse may hold the key to the future developments of biofuels or sequencing the tomato genome.

Unripe Cherry Tomatoes. Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.

With over 200 square metres of temperature and light controlled growing space for a variety of plant species, the GroDome is the only rooftop facility of its kind in London.

Since it’s opening in April earlier this year, three projects have already taken root in the GroDome:

1. Research into extracting sugars for biofuels from the cell walls of willow trees.

2. Understanding tomato stress resistance and sequencing the tomato genome. The long term aim being to produce crops that are better able to survive in today’s changing environment.

3. Studying how aphids, a serious pest, interact with plants, in the hope to breed resistance mechanisms into plants.

The GroDome is only part of a development project at Imperial’s South Kensington Campus. In order to help support and develop plant science research, a number of laboratories have also been refurbished and specialist controlled environment plant growth rooms installed.

We’ve now got ourselves a Twitter feed. Finally. We’ll be tweeting daily on all things to do with science in London, from news and events to useful links and historical tidbits. You can also follow the New York feed here and Boston here. Tweet tweet.

I recently got a behind-the-scenes tour of the City of London Cemetery and crematorium. Don’t ask why. It’s the sort of thing I do. The cemetery, out near Wanstead, is England’s largest and stretches over 200 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds. This sprawling terrain has relatively few famous residents. Footballer Bobby Moore and a pair of Ripper victims are probably the most notable. But I was very surprised to learn that the remains of eminent scientist and architect Robert Hooke are also supposedly buried here. Surprised because Hooke died in 1703, some 150 years before the cemetery opened.

Turns out that Hooke was originally laid to rest in St Helen’s Bishopsgate, a rare Medieval survival in the City, and now best known for its jarring juxtaposition to the Gherkin. Many members of the Royal Society came to this place on 6 March 1703 to see Hooke ‘decently and handsomely interred’. And there he remained getting progressively less decent and handsome as the years wore on.

In 1891, the floor of the church was lifted as a prelude to relaying the nave pavement. A grim discovery was made, as described by the local Rector:

“A horrible view…of loose, confused and intermingled bones with which the ground was filled to several feet in depth…effluvia from the decaying remains below was free to rise from the floor of the church and pollute the air.” The grisly necrocopia of bone, rags and coffin wood was such a jumble that only ten bodies could be reliably identified. Hooke was not among them.

The entire gruesome payload was carted off to the City of London Cemetery and interred in a mass grave beside a similar import of bones from St Martin Outwich. The spot is marked by the Gothic memorial shown at top. Here’s a close-up of the inscription.

It is assumed that Hooke’s remains were among those transported, but this cannot be unequivocally proved. He may even be partly buried in Wanstead and partly in Bishopsgate, a fitting end to a man who covered so many fields. Whether or not he’s interred in the City of London Cemetery, the place is worth a visit for its elegant landscaping and sculpture. The perfect opportunity arises on 19 July, when the cemetery holds its first Open Day for several years. And don’t miss the crematorium tour if you’ve always wanted to handle a bucket of used hip replacements.

Previous installments of the Scientific Tourist in London.

Today sees the start of the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2009 in London, which sees over 20 diverse exhibits on display until Saturday 4th July. The event offers the chance for non-specialists to observe first-hand some of the creative ideas of the 21st Century and engage with their creators.

The Royal Society’s event is truly trying to engage science and the public – offering the two cultures (as first referred to be C.P. Snow), the opportunity to communicate to, and with, each other. The exhibition is all about the public contecting with scientists – asking them about the work and offering their opinions. There is a diverse collection of interactive exhibits – from understanding why fluorescent fish can help humans, to how a chewing robot can help develop the future of dental technology. There is also a selection of art, history of science exhibits, lunchtime talks, an interactive presentation and, on Saturday, a family workshop.

My own Imperial College London have four very different displays at the Summer Science Exhibition. One of them focuses on how what happens in the womb can have a life-long effect. A group of researchers from the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Imperial College have constructed an exhibit featuring a game for visitors to play that shows how a mother’s stress can increase the heart rate of her unborn baby. The researchers behind this exhibit hope that it will raise families’ awareness of the effect on stress on every single member of their household, including those currently unborn. They believe that by reducing stress during pregnancy, thousands of children could be prevented from developing emotional and behavioural problems, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

A human foetus. Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Their exhibit also features a real placenta, encased safely in plastic, which visitors will be allowed to touch. The significance of this display is that when pregnant women become stressed, the placenta becomes less protective and the mother’s stress hormone cortisol can have unwanted effects on the foetus.

One of the other Imperial College exhibits is sure to catch the attention of visitors, with a James Bond-esque title: “Quantum of Sol”. Imperial Scientists from the Department of Physics in conjunction with the Grantham Institute of Climate Change have created a new generation of ‘nano-structured’ millimetre-sized solar cells that could convert the sun’s energy to electricity more efficiently than current technology.

The solar cells, which are custom-built on a scale 1000 times smaller than the size of a human hair, capture more solar energy than existing silicon solar panels. With different layers of materials, they are able to individually target different colours of sunlight, leading to greater efficiency. The lead researcher, Dr Ned Ekins-Daukes, believes that within a decade his technology will be capable of achieving 50% efficiency – a vast improvement on the current solar panels which can only manage between 12 and 20 percent.

Visitors interested in this exhibit, will be able to temporarily become solar power engineers during their visit. Experimenting with mirrors and lenses, they can focus a beam of light onto a miniature solar cell, in a scaled-down representation of desert solar power technology, known as a ‘concentrator power system’ to learn how much electrical power can be generated from the sun.

With a whole host of other exhibits touching on the fields of biotechnology, space exploration and environmental studies amongst other topics, the Royal Society Summer Science Event 2009 is sure to inspire both working scientists and the general public alike.

For information on visiting the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2009, see the Royal Society’s website.

Monday
Inside Nature’s Giants (C4, 21.00-22.00) The anatomy of an elephant is revealed while Richard Dawkins looks on.
Frontiers (Radio 4, 21.00-21.30) An update on stem-cell technology.

Wednesday
NASA – Triumph and Tragedy (BBC2, 21.00-22.00) The ‘tragedy’ part of this astronautical moiety looks at the three disasters and one near-disaster the space agency has overcome.

Thursday
Material World (Radio 4, 16.30-17.00)
The Sky at Night (BBC4, 20.30-21.00) A guide to studying the surface of the moon.
Leading Edge (Radio 4, 21.00-21.30) Efforts to improve the ‘public understanding of science’.

Saturday
Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery (BBC2, 21.30-22.30) The history of heart surgery.

Sunday
Being Neil Armstrong (BBC4, 21.00-22.00) Andrew Smith, author of the beautiful book Moondust, goes in search of that most reclusive of moonwalkers.
Man on the Moon (BBC4, 22.00-23.45) Perhaps Smith (see above) should have waited an hour, as Neil Armstrong introduces this movie-length documentary about man’s greatest adventure.

Greetings, my friends.

Among the many technological wonders that separate your era from mine, one of the most remarkable, and yet least remarked-upon, is the ready provision—at least in the more developed nations—of clean drinking water. In my day, such provision was in its infancy. A handful of waterworks companies existed, which supplied water to industrial premises, and to a small number of domestic customers. The City and west end of London, for example, was supplied by the Chelsea Waterworks Company, which drew tidal water from the Thames: its principal reservoirs lay at Pimlico, on a site now occupied, I understand, by Victoria railway station. The water itself was unfiltered, and not infrequently offensive and foul to the taste. The greater part of the population, the middling sort and the poor, had little recourse even to provision of this kind, and had perforce to depend on the still less satisfactory facilities of public conduits and pumps, the services of water-carriers, or the river itself. Waterborne diseases, such as dysentery and cholera morbus, were rife. How this contrasts with the London of your day, in which clean, potable water is piped at a modest cost to every home.

All of which makes it the more worthy of comment that large numbers of people in your society choose not to avail themselves of this provision, but to purchase their drinking water in bottles from shops, at no little pecuniary expense, and at no little practical inconvenience. I speak here merely of the immediate expense and inconvenience to themselves: still greater is the cost to what you would call the environment, in terms of the manufacture and subsequent disposal of millions of plastic or glass bottles, and the carriage of the bottled water hundreds, or even thousands, of miles from its source to the place of sale.

There is a felicific calculus to be undertaken here, and it is not a complex one: the greatest happiness of the greatest number would undoubtedly be most readily achieved by the widespread consumption of tap water.

Why, then, should so many continue to buy their drinking water in bottles? It is because they have been led to believe that bottled water is purer in content and more beneficial to health and wellbeing than tap water. And which esteemed scientific and medical authorities have apprised them of this supposed fact? Why, none other than those merchants who are seeking to sell them the water in bottles.

A host of scientific and consumer reports have disputed this fiction. The Drinking Water Inspectorate conducts routine examinations of tap water in the United Kingdom, and routinely finds that the vast majority of public supplies meet their exacting standards of purity. A Minister of the Crown has declared that the amount of money spent on spent on mineral water “borders on being morally unacceptable”. In the American United States, public campaigns such as those of Corporate Accountability International and Bottled Water Blues press the arguments for drinking tap water. Yet, despite a modest reduction brought about by the current economic crisis, bottled water continues to be produced, purchased and consumed in scarcely imaginable quantities.

The question is one of competing authorities. There is, of course, no fallacy in making reference to the opinion of this or that professional person in any case in which the forming a correct judgment is beyond one’s immediate competence. Frequently, in matters touching medical science, chemistry, astronomy, the mechanical arts, &c, no other course could be pursued. However, in such a case as the present, the fallacy is to believe that the interest of the merchants of bottled water is the same with one’s own; when in fact it is clear that the declared opinions of these merchants are in a peculiar degree liable to be tinged with falsity by the action of sinister interest. The truth is that the purveyors of falsity are listened to because they shout the most vociferously and the most constantly; and the fact that their mental poison is so fulsomely received can be ascribed only to intellectual weakness on the part of the promiscuous multitude.

It seems hardly a coincidence that the name of the most popular brand of bottled water, spelled in reverse, reads ‘naïve’. I trust that none of my readers can be characterised under such a head.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant,
J.B.

Just a reminder that a few of us are meeting for a wee tipple next week. The June Nature Network London drinks meetup takes place on Tuesday 30 June onboard the PS Tattershall Castle. It’s a floating pub, commanding spectacular views of the London Eye and South Bank. We’ll be out on deck somewhere from 6.30, hopefully soaking up the early evening rays. If you’d like to come along, either drop me an email or leave a comment here, and I’ll email you my phone number in case you can’t find us. Everyone welcome.

A bumper week of science on the tellybox, and a star turn from Jenny Rohn on Wednesday.

Monday
Frontiers (Radio 4, 21.00-21.30) Why do humans, unlike other primates, have such a long childhood?
Strange Encounters (Radio 3, 23.00-23.30) Week-long series considering ground-breaking experiments as related through works of literature. Tonight, biologist Matthew Cobb on the quest for spontaneously-generated life. Check out who’s on on Wednesday.

Tuesday
The Reith Lectures: Genetics and Morality (Radio 4, 09:00-09.45) Professor Michael Sandel discusses his views on how we should use new genetic technology for the benefits of society.
A Good Read (Radio 4, 16.30-17.00) Kate Mosse talks to scientists Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Vivienne Parry.
Strange Encounters (Radio 3, 23.00-23.30) Astronomer Stuart Clark on the Great Solar Storm of 1859.
The Big Bang Theory (C4, 23.15-23.40) The science-based sitcom’s second series concludes as the gang prepare to visit the North Pole.

Wednesday
I Was Douglas Adams’ Flatmate (Radio 4, 18.30-19.00) Of course I wasn’t, but here’s a man who was.
The Greening of the Deserts (Radio 4, 21.00-21.30) A look at how global warming will make the world’s barren places more verdant.
NASA – Triumph and Tragedy (BBC2, 21.00-22.00) Four decades next month since that one small step. This documentary sounds like a run-of-the mill journey through the NASA archives, but when does footage of rockets and space ships ever get dull?
James May’s 20th Century (BBC2, 22.00-22.30) More space-based hi-jinx from May, including a road trip in a lunar rover and the revelation that the race to the moon began with a rocket attack on Chiswick. Who knew? Me, actually.
Strange Encounters (Radio 3, 23.00-23.30) Our very own Jenny Rohn discusses Peyton Rous, who discovered that viruses can cause tumours.

Thursday
Material World (Radio 4, 16.30-17.00)
Leading Edge (Radio 4, 21.00-21.30) Astronomer Royal Lord Rees gets interviewed about moon landings and other space things.
Strange Encounters (Radio 3, 23.00-23.30) Engineer Basil Mahon describes Hertz.

Friday
Strange Encounters (Radio 3, 23.00-23.30) Virologist John Oxford on Spanish Flu.

Saturday
Saturday Play: Journey Into Space (Radio 4, 14.30-15.30) Classic 50’s sci-fi gets a topical re-airing.
Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery (BBC2, 21.40-22.40) The second part, looking at the history of hear surgery.

Sunday
File on Four (Radio 4, 17.40-17.54) The causes of swine flu.
James May on the Moon (BBC2, 21.00-22.00) Not literally, of course. This is the first in an anticipated meteor storm of shows about space, with the upcoming 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.
James May at the Edge of Space (BBC4, 22.00-22.30) And, straight away, here’s the second in that predicted meteor storm.
The Moon (BBC4, 22.30-23.00) And the third.
The Sky at Night (BBC4, 23.00-01.00) BBC4, you are really spoiling us with all this moon coverage.

It seemed almost ironic that in an event aiming to highlight the issues surrounding the current loss of biodiversity, the range of speakers and topics could not have been more diverse.

The day, which was organised by Conservation Today, was loosely divided into three sections. The first, “The Necessities of Conservation” saw Dr Sam Turvey and Dr Emily Nicholson address some of the problems facing conservationists; from poor communication between governments and scientists to blatant refusal to invest in recovery programmes. Writer Caspar Henderson provided a more philosophical view on these issues, and his quote from Kafka seemed particularly poignant at this time where extinction rates are 100-1000 times the usual background levels: “There is hope, but not for you.”

The second session provided something entirely different, exploring the idea of “Biodiversity and the Imagination”. Charles Darwin’s great-great-Granddaughter Ruth Padel started proceedings with several absorbing readings from her book ‘Tigers in Red Weather’. Dr Jamie Lorimer then gave a geographers point of view on the ideas of ‘natures vs. Nature’; how we view these, and the nature of the binary dualism that seems to separate society and people from nature and animals. The audience was then asked “Would you like an apple?” by Melanie Challenger, who went on to present an interesting dichotomy of how we are losing language diversity much in the same way that species are being lost.

“Biodiversity Futures” was the title of the final session, although the speakers did stray from the brief somewhat! Presenter and professor, Armand Leroi, chose to ask the audience for advice, having been giving almost free reign by BBC4 to make a television programme on conservation. He was followed by Professor John Fa who presented an illuminating account of the bushmeat trade in the Congo basin. He talked about the research done by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, and the many problems they face along the way. Finally, Steve Roest, the Director of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, used a film and passionate speech to remind us that we also need to be aware of the plight of the Oceans, and the numerous illegal activities such as dumping of waste and illegal fishing which go on in them. As he rightly pointed out, “The Ocean is our larder, but it’s also our toilet”, something which is especially important to remember given that current estimates put the extinction of commercial fishing at sometime before 2048.

At the end of each session there was a debate between members of the panel and audience, and this was the true strength of the event. Not only were members of the public able to ask questions and clarify the (sometimes science-heavy) issues, the panellists also questioned each other and discussed issues such as whether we can really compare the decline of language with the mass extinction of living species.

The event took place in an art gallery within the eco-friendly BASH HQ, and also featured a collection of art projects, supported by the Royal Society of Arts. These innovative pieces aimed to illustrate the many things we are currently doing which damage the Earth, and what we could be doing to protect it. One piece featured a shower curtain which physically pushes you out of the shower using inflatable spikes, after you’ve had your designated four minutes showering time. However, my favourite piece was a collection of hundreds of pieces of litter, all collected from Britain’s beaches, and being sold as “100 % unique” souvenir gifts.

Founder of Conservation Today, Will Pearse, said he felt the event was a “huge success”, allowing a variety of people to engage and debate the issues of conservation. This will hopefully be the first of many events organised by the group, but in the meantime, you can go to their website to read a range of blogs and news stories covering global wildlife conservation and environmental topics.