For the first time in Months, I am blogging from a desk at work. I have returned from maternity leave, and have spent the morning re-arranging the objects on my desk and trying to familiarise myself with the manuscripts that have been assigned to me in the Manuscript Tracking System.

A few things have changed since I left, one of which is that we now have a presence on twitter (NatureProtocols). I have not really played with twitter much for myself (BronwenAnn), but am going to spend a little while experimenting with the functionality and trying to work out how it fits into my life (and my work!).

Katie has just shown me how to use bit.ly to make short urls. I think that this is rather neat. Here is my shorter url for Work Blog:
http://bit.ly/workblog

The excellent post on Noah Gray’s blog entitled The breast feeding scapegoat is timely as this week (starting today) is Breastfeeding Awareness Week in the UK. In the comments there is a lively discussion on whether or not there should be private places available for women to do it; and some exclamations on how many women in science return to work very soon after having their babies.

My experience of breastfeeding has been very positive. My daughter was delivered prematurely and for the first few days was fed solely via a nose-tube. I was praised for every millilitre of milk that I expressed to add to the formula until I was able to produce enough to feed her; and was given a lot of encouragement and advice both for the expressing and when I started trying to feed her myself. My personal motivation was two-fold: I needed to have a role while my baby was surrounded by competent medical staff and machines, and I wanted to exploit every opportunity to have physical contact with her. I am ever so grateful to the other mothers and nursing staff at St Peter’s hospital as it would have been a lot more difficult to persevere without their support. Bliss, a charity for special baby care, has prepared a really good leaflet on breastfeeding the premature baby which can be accessed from this page.

Unfortunately, though, the stress related to the whole NICU experience can make it so that it is difficult to keep up with expressing and it may be that the mother’s body is unable to produce milk at all. Like many other neonatal units, St Peter’s hospital has a milk bank for donated milk. For information about donating breast milk the United Kingdom Association for Milk Banking might be a good place to start. To my knowledge, the main advantage of breastmilk in this context is that it is easier to digest, and the premature baby will be able to tolerate larger volumes of it.

Woking is a very civilised town with many of the restaurants and coffee shops having signs saying: Breastfeeding Welcome Here, though for some reason I prefer to either have privacy or a lot of open space (if you have ever been with someone who whistles in a lift you probably know how I feel with respect to the appropriateness of the behaviour – though of course you may not agree that they are analogous…). The local Boots and the main public toilets have separate rooms for breastfeeding and changing babies, and I have made frequent use of these. The absolute best for me, though, is to do all of the play-with and care-for my baby in the shade of a leafy tree on a sunny day.

Having bought a little tree book (as well as a little wild flower book) I am starting to expand my knowledge of UK plants. The first day was spent going from one horse chestnut to the next, but now there are a few more that I have added: e.g. red oak, London plane, silver birch and sycamore.

A plant though, that I recognised along the side of the canal was in neither of these books being neither a tree nor a wild-flower-type plant. When I say recognise, I mean: “That looks really familiar, I wonder if it is a…”

By choosing the family “Equisataceae” and selecting England on the Botanical Society of the British Isles questionaire, I was able to find out which species it was, namely: Equisetum fluviatile

What seems like a very long time ago, I did an MSc in Natural Product Chemistry which dragged out over 2 years, because I kept not being able to isolate anything interesting (and I got sidetracked into doing a lot of practical demonstrations and piano teaching). One of the plants that I tried to isolate something interesting from was one of the horsetail species. I ended up getting some quite cool SEMicrographs with the distribution of silicon in the stem after having a bit of trouble with goopy extracts containing rather a lot of silicic acid.

Every day I walk around the park with Hap in a pram. She is very excited by all the leaves and flowers so I walk rapidly between trees and then very slowly while under them. Usually we watch in silence, but sometimes it occurs to me to say something about… whatever it is we are looking at. And I am starting to get a little bit tired of not knowing the names of the trees.

I thought that I would try to do something about this by searching on the web. The first website that looked promising was:

British Wild Flowers

The problem here is that it gives (very long) alphabetical lists of flowers, trees and shrubs, brambles, or Grasses, Sedges, Rushes and Ferns, and you would have to wade through it trying to find a match with the photograph that you took.

The next website looked even better:

Find Wild Flowers

It has a neat questionaire that you fill in with your observations regarding, for example, the colour of the flowers and the arrangement of the leaves. It even has a helpful glossary. My problem is that when I submit my observations for this plant:

I get:

Prunus avium

Which doesn’t seem to be right… I thought that this one was Prunus avium…

Oh dear. I suppose I will have to go back to saying: “What a nice tree. What beautiful flowers. Look at how the wind makes the leaves wiggle. Higgle piggle wiggle.” and then something about photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Bththth.

As many of you know, Michael Crichton died on the 4th of November. I obviously did not know him personally and know very little about him as well, though I would like to write a short remembrance of the intersections that his work has had with my life.

At the time-and-place that I went to University, there were three authors’ books that you needed to be able to say seemingly-clever things about in order to be an accepted part of the geeky-intellectually-arrogant science in-group. These were: Tolkein, Douglas Adams and Michael Crichton. I remember being ignored for an afternoon after admitting that I preferred “The Hobbit” to “The Lord of the Rings” – that kind of statement was Not Clever for all sorts of reasons and perhaps I should not even write it in a blogpost in the here-and-now.

“Jurassic Park” was the first Crichton book that I read, and I absolutely loved it! Chaos theory was new to me, and the idea of dinosaurs running about was pleasing in a childishly bloodthirsty sort of way. Our group discussed whether it was possible to re-create pre-historic organisms for hours, but given that this was 1992-1994 and I was the only one that had even a peripheral connection with biology, these were not particulary informed or otherwise meaningful. It is quite cool that another news story this week was about cloning mice from frozen material raising questions about the possibilities of bringing back woolly mammoths (which are almost as scary as dinosaurs!).

I watched the movie of The Andromeda Strain and thought it was excellent, but did not connect Crichton with it. I have since read “Congo” with its transcriptions of super-cool text-like electronic communication and “A Case of Need” where I found out from the back-cover that Crichton had funded his medical studies by writing (what I would term) a trashy novel once a year during his holidays.

I found this humbling.

Regardless of what you think of these novels, or his later work for that matter, he was certainly one of those super-humans: a class of achiever that make the rest of us look like we aren’t doing very much with our time.

More recently – and bear in mind that I have not owned a tv for the last 10 years – I took out the first series of ER from the local blockbuster (the chap at the counter said that it was very good, and we had chatted enough over previous months for me to trust his judgment) and watched it for the first time. I was completely sucked in, and swallowed it pretty much in one sitting. The counter-chap did not say anything when I returned it and took out the second series, but remarked when I came for the third one: “Now you are just hiring it to watch (he said something different, but I cannot actually remember which verb he thought most appropriate for a woman admiring an attractive man) George Clooney.” Which was true. And I stopped there.

……………………..
Here are few links relevant to this post:

Ian Brooks on our Nature Network has written a post approaching this subject from the phrases used in obituaries. There are some very interesting points in the comments.

The official Michael Crichton website gives a lot more information regarding his output as a whole. He wrote many other books and was involved in many films that I am unlikely to ever watch or read.

The news story about cloning from frozen mice

And finally, something from xkcd:

Alain and I are pleased to let you know that Hap is finally home!

She was delivered by C-section on the 25th of September at 13:31 and weighed 1.49 kg. Her name is Sarah, though we still call her Hap.

Here is a photograph of her about an hour later, before all the tubes and wires were attached.

She spent the next 3 weeks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at St Peter’s Hospital, and came home yesterday afternoon. Here is a photograph of her sleeping peacefully in her Moses basket this morning.

Because Nature Network is supposed to be a scientific place, let me include a graph!

Talk about Science Blogging 2008: London without repitition, hesitation or deviation for 60 seconds starting now!

Arriving late at the Royal Institution I was greeted by Joanna and a t-shirt with a cool logo. The Faraday lecture was packed and luckily I entered just before Ben Goldacre was about to speak (so hopefully did not miss very much). He said, inter alia, that science journalism needed more editors and praised Radio 4 for having scientists speaking about their findings rather than other people “interpreting them”.

From advice about linking correctly using DOIs, WebCite and InChi to a challenge to encourage senior scientists to start a blog, it was a stimulating day.

In the breaks it was a pleasure to see and meet on-line celebraties and electronic friends from the blogosphere and Second Life.

Whether blogging to communicate findings below the lowest publishable unit, fight the good fight, examine our navels, or express half-baked ideas it seems that we are all famous for 15 people or was it fifteen… oh bugger

My new favourite thing to eat is:

Marks and Spencer Fresh Fruit Jelly: Calamansi & orange flavoured jelly with fresh grapes, orange and pineapple

The ingredients are:
water (well duh)
grapes
orange
sugar
pineapple
gelling agent: carrageenan (sulphated polysaccharide from seeweed)
E508 (KCl)
Locust bean gum (a branched polysac of mannose and galactose from the Carob tree)
citric acid
E331 (one or all of the three possible sodium citrates)
“natural flavourings”
mixed carotenes
anthocyanins (from carrots)

There are two comments to make about this ingredient list:
1. Jelly can be any substance that is liquid at one temperature (or pressure) and a gel at a different one – if you care what it is made from you need to look at the ingredient list. For some reason I thought that the food product was by definition something that contained gelatin.
2. E numbers sometimes represent pretty benign compounds.

It has also made me think that it would be possible to “engineer” jelly so that it had the optimal transition temperature. Marks and Spencer’s jelly rests in the fridge (at the shop) and seems to survive the trip home. Hartley’s makes a pot of jelly that rests on the store shelf, and of course there are jelly based sweets that hold their shape for a limited period in the mouth.

And it reminded me of our lectures on differential scanning calorimetry where we discussed at length the analysis of chocolate and lipstick: two other common commodities where the melting/transition temperature is critical to the performance of the product. Chocolate is interesting in that it has a second transition at lower temperature which is irreversible making it so that it doesn’t taste the same after it has been in the fridge. I suppose that in really cold countries some trick has to be done to lower the temperature of this transition… or maybe the chocolate always tastes weird in these places…

Dear Mom,

It seems that my pregnancy can be divided into the foods that were craved (weeks numbers are difficult to keep track of when your mind is turning to candyfloss you are very busy doing other very important things). After a period of wanting lamb-chops and oranges (and not terribly much else), I have now moved onto jelly-with-fruit and buttered-toast-with-marmite (and I don’t even like Marmite).

The lamb-chops and oranges kind’ve makes sense: the blood volume is increasing so you need iron, and you need vitamin C to absorb the iron.

But why jelly?

We could make up stuff about protein, but according to Wikipedia ‘gelatin is one of the few foods that cause a net loss of protein if eaten exclusively’.

Perhaps you have some thoughts, or maybe it is just one of those things.

Yours etc.,

Bronwen

Hello All,

Perhaps you, or someone you know, would like to come and work at Nature Protocols as an Assistant Editor from October to December 2008.

Commissioning and editing protocols is a lot of fun, and while you will not have the benefit of my scintillating company, Kath, Dot, Hannah and Sam are really nice people to work with.

The advert uses phrases like “be familiar with a broad range of laboratory techniques” and “ideal opportunity for someone considering a career move
from research to publishing”.

The advert

The advert now posted on NatureJobs