Oh poo! My neglected corner of cyberspace. Had sort of forgotten all about it until I read the e-mail regarding Science Online London (which was sandwiched between a whole load of friend requests from MySpace; curious, I don’t have an account do I? – not that I remember anyway). Anyway, for those thinking of attending the event at the Royal Institution you may be interested in this review of the restaurant (from this weekend’s Guardian). I pass it on without comment except to say that I was in tears when I read it.

See how you give things away in a blog? – I’m clearly forgetful and I’m a Guardian reader…

I had this great idea (OK, I thought it was a great idea) to try and write a blog entry using all 200 of the “words” that have been banned by the Local Government Association. The thing that caught my attention between giggling and retching was that “quantum” is to be outlawed, so straight away I could see something forming around the subject of quantum mechanics. Having eagerly printed out the list and spent time subsequently studying it, I’ve given up on the idea. There are a number of reasons, not least of all because it would be a really tedious exercise to write and should anyone ever read it (not too much danger of that) they might actually die. Also, there were some acronyms in the list and I’ve actually no idea what they stand for (ergo, not much point in using these in public communications!). If in fact they are not actually acronyms but words then I imagine that “LAAs”, for instance, are what you say to yourself (loudly) when someone is mindlessly spouting LGA-speak.

There are some real shockers in the list, but/and depressingly, several that are widely used within academia (henceforth I will carry the list with me at all times, always ready for a spot of real-time editorial work). Some of the alternatives are quite amusing (note that these are not “suggested alternatives”; no, these are the alternatives). “Cautiously welcome” becomes “devil in the detail” – eh? “Empowerment” is now “people power” – yay! right on! “Lowlights” = “worst bits”. Some are confusing – “holistic” is to become “in the round” (now, I understand holistic, but what on Earth does “in the round” mean?). But some are to be applauded. That favourite in universities right now, “resource allocation” has to be replaced by “money going to the right place” (yes, I think I can accept that one).

Some “words” have just been banned altogether and are basically not to be used at all (so whatever meanings they might once have had are to be expunged from the English language). For instance, “downstream”, “governance”, “lever”, “paradigm” (poo, no more paradigm shifts) and that well-known one (what I would think of as a phrase, rather than a word) PREDICTORS OF BEACONICITY (yer what? no, I’ve no idea what this is supposed to mean; mind you, great name for a thrash metal band – note to self).

Finally, I note that “coterminous” is to become “all singing from the same hymn sheet”. I’ve never had cause to use coterminous at any point in my life (although all those years spent studying Latin have clearly not been wasted since I know what it means without having to look it up), but the hymn sheet thing, surely that’s not good in diversity terms? It might have worked quite well in the days when we were a Christian country, but do Muslims sing hymns? (it’s a genuine question) – I certainly don’t, and besides, is its use offensive to those that do? I need to think outside the box on this one, er, except this is no longer allowed.

(lol, coterminosity wasn’t in the spell-checker).

I have recently been working through my organisation’s new VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and trying to understand how I can use this pedagogic tool in my teaching activities. This is a pretty important development for us (and dare I say it, not just “us” who work here, but “us” in the sense that this is surely the way all education will be delivered in the future). I’ll not say any more about it here except to say that, notwithstanding the fact that some are bound to like it whilst some won’t, I’m fairly sure that eventually we’ll all wonder how we ever existed without such things. At the same time I’m reading We-Think by Charles Leadbeater which is all about the new opportunities that present themselves with a globally internet-connected community all working together selflessly to solve problems and develop content (Wikipedia being an example of what can be achieved; that will be seen as either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective). As an aside, note that I am reading the paperback book version (haha, what a luddite) because I don’t like getting sun cream on my laptop and my eyes aren’t good enough to read from a post-it sized screen. Anyway, it’s all delightfully optimistic and I want to believe it. So this, along with the potential of a fully functioning VLE has got me thinking about how we in the scientific research community, are going to use the power of we-think, beyond mere micro-blogging, rate my professors and shite gifts for academics (or the new variant that I want to introduce, gifts for shite academics).

First of all there’s blogs. Ah yes, I imagine a world in the future when there are 9 billion active blogs. That’s a lot of procrastination. So, here’s a typical entry for a day in the life of a scientist. Late for work on account of the wrong kind of rain. Spent the morning cleaning glassware and making up solutions before attending to a pile of risk assessments and COSHH forms. After a woeful lunch in the canteen tried to make headway with the 261 unread e-mails. Returned to the lab to find that the nitrogen gas supply had run out (again!) and any vestige of a research student was completely absent, so had to sort it out on my own (again!). Afternoon spent running standards. There’s something not quite right with the instrument; can’t put my finger on it. etc. etc. You get the picture. A large part of scientific endeavor is pretty tedious and not without personal sacrifice (see Darwin, C. for instance). We do it because we are driven to do it, and the fact that we don’t look good in a suit and tie.

Now, in our spare time, we might want to speculate on a few “big ideas” (most enjoyably something that is outside the field of our own specialisation) but anything of any consequence we’re going to keep to ourselves because (a) we’re bound by institutional/funding IPR restrictions and (b) we need the publications, otherwise no job, promotion, salary increment etc. I can see, however, instances where we-think works (and works well); for instance, images form NASA space missions being put directly onto the web (even principal investigators have to retrieve them from there, i.e. at the same time as anyone else). All and sundry can then download the images and with the empowerment of post-modern thinking, speculate on what the squiggly bits mean. But you couldn’t do this with, say, raw spectroscopic data acquired from the same mission; this arcane stuff has to be corrected, the instrument may have to be re-calibrated, there may need to be some lab tests run on the ground reference model, and so on. Without this lot, the output is just noise.

So, I’m still trying to see how this brave new world will work (for me at least, in my subject area). At the same time I think of the idealists who imagine that we somehow create a wiki on cancer-cured-here.com and then, by the magic of the internet, the cure appears. But there’s another aspect that bothers me: and that is, when the sum of all knowledge is recorded on a big server somewhere (Deep Thought, for instance) what will be the point of humans?

Fascinating day out in London last week, attending two separate events: the opening of MAGIC at Imperial College, and to hear a lecture delivered by Richard Dawkins at the Natural History Museum. The former was to celebrate the commissioning of a new suite of mass spectrometers and associated clean laboratories. The scientists who get to work the MAGIC (MAss spectrometry and isotope Geochemistry at Imperial College) are interested in using high-precision isotope ratio measurements to investigate all kinds of phenomena in the natural world, such as ocean circulation, environmental pollution, and the origin of planets. This is state-of-the-art stuff involving the application of specialised preparation techniques, the separation and purification of chemical species and the measurement of vanishing small quantities of materials to excruciating levels of precision. Utterly amazing.

One of the potential applications is in the area of dating particular events in geological history. So, for instance, as Alex Halliday demonstrated in one of the talks, we are able to chart the early evolution of the Solar System from its inception, and recognise events that took place only a million years apart. Don’t forget this is in a body that is about 4.6 billion years old; so, in principle, scientists are able to distinguish things that took place at 4.600 and 4.599 billion years before present. Actually it’s all even better than this – our reference point for “the start” (which is taken as the origin of refractory minerals in certain meteorites) is dated to 4,567,110,000 +/- 160,000 years ago. As you might imagine, there is considerable debate about the details! Interestingly the Moon can be dated to have formed at least 45 million years after the Solar System formed, and maybe even 100 million years after “the start”; 70 million years after that there were rocks (i.e. a crust of some sort) and water on the surface of the Earth. Perhaps it’s time to start thinking that the event which formed the Moon (a giant impact of a “Mars-sized” body with Earth) also lead to the conditions that ultimately allowed the formation of life.

After the cutting of a cake in the shape of a mass spectrometer (who says scientists don’t have fun?) it was time for a swift glass or two of wine (accompanied by an inordinate quantity of nibbles made from smoked salmon) before a dash to a reception at the Natural History Museum where there was, er, more wine and smoked salmon. Dawkins delivered the Open University Annual Lecture to an audience of enthusiasts rather than detractors. So this was full-on Darwinism, documenting the historical development of ideas that ultimately placed the significance of Homo sapiens into context (this was an opportunity to think more about the last few million years of Earth’s history as opposed to the first few). Actually his talk was not all about Darwin-ism; rather it considered the role of other players working in the field at the same time as Darwin, namely Edward Blyth, Patrick Matthew and, of course, Alfred Russel Wallace. Indeed, Jim Moore noted, during a subsequent panel discussion that the phrase “Darwin’s dangerous idea” is a bit of a misnomer since there were a number of people working in the area of evolution and natural selection. What Darwin did, which the others didn’t, was to write a best-seller (note to self).

The question and answer session for the Dawkin’s lecture was an absolute delight. A very erudite affair involving eloquent speakers (both audience and panellists), all handled in a very gentlemanly manner (you know what I mean) – one was taken back momentarily to Victorian England. Such a contrast somehow with the brashness of the modern day cosmochemists and their desire to use devices made from the shiniest of steel to torture rocks into giving up their secrets. And yet, of course, the evidence of rocks being billions of years old, and humans evolving from apes, are both anathema to some.

OK, not Jennifer Rohn (JR) the illustrious author of books, or the collection of muscle, bones and sub-cutaneous fat that constitutes but one example of Homo sapiens (lol, don’t see me getting a call to contribute to lablit any time soon), but rather JR the postage stamp-sized avatar that stares at me every time I log on to NN. At one level I could be thinking about JR in terms of “blog envy”, but at another I’m thinking about what it means to be a scientist. I am reflecting on an article in this week’s Times Higher which has some interesting things to say about scientists (e.g. for some, universities are “places where people with Asperger’s get asylum”; for others, their classes are “padded cells for obsessives”, for whom writing books stops them from “assaulting strangers and being the biggest bores that ever existed”). Let’s be honest guys we are odd. It’s why people like talking to us at cocktail parties; we are an interesting source of benign entertainment. It’s also, I think, why we enjoy each others’ company (you don’t have to justify why your clothes/hair/appearance looks shite, or why you think some miniscule element of detail is important, or why you’ve been up half the night sweating over some ostensibly inconsequential fact or other). Is it good to be a scientist or a curse?

In the old days when we used to talk about the possibility of life beyond Earth we would invariably get into a debate about the likelihood of a silicon-based variety. I think it was Carl Sagan in an “I refute it thus!”-moment who said that if a silicon giraffe had walked by the Viking Lander (on Mars) they would have got a picture of it. The bottom-line is that silicon-based life is so unlikely – why would the laws of nature have conspired to use silicon when there’s carbon? Besides in a sense, humans are silicon-based since they are composed of 0.025% Si (present, I think, in things like fingernails etc.). Also, as a society and species we are now absolutely reliant on silicon for our survival, beyond merely providing the platform on which we stand. I’m referring of course to silicon chips. I was going to write “non-biological silicon chips”, but that got me thinking, no, they are biologically produced. Part of our habitat is cyberspace – it is hard to imagine “life” now without it.

Anyway, we digress; there are lots of really creative ideas (both science-possible and science-fiction) for what forms alien life might take. It is even possible that life exists in the Sun (just think of the magnitude of the energy available). But the interesting thing is this: cosmologists tell us that 95%, or so, of all the mass-energy in the Universe is not normal (haha, what vanity to call the 5% that we’re in “normal”). Rather, it is dark (dark matter, dark energy) and we can’t see it. We just know (on the basis of scientific interpretation) it has to be there. As an aside here I note that cosmologists are sometimes referred to as being “often wrong but never in doubt”.

In other words, it seems to me, from a purely statistical perspective there has got to be a greater chance of life being in the dark bit than in the abnormal bit that we inhabit. So, if we know life is here (looks in the mirror to check) then it is almost certain to be elsewhere (but where we can’t see it). And if we can’t see it, or we don’t otherwise know how to recognise it, then perhaps it could be a whole lot closer to home than we think.

I went to the formal launch of the Institute for Origins last Friday. This is a virtual center at UCL that includes staff from a number of different departments all working together under a theme of origins – the clue is in the name. All very interesting, but the most inspirational aspect of the launch was a talk (actually, more of a speech) given by Sir Paul Nurse on the subject of “science and curiosity”. The basic premiss was that organisations, governments, funding agencies etc. need to foster blue-skies research (and research doesn’t get much more blues-skies than origins), and not to get involved with too much by way of directing operations or only supporting applied research. OK, he was quite measured and also said that not everything and anything should (or could) be funded, and that scientists do need to justify their work to the tax-payers. And, by extension, that we do need to seek out ways (as and where they exist) of contributing to national wealth creation, or addressing the “big themes” . But it was an absolute delight to hear someone so eloquent (and, dare I say it, revered as a scientist) talking about people doing science for the sake of curiosity. In times of uncertainty about the (financial and ecological) future it made one feel good about being a scientist. I do hope he’s advising the UK Government about future funding priorities.

Like tens of thousands of bloggers everywhere it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I return, after many weeks of inactivity, to my unloved and unlooked at part of cyberspace. My problem is (or has been), as a Head of Department the things that occupy me on a daily basis (and which would be easy to blog about) are not the things that I, personally, wanted to have in my blog. My plan was to keep it confined mainly to science, and not politics. As an aside, university and higher education politics are absolutely fascinating (clearly, one would not take on a management/leadership role if one couldn’t find interest in such matters). But there are plenty of people writing about such things (and some of them do it so eloquently and with such erudition).

Today is my last day as Head of Department. So, we’ll see if I manage to find more time to contribute here in the future. Having watched the BBC2 drama “Margaret” last night it is with the same sense of sadness that I will return to the backbenches of academia. Actually, I am being ironic; I’m really looking forward to it! It’s not that one has not enjoyed being a Head, but it is definitely a process that re-wires the brain (like too much time spent on Facebook, see for instance).

I have been to a lot of talks recently about exoplanets, with content at all levels (from school lectures, to professional research seminars). The whole business is, without doubt, a very exciting area of study. The endeavour has moved beyond the initial fanfare of discovery to one of documentation, building up a picture of the relative proportions of the different types of objects out there. The hope is that we will soon begin to find evidence for truly Earth-like exoplanets. And then there’s the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In almost all of the presentations I’ve been to, I have heard the speakers say that the implications of finding evidence for life on a planet beyond Earth would be profound (“profound” is very much the word of choice). To some extent we’ve been there before with the notion on life on Mars – some would say it has already been discovered, but for most it is still not proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

As I get older I’m beginning to question just how significant such a discovery would actually be. The fact that we are here to ponder the question at all is proof that the laws of physics in our Universe are such that (intelligent) life is inevitable. So, we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we are here. And just on the grounds of statistics alone there are unquestionably, within the Universe, many other places like Earth, in planetary systems like our own (i.e. whether or not we’ve observed them). Given that life has been present on Earth for at least a couple of billion years, if not for more than 80% of its existence, it seems inevitable that Earth-like planets elsewhere in the Galaxy/Universe are bound to harbour life of some sort (of course, I’m hardly the first person to ever think or write this).

Yes, it will be cool when someone (or rather, some thing since it will be an electronic device of some sort) detects a signature of life on an exoplanet (e.g. a spectral signature of an atmosphere containing methane or ozone). And the detection of the second such planet will be equally rewarding. But what of the 3rd, 4th, 5th…? How many Earth-like planets will need to be observed before we’re bored with such things? Not many I would imagine. At this point it will no longer be profound.

I guess the thing about finding life on Mars (which we pretty much know for sure could only ever be primitive in nature) is that there would then be the possibility to study it (always assuming that the lawyers, ethicists and planetary protection police would allow us). The frustrating thing about detecting signs of life on a planet 50 light years away would be that it is 50 light years away.

No, I think what would be really profound is finding no evidence for life (beyond Earth) anywhere in the Universe.

(With due acknowledgement to Arthur C. Clarke).

So, I’ve just read an interesting article in “another magazine” (follow the link in a previous blog to understand this not very amusing comment). The article in question considers the possibility that heavy isotopes contribute to longevity. See here

Specifically, a daily dose of heavy water (i.e. that enriched in deuterium, D2O, compared to “normal” water, which is mainly H2O) may result in a longer (not necessarily happier) life. I haven’t actually read the source work (OK, at least I’m being honest), but if I understand things correctly, the argument goes like this: the higher bond strengths that accompany heavy isotopes (e.g. C-D, versus C-H) are beneficial when it comes to capturing free radicals. Sounds eminently plausible.

I wonder if it’s possible to test this idea to some extent by simply looking at rates of ageing (etc.) across the globe, or perhaps more usefully, within a single large country like the USA. Since natural waters on Earth vary in their content of deuterium by a factor of two, maybe it would be possible to identify an effect within datasets that (presumably) already exist. I appreciate there could be a zillion other factors that go along with geographical location, but maybe isotopic composition is not something that has been considered previously in the business of gerontology.

As an isotope chemist I’m always interested in the ways that isotopes (and, to be clear, we’re talking about stable entities here, not radioactive ones) may have unforeseen effects. As a hypothesis, without much by way of supporting evidence, I have often wondered whether isotope ratios play a (key?) role in the origin of life. In a general sense, I’m convinced that one of the reasons we haven’t yet understood this phenomenon is because we haven’t yet been able to contemplate (or reproduce) the conditions necessary to facilitate this. Isotopic composition may be one such variable that we should take into account. The problem is: we are generally constrained in our thinking about life (on Earth) to scenarios that are geocentric, or even uniformitarian, in nature. What about if the key ingredient is carbon with an isotope ratio, 12C/13C, of 4 (i.e. that obtained in the CNO-cycle in stars), as opposed to the value of 90 we observe today on Earth? I’m not necessarily arguing a case for panspermia; maybe this all took place on Earth using “normal” Solar System materials (maybe we just haven’t discovered these materials yet – maybe they are in a certain class of comet or asteroid)?

OK, time for Occam’s Razor and some snake-oil…