Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

So as the press centre winds down, and the festival comes to a close, I thought I would quickly wrap up the festival through the adventures of the other BA Media Fellows before we all go back to our day jobs.

Emma Byrne started the week at an early morning press conference on monkeys, where one of the scientists started jumping around and hitting things to illustrate what constitutes aggressive behaviour in these animals. None of the other press conferences were quite as exciting.

Elizabeth Mitchell covered the Venus project – which lets people explore hidden treasures at deep underwater archaeological sites from their own virtual submarine.

Several of the fellows took the opportunity to report on the topics relevant to their research fields, with Frances Harris reporting on food policy in Britain and Lorna Dawson reporting on the role of earthworms in cleaning up soil polluted with lead and copper.

Many of the stories were from the press conferences which filled our mornings, like Marcus Pearce’s story of the weakness of steel, Jennifer Carpenter’s article on a new touch-sensitive nerve fibre responsible for the sense of pleasure from stroking, and Ashok Jansari’s piece on how the unreliability of memories makes them a serious problem when it comes to investigating crimes.

A few, like me, were allowed the freedom to wander the festival and see the other sessions. Angela Hodges wrote about modelling of the spread of epidemics based on tracking mobile phone movements, and Matt Rooney has a piece coming out next Thursday covering some of the debate at the festival on blue skies research.

And in the middle of all this we got to see the LHC hullabaloo from the journalist side of things.

We have all had a wonderful time. But now it is back to the laboratory for me, at least until next year when the festival comes to me at the University of Surrey.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 11, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

This morning I went to see a speaker talk about the tragic death of a young girl, killed by a chronic urinary tract infection. This infection resulted in the growth of bladder stone, leading after some years to renal failure and finally death.

Why is this special?

Because this girl died between 1,000 and 1,300 years ago and the rare find of a urinary stone provides a wealth of data for forensic scientists.

Sophie Beckett, a forensic scientist from Cranfield University, analysed the stone found with skeleton 3010, one of 300 individual Anglo-Saxon burials at the appropriately named Boneyard field in Sedgeford, Norfolk, on the east coast of England.

The skeleton was able to give clues to the child’s age (13 to 15 years old) and showed a history of poor nutrition and disease; but the discovery of the urinary stone by a very careful archaeology student, fresh from a lecture on such stones that form in the body, gave clues to the child’s gender and untimely death.

Urinary stone discoveries are rare at archaeological sites because they look like pebbles. They may also degrade in the environment, and in this case the fact that part of the stone had eroded allowed the archaeologists to see the layered structure and helped them realise that this wasn’t just a pebble.

Beckett says the analysis of the chemical, crystalline and physical composition of the 3.5cm long stone led to their conclusion that it was a female child with a urinary tract infection (UTI) that caused the stone to form in bladder. The chemical composition (bioapatite and Whitlockite), and the hollow centre with some organic residue showed that it was caused by a UTI. The chemical composition also showed that it was mostly likely not a kidney stone, with the size suggesting it would have been in the bladder. The gender of the child was suggested by the fact that UTIs are more common in girls (well this is an archaeology story) and the size of the stone together with other evidence from the teeth suggests that it all ended in renal failure, and death.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 11, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Reverend Michael Reiss is the director of education at the Royal Society. And he is advocating discussing creationism in science classes. And he has a PhD in evolutionary biology. Hang on a second, this doesn’t look like the recipe for a standard creationism debate.

What Reiss believes is that when the issue of creationism or intelligent design is raised in the class room (and he expects it to be raised increasingly frequently) the teacher should discuss it as an alternative “worldview” but show why it is not a scientific theory and why evolution is a scientific theory.

Reiss said that his opinions were formed when he was a biology teacher at school “banging on about evolution”. He describes himself as having been “evangelical about evolution”. As a teacher he found that this approach meant that students who didn’t accept evolution would just turn off from science.

Reiss says an increasing number of children are from families who don’t believe in evolution, in part due to the increase in Muslim children from families that hold creationist views.

I had the chance to catch up with Jim Al Khalili (see blog from Tuesday) and discuss Reiss’ ideas. Al Khalili said that creationism is the same in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but the difference in Islam is that there hasn’t been open discussion of the theory of evolution yet. At the moment, even people who accept natural selection would not accept that humans are part of that evolution. He went on to say that it is absolutely crucial that Muslims are part of the debate about creationism and science, but that the debate has to come from within.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 11, 2008
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Well it's time for me to catch a flight back to London. I may have another update or two when I get home, but bye for now!

Geoff

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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While the rest of us are working like dogs, trying to tell the story of the LHC, look who I found enjoying a beer on the patio? It's Science's Adrian Cho.

To be fair, he's already filed his story. And the beer is non-alchoholic (due to restrictions on site today).

Image: GWB

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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Roger Jones, a physicist who I interviewed for the "Voices from the collider" segment, has posted some first images from ATLAS on his blog. Like CMS, these images, were taken when the beam struck a collimator, so they’re not from actual collisions. I actually just took a stroll to the ATLAS control room, which is a hop and a skip from where I’m sitting now, and it was full of energy.

Roger explained to me that this was the first taste of real data for the ATLAS subsystems, and they were frantically trying to understand what the detector was showing them. The mood was a little tense actually. Nothing like shaking down a brand new, multi-billion-dollar detector to make everyone jumpy.

Images: ATLAS, GWB

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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And just like that, beam 2 has completed its first circuit of the LHC. That's it, they've got it clockwise and anticlockwise (counterclockwise for the Americans in the readership). The day has been an official success. What a relief to all the beam guys who have been sweating bullets for a few weeks now.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Alison Wright, Chief Editor of Nature Physics.

I’m so excited I can hardly type. I’m just back from the ‘Big Bang Breakfast’, organized in Westminster by the UK science funding body STFC, to celebrate the start-up of the LHC.

Over tea and sausage sandwiches, physicists and media representatives watched this morning’s events unfurl, live from CERN. Just after 8:30am, the first flash of a monitor showed the beam had entered the 27-km ring, ready to be coaxed through each of the eight sectors of the machine in turn.

It was edge-of-the-seat stuff (certainly if you’re a particle physicist, and, I confess, I am). Twenty minutes later, the beam was half-way round and through one of the detectors, CMS. “They’ve got tracks!” The none-too-hushed whisper ripped round the hall like, well, a proton in an accelerator...

They made it look easy (although, believe me, it isn’t). Sector after sector, the beam sailed through. The breakfasting physicists couldn’t quite believe how well it was going — the previous CERN accelerator had laboured 12 hours to circulate its first beam. I needed more tea.

Now the beam was through another detector, LHCb, which was reporting signals too. The last sector, through the ATLAS detector, awaited. A text message from a friend in the ATLAS control room: “All power just went green”. This is it.

Lyn Evans, LHC project leader and our capable MC at CERN, directs everyone to watch for two flashes on the monitor — one for the beam going in, one for it completing the lap of the collider. And there they are, less than an hour from injection, two flashes of light marking the first circulation of beam and the beginning of an epic experiment. There’s applause, and I want to cry. More tea, I think.

Now we’re clustered round a laptop as the first signals come through from ATLAS. This project, this LHC and its detectors, has been 20 years in the making. There’s delight — and palpable relief — among the physicists: no one could have dreamed this start-up would happen so smoothly.

I raise my cup of tea to the LHC!

Posted by Mark Peplow on September 10, 2008
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They're back at it, and they've pushed beam 2 halfway around the machine now. Assuming nothing goes awry, they should successfully complete their test of the second beam shortly.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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A cryogenic problem at has delayed the anticlockwise beam test. The LHC’s big dipole magnets are all superconducting, and so they need to be cooled to just 1.9 K (around -271 C) in order to function. There’s apparently some minor temperature fluctuations at point 8 (see the map below), which have held things up by about an hour. I’m told that point 8 has been a little buggy over the past few nights, but it’s probably nothing too serious.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

The launch of a new European Space Agency (ESA) satellite has been delayed. The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) was due to be launched today (its mission is to map the Earth's gravitational field in unprecedented detail) but the launch has been delayed until October 5 due to dodgy sat nav.

Perhaps they realised that the competition from the LHC, aptly renamed the License for Huge Coverage on the Great Beyond, might ruin their big day?

On Monday, ESA's Launch Campaign Manager Jürgen Schmid was reported on ScienceDaily as saying that "So far the GOCE launch preparation activities have gone quite smoothly". The same day, they reported that launch preparations had stopped "due to an anomaly identified in one of the units of the guidance and navigation subsystem".

In a press conference today at the festival organised by one of the funders, the Natural Environment Research Council, Marek Ziebert from University College London let slip that this problem has happened before on a different launch. Ziebert suggested that it was the responsible thing to delay the launch until it was fixed. Not just bad timing then?

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 10, 2008
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That’s a photo of prominent theorist John Ellis from this morning, all ready for his close-up. The past week or so has promoted a lot of the physicists at CERN from particle pion to minor celebrity. It’s a bit of an odd situation for people who spend a lot of their working lives either underground or staring at computer screens.

But most of the people I’ve spoken to so far seem really happy to finally get some recognition. Click here to listen to Monica Dunford, a physicist from the University of Chicago, talking about her experience with the media.

Image: GWB

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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It’s not good enough to have a beam of protons going one way around the accelerator. In order to get collisions, well, you’ve got to have particles coming from the opposite direction. To that end, the guys in the control room have just begun testing beam 2. The sequence is exactly the same as beam 1—the protons will gradually make their way through the eight octants of the machine, one at a time (see below). But they'll go the opposite way.

Hopefully it will go just as smoothly as beam 1 did.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Right, now that all the fuss of the LHC is over [far from it - Ed.], we can get back to interesting science – statistics.

One hundred years ago this year, “Student” (William Sealy Gosset) published his new statistical hypothesis test for looking at whether differences in small data sets were due to chance, or were actual differences. To honour this landmark centenary, the President of the BA Mathematical Sciences section, Stephen Senn, gave what was a very amusing (I’m talking laugh out loud funny) presentation about the history of the t-test. Of course there was some maths in there too, but after a long day it was easy to glaze over for those bits.

The t-test is so widely used today that film studies and Jewish studies are the only academic disciplines in which Senn has yet to find examples of its usage, and he is continuing to search those disciplines. He has found examples, from searches in JSTOR, in a number of papers on law, music and religion as well as the usual sciences.

But it didn’t happen overnight. When the test was originally published it took 16 years before anyone noticed that the data set that Gosset used was wrong. Gosset had to publish under a pen name because his employer, the brewer Guinness, who had sent him on sabbatical to study with Karl Pearson at University College London, didn’t want the brewing industry to know that they were using this statistical method. They also didn't want him to use their secret brewing data, so instead he used data on the effects of the two optical isomers of the drug hyoscine on the amount of sleep that inmates of an insane asylum were getting, published by Cushny & Peebles in 1905.

The data in the paper showed no difference between two isomers, but in Gosset’s paper he used his new test to show a significant difference. Gosset’s work was included in Ronald A. Fisher’s Statistical Methods for Research Workers, first published in 1925. A mistake in Gosset's work was subsequently spotted - he had erroneously compared a control to an isomer, so Fisher removed the names but kept the numbers, as an exemplar of the t-test, in later editions. And the rest, as they say, is history...

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 10, 2008
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The Compact Muon Solenoid, one of two, big all-purpose detectors here at CERN has released its first photos from this morning’s event. The image (right), shows particles flying through the detector. They came not from beam-on-beam collisions, but from the beam of protons colliding with a collimator upstream from CMS. Jim Virdee, the CMS spokesperson, says that these images are actually a bit noisier than what they hope to eventually get from proton-proton collisions.

Fair enough, but they sure are pretty.

Image: CMS

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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They've lifted the last block and the beam's made it's way around! Applause is filling the control room and the press room for that matter.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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These guys are working fast. They're already pushing to sector 7-8. Shouldn't be long at all now...

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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The beam has just made it to point six. Lyn Evans says he thinks beam will be circulating around the machine in an hour's time. "I think we're making very good progress," he says.

Meanwhile, CMS has reportedly seen tracks from the beam as it crashes into a beam stop upstream from their machine.

Incidently, if you're wondering where the beam is, here's a map of the LHC. They're currently injecting the beam all the way around to sector 6-7. Sector 6-7 has never been done before apparently, so hopefully no surprises.

image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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They've made it to the halfway point, and Lyn Evans, the man behind the accelerator is looking pretty relieved about it all. As they move to point six they will dump the beam again to make sure that everything is running properly.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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Well here we all are crammed into the globe, the weird little ball outside CERN. They've got a big TV up where we can watch as the LHC operators inject the first beam. They're not going all the way around in the first go. Rather, they're injecting it in phases around each of the LHC's eight sectors. It's a little hard to say exactly where they are because there's no audio at the moment, but it looks like they've gotten beam to point three or so.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 10, 2008
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The LHC may seem pretty advanced, but it’s got nothing on CERN’s high-tech coffee machines. That’s right, they’re fully automated and even have a touch-screen interface. It's the coffee of tomorrow, today folks. Most importantly, it's plenty tasty.

Image: Geoff

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 09, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Diatoms are eukaryotic unicelluar algae found in water. Their cell walls are made of dissolved silica and have extraordinarily intricate designs, which scientists have come up with various theories of predation and self-assembly to explain. Now scientists investigating the light properties of these organisms are hypothesising a new theory. Because of the way the diatoms can manipulate and diffract light through their cell wall, the researchers suggest that they could have evolved to maximise the potential for photosynthesis.

In a press conference today, Pete Vukusic of the University of Exeter spoke about his research into the way the diatom Coscinodiscus wailesii manipulates light. To do this, his team removed the material inside the cell and used an electron microscope to take images of the cell walls and performed “elaborate optical experiments”, including putting the cell wall on the tip of a needle, placing it in seawater and shining a lasers through it. They found that the walls also restricted the wavelengths of light that entered the diatom.

The picture below shows the highly regular patterns in the layers of the diatom cell wall. No scale is provided, but the cells are typically 230 to 370 µm.

The new hypothesis is that the nanostructure in the cell wall allows the chloroplasts within the cell better access to light needed for photosynthesis, no matter where in the cell the chloroplasts are located.

Vukusic says that understanding these structures and their manipulation of light might have applications in biomedical fields. The diatoms are cheap, easy to replicate, widely available, and may be suitable vehicle for medicines. For example, Vukusic described the possibility of coating the surfaces of diatoms so antigens attach to the surface. When an antibody attaches to the antigen it would result in a change in the light properties which can be detected optically. The results are to be published in the Journal of Materials Research in December.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 09, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

There was an interesting session on science in the Islamic world this morning.

It was hosted by physicist Jim Al Khalili, born in Baghdad to an Islamic Iraqi father and Christian English mother, and brought up with religious debate. He is currently researching the golden days of science in Islam as part of a BBC series on the subject, and for a book “House of Wisdom”. In his travels researching the documentary, devout Muslims he came across mostly said that the Qur’an is not a scientific text, but it teaches you how to live your life, and encourages you to study and understand the world. But a minority did say that the Qur’an provides all the keys to science.

In the past, there was no problem with the compatibility of science and Islam, including when notions of evolution were introduced. Hakim M Salim Khan, of the Mohsin Institute, gave the example of the ‘incurable’ illness. Khan says that the Qur’an teaches that Allah doesn’t create illness without creating a cure, so Islamic scientists will continue searching for that cure.

The session was organised by British think-tank Demos who is working with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Nature and a range of European and Islamic world organisations to produce an Atlas of Islamic-World Innovation.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 09, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

My first day at the festival started early with press conferences, watching the British (and international) science media in action. I took a bit of time out to go and see some of the other activities, a lot of which are aimed at getting school kids interested in science. There were robots, exploding things, kids using bicycles to light a (very small) house, and a giant blow-up cell that kids could walk inside.

Once all the press conferences were over, I wandered off to enjoy one of the adult sessions of the festival: “Science fiction and you”, where the presenters showed the influence of science fiction literature on our view of science, and extraterrestrials.

Jon Turney, an author and academic based at Imperial College London, pointed out that "depictions of scientists and science in films is a bit silly".

But author Stephen Baxter illustrated the role of science fiction in exciting aspiring young scientists with the examples of the young boys Wernher von Braun and Robert Goddard, who were inspired by the tales of Martians travelling to Earth by Kurd Lasswitz (Two Planets) and H. G. Wells (War of the Worlds), respectively. Both von Braun and Goddard went on to become leading rocket scientists.

Unfortunately Baxter didn't speak about the influence of science fiction on his own application to become an astronaut. Apparently he was rejected because he couldn't speak French. Questions were raised about which aliens were thought to speak French.

Science fiction shows children and adults alike what it is that scientists do in their work, according to Turney. Sure, the facts may be liberally applied, and the future predictions might be questionable, but, says Turney, stories like Gwyneth Jones’ Life and Gregory Benford’s Timescape do give insights into scientific labour and the qualities of mind needed to be a good scientist.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 09, 2008
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It's only a few days before the official "start up" of the LHC, and people everywhere are getting all excited. Unfortunately, a lot of that excitement is focused around a single, erroneous question: "Will the LHC destroy the world?"

The answer, of course, is no. Even the Sun, the silliest of British tabloids, knows that (although they do have some pretty good ideas about how to pass the end of days, think Super Mario Brothers).

Nevertheless, there's a vocal and determined group of folks who are doing their best to convince the public that there really isn't going to be a 11 September. Some of them will post shortly on this blog I'm sure, and fair enough; it's a free world. But others are going too far. In the past few days, reports have come out that a few physicists at the LHC are recieving death threats from hardest of the fanatics.

Enough is enough. Leave your case to the courts and stop trying to scare the poor physicists.

Image: cern

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 08, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

The discovery of more fossilised forests in Illinois coal mines is providing insights into the impacts of global warming on ecosystems.

Last year, Katherine Sanderson reported in Nature News on the discovery, reported by Howard Falcon-Lang from Bristol University and colleagues. The fossil forests were originally noticed by maintenance workers, working in the passages where the coal had been mined. The coal would have formed from soil that lay beneath the tropical forests. Now that the coal is gone, the roofs of these passages show the bottom of the forests: tree roots, leaf litter from the forest floor, and tree trunks.

Since then, the researchers have been searching different mines in the area. Now they have found fossil forests in 15 different mines in the area, including one that covers 100 square kilometres, Falcon-Lang said in a press conference today.

The discovery includes different layers of forest from different time periods spanning a total of two million years, during which time (approximately 306 million years ago) the climate went through a significant warming. And with this shift in climate, a shift in vegetation is evident in the fossilised remains.

Before the warming, these areas were covered in lush rainforests, similar to the modern day Amazon. The warming took place “almost overnight in a geological sense” according to Falcon-Lang, after which, the fossil record changes, showing a shift to a forest dominated by weedy ferns.

This shows that there was a threshold which tips the balance and unravels the whole system, says Falcon-Lang. The forests provide an ancient case study of climate change, which the researchers are now comparing to records of ancient carbon dioxide levels, hoping to learn more about what we might expect as our modern day climate changes.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 08, 2008
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Posted by Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Hello from the 2008 European City of Culture. That is Liverpool, home of the Beatles, Everton football club, and for the next week, the BA Festival of Science.

The BA is the British Association for the Advancement of Science, an organisation that is working to bridge the gap between science and the public. One of the ways they do that is through the Festival of Science. From the programme:

“The BA Festival of Science features top scientists and commentators from all over the country, all of whom are committed to public debate and discussion of the advances and issues that affect us all – this is unique experience for you to question them about what they do, why they do it and what might happen in the future.”

So here am I to find who is asking what, and to keep you up-to-date, and hopefully entertained, with the goings on at the festival. You can find out more about the festival programme at the website.

But who am I? I am the product of one of the BA’s other programmes, the BA Media Fellowships scheme. I'm a researcher who has been temporarily transplanted from the lab to Nature's news desk.

And for all my hard work at Nature News, I am being rewarded with a week as a real roving science journalist, working hard in the press office at the festival, and relaxing with a little liquid refreshment in the evenings. There'll be more posts throughout the week.

Posted by Editorial Guest on September 06, 2008
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