My fellow Cambridge-London commuters; did you work it out? Once you know that it depicts a gene, it’s annoyingly obvious. But despite travelling past it by train about three days per week, I failed to identify the thousands of brightly coloured bars painted on the cycle path next to the rail track near Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s hospital as a nucleotide sequence. It should have been a clue that only four colours are used.
It probably comes from generally not being very biochemistry minded, as a straight-physics editor. Nevertheless, a friend of mine mentioned he had heard about the biology-inspired cycle path artwork and after some quick Googling, the rumour was confirmed; the colourful sequence stands for the BRCA2 gene, implicated in breast cancer and discovered in 1995.
What a good idea to combine scientific topics with railway scenery. After five years of commuting I would welcome more of these puzzles along the rail track to keep me entertained!
Liesbeth
Liesbeth Venema (Senior Editor, Nature)
Wow, that was quick – vandalism fixed… you can obviously check out the page history of course…
Very interesting!
Your post motivated me to dig deeper into the sources and prices of single-wall and multi-wall nanotubes. I have posted a review on my blog:
https://materialsguru.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/carbon-nanotubes-still-not-a-cheap-material/
Single-wall nanotubes are still quite expensive. Unless a breakthrough application is found, I seriously doubt if these can be a commercial success. Multi-wall nanotubes, on the other hand, seem to be gaining momentum – production capacity going up and prices coming down.