illuminating science

Australia’s leading industrial research group, the CSIRO, is announcing a major breakthrough in renewable energy, with the delightfully open ended name “Solar-thermal energy”. I’m not quite clear of the connection to a story I blogged much earlier, but it seems to run on a slightly different principle.

The idea is that mirrors (two hundred of them!) track and focus the sun’s rays onto a giant tower, preferably somwhere in Australia’s outback where it’s hot, sunny and the land is cheap (!). The intense heat produced is then used somehow to combine with water and natural gas to produce a renewable fuel source. CSIRO’s renewable energy page doesn’t really provide a lot more detail, and I don’t know whether this is just poor communication, protecting the new technology, or something more sinister (cue little pinky to side of mouth).

What’s really amazing is that they claim that just a 50km by 50km stretch of land could provide all of Australia’s power needs in 2020. That’s a pretty bold claim, and a lot of electricity, but if the media has published it it must be true (right? :))

Regardless, any positive steps towards a better energy solution is a good thing.

Okay, this is off-topic, but it’s my blog, so I can write what I want, right? I just read a horrifying announcement that Robert Jordan, the author of the Wheel of Time series, has been diagnosed with amyloidosis, a rare blood disease where misfolded proteins cause a variety of problems. In Robert Jordan’s case, his heart is being affected and with treatment, his median life expency is four years.

For those who don’t know him, Robert Jordan is famous for writing the Wheel of Time series, which currently stands at 11 books. I, for one, was a massive fan several years ago - the first 6 or 7 books in the series are truly awesome. I’ve mentioned before how I love concistency in my sci-fi/fantasy - well RJ’s books are without a doubt the best thought out fantasy series ever. The magic system is as complex, believable, detailed and ripe for discussion as any quantum textbook (and you can read that statement however you like - it’s probably accurate in all interpretations!) and his world is wonderfully rich and complex. The rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan (RASFWRJ) newsgroup is full of detailed discussion and debate about the various mysteries and intracacies of the world - the Wheel of Time FAQ might give you an idea of just how delightfully complex this world is! If you haven’t read the series, I highly recommend it.

Slightly disappointingly, the later books start to drag a little, mainly because he had so much going on - and I admit I haven’t read the last couple - but the latest book is supposed to be much better and I’ve heard really good things about it, so I’m going to go back and read the series again and keep going (each book is ~600 pages, and I’ve probably read books 1-8 about 3 times Like I said, it’s addictive!)

Anyway, on his blog RJ says that he has no intention of giving up just yet, and that the next book A Memory of Light was already intended to be the last, finishing up the major plot arc, even if it had to be 2000 pages long. So although fan’s worst fears (that RJ would get a terminal illness before finishing the series) have come to the forefront, it seems everything might just fit in. He also plans to write two prequel novels, plus a whole other series (about 30 years worth of books, he estimates!) so here’s hoping he pulls through comfortably.

So Africa and parts of the Middle East were today treated to a total solar eclipse, where the moon lines up perfectly between the Earth and the Sun. Although total solar eclipses generally occur every 18 months or so, we’re in a bit of a dry season at the moment - the last eclipse was in 2003, and the next won’t be until 2008 - so you can bet that the true eclipse junkies would have been out in force.

Indeed, in Libya, normally a hard place for tourists to gain entry, special visas and permission to bring in telescopes were made widely avaiable, giving amateur and professional astronomers alike the chance to experience the eclipse under Libya’s clear and calm skies.

There’s only been one total eclipse in Australia recently, and that was Ceduna in South Australia a few years ago. As much as I would have liked to have gone, I didn’t really have anyone to go with and wasn’t comfortable going by myself. So, I missed out on my best chance for several years - not until 2012 does another eclipse come my way, although by my luck I’ll have moved somewhere else and still miss out!!! Hopefully, though I’ll make it eventually - it really sounds like one of the most breathtaking things.

Oh, and finally, I love this line from the ABC news story:

Eclipses should never be viewed without proper optical filters or glasses specially designed to filter out ultraviolet light, which is invisible to the human eye but can burn the retina even when the sun is covered.

Yes, that’s true up to a point - the UV light from the sun can burn your retina, possibly doing permanent damage. Even when only a sliver of the sun is visible it might be enough to do damage. The exact timing is unclear - the Straight Dope estimates up to 30 seconds of exposure might be safe, whereas Dr. Karl says anything more than a “brief glimpse” is going to blind you - even if 99% of the sun is covered. I find this hard to believe - I’ve looked at the sun before, the whole sun albeit briefly, and don’t seem to have suffered ill effects. Sure that’s not a proof, or even remotely scientific, but it seems a little extreme. (That said, don’t look at the sun. This is pure conjecture, not legal advice!)

In any case, a very important point (at least from the enjoyment perspective) is that when the sun is completely covered (as in, totality) it is completely safe. The sun is covered, that’s what totality means, and so the moon blocks all of the harmful light. Yes, there’s probably still some leaking around the edge, particularly if the eclipse is such that the moon appears slightly smaller than the sun rather than larger, but it’s not going to do any damage - it will be the weakest part of the UV emission anyway (think cross sections).

So if you ever get the opportunity to look at a solar eclipse, bring your pinhole projector or your special glasses, wait for totality, then enjoy the most amazing astronomical site. But as soon as that first crescent of light re-appears, cover up again! And if you can’t wait for or can’t reach a solar eclipse, there’s always a couple of lunar eclipses each year - there’s one coming to a location near you!

As any experimentalist can tell you, keeping a good lab book is essential. When you’re working on an experiment, you must keep records of what you did, what materials you used, what techniques and of course, what results you got. Now, to the unenlightened (or uncynical, depending on how you look at it) this probably seems like just good record keeping and making sure that you don’t lose any hard earned data. And it is, to a large degree.

But surprisingly, one of the most important things you must record is when you did the research. Because, if you discover something amazing and find a way to patent it, you might be required to back up your claim that you discovered it before anyone else. Particularly in high profile and/or highly competitive research areas, the guidelines for doing these lab books is quite intensse - leave no blank pages, sign each page and have it witnessed, paste in photos and put pen marks around the edges bleeding onto the paper to help establish that the photos haven’t been swapped at a later date. And so on.

The idea is that someday, if you’re lucky, that journal might be the evidence you need to establish a multi million dollar patent which will set you up for life. Only a rare few reach this noble level, however - outside one office at the University of California San Diego physics department, a researcher had posted - uncashed! - each royalties cheque he had received from his patent. And each cheque, lovingly blue-tacked to the wall, was for between 1 and 3 cents. Don’t ask me…

But never fear - there’s an alternative! Simply become a famous physicist, leave behind only a few journals each filled with both insightful and personal comments, and they might fetch over one million pounds each. That’s what journals from Robert Hooke went for in a last minute grab by Britain’s Royal Society, just before it went on auction. It was found recently in an attic (man, I wish I had an attic!) and although the Royal Society had claimed they wouldn’t be able to meet the asking price, they managed to produce the dough minutes before the notebook when onto the block.

In case you don’t know, Hooke is a moderately well known physicist particuarly for his discovery that the force a spring pulls with depends linearly on how much it is stretched. Interestingly, he and Newton were often at each other’s throats, and Hooke discovered several things that are now credited to Newton, including: the Newtonian telescope, a certain interference pattern called Newton’s Rings, and the inverse square law of gravitation (which he predicted, but could not prove. Darn!)

The book will soon go on display, and scans of the pages made available online. Although I doubt I’ll ever look at them, it is nice to have history in the public domain, rather than some collector’s private library.

Oh, and there’s one small caveat I should mention if you plan to use this to make your fortune - it only tends to work posthumously. Perhaps now would be a good time to get an uncle or aunt hooked on physics?

Possibly good news today, with a study showing that native Australian frogs might be holding their own against the infamous (and ugly!) cane toad, an species introduced into Australia to eat the sugar cane bug but which proved to enjoy the taste of frogs more. It’s slowly been spreading across the country, and scientists held, and indeed still hold, grave fears the native species it displaces. A recent study, however, seems to show that native frog populations have not been decimated, as feared, and perhaps things aren’t quite as bad as they seemed.

Other researchers, howeve, remain unconvinced - apparently we don’t really have good numbers of what frog populations should be in these areas, and so don’t know what the baseline is for comparison! Data should be coming in shortly from Kakadu National Park, which the toads are just now starting to reach despite everyone’s best efforts, and that will hopefully provide a better idea of what’s going on.

Although the story sounds like positive news, I feel a little like I do every time a study suggests that global warming isn’t as bad as we thought - all the other data points towards Really Bad News (TM), and if people become complacent or worse yet, start to disregard all the other data, then if the danger does turn out to be real, we’re in big trouble.

That said, toad-wacking is almost a national passtime in some parts of Australia, so I don’t think people are going to ease up on the little buggers any time soon!

When I’m tutoring, I always “urge” my students to think about their answers and to do back of the envelope calculations before proceeding with the bigger problem. Today I almost became a hypocrit, but fortunately redeemed myself at the last second.

So, I was working on this problem where we want to calculate the absorption spectrum of a molecule (that is, what frequencies of light it will absorb, and how strongly at each frequency) when you take into account the vibrations of the molecule itself. These vibrations, called phonons, can use up extra energy from the light, or indeed supply the extra energy needed, and “broadens” out the spectrum. (The solvent (e.g., water) around the molecule also does this, and usually on a larger scale, but here we were specifically interested in the molecule vibrations.) We then wanted to compare our prediction to some experimental results and other simulations we’d done.

Anyway, the computer simulations had identified 60 vibrational modes (ways that the molecule can vibrate) and told us how strongly each mode coupled to the system. I was then working on predicting the absorption spectrum from those modes and couplings, and after much brain straining (Yes, that’s a scientific term :)) came up with a formula for all the peaks. The catch was, you had to sum over all the possible combinations of vibrations - first, try creating one vibration in Mode 1 and three vibrations in Mode 2, then try again, this time again creating one vibration in Mode 1 but two vibrations in Mode 2. Now, repeat that for sixty modes simultaneously, where you can have as many vibrations as you want! I decided, though, to restrict it to just 3 vibrations in each mode so that the total number of combinations I needed to consider was just 3⁶⁰, though I would obviously like to have more than that if possible. This looked like a suspiciously large number, but when I spoke to someone else from my group, they seemed confident that it could be done in a reasonable amount of time.

So we started thinking about how one could program it, and started working on some code, while I became increasingly uncomfortable with this large number. So I started to think more logically - a typical computer does roughly 1 billion CPU cycles per second (e.g., my PC has a 2GHz processor). If every one of those cycles could compute one of my cases, it would take roughly 3⁶⁰/10⁹ seconds. Convert to years and…uh oh. Roughly a trillion years of computation. Darn it. Even using a super computer won’t change that, and particularly since each calculation will take well more than a cycle. Even if I only allowed 2 possible vibrations (i.e., one vibration, or none) I’d still need about 30 years. And to store that amount of data would require an awfully big disk.

Fortunately, I think I can comfortably ignore many of the modes - only about 20 have signficant coupling (using a natural break in the data) which will take only an hour or two, I think. Unfortunately, it would produce about 3 gigabytes of data, which is bad, so I’d need to find some way of selectively keeping the data or not. (I don’t know the best way of doing that, yet, but hopefully I’ll come up with something.)

Anyway, the moral of the story is, think before you code! Fortunately, we didn’t spend much time on it before thinking, and the code we did write will still be useful, but it could easily have been different!

The European Space Agency announced today a new test of the final not-quite-verified predictions of general relativity - gravitomagnetism, or as its more commonly known frame dragging (which is actually a subset of gravitomagnetism). It’s based on the idea in general relativity that mass deforms space, and that’s what produces gravity. The old analogy is placing a bowling ball on a trampoline - it warps the space around it, and so a golf ball placed nearby will roll towards it. Of course, that’s just an analogy, but the theory is much the same idea, at least mathematically. Frame dragging builds on this and says that as body moves and particularly rotates, it can “drag” space with it, affecting other objects in a way we wouldn’t expect from our traditional picture of gravity. It’s something akin to rotating a spoon in a jar of honey - honey far away from the spoon will be dragged around by that motion, albeit slowly (but again, this is just ana analogy!) Experimental evidence from satellites suggests strong agreement between general relativity and experiment, although the big test will be the results from Gravity Probe B which will hopefully be not too long away. In both these cases, because the frame dragging effect is so minisculy small, long term experiments in orbit were needed to observe the effects.

This recent experiment, by Martin Tajmar, looked at effects near to a rapidly spinning and accelerating superconducting disk. They placed acceleration sensors near it and detected forces which they believe are due to the gravitomagnetic effects of the rotating disk. What’s most surprising, however, is that the effects they measured were one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts (NB: I can’t find this in their papers - just the article). The question, of course, is whether you really believe their data or, alternatively, their analysis. They say that they performed over 250 experiments and argued and checked their results over three years, but at the same time, for general relativity to be wrong would be an incredibly surprising result, given its great success. Their signal to noise ratio (from their paper) is 3.3, which seems quite low (as in, their signal is only three times larger than the noise they’d expect from the experiment, possibly making it hard to extract the true data) but they approach this cautiously, and agree that it needs to be repeated.

But at the same time, that would be an incredible breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. Yes, I know that sounds odd, but in some ways we will learn more from this experiment if it disgrees with general relativity (and hence sparking huge amounts of research and funding) than if it confirms what we already “knew”. I think many (most?) scientists suspect that general relativity isn’t the complete truth, but the thinking is usually that the answer will appear at the highest energies of your particle accelerators, rather than in a “simpler” lab setting. As they claim, it would open up a whole new way of experimenting with the quantum/GR boundary. I think that, if I had a choice, I’d be hoping that general rel doesn’t work out here - it would be quite exciting!

Incidentally, this result came from (and overshadowed) their attempts to explain the discrepency between experiment and theory of the mass of the “Cooper pairs” in superconductors (Niobium, mainly), these being the pairs of electrons which enable current to flow without resistance. I’m just not sure from the article whether they succeeded with this or not - though looking at their paper seems to support it. At the very least, the trends they observed for the gravitomagnetic effects are apparently in agreement.

If you’d like more info, you can check out either the above paper on the mass of Cooper pairs, or this paper where they discuss the implications of these experiments for the mass of gravitons, particles which are theorised to transmit the gravitational force. Their main result there is that the current values of the cosmological constant (related to “dark energy”) and gravitons predicts massive gravitomagnetic fields, which aren’t observed (but how this fits with his statements that the observed fields are much larger than general relativity, I don’t know!) They argue that it can be explained by allowing the local “energy density” (literally what it sounds like - how much energy you pack into one spot) controls the “vacuum energy”, meaning that we could engineer and control the vacuum using coherent matter (like superconductors, etc). Unfortunately, I’m in no position to debate these conclusions!

The papers are relatively readable, at least in the introduction and conclusion (and provided you don’t care about the maths!) but I have to admit that some of it sounds slightly far fetched. I won’t say crackpotty - perhaps this is just how all cutting-edge fundamental physics papers look to the non-expert. But certainly the first line of their last paper is a hard sell - “It is well known that the mass of the photon and graviton in vacuum must be non-zero…of about 10^-69kg” Woah!

A friend of mine, a science communicator, recently sent me this awesome page about the importance of understanding torque - how big a crane do you need to lift a car out of the water? Or, indeed, a crane? It’s posed as a humorous sequence of photos, but would actually make quite a good physics problem.

If you follow along with the photos, you’ll see that apparently a car fell into the water, and so a crane was pulled in to pull it out. Although the crane was no doubt designed to lift a car, they neglected the concept of torque - that is, the rotational force that lifting something out to your side creates. In this case, the force of the car at the end of the crane was enough to tip the entire crane over into the water, joining the car! It would be a good exercise for people to estimate the torque produced on the crane, and how much the crane must have weighed to counteract it (the last question is perhaps not trivial, since the crane would have to pivot around its closest edge, so you’d have to think about the different lever arms, etc).

The next series of photos show a second, much larger crane called in to pull out the car, which it did successfullly - the extra weight of the crane was enough to balance the torque of the car. Then, the large crane attempts to pull out the smaller crane. The last photo, however, shows the big crane toppling in after the smaller one! Unfortunately, it’s not quite true - the final collapse hsa in fact been photoshopped (which you can see by the abrupt return of the white boat in the background). But it would again make for an interesting exercise to use the small crane weight estimate from the first half to estimate the minimum weight of the larger crane.

So, it’s not quite such a good story if the second crane doesn’t go in, but it’s still cool that any of it actually happened!

Or is he? Actually, this is just a quick plug for another physics-based song that I’ve written: Schrödinger’s Cat is Dead, set to the tune of Pore Jud is Daid, from Oklahoma. I’ve also put up some of the physics poetry (see the sidebar on my homepage) I wrote for a competition the UQ Physics Club PAIN last year. Unfortunately, I was out of the country, so couldn’t actually win, but I would’ve if I’d been there. Search your feelings - you know it to be true.

Anyway - enjoy the rest of your weekend, ladies and gentlemen!

I found quite a cool website today - a course from Colorado University on The Physics of Everyday Life. (Bet you wouldn’t have guessed that from the post title, hey?)

It’s a collection of lecture notes (follow the sidebar link) on a variety of physics concepts applied to everyday phenomena - rainbows, microwaves, gravity, etc. A lot of it is standard first-year physics stuff (so could be a good supplement to people taking related courses, particularly “physics for biologists” style courses like we offer at UQ!) but there’s also some quite good discussions - I actually learned quite a bit from the discussion of microwaves ovens. I “knew” the physics, but I hadn’t quite appreciated its applications.

I think it’s quite an interesting and well written set of notes, and would be worth having a look at. Also interesting is that they use a “clicker” system - students all purchase a portable “multi choice” controller, which is registered to their ID. Then, the lecturer puts up a multi-guess multi-choice question, gets students to vote on their answer, and so gets instant feedback on how well the class is understanding the material. I’ve heard of it before, but not seen it in action; I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s had experience with it.

Yep, a neat little paper recently shows that the ancient technique of examining a patient’s urine might still be important today. Once a vital technique in Middle Ages diagnosis, it has lately been ignored in favour of more complex, and naturally more accurate, tests. But for a quick and simple check of common conditions, it could still be valuable.

Giving it the rather prosaic name “the uroscopic rainbow”, Dr Carole Foot from Queensland’s Prince Charles Hospital has made a guide which translates the colour of your pee into a medical diagnosis. For instance, a common sedative in critical care wards will turn your urine pink if dosed correctly, but green if you’re getting too much. Or, pink urine could be gout - you’ve got to be careful there.

Want to check if your patient is taking their tablets? Some drugs change the colour of your urine, so the nurses can quickly check whether you actually palming the drugs off the black market (mmm, antibiotics…) And if your urine is blue/green - you’re drinking too much mouthwash. (Though, honestly, if you’re drinking mouthwash, you’ve probably got more serious issues to deal with.)

Although it’s quite a humorous topic, if this catches on, it may be that urine samples will become a more mainstream part of hospital life.

While on the subject of medicine, another article on ABC was about harvesting stem cells from menstrual blood. Unfortunately, they only say you can get “30 times more than bone marrow” which doesn’t really give any quantitative measure of whether this is useful, or just interesting! (Incidentally, the article has a picture of an attractive young girl which kind of jars with the rest of the article - the caption links it in by saying the younger women have better quality stem cells in the menstrual blood, but my first response was to imagine that she’s menstruating and/or providing the samples for the study - surely a more scientific picture would have been more appropriate?)

Today is Pi Day! That’s right, for those countries who write their dates mm.dd, today is 3.14 - the first few digits of Pi! Okay, it’s not that convincing, but just wait until 2015 - that will be a day to celebrate! (Particularly at 9:26 :)) Regardless of its motivation, it’s a fun way to celebrate one of the most interesting numbers in mathematics.

Looking for ways to celebrate Pi? Well, here’s a few ideas:

• Sing The Pi Song, a little ditty setting the digits of Pi to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, with a group of friends - it’s fun! Honest!
• Bad at darts? Pretend it’s deliberate! By throwing darts randomly at a board, you can estimate Pi, as this little applet shows. If you draw a square on the board (or the wall, depending on how bad your aim is) you can compare the number of hits in the square to the circle, and estimate Pi. Sure, you need to throw a few hundred darts, but it’s a great way to spend an evening.
  • If you’re actually really good at darts, but really bad at sewing, you could instead drop your needle many times onto some parallel lines. A nice little theorem tells you how many lines it should cross! Great for rainy days! And if the rain keeps going, you can prove why it works.
• Perhaps try estimating Pi by hand - there’s always the Taylor series expansion for arctan(1/2)=Ï€/4 (if that makes sense to you!) but this converges awful slowly. Instead, use the Ramanujan formula which gives many digits for every iteration.
• If you’re really adventurous, prove that Pi is irrational - you might want to use this as a bit of a guideline.
• Memorise Pi! The first hundred thousand digits are online to get you started. But you’ll have to work to beat Hiroyuki Goto, the official record holder at 42,195 digits. Let alone the unofficial record holder at over 80,000!
• Look for your name in Pi! NERSC allows you to search for a numerical representation of your name (or any other string) in the binary representation of Pi, after a new method was devised that lets you calculate the nth binary digit of Pi without having to calculate the previous ones! Unfortunately, it only works in binary or hexadecimal, but it’s not that hard to convert back! Perhaps the position of your name could define your “Pi number”?
• Finaly, bake a sour cherry pie (or pick one up from Wanda’s if you happen to live in Toronto - I wish!) As long as you make the pi round, you can probably justify it - but basically, it’s just an excuse to bake and eat a delicious pie. I must confess, I make a truly excellent sour cherry pie, and I’m always looking for an excuse!

If you’ve got any great Pi Day stories let me know. I’ll see if I can convince my swing dancing friends to get involved tonight!

11:00am: I’m now upgrading the blog - it may be out of action for a small while if things don’t go to plan! Will update soon!

11:40am: The update is complete, and everything should be running smoothly again!  I’m afraid that a couple of recent comments who’d been eaten or moderated by Spam Karma may not have made it out alive, so if so, I apologise for that.  Please report any problems!  Otherwise, hopefully everything will run smoothly from now on.

We now return to your regularly scheduled postings.

Like many people, I have to blog about Google’s latest addition - Google Mars. It is, quite simply, awesome. Just like Google Earth (and Google Moon, for that matter) it allows you to wander around the surface of Mars checking out the various craters, ridges and landing (or crashing, as the case may be) sites for the various Mars missions.

My favourite is the “Happy Face Crater” - just search for “happy face”. The first time I went to it, I was mega zoomed in (thinking it would give me the best view of the features). I’m looking at the marker, and I couldn’t see any “happy face”. Then, on a whim, I zoomed out, and, well…you be the judge!

Let me know if you find an interesting location!

And, okay, I didn’t get to upgrade the blog yesterday. But today it will happen - promise!

Thanks to everyone who’s given feedback about the recent commenting problems. I don’t know why it’s happening, but it’s something to do with the spam filter, which currently nabs almost 500 spam message a day, sometimes.

I’ve been meaning to upgrade to the next version of Wordpress and Spam Karma anyway, so I’ll do that today, and hopefully that will remedy the problems. Apologies!

I’ve always loved a good parody, and many years ago it occurred to me that the digits of pi (you know, 3.14159, etc) might work quite well as the lyrics of a song - something along the lines of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, in fact. I went home, and overnight produced this little song which has become quite popular amongs those who have seen it. It’s regularly performed at the Junior Physics Olympiad at UQ, and has made guest appearances at schools and workshops from those who have learned it there.

So, for your viewing pleasure, may I present: The Pi Song. Best sung loudly and with gusto! (He’s a really good singer, Gusto is.)

Have a good weekend!

At some stage, I’m going to post my pet hates - things that really, really drive me batty. (For what it’s worth, number #1 on that list are DVD menus. You know, where they show me a 20 second clip summarising all the key plot points of the movie before I reach the menu, and then insist on showing me a “cool” clip when I try to go to a submenu - or even when I hit “Play”! Honestly, I’ve got the DVD - I’m sold, you don’t need to convince me. All I want to do is navigate as quickly as possible, change my settings as required, then play. The menu is just that. If Satan and I ever get together for a brainstorming session, every DVD producer will be required to spend an eternity viewing their own DVD menus.)

Anyway.

My other pet hate is bottled water. Now, if you live somewhere where the water supply is potentially harmful (e.g., some parts of Asia, etc) then bottled water is a brilliant solution, although it’s generally bought in bulk. But if you live somewhere where the tap water is fine and all-but-free, you’ve really got to wonder - is it worth paying $2 or even $3 for a 600mL bottle of water, when I can get a glass of tap water for next-to-nothing?

There’s a few reasons why this all ticks me off. Firstly, I’m not really convinced that many (most?) people could actually tell the difference. Sure, give them room temperature tap water out of a glass or ice cold water out of a fancy bottle with pictures of mountains on it and I know which will “taste” better. But I’d really like to do an experiment comparing chilled tap water and chilled bottled water, both served out of a plastic cup, and see whether there really is a statistical difference in people’s perception of them. Not least because I suspect ice cold water numbs the taste buds a little, furthering dampening any differences.

Secondly, I’m not convinced that there’s actually any health benefit. In fact, some recent studies have suggested that the heavy mineral content in bottled water makes it unsuitable for babies or small children. Do we actually want minerals in our water? A little sodium perhaps, but do the trace amounts of other minerals actually have any health benefits? I don’t know, but I find it hard to swallow (pun intended :)) Other estimates (from a (basically) anti-bottled-water group, so don’t trust them) suggest that 25% of bottled water is just tap water which may or may not have been treated further. Probably an exageration, but nevertheless. (The movie “The Tuxedo” has a kind of tasteless yet relevant opening scene where we see a beautiful mountain scene, complete with river. A deer pees into the water, and we follow the river along its course before finally winding up in a water bottling plant, where the water goes direct, untreated, into the bottle. Mmmm. Pure water!)

Thirdly, I think people are being ripped off. Wake up and smell the odourless liquid, people! This stuff is really just water - except because it’s been shipped from halfway across the world, it costs as much as soft drink, and sometimes approaches that of beer or wine (I once ordered a bottle of water (meaning, tap water) and got a bottle of Italian water that cost $8 (we discover when we get our bill)! But, boy, did it taste like…water.) The marketing firms are promoting it as being healthy, you’ll “feel great”, etc - which is all true, but just as true for tap water in most places. They’re ripping people off, massively, and yet people seem to follow the old adage that if it’s more expensive it must be better. Really irks me. Particularly in some restaurants where they only serve bottled water!

Okay. Calm.

Finally, all this bottled water is creating yet more rubbish - plastic using up valuable crude oil, before being thrown away. Something like 2.5 million tonnes of plastic are used in these bottles. And sure, there are many other wasteful sources, and Cocoa-Cola is probably a far greater culprit, but it really does raise the question of why we don’t just use the taps that are installed in every home.

So, that’s my piece for today, inspired by a post on Centripital Notion linking to the National Geographic article above. I don’t imagine it will change any time soon, but I suspect that people will come to their senses sooner or later And, as always, this is just my opinion - so feel free to argue with me!

There was an interesting article recently about understanding consciousness. This a very hot topic within neuroscience at the moment - does consciousness simply arise from electrical impulses in the brain? Is it a deterministic (predictable) model? Does quantum mechanics play a role? Could we simulate a brain on a computer, or perhaps a quantum computer? If so, it raises deep philosophical questions about the nature of the “soul”, and whether humans are special compared to animals or just simply more advanced. (See comments for some more clarification on what I mean there.)

But what was most interesting about this article was the ethical issue involved - the researcher, Bill Newsome, wants to implant an electrode into his brain so that he can both monitor the currents corresponding to his thoughts, and see how his thoughts are changed by electric currents induced by the electrode! The actual technology isn’t new (I’ve already blogged a little about brain-computer interfaces and specifically the BrainGate technology) but these have always been for medical applications like helping Mathew Nagle, a quadraplegic, to control a computer with his mind. Although experiments have been done with monkeys, Bill Newsome wants to really know what happens and what he sees or feels based on the electrical impulses in a controlled experiment.

Part of the issue seems to be that even if this study is well thought out and safe, it’s a slippery slope - some young researcher somewhere looking to make a name for themselves decides to perform a riskier implantation hoping for better results - and perhaps with serious consequences. Granting ethical clearance now sets a possibly dangerous precedent.

I have to say, it’s a pretty bold step - as a researcher, my brain is my most valuable asset (after my good looks, anyway) and I’d be very wary to risk doing anything to it. On the other hand, it’s his brain - should he need ethical clearance to use it and do with it whatever he sees fit? I guess there’s the risk again that others will take ever more extravagant steps in their pursuit of fame (just look at Big Brother…) I’m also not absolutely convinced as to what insight this experiment will actually provide, but I’m not a neuroscientist (Thoughts, reader D?)

A similar situations surrounded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine which went to two researchers that discovered that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacteria. This was so completely against the current medical thinking, that one of them had to infect themselves with the bacteria, show they got stomach ulcers, and then show that antiobiotics could clear them up, before anyone would believe them. The Nobel citation “praises the doctors for their tenacity”. I should think so! In a blatant piece of cross posting, Would you infect yourself with a disease to prove your cure? I’ve got to say, I’d prefer to work though more conventional channels!

The University of Queensland, where I study, has started a monthly science lecture series called BrisScience, which features talks on cutting edge science from key researchers. It’s run by Jennifer Dodd, and the first talk in particular (on March 13th!) should not be missed if you’re in Brisbane!

The speaker is John Mattick, who is a professor at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland. He works on understanding the role of so-called junk DNA - the parts of our genome that don’t appear to make proteins, which is believed to be the sole purpose of DNA. You might think this is just a small fraction of our total genes, but in fact, 98 percent of our genome is “junk”, and it has been conserved over millions of years of evolution. Professor Mattick is one of the world’s leading researchers exploring the idea that, far from being junk, this DNA actually contains vital information, and perhaps contains much of the “meta” information (to use a programmer’s terminology) on how to actually put the proteins together. I’ve actually mentioned Prof. Mattick before, in the context of Science magazine most important scientific achievements of 2004.

Prof. Mattick has previously given talks to my department, and he is an excellent public speaker. Not only does he know his material, but he able to communicate it simply and effectively to someone with no prior knowledge (me!) and is very clearly enthusiastic about what he does. So I highly recommend headling along on Monday week if at all possible!

Here’s his abstract:

March 13: The Secrets of our Genes

The standard wisdom in modern genetics says that DNA is organised into genes that make proteins, which in turn make living things.

But less than 2% of DNA in humans is actually used to make proteins, so what does the other 98% do?

The conventional answer is that it doesn’t do anything: it’s simply junk DNA, along for the ride but contributing nothing. John Mattick questions this story and argues that the extra DNA is the opposite of junk: it may be ultimately responsible for the development of all life more complex than bacteria.

For all the details, including maps, visit the relevent BrisScience page. Might see you there!

There’s a quote from Austin Powers that goes like:

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
Number Two: Sea Bass.
Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.

It goes on, but I digress. The point is, it’s supposed to be funny - we don’t actually plan on building laser beams into shark’s heads. Right? Well, I’m not so sure any more.

There’s new research being done by the Pentagon to implant electrodes into a sharks head, and then using a combination of stimulation and rewards, convince the shark to swim in a certain direction - basically, controlling it. The idea is that the sharks could be trained to follow a ship (submarine?) without being detected - stealthy, undersea spies.

Now, there’s no denying that this is clever. It’s amazing research. But I’m really not sure about the ethics. In wartime, would governments start killing sharks just on the offchance that they’re spies? There are more “practical” (i.e., less conspiracy theory) application - rats can be trained through neural implants to sniff out explosives in rubble, or perhaps to detect people trapped after an accident.

Is this fundamentally different to training a dog to sniff out drugs at the airport? I think it is - there, at least you’re taking advantage of the natural abilities of the animal, and its natural instincts. I recently reported about using wasps and bees to do similar activities, but again we’re talking about using their natural abilities. I think once you start implanting electrodes and really controlling them…that’s crossing the line, I think. New Scientist is using terms like “remote controlled sharks” which at first inspires me to grin, then to be somewhat horrified. I think it’s a subtle distinction, but a real one.

Perhaps good things will come out of this, such as technology for quadraplegics for direct neural interfaces, but I’m not convinced this is the right approach.