Posted on 17.03.13
Highlights from this week’s New Scientist.
Breast milk could give a plentiful supply of embryonic-like stem cells for treating Alzheimer’s or repairing damaged hearts.
A judge has permitted the use of “truth” drugs to evaluate the mental state of James Holmes, accused of killing 12 people in Colorado last year.
Heart disease is commonly thought to be a modern ailment, but evidence from ancient mummies suggests humans have had heart problems for thousands of years.
Image: Randall Thompson | The Lancet
Posted on 15.03.13
I went along to Ideas in the Bath? Serendipity, Chance, and Science, a panel discussion on the role of luck in science hosted by the British Library and part of the Inspiring Science season.
Mike Baillie is constantly on the look out for old wood. Sometimes he gets lucky.
A dendrochronologist at Queen’s University in Belfast, UK, Baillie pieces together precise chronologies spanning hundreds of years by analysing growth patterns in tree rings. The timelines can then be used by archaeologists and to calibrate radio carbon dating. But without samples of preserved timber for all periods, tree-ring chronologies will have gaps.
That was the situation several years ago, when Baillie had no wood bridging the 10th century – until one day, staring out of the window of the London to Durham train, he spotted a pile of bog oaks in a field. He sat up – but thought he would never be able to find that field in the middle of the North Yorkshire moors again. Then he saw signs for a motorway junction. “As nice a grid reference as you’ll ever have,” he says.
Not only did Baillie manage to find the bog oaks again, but they spanned just the section of chronology he was missing.
In most accounts of scientific careers, the idea of serendipity doesn’t come up. As chemical engineer Julia Higgins of Imperial College London, the chair of a discussion on the topic at the British Library in London on 11 March, puts it: “Scientific obituaries do not have much to say about luck.” Of course, scientists can be as lucky as the rest of us. But by convention, luck is brushed aside. It is not part of the scientific method.
“Scientists like to put over the idea that they are like Spock from Star Trek,” Higgins says. “But actually they are passionately creative people.” And no less superstitious than the rest of the population, it seems. The panel talked of lucky toy giraffes, lucky cloning rabbits, and of a colleague dashing to get his lucky T-shirt before a rocket launch. “You don’t believe in that, surely?” the lucky T-shirt wearer was asked. “Of course not,” he said. “But it works.“
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Continue reading at New Scientist.
Posted on 10.03.13
Highlights from this week’s New Scientist.
Update [01.04.13] I spoke to the nice people at New Hampshire News Radio for their Word of Mouth show about Vulcan mind melds and telepathic rats.
Brain implants have allowed rats to share information with each other through thought alone.
Measurements of brain activity during general anaesthesia could tell doctors if a patient is waking up while still under the knife.
Posted on 28.02.13
I visited Peter Coveney at University College London’s Centre for Computational Science where he’s building virtual blood vessels in the brain. In the heart of the UK’s fastest supercomputer beats a human pulse.
WHAT will it be like knowing when and how I might die? The question hits me as I look at images showing the force that flowing blood exerts on a brain aneurysm. I’m at University College London (UCL), but the images are being produced by a simulation running on HECToR, the UK’s fastest supercomputer, based in Edinburgh.
The complex fluid-dynamics simulation is similar to those used by the likes of McLaren and Ferrari to design Formula 1 racing cars. Leaps in mathematics and computing power now mean that increasingly complex biological functions can now be simulated in silico instead of in vivo. Welcome to the future of medicine.
These simulations could soon run on desktop PCs. The biggest challenge will be presenting the data to doctors in a useful way, says Peter Coveney at UCL. “Today’s medics are not trained in fluid dynamics,” he says.
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Continue reading at New Scientist (requires subscription, I’m afraid).
Posted on 23.02.13
Highlights from this week’s New Scientist.
Bumblebees can sense the electric fields surrounding flowers and may rely on them to pick the sweetest nectar.
Sony’s PS4 wants to be the centre of a more sociable gaming experience. Here’s a run-down of the essentials.
Some seeds have a look that evokes all-consuming fire, says Svjetlana Tepavcevic, an artist who captures her portraits with a flatbed scanner.
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