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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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Mobile phones have revolutionised our lives in many ways. They are
invaluable when you miss your train or when your car breaks down. For a
small group of people in two very different parts of the world they are
turning out to be, quite literally, a life-saver. |
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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The Terminator, C-3PO and HAL: Hollywood's robot stars. Scientists
and engineers have spent years attempting to turn this science fiction
into reality, but have we really come any closer to creating an
artificially intelligent being?
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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You probably know the feeling. Your alarm clock is ringing and it's time to face the morning. Suddenly, memories of the previous night come flooding back, along with a pounding headache and raging thirst. You struggle to lectures with wobbly limbs and waves of nausea, making that tired old vow, "Never again. Never again."
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
1. Britain’s binge drinking culture is costing the country £20 billion a year The long term effect of heavy drinking is serious and the NHS estimates it spends £164m a year treating alcohol-related conditions.
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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In each and every one of the billions of cells in the body there are
thousands of copies of a biological motor 200,000 times smaller than a
pinhead, an enzyme complex called ATP synthase. This motor rotates
surprisingly fast (approximately 6,000 revolutions per minute!) and is
essential for life. However, research at Professor Sir John Walker's
laboratory suggests that disrupting this tiny machine might be a way to
kill cancer cells, lower cholesterol levels and reduce the damage
caused by heart attacks and strokes.
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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Even
setting aside the knotty philosophical problem of what makes us human,
there is still a biological puzzle: how did we acquire the features
that set us apart from our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees? Humans
and chimps share 98.5% of their genetic material, more than many other
sibling species pairs. That number increases to 99.4% if you consider
only the stretches of DNA containing the information to synthesise
proteins. How could this tiny remaining difference account for all the
peculiarities of Homo sapiens: walking upright, brain size,
intelligence, language and complex society?
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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Soon after starting tumour research, I was asked what I would do if
I invented a cure for cancer. Setting aside the improbability of such
an event, I was forced to admit that I didn't know. Would I write to
Nature and present my idea to the world? Or write to the Patent Office
and secure the invention as my own?
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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Mushrooms, plant seeds, dried figs and dogs' testicles might not
appear to have much in common. Yet for Greek Olympians 2000 years ago,
these were the equivalent of doping. Times have changed though, and in
what has become a highly lucrative business, the methods and drugs
available to enhance athletic performance are becoming increasingly
sophisticated. The scandals of Athens may have left the front pages,
but the problem remains. Modern day cheats have tricks up their
sleeves, but scientists are working hard to find methods to catch them
out. Will they have outsmarted the cheats by the time the Olympics
reach Beijing in 2008?
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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In
1995 Dr Diana Bianchi was trying to develop new non-invasive methods of
prenatal diagnosis. She and her colleagues at the Children's Hospital
in Boston examined blood samples from 32 pregnant women and tested for
the presence of cells with a Y chromosome, a good indicator that the
women were carrying a male foetus.
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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Edited by B. Jack Copeland (Oxford University Press, 2004, £14.99). Reviewed by Tom Walters |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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By Richard A. L. Jones (Oxford University Press, 2004, £16.99). Reviewed by Joe Piper |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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By Simon Singh (Fourth Estate, 2004, £20). Reviewed by Rachel Mundy |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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Born in Ulm, Germany on 14 March 1879, Einstein was fascinated by the mysteries of nature from a young age. However, he resented the rote learning that dominated his school curriculum, preferring instead to construct and solve his own simple algebraic problems from scratch. Despite his disdain for formalised schooling, his aptitude for mathematics was quickly recognised by his teachers and in 1896 won him a place at the prestigious Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zürich to study physics.
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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What Does it All Mean? E=mc2: Einstein first published the equation in a 1905 paper entitled Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? The ‘E’ stands for energy, the ‘m’ for mass and the ‘c’ for the speed of light in a vacuum, the fastest speed in the universe at which particles can travel. Einstein developed the equation from the theory of special relativity that he had devised earlier that year. |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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The recent establishment of a ‘virtual department’ at Cambridge University, uniting researchers in biology, medicine, physics and engineering, is recognition of an emerging discipline. The Cambridge Computational Biology Institute (CCBI) is co-ordinating efforts across almost all scientific departments, with the involvement of no fewer than 16 professors representing an impressively wide spectrum of knowledge and experience. This is co-operation on an unprecedented scale, but what is the motivation for such initiatives, and can they help to counter overspecialisation in scientific research?
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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It had been one of those days; 6am start and straight to the lab after breakfast. I had hardly moved since, just identified and recorded frogs found the night before. It wasn't the usual Cambridge lab, all white coats and humming computers. My bench was bamboo lashed together with vines, and a nearby tree provided hooks for my equipment. Oh, and the nearest phone, computer or power socket was a day's journey away.
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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The Forensic Science Service (FSS) aims to contribute to crime
detection, conviction of criminals and exoneration of the innocent. In
2003, the FSS dealt with 140,000 cases and continued to run a research
facility responsible for many forensic science breakthroughs and
innovations, particularly in the field of DNA technology. Helen Butler
works as an assistant forensic scientist at their Huntingdon lab, one
of seven laboratories across England. |
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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The
three hundred occupants of the Babraham Institute conduct their
biomedical research in surroundings that are a little out of the
ordinary: a 19th century stately home in a small village just to the
south of Cambridge. There I met Paul Cuddon, a final year PhD student
who is completing his studies under Dr Martin Bootman at the
world-renowned Laboratory of Molecular Signalling. With the help of Dr
Simon Walker, the group's imaging specialist, Cuddon has taken
photographs of neurons at the extraordinary level of detail seen on the
front cover. These images allowed him to visualise the fine level of
interaction between two of the principal cell types of the brain, the
neuron and the astrocyte.
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
 The Cambridge based company Light Blue Optics has developed a tiny video projector, the size of a cigarette packet, without the need for expensive light bulbs or bulky lenses. Traditional digital projectors use a bulb, a wheel of colour filters and a lens to magnify the image. However, the bulbs can cost up to £400 and have a short life. Not only is the new projector more robust, but it is also smaller and more cost-effective. It works by creating a 2-D holographic image of a picture, using diffracted light from a laser that illuminates a small liquid-crystal-on-silicon microdisplay inside the unit. Sharp images are produced without the need for bulky lenses, and the hologram chip inside the projector can generate 200 frames per second. It might be possible to downsize even further and integrate the projector into mobile phones. The company expects the projectors to be in the shops in two to four years.
www.lightblueoptics.com |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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Medical student Chris Zagorski has set up a company with colleagues
from his Cambridge MIT Institute exchange studies that has great
potential to help breast cancer sufferers. Chris came up with the idea
of developing a tissue scaffold that could help breast cancer sufferers
who had undergone mastectomies to grow new breast tissue. This idea has
great benefits as it will help heal the physical and psychological
wounds caused by intense cancer treatment, as well as negating the need
for artificial implants. Along with MBA student Harry Sloan and Prof.
Ioannis Yannas, Zagorski founded the company BioScaffolds. The team is
hoping to develop the technology in the UK, followed by Europe and the
US. It will take at least five years for the technology to be
available, although once prototypes have been developed and undergone
clinical trials it is hoped that this will pave the way for technology
to help regenerate other body tissues, such as the liver. |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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Researchers from the Department of Earth Sciences have shown
that volcanoes may have played an important role in the origin of life
on Earth by fixing nitrogen. All life needs nitrogen to survive, but
most organisms can't use atmospheric nitrogen as it is in the wrong
form. Bacteria and fungi in the soil can fix nitrogen into a form that
plants can use, which in turn is used by animals further up the food
chain. In the primordial soup, however, no such bacteria existed, so
where did the fixed nitrogen come from? Tamsin Mather and David Pyle
measured the composition of gases above a hot lava lake at the Masaya
Volcano in Nicaragua and found that there was a higher level of fixed
nitrogen in the volcanic plume than elsewhere. The heat from the
volcano allowed the formation of fixed nitrogen, and the results
suggest that volcanoes could have been as important as lightning and
asteroid impacts in fixing nitrogen for use by the earliest
micro-organisms. |
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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The development of multi-fingered microcages by Dr Jack Luo and
colleagues in the Department of Engineering could offer a much better
alternative to the instruments currently available for holding minute
objects such as biological cells. The device is made from a metal and
Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) bimorph layer deposited by a process used in
industrial microelectronics. The DLC layer forces the fingers to curl
inward, forming a cage 20-40 microns in diameter, the width of a wool
fibre. The microcage opens when a pulsed current is applied to the
device, which can be used for holding specimens without applying direct
force, thus avoiding damage. Specimens can then be tested, probed,
injected or transported. Currently, the operating temperature is too
high for use on biological specimens, but development of the device is
ongoing to make it more suitable. The new technology could have
applications not only in biology and medicine, but also in nanoscience. |
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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An unusual collaboration between Dr Rosaleen McCarthy from the
Department of Experimental Psychology and choreographer Wayne McGregor
may lead to new insights into how the brain processes and comprehends
movement. The Choreography and Cognition project, funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Board and Arts Council of England, examined how
dancers retain movement and how they put movement together. When the
dancers were asked to visualise a routine whilst repeating a word over
and over, they found they could run the routine through in their minds
with no interruption. However, when they repeated the visualisation
whilst tapping a sequence of dots on a page, they found that the
sequence in their minds became disrupted. Dr McCarthy hopes that this
will help to understand how the brain thinks about movement whilst the
body is carrying out different tasks, thus helping patients with brain
injury or movement disorders.
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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When the BlueSci team gathered to judge the photographs for our cover competition, we were impressed by the diversity of images we'd received. Cambridge's scientific community is certainly very heterogeneous! With such a high standard of entry, it was difficult to pick a winner. I think you'll agree that Paul Cuddon's photograph of neurons is stunning. As always, you can learn more about it by reading our on the cover article.
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Tuesday, 11 January 2005 |
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The first issue of BlueSci was launched last term and was
enthusiastically received. We are thrilled with the response, and are
glad that you, the readers, agree with us that there's a real niche for
what we're trying to achieve. We hope that in giving Cambridge
scientists a chance to express themselves we have managed to entertain
non-scientists and scientists alike, and have also provided a forum for
everyone in Cambridge to find out about events across the University.
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Saturday, 15 January 2005 |
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The eminent doctor solves your problems |
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