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Wednesday, 04 October 2006 |
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Geneticists and zoologists at the University of Cambridge have produced the most accurate model yet of how modern humans came to populate the planet. There is a consensus amongst archaeologists that the modern human population originated from a single population somewhere in East Africa between 45,000 and 75,000 years ago. However, other questions such as the migration speed and the size of the original settlement are hotly disputed. The model, developed by a team led by Hua Liu and published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, fits well with current archaeological data. It suggests that the process of human colonization may not be as complex as first thought. In the team’s model, a small group of individuals leave a settlement and establish their own a short distance away. Once the new colony has grown to a certain size, the process repeats itself and a new settlement sprouts off forming a chain of settlements. Using the model, the authors estimate that the original settlement in East Africa was composed of about 3000 individuals, with the first migrants leaving it about 56,000 years ago.
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Wednesday, 04 October 2006 |
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Cambridge University Science Productions (CUSP) has produced a series of webcasts from the BA Festival of Science. The BA Festival is a week-long science festival that is held in a different UK location every year. This year it was held in Norwich. The Festival brings together over 300 of the UK’s top scientists and engineers to discuss the latest developments in science and engineering with the public. The theme of the Festival was ‘People, Science and Society’. The address by Frances Cairncross, the BA president, explored the economic impact of climate change and the ‘human’ context of scientific development. CUSP has produced webcasts from the BA Festival for the second year running. The webcasts include coverage of the keynote Award Lectures, several segments on the interface between science and art, and a series of live studio debates. The main presenters were Greg Foot (formerly of CUSP and now at the BBC) and Matt Cunningham (from GMTV’s Toonattik). The webcasts were produced in collaboration with students from Imperial College’s Science Communication course and technical staff from the University of East Anglia. The webcasts are available at www.sciencelive.org. |
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Wednesday, 04 October 2006 |
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Weight gain in infancy causes children to start puberty earlier. In a paper published in the July issue of Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, researchers led by David Dunger from the Department of Paediatrics, University of Cambridge, discussed whether childhood obesity could be causing increasingly young children to enter puberty. Once a child enters a pubescent age, weight will play a part in dictating when puberty will begin. For example, a malnourished child will start puberty much later. That seems logical, but there is also growing evidence to suggest that your weight as a baby could program when you will hit puberty in later life. Whether the increase in childhood obesity will lead to earlier puberty is uncertain. It is currently estimated that the age of onset of puberty will decrease by 6–12 months every 100 years. The paper calls for a long-term investigation into this figure. The decreasing age of puberty has long been thought to be influenced by a variety of factors, including ethnic background, geographic and socio-economic factors. A study in Norway and Denmark found that the onset of menstruation in young women had fallen rapidly since the nineteenth century, by up to 12 months per decade.
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Wednesday, 04 October 2006 |
 Image: Renata Ferreira The team looked at instances when a third-party monkey intervened in support of one participant in a fight. This is an example of ‘coalition’ behaviour. The dominant male, known as the alpha male, was the most likely to intervene in conflicts. This may be a way of showing the female monkeys his protective abilities. The alpha male projected his role as a ‘protector’ in the group by favouring the most subordinate of the two immature contestants. The study, led by Renata Ferreira and published in the American Journal of Primatology, looked at 20 capuchin monkeys ranging in a semi-free state. Whether or not the monkeys were related did not affect coalition behaviour during a conflict. The tendency of the monkeys to remain close to each other was more important. The pattern of supporting the youngest combatant was not seen in a conflict amongst adults. |
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Thursday, 19 October 2006 |
Focus on scientific foresight and why we need scienceBlueSci identifies areas of promise in scientific research and learns that “the most interesting discoveries will be the unexpected ones”Michael McIntyre is a Professor in theoretical fluid dynamics based at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the Academia Europaea. He edited the Journal of Fluid Mechanics for 10 years and was awarded the Bartels Medal of the European Geophysical Union and the Rossby Medal, the highest award of the American Meteorological Society. |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Sheena Gordon and James Pickett take a trip to the world of systems biology
Have you ever considered the
Underground network to be analogous
to the immune system? Unless you
have been exposed to systems biology,
probably not. Systems biology is a new
approach to biology that has developed
alongside technological innovations
that have enabled data collection at the
level of the entire organism. Some predict
that systems biology is on track to
replace some of the more traditional
styles of research within a decade.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Tristan Farrow explains how teleportation is not just science fiction
In Star Trek, all Captain Kirk has to do
is say “Beam me up, Scotty” and he
dematerializes from a desolate planet
and reappears on board the USS
Enterprise.Teleportation, however, is not
so simple. A body cannot be disassembled
atom by atom and rebuilt elsewhere.
But, teleportation should not be
confined to the realm of science fiction,
as it is in fact reality.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Katherine Bridge highlights advances in visualizing neurons
A hundred billion nerve cells are all
chattering away to each other in your
brain helping you to learn and forget
what you are told in your lectures, letting
you feel happiness and telling you
that you like the taste of chocolate.The
most intriguing thing about these
activities is that we still don’t really
know how the brain works.We hope
that technology will one day enable us
to understand fully the development of
this complex organ and what happens
when something in it goes wrong.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Gemma Simpson reveals how computers are trained to read minds
The ability to read and decipher the
facial expressions of another human
being is vital to survival. In fact, interpreting
the facial expressions and gestures
of others may be so fundamental
to human survival that we have
evolved a specialized region of the
brain to do it. In the age of the computer,
the burning question becomes:
can we program a machine to have the
same capability? The answer may well
be yes, as image processing, and possibly
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI), may facilitate the creation of a
formula for interpreting facial expressions
and complex emotions.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Flora Greenwood reveals the importance of a part of the brain
You see someone on the street and
cringe because you recognize their
face from a brief drunken meeting a
few weeks earlier. The name is likely
to have been forgotten, but the face is
somehow effortlessly locked inside
your memory.Whether we want to or
not, humans are likely to recognize or
feel familiarity with a face even if only
seen once. How do we do this? Faces
are generally highly similar, with only
subtle variations, making us experts at
this particular form of visual memory.
Moreover, we are astonishingly good
at judging emotion from facial expression,
even if we can only see the eyes.
Do we have a specialized ‘face module’
in the brain that deals only with
faces? And if so, are we born with it,
or does it develop during early life?
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Louise Woodley opens the door on free access to scientific information
One of the oldest practices in science is
that following their hard-earned Eureka
moment, scientists publish their findings
so that the rest of the scientific community
may share in their discoveries, cite
their work and build upon it. This is
how scientific theories are disseminated
and adopted and how research reputations
are built or destroyed. In reality,
this spawns fights for first authorship,
secrecy to avoid being scooped and the
ultimate quest of having one’s material
published in the most prestigious journal.
Publishing papers is integral to the
academic lifestyle and the framework of
scientific publishing is undergoing a
mini-revolution as many scientists and
members of the public are fighting for
an open-access model of publication.
Open access is the immediate publication
of articles on the Internet so that
anyone can access them free of charge.
Only time will tell if this new model of
publication will become a reality for all
scientific journals.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Hannah Critchlow discusses schizophrenia: a disease of the brain, not the mind
Mental health, particularly schizophrenia, was until the latter part of last
century heavily stigmatized, poorly understood and in many ways socially ignored.
Such stigma is gradually dissipating as scientific knowledge, and the public’s
awareness, increase. Nevertheless, many people still think schizophrenia can
be defined by hallucinations and delusions of grandeur, or believing oneself
to be God. While these traits are often seen in people suffering from schizophrenia,
they make up a small percentage of the total symptoms of the disease. |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Gemma Simpson connects string theory and QCD to the Theory of Everything
The Theory of Everything (ToE) sounds
rather grand, but it is based on a relatively
simple idea: it should combine
what we know about the four fundamental
forces of the universe into a single
theory. If we can achieve a ToE then
scientists will be able to model even further
back in time, possibly to the beginning
of the universe. A proposed ToE
should generate testable hypotheses. A
recently developed theory, which combines
string theory and quantum chromo
dynamics (QCD), seems to be the
most suitable candidate thus far.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Tom Baden shows how we study ions in neuronesThe nervous system consists of billions of inter-connected nerve cells. Over one
hundred years ago, on the basis of morphological studies, Ramon y Cajal reported
nerve cells to be the fundamental individual unit of the nervous system. Indeed,
neurones are the cellular unit of the brain, however, they are not necessarily
the smallest unit of computation. In fact, each nerve cell is a complex information
processor in itself. |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Ana
Vasiliu introduces the Journal of Spurious Correlations
A number of academic journals
have recently been established to make ‘negative’ results accessible in a peer-reviewed,
citable form. However, the content at stake is much more diverse than simply
negative results. There is a wide gap between failed randomized trials in
medicine and psychology, quasi-experiments, theories disproved by empirical
research, circumstantial evidence against theoretical expectations and
anomalies in the social sciences. Such studies do, however, share the common
factor of being embarrassing when submitted for peer review, and suffer a correspondingly
higher burden of proof before their (relatively rare) appearance in print. The
question is, can you tell a negative result when you see one? What is lost in
the processes leading from research output to publication? What, if anything,
has been done to count, name and review those findings that are felt only indirectly,
as systematic shortcomings of published content? |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Peter Stern takes us behind the scenes of a scientific publication and tells
how he can “make
a career, but not break a career”
Any scientist trying to survive in the academic world will undoubtedly face
the realities
of the publish-or-perish philosophy. To begin and then sustain one’s research
career, results must be obtained and manuscripts must be published. Not only
that,
if one dreams of tenure or even a professorship, then these manuscripts have
to be
published in high-impact journals, journals like Science, which receives over
12,000
manuscripts per year, of which fewer than 8% are published.These journals are
making
careers and guiding the focus of research. Peter Stern has been a Senior Editor,
specializing in neurobiology, at Science for the last eight years. |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Julius Rix and colleagues brave the cold for science
There I was, halfway through writing
up my PhD thesis, when I began to
think about what I would do after I
had finished. I had realized that I
wanted to do something different and
I certainly did not want to be sitting
in front of a computer. I found out
that the British Antarctic Survey
(BAS) was looking for Electronic
Field Engineers and, despite thinking
that I had little chance of getting the
job, I decided to apply.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Lucy Butler reports on the activities of CUTEC
Cambridge is full of people with
bright ideas: research that goes on
every day in the University could produce
new technologies that would
revolutionize our lives. There is a vast
amount of potential, but unfortunately
much of this remains unrealized.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Nick Jackson traces the history of medical teaching in Cambridge
Medicine is one of the most venerable
degree subjects at the University of
Cambridge, and one that has transformed
radically since its introduction
in the Middle Ages. Like law and divinity,
medicine has been a part of the
University’s curriculum in one form or
another since the thirteenth century.
Although the earliest medical degree
of which proof survives was awarded
to James Freis in 1460, the first evidence
of medical teaching at the
University of Cambridge dates from
the 1270s, when Nigel de Thornton,
Doctor of Physic (medicine),
bequeathed property to the University,
including a medical lecture room.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
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Happy Second Birthday, BlueSci!
 According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, by the age of
two a healthy toddler should be “increasingly more mobile and aware of
himself and his surroundings”.This principle most certainly applies to
BlueSci.
During the last year, BlueSci team members have been as far afield
as Belgium, for the Communicating European Research Conference, where we saw
first hand science outreach initiatives in Europe. BlueSci has also
teamed up with Cambridge University’s Scientific Society (CUSS), to film
the after-dinner speeches at the CUSS annual dinner.
Our “desire to explore new objects and people” is also increasing,
with the recruitment of a team of news writers for BlueSci online.
As part of Cambridge University Science Productions (CUSP), BlueSci
has podcast interviews with the lecturers of the Darwin Lecture series; visit
www.bluesci.org.
Looking ahead to the coming year,we are pleased to be continuing our relationship
with Varsity Publications.We’d like to thank the Varsity Business Manager,
Chris Adams, and welcome his successor, Adam Edelshain.
Furthermore, CUSP has undergone
some restructuring. One of our aims is to
provide staff and students of the University
with opportunities to train in science communication.
We have organized a series of
hands-on workshops for Tuesday evenings.
Workshop topics will include editing short
films, writing and magazine production.
We are very much looking forward to the “terrible-twos”—a
time when BlueSci is expected to “experience huge intellectual
and social change”. I hope that BlueSci continues to provide
material that you consider enlightening and entertaining. Please feel free to
email us with your feedback.
Louise Woodley
managing-editor@bluesci.org |
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Saturday, 30 September 2006 |
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The start of a new academic year brings with it a host of new BlueSci
readers.At BlueSci,we aim to produce a popular science magazine that
is both informative and entertaining for all members of the University.The magazine
contains feature articles that have been written by undergraduates,graduates
or postdocs.
 Features articles in this issue cover
diverse topics.TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
discusses how string theory might lead
to a testable Theory of Everything, while
FREE-FOR-ALL introduces open-access
publishing. For the more biologically
inclined, SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE
BRAIN, FACE VALUE and ALL IN THE
MIND? deal with brain biology.
BlueSci also contains regulars that appear in every issue. Members
of the BlueSci team commission these articles. In INITIATIVES you can
read about the activities of CUTEC. AWAY FROM THE BENCH gives insight into what
life as a scientist in Antarctica is like, while in A DAY IN THE LIFE…
Peter Stern chats about life as an Editor. HISTORY and ARTS AND REVIEWS both
take us back in time and trace the history of medical teaching and science in
film, respectively.
The final regular section is FOCUS. In
this issue, FOCUS features an opinion
piece by Professor Michael McIntyre,
which I highly recommend, as well as an
interview with Professor Austin Smith.
In addition to the magazine, BlueSci produces a website that contains
additional articles and is updated regularly with news articles. I hope you
enjoy reading issue 7 of BlueSci!
Sheena Gordon
issue-editor@bluesci.org |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Mico Tatalovic and Alison Frank review the relationship between film and science
At first sight, film and science may appear to have little
connection.Yet it was through science that the technology
required for film was first developed. In fact, it was in
direct response to scientific needs that a crucial moment in
the growth of cinema occurred.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
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Dear Dr Hypothesis,
When I was on a trip to Italy over
the summer holidays, I heard a
group of Italian sparrows cheeping
to each other. This got me wondering:
can birds from different countries
understand each other, or is it
all pigeon to them?
Passerine Phil
 Image by Lakshmi Harihar
Phil, this is quite a difficult question to
answer without being able to ask the
birds directly. I can tell you that ornithologists—
people who study birds—know
that different species of birds can sing
characteristic songs, and it is therefore
believed that different species cannot
understand each other… just like we
can’t understand the languages of other
animals. Bird song is also thought to vary
within a species in much the same way
that people can speak different dialects of
the same language. Continuing this analogy,
I suspect that birds of the same
species, but in different countries, may be
able to recognize the meaning of a foreign
bird’s chirping, even if they can’t
understand every single word.
Dear Dr Hypothesis,
I work as a postman, which is a fantastic
job in the summer. It is not so
good in the winter, however, due to
the risk of ice and other cold-weather-
related problems. In the dark
mornings on my rounds, I have spent
a lot of time wondering why I am
able to see my breath at this time of
day, but at no other time. Can you
help me figure this out?
Delivering Derek
DR HYPOTHESIS SAYS:
You can see your breath because of the
chemistry between air and water and the
phenomenon of condensation. Condensation
is the conversion of a vapour to a
liquid. As you are no doubt aware, water
can be suspended in the air as vapour.The
concentration of water that can be held
like this decreases as the air cools down.
You are able to see your breath as the
water in it condenses. The temperature
has fallen to a level at which your breath
has more water in it than the air can hold.
Dear Dr Hypothesis,
As the nights start becoming longer, I’m looking forward to getting my
woolly jumper on, filling up my Thermos and getting back to my first love: astronomy.
I pride myself on being a bit of an expert on the night sky. Despite this, I
was stumped when a friend asked me who had named the planet Uranus. And, perhaps
more importantly, were they having a laugh? Can you please help me maintain
my pride?
Celestial Clive
 Image by Lakshmi Harihar
Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel on 13 March
1781. He originally recorded it as a comet and named it George’s Star,
after King George III. Unsurprisingly, European astronomers were not as keen
as Sir William on this name, and several discussions ensued as to what the planet
should be called. It was the editor of the Berlin Astronomisches Jahrbuch
who ultimately suggested Uranus, the Latin name for the Greek god of the sky.
Reluctant to give up their sovereignty, the British continued to use the name
George’s Star until at least 1850. So Clive, you can tell your friend
that the naming of Uranus was definitely not a laughing matter for eighteenth-century
astronomers. |
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Dr Hypothesis asked:
What colour is molten gold? Why?
One of our readers answered:
Molten gold can be a variety of
colours because it is almost always
alloyed with other metals. If it contains
copper it will be redder, iron
makes it blue, and aluminium makes
it purple, while natural bismuth and
silver make it black. It may surprise
you to know that gold, more often
than not, contains 8–10% silver.
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Sunday, 01 October 2006 |
Dr Hypothesis’ research assistant Tom Pugh challenges you to try your
hand at this mathematical mystery:
Mr and Mrs Diophantine love dogs. Last year they had six, and a month ago Mrs Diophantine bought more. On top of that they have kennels, which until yesterday contained four times as many dogs as there were in the house, plus two guard dogs Brutus and Bruno. Yesterday, the summer holidays began, and their neighbours dropped their dogs off at the Diophantine Dog House, adding a third again to the number of dogs in the kennel. Mr and Mrs Diophantine can only handle looking after 50 dogs in total at any one time.
How many dogs are they currently looking after?
Click here for the answer...
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Wednesday, 04 October 2006 |
Answer:
Calling the number of dogs in the house a, the number of dogs in the kennels before yesterday n, and the number of dogs in total now m, we can derive the following equations:
n = 4a + 2 and m = 4/3 n + a
Therefore:
3m = 4n + 3a
Substituting n with 4a + 2:
3m = 19a + 8
This is a Diophantine equation, hence the name of the problem. This equation has an infinite number of discrete solutions becausedue to the fact that m and a must be whole numbers. For example, m = 9 and a = 1 is a possible solution to the equation. However, not all of the solutions will fit the problem because we know that a is greater than 7 and that m is less than 50fifty. The only solution which fits these conditions is m = 47 and a = 7.
That’s a lot of dogs!
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