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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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Welcome to the new issue of BlueSci! Many thanks to everybody in the CUSP team for their hard work that made this issue possible and to Varsity for its continued support. |
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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In July 2004, a bank worker named Vikki Anderson had her handbag stolen. She cancelled all the stolen documents immediately but this was not enough. Within weeks a £20,000 loan was taken out in her name, and direct debits were set up from her bank account. She later reported that it had taken “hundreds of hours” to sort out the resulting mess. Her tale, covered by the BBC, is a typical example of identity theft, in which a criminal uses a person’s identity for their own ends. |
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Written by Aaron Savio Lobo
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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Shrimp is probably among the most sought after and valued seafood. It accounts for 20% of the income generated by the global fishing industry. Shrimp available to the consumer is either wild caught or cultured and reared on shrimp farms. The majority of the world’s shrimp is captured by a fishing method called shrimp trawling. A shrimp trawler drags a conical net from its stern along the sea floor. The net has a wide gaping mouth that tapers backwards, with the net mesh also decreasing in size in the same direction. The net thus has the smallest mesh size at the end called the bag-net where the catch accumulates. However, a net designed for the capture of creatures as small as shrimp is unlikely to miss anything that crosses its gaping mouth. For obvious reasons, shrimp trawling results in the capture of extraordinarily large numbers of other species as well. These non-targeted or incidentally caught species are commonly referred to as bycatch. |
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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Surface science underpins a multitude of technological applications and fundamental processes. Surface properties govern many of the properties of materials around us, ranging from everyday macroscopic effects, such as friction, to the microscopic quantum effects that control nanotechnology, catalytic activity and the behaviour of electronic devices. Surface scientists, including those here in Cambridge, are constantly developing new techniques to gain detailed information about the characteristics of surfaces, and to understand just what happens as two atoms pass each other by. |
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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Despite the advances of twenty-first-century medicine, the world is still plagued by infectious diseases. These are transmitted by any one of numerous pathogenic bacteria, viruses, protozoa and micro-organisms. Yet one of the most recent epidemics in Britain, variable Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), was not caused by any of these agents. Instead, the mysterious culprits of this disease were found to be prions, short for proteinaceous infectious particles. They are pathogenic agents made solely of protein, making them unlike any other infectious disease. Furthermore they can bring about disastrous effects in the body. |
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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We all know that Cambridge is a stimulating and dynamic place with an incredible history of scientific and technological achievement. If the University of Cambridge were a country, it would come an incredible third in the Nobel Prize rankings, lagging behind only the US and the UK. What are the reasons for this success? Clearly the talent of its researchers is a major contributing factor, but just as important is a spirit of innovation and motivation, of finding a novel solution to a problem, and following it through to completion. With the advent of the high-tech sector, the Cambridge-based start-up has enjoyed significant success in recent years. |
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Written by Terry Evans
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
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Modern technology seems to make the world go round. Gadgets and gizmos are an unavoidable part of modern-day living. But where do original ideas come from? Terry Evans speaks to Andy Milton, an Innovation Consultant from Innovia Technology, to find out how new inventions, from the fun to the essential, are dreamt up and brought to life.
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
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Anthropology, or the study of human beings, is a wide ranging subject that incorporates and draws upon many scientific and archaeological disciplines. This is reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of a major new initiative for research into human evolution at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge. As the largest of its kind in Europe, the centre houses research ranging from archaeology to genetics and even chimpanzee culture, with scientists from each of these disciplines working side-by-side. A large part of the work at the centre takes place outside Cambridge, in 20 field sites scattered across the globe from Siberia to Central America. One of the most interesting field-based projects being undertaken is the tracking of early human movements out of Africa.
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
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This summer a group of eight students from the University of Cambridge
will be flying to locations such as Indonesia, Honduras and South
Africa, where they will employ skills learned in their degrees in a
conservation project as part of Operation Wallacea, a series of
biological and social science expedition projects. They will be joining
scientists from around the world to monitor biodiversity, and to carry
out a number of research projects on the unique flora and fauna in
these specially identified locations.
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
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Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) assembled the largest natural history collection ever made by one person. He charmed royalty with his zebra-drawn carriage, kept giant tortoises as pets and published around 1200 books and papers over his lifetime. Yet his personal life remains shrouded in mystery. Who was Lionel Walter, second Baron Rothschild, and how did he contribute to science?
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
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Students at Cambridge read for a degree in Natural Sciences, yet many scientists feel that they do not get the opportunity, to or know how to read at all. Conversely, budding literary scholars may have become convinced that they do not understand, or cannot do science. But does this have to be the case? Can reading bring science and literature together?
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
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Comics are generally underrated as an art form. The comic-book medium is most often associated with animated children’s stories. However, for many people comics are more than this.
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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The University of Cambridge boasts a world-renowned reputation for excellence in science. But do you really know the full extent of the heritage of this great institution? From the likes of William Gilbert in the sixteenth century to our most recent superstar Professor Stephen Hawking, this book details the history of scientific research at the University of Cambridge spanning six centuries and boasting more than seventy Nobel Prize winners, which incidentally earns the University its own section in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. Editors Peter Harman and Simon Mitton take you on a wonderful journey through the scientific minds that flourished and impressed here in Cambridge. This collection of chapters tells the stories of most of the greatest scientific minds this planet has seen. It will inspire any budding scientist studying at Cambridge. Not only that, it is a fascinating souvenir for anyone who has a connection to this University. |
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Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
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According to Malcolm Longair, the concept of steady state cosmology was inspired by an evening at a Cambridge cinema in the mid 1940s. Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold saw The Dead of Night, a horror movie consisting of four apparently unrelated ghost stories “with the interesting property that the end of the fourth story connected unexpectedly with the beginning of the first, thereby setting-up the potential for a never-ending cycle”. When the gentlemen returned to Bondi’s rooms at Trinity College, Gold is reported to have suddenly turned to his colleagues and asked, “What if the Universe is like that?”. These three Cambridge scholars may have been B-grade movie connoisseurs but they also happened to be first-rate astrophysical cosmologists. |
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Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
Dear Dr Hypothesis,
During a recent, rather late, evening in the pub I
was discussing the issue of death with one of my close friends.
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