BlueSci

issue 15

Written by Nicholas Gibbons

Friday, 30 April 2010

Recent research by scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) has shed new light upon the neurological mechanisms behind our sense of smell.

Rainer Friedrich's group at FMI used advanced optical testing techniques to analyse the response of Zebrafish to gradual changes in odour character and strength. The results, published in Nature this month, showed that although the neurological patterns produced by the brain are generally invariant with odour intensity, they undergo very distinct changes as the smell is subtly altered in character. This suggests that odours are represented discretely by neuronal circuits in the brain, rather than by a continuous spectrum. As one odour evolves into another, a switching point occurs within the olfactory bulb where certain neurons are turned off and others turned on which gives rise to a new response pattern reflecting the new odour type.

Categorising smells in this way allows the brain to focus on certain groups whilst ignoring others. Sommeliers, for example, are able to distinguish between the delicate notes of a wine whilst simultaneously ignoring unrelated odours in the air such as perfume or cooking food. There is a fine balance between extracting the required information without being distracted by background smells and this method of discrete odour characterisation makes this possible. Friedrich believes that similar principles could also underlie other fundamental processes in the brain such as decision-making. Decisions are also considered to be discrete and are made based upon the information which is available, however sometimes a tiny addition can catalytically affect the final result.

www.nature.com

Is That Egg Mine?

Written by Wing Ying Chow
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
At the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, a flock of zebra finches are getting a little bit confused... Zebra finches are brightly patterned birds from Australia that exhibit intriguing behaviour when it comes to raising their young. Some females of the group lay eggs in other female's nests. She tries to deceive the host into incubating and raising the chick as her own. This is called brood parasitism, the most famous example of which is the cuckoo, which does not build a nest but parasitises another species exclusively. Schielzeth and Bolund, who carried out this research, used a complex set-up involving 139 finches and 1732 eggs. As the host and parasite are the same species in this case, genetic analysis was required to tease out the parentage of each egg, a tool not available for observations in the wild. While zebra finches do make their own nests and lay eggs in them, the researchers found that one in five clutches have a parasitic egg, one out of every six eggs is a potential parasitic egg and two out of five such parasitic eggs are successful, in that the host incubates the egg without rejecting them. The timing of laying the parasitic egg seems to be crucial to its success. Too early and the hosts are likely to abandon it, too late and the hosts are already incubating their own clutch and it will be difficult to sneak another one in. The gregarious nature of zebra finches means that they are able to monitor what other nesting pairs are doing and time their parasitic attempts accordingly.

Spying on catalysts

Written by Kathrin Holtzmann

Friday, 30 October 2009

A new method for measuring catalytic activity has been developed using nanoparticles.

Catalytic activity can be very hard to measure. Currently the reaction of model catalysts is investigated under isolated conditions that do not resemble the conditions under which the catalysts are normally used. The reactions are judged purely on their products without further inquiry in the mechanisms going on. A group of scientists from Chalmers University have recently developed a system to measure catalytic activity in situ using the colour of nanoparticles, which could change all this.

Larsson and his group use nanoparticles as clever, indirect sensors, to track the catalyst and the products it is reacting with. This technique is not new, this idea is also used for developing biosensors, but applied to catalysts could pose a break-through in the understanding of the underlying processes.

Little gold nanodiscs are covered with a special adhesive to which the catalyst particles are attached. The nanoparticles act as plasmonic probes; they allow light of a certain wavelength to couple into the surface as a standing wave, which results in it appearing a certain colour. The wavelength of light which is coupled or absorbed, depends on the shape of the particle. Any change in size due to absorption of molecules results in a shift in the wavelength absorbed and can be easily monitored optically. The authors estimate that they could detect coverage down to one thousandth of the nanoparticle's surface, using this technique.

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Written by Jamie Farnes
Monday, 28 September 2009
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Submissions for BlueSci

Written by Christopher Adriaanse

Friday, 31 July 2009

BlueSci accepts between four or five feature articles submitted by junior members of the university. Get in touch with an idea or simply email your completed article to submissions@bluesci.org

Articles are normally approximately 1200 words and should not be based too closely on topics recently covered in previous issues.

The deadlines for submitting articles for the 09/10 academic years are:

Issue 17 - 30th October 2009
Issue 18 - 12th February 2010
Issue 19 - 2nd July 2010

Once articles are submitted, they are selected anonymously based on content, clarity and subject material. The successful authors will be notified by email.

Hints and Tips

If you are thinking of submitting an article for the next issue of BlueSci, please read the following guidelines:

Topical subjects are often a bad idea as they may be out of date by the time we go to press
We are unlikely to publish an article on a similar subject to one that we have recently published so look at our back issues
The article should be informative and factually correct but understandable to a non-specialist
Articles should not read like a scientific journal paper but do include relevant quotes from scientific studies
Please don't use overly chatty or colloquial language

Interviews

Articles can be made much livelier by including quotes. Most scientists will happily to speak to you about their work. Please be sure to inform them that their quotes may be published and provide details of where they can find the finished article. BlueSci has a Dictaphone that may be borrowed.

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We welcome the inclusion of diagrams or photographs but we will need the author�s permission to use them. If you can't provide pictures but have an idea, please pass on the details as our graphics team are on hand to assist.

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The entire article must be original material and not cut and pasted directly from scientific papers or web sites. We have and will continue to reject articles that we believe to have been plagiarised.

Please list any papers or websites that you have used at the end of the article. This helps us to verify the scientific accuracy of the article, as well as giving credits where necessary.

Editing

BlueSci reserves the right to edit the content of all articles accepted for publication in consultation with the author.

Copyright

BlueSci is published by Varsity Publications, who own the copyright for all material in the magazine. It is therefore vital that you do not publish your work elsewhere without obtaining permission and we ask all writers to sign a copyright consent form acknowledging that they are aware of this once their article has been accepted for publication.

If you are submitting your work elsewhere concurrently, please inform us at the time of submission as this may influence our choice of article.

Please read our terms and conditions before submitting

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