Category Archives: science

books, medical, science

Book Review: The Secret World of Sleep

Penelope A Lewis
The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
This is another of those books which I wanted to read and which appeared for either Christmas or my birthday (I forget now which as they are quite close together). This is what the cover blurb says:

A highly regarded neuroscientist explains the little-known role of sleep in processing our waking life and making sense of difficult emotions and experiences.
In recent years neuroscientists have uncovered the countless ways our brain trips us up in day-to-day life, from its propensity toward irrational thought to how our intuitions deceive us. The latest research on sleep, however, points in the opposite direction. Where old wives’ tales have long advised to “sleep on a problem,” today scientists are discovering the truth behind these folk sayings and how the busy brain radically improves our minds through sleep and dreams. In The Secret World of Sleep, neuroscientist Penny Lewis explores the latest research into the nighttime brain to understand the real benefits of sleep. She shows how, while our body rests, our brain practices tasks it learned during the day, replays traumatic events to mollify them, and forges connections between distant concepts. By understanding the roles that the nocturnal brain plays in our waking life, we can improve the relationship between the two and even boost creativity and memory. This is a fascinating exploration of one of the most surprising corners of neuroscience that shows how science may be able to harness the power of sleep to improve learning, health, and more.

Yes, OK, I guess it does do all of that and at a level which is likely OK for the intelligent layman. But as a scientist I found it somewhat lacking, or maybe more correctly it felt loose, in the details. I don’t profess to be very knowledgeable about the neurology of sleep, but I had the feeling that there was more there which is known and which would tie everything together. I may be wrong, and in fairness to Lewis she does say at a number of points “we don’t know how this works”.
Did it tell me anything I didn’t know? Well nothing which I found helpful and which has stuck sufficiently that I could recite it now. As always, yes, OK, I’m probably way above the audience this was written for. I found it an easy but not compelling, or gripping, read — sufficiently so that I whizzed through it far faster than I had expected.
All of this is a shame because I wanted to get that “Wow!” inspirational insight and it didn’t happen. I still feel it should.
As with many modern books it is a slim volume (about 190 pages) and it could have been much slimmer: as always there is too much white space on the page. Even if you don’t want to reduce the font size the leading could certainly be reduced, as could the margins slightly. That would make it a more compact volume, both in looks and physically.
I was also not struck on the cartoon-style illustrations. I didn’t find them illuminating (indeed at times downright confusing) and felt that maybe a few more, better, diagrams were needed for the target audience.
One thing which Lewis does however do well is to write a summary paragraph or two at the end of each chapter. Other authors please copy.
Is this a bad book? No, certainly not. It would likely work very well for an intelligent layman. It is merely that it didn’t work for me; but then it probably wasn’t intended to.
Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆

amusements, science

Oddity of the Week: Banana Radiation

We are exposed to ionising radiation every minute of every day, much of it in the form of background radiation including cosmic rays, rocks in the ground, radon gas, water and food.

banana

Bananas, for example, contain naturally occurring potassium-40, a radioactive isotope of potassium. Incredibly, there is even something known as the ‘banana-equivalent dose’, an attempt to contextualise artificial radiation exposures for the general public.
An X-ray screening at a US airport is roughly two and a half times a banana-equivalent dose.
From Simon Flynn, The Science Magpie (2012)

books, environment, history, science

Coming up in February

Interesting events and anniversaries in the coming month.
1 February
Start of the last London Frost Fair, 1814 which lasted four days, during which time an elephant was led across the river below Blackfriars Bridge. This was the last frost fair because the climate was growing milder; old London Bridge was demolished in 1831 and replaced with a new bridge with wider arches, allowing the tide to flow more freely; and the river was embanked in stages during the 19th century, all of which made it less likely to freeze.


2 February
Candlemas. This is the Christian festival 40 days after Christmas of the presentation of Jesus at the temple. This day is also celebrated as Imbolc in the Wiccan/Pagan calendar (although some traditions celebrate on 1 February) in honour of Brigid, the goddess of fertility, fire and healing. It is also a time of increasing strength for the sun god and is Groundhog Day in the USA.
2 February
British Yorkshire Pudding Day. What better way to cheer up a miserable winter’s day than with Yorkshire Pudding? Read more here >>>>
10-16 February 2014
Go Green Week. The idea for Go Green Week is to encourage people, especially young people, to think about the environment and climate change. Read more here >>>>

12 February.
Bagpuss. On this day in 1974 BBC TV showed the first ever episode of the children’s animated series Bagpuss, an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams. Sadly it was a bit too late for my childhood (I was a research student by then) but it was (and is) still fun and became one of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate’s iconic series. Read more here >>>>
14-21 February 2014
National Nest Box Week. Run by the British Trust for Ornithology, National Nestbox week is to encourage us to put up nestboxes for the birds. Why? Because so often these birds are declining due to a scarcity of nest sites as mature trees are cut down. This is also a good time to check existing nestboxes and (if they’re not inhabited by anything hibernating — insects, dormice, etc.) to clean them our before the new nesting season begins. Read more here >>>>
15 February.
Galileo Galilei was born this day in 1564. Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements included improvements to the telescope (and thus astronomical observations) and support for Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism. For this latter Galileo was arraigned by the Inquisition, made to recant and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Galileo was one of the all time giants of science. Read more here >>>>
17-23 February 2014
Chip Week. It seems that we Brits can’t get enough chips, so let’s admit defeat and celebrate! What? You mean they’re bad for us? I don’t believe it! Read more here >>>>

25 February.
Sir John Tenniel, British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist, died this day in 1914 just a few days short of his 94th birthday. He is perhaps best known today for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Read more here >>>>

beliefs, books, science

Book Review

John Conway, CM Kosemen, Darren Naish
Cryptozoologicon, The Biology, Evolution and Mythology of Hidden Animals, Volume I
(Irregular Books, 2013)

This is strange book. It is one I wanted to read and I was given a copy for Christmas. It sounded as if it would be interesting.
What the authors set out to do, and they are up front about stating this, is to look at some of the myths of strange animals unrecorded by science and then to look at how plausible the myths are and what the animal might be. They write a couple of pages about each of the 28 creatures they choose. All of which is fine, if eccentric.
What they then go on to do is to speculate wildly about history, evolution and taxonomy of each creature as if it were real. They do say repeatedly that what they are indulging in is speculation, but they acknowledge that it will be misinterpreted by the wilfully minded.
As they say on the cover blurb:

Cryptozoologicon is a celebration of the myths, legends, evolution and biology of hidden animals. Always sceptical, but always willing to indulge in speculative fun, Cryptozoologicon aims to provide a new way to approach cryptozoology: as fictional biology.

And in their Introduction:

For each cryptid, our entries consist of three sections. We consider it important that people understand exactly what we have done. In the first section of text, we briefly review what people have said beforehand about the given cryptid. We refer to the key accounts and describe what the creature is supposed to look like.
In the second section, we present an evaluation of the reports, make a conclusion about the identity of the given cryptid, and decide whether the accounts refer to a real creature or not. Given that we have included quite a range of mystery animals in our book — some of which are fairly ridiculous and others of which have essentially been debunked — our conclusions range from the open-ended to the “case closed” type.
Finally, we include a third section of text in which we deliberately jump onto the bandwagon of speculation, and wax lyrical about the identity, evolution and biology of the cryptid concerned, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Yeah, “fictional biology” is about the size of it. I had hoped that it might present some interesting new evidence for something. It doesn’t.
And I had hoped that even if it didn’t the book might be amusing. It isn’t that either.
I found it tedious beyond belief. There is nothing here except a regurgitation of the already known myths and their debunking with some wildly speculative and very tedious fiction. The text is extremely dull; not especially poorly written just unimaginative and not sparkling. On top of that I dislike the large colour illustrations; that’s down to their style rather than content; for me they didn’t add a great deal.
The book could, indeed should, have been interesting; and this could have been done with very little extra effort.
For me this book just didn’t work. I found it incredibly tedious and in fact gave up reading attentively no more than half way through and skipped through the remainder.
Unless you have to read this book for some reason, frankly I’d give it a miss.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

books, science

Book Review

Alice Roberts
Evolution: The Human Story
(Dorling Kindersey, 2011)
This is another of the book I have long wanted to read and which I was given for Christmas. And I was not disappointed.
As one would expect from Dorling Kindersley this is a sumptuously produced book with a very large number of outstanding photographs and illustrations. And it is a large, and heavy, coffee table sized volume, so not ideal for reading in bed.
But do not be decieved by this, or the Dorling Kindersley imprint. Evolution is a serious book documenting the story of our development from the earliest known hominins of some 7 million years ago to the present. It is very much aimed at the interested layman, although I would think that teenagers interested in archaeology, palaeontology or anthropology (or indeed just biological science in general) would also find it absolutely fascinating and useful.
The text, which although maybe a little on the sparse side for me, presents the prevailing scientific understanding in proper, but intelligible, detail — and it clearly highlights and explains where there are conflicting hypotheses. All of this is just as one would expect from Prof. Alice Roberts who is one of the current generation of outstanding British scientists and science communicators.
The book is divided into five sections: Understanding Our Past, Primates, Hominins, Out of Africa, From Hunters to Farmers. Each of the sections has been created by a specialist in the field and collated by Alice Roberts who wrote the Out of Africa section.
The middle section, Hominins, occupies almost half of the 260 pages. In doing so it presents several double page spreads on each of the 20 or so major species along the route from early hominins to us. Each of these mini sections tells the story of the species, how it was discovered, what characterises it and ends with a double page spread of photographs of a reconstructed head showing what the species might have looked like and highlighting the characterising features.
These reconstructions were done by the immensely knowledgeable and talented Dutch brothers Adrie and Alfons Kennis. These reconstructions really are truly stunning and must have taken a great deal of time and cost thousands. They alone are worth the cost of the book!
Having said all that, this is not a book to be read from cover to cover, and indeed I have so far skimmed it quite quickly stopping here and there to read in detail. Although readers will want to look through the whole book to understand its compass, it is really something to be dipped into repeatedly, reading small sections as the interest arises. And it is something I shall indeed be returning to time and again.
Along with Alice Roberts’ earlier The Incredible Human Journey, this is for me one of the outstanding science books of recent years.
Overall Rating: ★★★★★

science

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

I watched, as I always do, this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (BBC4, 28,29,30 December), given by Dr Alison Woollard under the title “Life Fantastic: Am I a Mutant?”. They were essentially about (human) developmental biology.
Lecture 1. Revealed how the transformation from a single cell into a walking, talking, multi-trillion-celled organism we call the human body takes place.
Lecture 2. Looked at how diversity in the natural world has come from genetic mutation, explored how species adapt and change to survive and at the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.
Lecture 3. There’s one certainty in life: death. Every living thing eventually dies. But why? How do cells know when to stop living? What happens when they age? And are there ways of halting that process?


RI Auditorium: Christmas Lectures 2010

Now I know I’m a scientist and way above the experience level of the target audience (young teenagers), but I am not an expert on cell biology so I should be able to learn things. But I didn’t. And I found the series dull and pedestrian (although better as it went on) — which has been a feature of the RI lectures in recent years.
This is partly down to the lecturers. I found Woollard’s style wooden and lifeless, especially in the first lecture; for someone who professes to be excited by what she was talking about there was little or no trace in the delivery. It was almost lecturing by sound-bite. And she was easily upstaged at the end of the first lecture by Prof. Sir Paul Nurse, who frankly should have been giving these lectures as he is clearly a natural communicator.
But the pedestrian nature of the lectures is also in part down to the way they have been dumbed down over recent years. Years ago there were six lectures in the series and the audience were expected to crane their necks to understand, but at the same time they were taken on a much better explained journey — logical step by logical step — with lots of practical demonstrations and models. In recent years the lectures have been commercialised, gradually reduced in number to the present three and made bland. The audience are now spoon fed a series of facts in vaguely connected steps with little useful explanation or demonstration of how one gets from A to C. Clearly the kids are not expected to be able to follow logic, understand demonstrations or have to crane their necks to understand. And I feel damn sure many don’t understand and can’t follow what’s going on.
Let me give a trivial example. At the start of lecture one Woollard bombarded the auditorium with 200,000 pieces of confetti, which scarcely created a carpet, and compared this with the 40 trillion cells in the human body. OK, as Woollard said, to create that number would take 6 years at the rate of 200K/second. I find this a useless comparison because it relates to nothing tangible — who can really envisage what 6 years is like? Wouldn’t it be better to point out that if this is 200K pieces then 40 trillion would fill the auditorium (how many times over?) and that the 200K wouldn’t even be enough cells to make your little finger? This can be related to things the audience can see and relate to. Isn’t that a more easily understood, because more tangible, comparison? It is really hard, even for me, to relate to the sheer scale of 40 trillion!

Christmas Lectures 2013

OK I understand in part why this dumbing down has happened. There is a level of scaredness that something might go wrong with a demonstration and someone get hurt. Has this ever happened during the lectures? I very much doubt it.
There is also the question of cost. These lectures are not cheap to stage. Apart from taking the lecturer away from their day job for an extended period to prepare, there is the cost of building and acquiring all the demonstrations as well as the several technicians that are required to do it. We are talking about a cost well into five, probably six, and maybe even seven figures. That money has to come from somewhere which is why the lectures have been commercialised through sponsorship and reduced in number.
In my view this dumbing down has to change if we really are going to inspire the next generation of scientists. I have no problem with funding these lectures, at least in part, through sponsorship; given the cost that is sensible as long as the sponsor isn’t calling the tune. But wouldn’t it be a great idea if the Department of Education contributed the equivalent of a couple of headmasters’ salaries each year? — a flea-bite in the overall education budget, but surely a significant contribution to bringing on the next generation of scientists. If this happened we could go back, as I believe we should, to a series of six lectures, with really inspirational lecturers who are also great communicators, and proper “wow, so that’s how it works!” demonstrations.
I’m thinking of the great lectures of some years ago: eg. Prof. Eric Laithwaite (engineering, 1966 & 1974) and David Attenborough (animal communication, 1973). Who do we have now to come up to their standard? Well let’s start with Prof. Sir Paul Nurse, Prof. Steve Jones, Prof. Alice Roberts. We need inspirational lecturers; recent years have seen too many who really aren’t.
But I seem to be in a minority of one. From what I see on Twitter, and elsewhere, the modern generation of young scientists lap up these lectures and think they’re brilliant. Maybe they are if you’ve been brought up on yoghurt and fish fingers. I believe that kids need to be brought up on something more substantial; you build robust adults by feeding them roast beef and proper vegetables. The same is true of scientists.

natural history, science, words

Words: Xylem and Phloem

At last a pair of botanical words!
Xylem and Phloem are the two types of tissue in plants which transport food and water around the plant.
Xylem [z-eye-lem]
The supporting and water-conducting tissue of vascular plants; woody tissue.
This is the network of tubes through which the plants move water from bottom to top. It also forms a large part of the woody (supportive) structure of the plant. It is concentrated in the centre of the stem.
As might be expected the derivation is from the Greek ξύλον, wood.


Phloem [flo-em]
The food-conducting tissue of vascular plants.
The network which transports food (mostly sugars) from the leaves where they are produced by photosynthesis to the growing tissue.
The phloem is softer tissue that the xylem and occurs mostly in the layer just under the bark where the latest “tree ring” is growing.
Again derived from the Greek: ϕλόος = ϕλοιός, bark + -ηµα (passive suffix).
All (vascular) plants, ie. the vast majority we meet in daily life, conform to this basic model even if they appear to be soft rather than woody. However as you would expect the reality is a lot more complex than the above explanation!

links, science

Did you miss … ?

Another collection of links to pieces you may have missed. Again this time with rather more of a scientific bent, although most a actually readable and interesting.
OMG! Deja vu! This piece on Jabłoński diagrams takes me back to my post-grad days ‘cos these processes were central to what I was working on. How’s this for a scientific demonstration …


Meanwhile physicists have been exploring the hydrodynamics of urination “splashback”. Should be an IgNobel nominee.
Apparently men stroked in their underpants may illuminate the chemistry that bonds relationships. Don’t get too excited: they were stroked on non-sexual parts of their bodies while wearing only underpants. Another IgNobel nominee?
A little over 100 years since Captain Scott sailed off on his vessel Discovery, there’s a new RSS Discovery about to start oceanographic research.
What happens in the brain when we’re asleep? Looks like it flushes the “neuro trash” out of the system.
And there are several more articles from Nautilus on actual waste …
First up it seems there are so many pharmaceutics leaking into our waterways that some fish are now blissed out on Prozac.
Every part of every one of us is made from something else’s waste. Yes, really! Without waste we wouldn’t be here.
While we bemoan the amount of plastic debris in the oceans, it seems it is providing useful homes for some critters.
So where does all that plastic come from. Indeed, where does your stuff come from? Yeah, OK, the supermarket. And where do they get it? Brandon Keim on Nautilus tries following the backward chain ad infinitum. And fails. Which I find rather worrying.
Moving away from the vaguely scientific to things in my backyard …
Here’s one of those curiosities about London that cab drivers are actually brilliant at: London’s narrowest alley. Should be good for a pub quiz or two!
What were they thinking of? Once upon not very long ago US Ivy League colleges took nude photos of all their first year students.
What is mankind’s greatest invention? String? New Scientist makes the case.

Finally two pieces on what makes Autumn so gloriously colourful. The first from Grrlscientist in the Guardian, the second from Malcom Campbell at SciLogs. Just think, I did my research on analogues of some of those chemicals, hence the Jabłoński diagrams.

links, science

Did you Miss … ?

Further links to interesting (well to me, at least) articles you may have missed. Yet again let’s start with the scientific, which unusually(?!) seems to be the majority.
First off we have a piece from the New York Times which again highlights that the biggest public health worry from the Fukushima disaster is not the radiation and cancer but the psychological effects on those involved. This appeared the same day as a piece in Discover about the unexpectedly loose connection between radioactivity and cancer.


Oarfish are curious. They’re long, flat and snake-like. They inhabit the deep oceans and maybe gave rise to the myths about sea serpents. It is unusual therefore for two to be washed ashore in California with days of each other. Luckily scientists went about finding out more about these enigmatic fish. First there was a suggestion that two such sudden deaths may herald a large earthquake, which was soon consigned to the bin of unfounded speculation. Then after a chance to autopsy one of the fish, scientists discovered a range of parasites — not surprising in itself but something we just didn’t know.
While we’re putting you off your lunch, here’s a great piece of science teaching. This guy got his 9 year old pupils to dissect cow brains and used the whole thing as a super teaching tool. I don’t know how he managed to get them over the “Yeuuggghhhh!!” factor.
Still on nasties, you’ll be pleased to know that the scourge of ancient times, Plague, is still amongst us. Of course it’s much less prevalent now, with modern sanitation etc., and very easily treated with antibiotics. Nevertheless there are still a few cases a year in the western world.
And then, of course, there are some fearsome insect predators — maybe not fearsome to us, but they are if you’re another insect.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. One man who turned magic into what we now think of as ordinary was William C Lowe, pioneer of the IBM PC, who died recently. Without him life as we know it would be very different, and many of us owe him a huge debt.
I hate changing the clocks twice a year; it seems so pointless. But it could have been a whole lot worse.
Slang. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. Except that it keeps changing and being reinvented.
What are members of Parliament not allowed to do? Yep, they can’t carry weapons or wear armour into Parliament itself. And at 700 years old this is one of the oldest pieces of legislation in the country which has never been repealed.
How happy would you say you are? Why are some people in some places way happier than in others? They aren’t; it’s all an artefact of magnified statistics. Diamond Geezer lifts the lid.

Finally, this will definitely make you much happier. Despite a recent report there is no global wine shortage. Felix Salmon at Reuters discovers that the report was a piece of dubious marketing. I’ll drink to that!

links, medical, natural history, science

Most Likely You Missed …

Another round-up of links to items you may well have missed …
As a chemist there are some compounds which you really do not want to work with. Meet the Mercury Azides. Non-scientists ignore the technical bits and just enjoy the spectacle!


On the occurrence of snarks and boojums in research.
Here’s a quick summary of the 20 big questions in science. So what happened to “How does photosynthesis actually work?”; I don’t think we properly understand this yet either.
It seems that becoming a boy, in utero, is far more haphazard and tenuous than we thought. A great explanation by Ed Yong.
An here’s another look at the weird world of our lost bones: the os penis and os clitoridis.
Not for the easily frightened … a look at the oceans’ most frightening and disturbing predator: the ferocious 10-Foot Bobbit Worm. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Botanical anthropology … the Bee Orchid as seen by XKCD.

It’s late summer. Which means everyone gets panicky about wasps. But is Britain really being threatened by plagues of wasps? Basically, no!
Oh FFS … Now the health Nazis have their claws into smoothies and fruit juices as being a health risk. Well I don’t like smoothies anyway.
Next up here’s a piece on five diseases we have consigned to the past, thankfully! Well maybe, not!
Life as we know it would not exist if it were not for one simple fungus: yeast. And it isn’t so simple, either.
At last we leave science and medicine behind …
Here are nine questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask. Sorry but they are rather US-centric.
So in a deal with Nestlé Google is to call Android 4.4 KitKat. So if they stick to the “treat” theme for their codenames, anyone want to suggest answers for Q, X and Z?
And finally, omnishambles is among the new words added to the OED. What is the world coming to? Oh, of course, an omnishambles!