TIZER'S SCIENCE NEWS

[David Whipp]

All a bit confusing if we think of 'paying by plastic' being using credit...

[Stanley]

You'll just have to get with the programme David......

[Tizer]

I know polymer notes are strong but don't take that strength for granted. I suspect mine must have had a nick in it already.

Perhaps it suffered from an excess of quantitative easing!

I'll bet the counterfeiters have already cracked the security of the new UK note before we even see it. Counterfeit money is such a profitable business that they can afford massive bribes to get critical information and they can buy the best equipment for manufacture. Just wait and see - it won't be long before we hear that there are fake notes in circulation.

[Stanley]

Did you see the programme 'Fake Britain' which dealt with fake £1 and £2 coins? They estimate that one in five pound coins are fake and the £2 coin is moving in the same direction.

[Stanley]

"stealth guided right sided temporal craneotomy debulking of brain tumour" Discuss!

[plaques]

Normally I never advise people to start internet searches on medical matters but I think in this case we must go along with supporting Stanley whatever our own particular views may be. With this in mind some background to craniotomy can be found on this link.Link.. Always remember that science is moving along faster than we see on the internet. Just leave it to the experts and give the best support you can.

[Stanley]

It's like Star Trek P. Uses the same software as stealth bombers. The programme takes coordinates from the MRI scan and guides the laser scalpel once the surgeon has opened the site. The surgeon is in control all the time but the control is more accurate than a human hand and cuts down on risk. We shall see.....

[Stanley]

It begins to look as though the stealth technology has given Janet some respite.... It's a bloody miracle!

[Stanley]

THIS caught my attention this morning. This is the only link I can find on the web but the report I heard was renewed confirmation of the origin of Man being Africa. I wish the racists would read this and recognise that we are all brothers!

[Bruff]

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries on how the body’s cells detoxify and repair themselves, or autophagy. Disturbances in autophagy mechanism have been linked to various diseases and conditions such as Parkinson’s, Type 2 diabetes, cancers and some age-related conditions. He holds a PhD from University of Tokyo and his Nobel Prize research was performed there. He also had a stint Rockefeller University. He is presently a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

And just to show that scientists aren’t without humour, scientists have a Mouse of the Month award for the mouse that has made significant contributions to science that month. This chap won back in 2009 for just this autophagy work. Goes by the splendid name of Mouse AtG5. http://images.google.de/imgres?imgurl=h ... 3&biw=1366

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

I heard that report Richard. I suppose I knew it must happen but had never really thought about my waste disposal system apart from the obvious.
I heard a lovely report on World Service this morning about the role of old females in the social life of pods of whales. Their sons, some of whom can be over thirty years old stay with their mother and rely on her data set which she uses for navigation. The old females always lead the pod when they migrate. If the mother dies the mortality risk of her sons rises eight-fold. Fascinating stuff about wonderful animals.

[Bruff]

If you're fascinated by whales I can recomment a book: Leviathan by Philip Hoare. Engrossing.

Another prize announced this morning; I'll pop a synopsis on here when it's done.

Richard Broughton

[Tizer]

Richard, thanks for posting the Nobel synopses. Seeing the mention of autophagy reminds me of another process that scientists have known about for a long time but most people aren't aware exists...apotosis, or programmed cell death. It's very important to our development from the embryo onwards. We can't develop just by adding new bits, we have to carefully dispose of some of the old bits too. This link gives a simple explanation of apotosis: LINK

[Bruff]

The Nobel prize for Physics has gone to a British trio all working in US institutions – David J Thouless; F Duncan M Haldane; and J Michael Kosterlitz. The three physicists work in the field of condensed matter physics. They discovered totally unexpected behaviours of solid materials, and came up with a mathematical framework, in the field of topology, to explain these weird properties. The discoveries have paved the way for designing new materials with all sorts of novel properties.

I have to say I don’t understand much about this work at all!

Thouless is a Scot and Cambridge graduate who got his PhD at Cornell University in the US (his supervisor at Cornell was Hans Bethe, who worked on the Manhattan Project and was too a Nobel Laureate – and a giant of 20th century physics). He was a Professor at Birmingham here before settling at the University of Washington in the States. Haldane too is a Cambridge graduate and is currently at Princeton University in the US. Kosterlitz is another Scot and again a Cambridge graduate with a DPhil from Oxford. He was at Birmingham with Thouless and is currently at Brown University in the US.

Good to see three British scientists get the prize, and two Scots as well. As some wag has said: today is the day topology is topical and matter matters

Richard Broughton

[Whyperion]

I heard that report Richard. I suppose I knew it must happen but had never really thought about my waste disposal system apart from the obvious.
I heard a lovely report on World Service this morning about the role of old females in the social life of pods of whales. Their sons, some of whom can be over thirty years old stay with their mother and rely on her data set which she uses for navigation. The old females always lead the pod when they migrate. If the mother dies the mortality risk of her sons rises eight-fold. Fascinating stuff about wonderful animals.

I think similar occurs with Elephants, with the matriarchs knowing the routes, food and water sources.

[Tripps]

Nobel Prize winner Prof. Haldane.

Strangely reassuring that he still uses a blackboard and chalk at his lectures, and his students take notes with a pen and notebook. No sign of laptops, Powerpoint or (my own pet hate) the overhead projector with felt tip pen.

PS. the name Haldane rang a small bell - I wonder if he is related to JBS Haldane

[Bruff]

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machines - controllable, nanometre-sized structures that can convert chemical energy into mechanical forces.

Hoorah! Fraser Stoddart is another Scot and a graduate of Edinburgh University, and was for a time Professor at the University of Sheffield and I attended a couple of his seminars as a postgrad. He is now at Northwestern University in the US. I think I may well have posted on these boards a few years back that I thought he would get the award. He is one of the few people, with the others, to have a fair claim to developing a whole new area of chemistry. Jean-Pierre Sauvage is French and is based at the University of Strasburg; he did post-doctoral work at the University of Oxford. Bernard Feringa is Dutch, and based at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he was educated.

This is pure chemistry this, genuine blue-sky research whose applications are yet to be seen. To create these machines the winners have pioneered elegant and sophisticated ways of bringing smaller molecules together in just the right way. It has been described as trying to build a lego castle in the dark with boxing gloves – that’s how hard it can be to link up the components to create a molecular machine. If you want to know how cool it is check this ‘molecular car’ out – it even has a 4-wheel drive: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15637867

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Richard. That car is mind-boggling!!

[Bruff]

Fraser Stoodart was born in Edinburgh but aged 6 months his family moved out of the city to become tenant farmers. The primary school he went to had only 5 pupuils and he learned to knit there, as the other four were all girls.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

Hah! We were taught knitting as well Richard at Hope Memorial School in Stockport. Big wooden knitting needles...... We loved it but soon regressed to French Knitting on a cotton bobbin modified with four panel pins in one end......

[Tizer]

Scientists in the USA are trying to figure out how Trump's election win will affect science, technology and engineering. He's known to be keen on innovation because he's a businessman and can see profits in new products and he loves the space programme but they're worried about fundamental research. The fact that he sees climate change as a hoax shows that he doesn't understand the scientific process. His views on immigration, his racism and his attitude to women are likely to create the same problems as Brexit will do in the UK - limit the country's ability to attract in good scientists from around the world. As for the the internationally renowned National Institutes of Health he said on a talk show: "...I hear so much about the NIH, and it's terrible."

`What does Trump win mean for US science?' LINK

[Stanley]

Whatever he manages to do will be even more terrible in my opinion, the man has no time for 'socialism'.

[Tizer]

The New Zealanders are having a tough time with earthquakes, there's plenty of reports in the news, and so it's useful to look at the reason that NZ is so susceptible to them. This page has a clear graphic showing the unusual combination of tectonic plate activities in and around NZ. The country lies on the junction of the Pacific and Australian plates but the boundary runs down the east side of North Island then has a kink where it crosses to the west side of South Island. The Pacific plate dives (subducts) under North Island and the Australian plate subducts under South Island. The kink is a bit like the San Andreas Fault in California - the two plates rub past each other in a jerky manner. The centre of the present earthquake is on this kink. Plates colliding in NZ

[Stanley]

We are so lucky in The Isles for many reasons. One of them is that our earthquakes are so small we hardly ever notice them!

[Tizer]

This is a neat bit of scientific progress and it shows how useful genetic engineering can be...
`Genetic breakthrough: Crops use more sunlight to grow' LINK
"Scientists have improved "the most important biological process on the planet" - photosynthesis. The breakthrough, published in the journal Science, used genetic modification to increase the amount of sunlight energy crop plants can channel into food production. That increased yield in an experimental crop by 15%. Researchers say this is a critical step towards increasing crop production to feed a growing global population. Lead researcher Prof Stephen Long, based at the the University of Illinois and the University of Lancaster, said decades of research into the 140-step process by which plants convert sunlight energy into food had revealed specific "inefficiencies in crops". "There are bottlenecks holding up the conversion of sunlight energy into food," he told BBC News. "Our research has tackled one of those bottlenecks."

"The scientists targeted a plant's natural Sun-protection mechanism - while plants have evolved to produce food using sunlight energy, they have also evolved to protect themselves from Sun damage, which slows the process down. "[To protect itself], the leaf induces a process that gets rid of excess energy as heat," Prof Long told BBC News. "But the problem is when a cloud moves across the Sun, there's less sunlight energy - the plant could use it all, but it carries on dispensing that energy as heat. "So what we've done is speed up the process by which that heat loss [switches off]." The team inserted extra copies of the genes responsible for this heat-loss switch."