TIZER'S SCIENCE NEWS

[Stanley]

Canadian scientists report that mosses uncovered by retreating glaciers have started to generate new growth under laboratory conditions after having been dormant for 400 years. (LINK)

[Tizer]

An alternative to the present attempts to make carbon capture work at power stations has been developed by a British scientist. He's about to give a lecture on it at an international conference but has been working on this for a number of years. For convenience I've copied part of a 2008 press release from his university which explains what it's about and it's significance. There is also a link to the full release on the university's web site.

Technological breakthrough in the fight to cut greenhouse gases
Scientists at Newcastle University have pioneered a breakthrough technology in the fight to cut greenhouse gases. The Newcastle University team, led by Michael North, Professor of Organic Chemistry, has developed a highly energy-efficient method of converting waste carbon dioxide (CO2) into chemical compounds known as cyclic carbonates. The team estimates that the technology has the potential to use up to 48 million tonnes of waste CO2 per year, reducing the UK's emissions by about four per cent.

Cyclic carbonates are widely used in the manufacture of products including solvents, paint-strippers, biodegradable packaging, as well as having applications in the chemical industry. Cyclic carbonates also have potential for use in the manufacture of a new class of efficient anti-knocking agents in petrol. Anti-knocking agents make petrol burn better, increasing fuel efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions.

The conversion technique relies upon the use of a catalyst to force a chemical reaction between CO2 and an epoxide, converting waste CO2 into this cyclic carbonate, a chemical for which there is significant commercial demand. The reaction between CO2 and epoxides is well known, but one which, until now, required a lot of energy, needing high temperatures and high pressures to work successfully. The current process also requires the use of ultra-pure CO2 , which is costly to produce. The Newcastle team has succeeded in developing an exceptionally active catalyst, derived from aluminium, which can drive the reaction necessary to turn waste carbon dioxide into cyclic carbonates at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, vastly reducing the energy input required.

Full story here: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press ... aRs9RV385Y

[Stanley]

Sounds interesting Tiz. I wonder if anyone in charge is reading and understanding it. If it's as good as it looks it would be a useful world-wide technology as well. Catalysts have always been a mystery to me, amazing how they can enable chemical reactions while seemingly remaining unchanged themselves. Another thing that always intrigued me was Absolute Zero. When they taught us the Gas Laws at school I pestered Mr Boake the Science Master for an opinion on the fact that if my reading of the laws was right, if you got the temperature of a gas down to Absolute Zero it ceased to exist. All he could say was that it was impossible to reach this temperature. Still a puzzle!

[Stanley]

A report in the Lancet that patients prescribed non-steroid pain killers like Ibuprofen have a slightly greater chance of having a heart attack.

[Tripps]

Hello Tizer - please explain it to us, and tell us it doesn't really matter. I don't need any more worries.

[Bruff]

Your teacher is right Stanley; you can't get to absolute zero.

If you could, all motion (which is what gives 'heat') would cease. But this violates Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - if all motion ceased at absolute zero than we'd know where something is. But if we know where something is, then the Principle says we don't know how fast it is moving. So how do we know it's not? The Uncertainty Principle is well established. People were well on the way in the era of classical physics in deducing that the theoretical minimum was about where it is (minus 273.15 Celcius, or zero Kelvin), but quantum physics explains the impossibility. It's also worth noting that it takes work to remove heat and so to remove all heat would require infinite work.

Now, we've through experiment got within a billionth of a degree of it. But we'll not get there. As interesting of course, is to think whether there is a highest temperature?

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

Never thought about that Richard. Quantum physics is weird isn't it. How can materials become relatively stronger as they get smaller? Fascinating....

[Tizer]

Tripps, you got it right first time...it really doesn't matter! One of the scientists interviewed on the Today programme was at pains (whoops, pun alert!) to emphasise that the increase in risk was "only slight". The researchers examined the `outcomes' of more than 353,000 patients and found that for every 1,000 patients with a moderate risk for heart disease, three would have an avoidable heart attack after taking high doses of non-steroidal painkillers for one year. The researchers said one of these heart attacks would be fatal. If we worried about all the things in our lives that had a 1 in 1000 or even 3 in 1000 risk we'd never get anything done and end up on anti-depressants....and then have to work out the risk of taking those! Furthermore, the study refers to `high doses' but I haven't seen any actual dosage quoted and don't know what `high' means here. You have to also balance the benefits of painkillers against such risks - if we stop taking the painkillers we might be at a greater risk of some medical problem or other and would definitely be less happy bunnies!

And remember, they haven't proven that painkillers cause heart disease. It's simply a statistical association (don't we love `em!) and there is always potential for so-called confounding influences, i.e. something else giving a false impression. Perhaps people who take the painkillers feel happier, have a more exciting and demanding life and are therefore that little bit more likely to end up with a heart problem.

[Tripps]

Good man - I thought so, but it sounds more reliable coming from you.

[Tizer]

By golly, that was a quick response! I've just added a few more words in the meantime. Thanks for your confidence in me...I hope it's well-founded!

[Stanley]

Of course it is! We have had time to assess you and as far as I'm concerned I'd rather trust you than any other sorce of scientific advice.
Now then, how about a quick explanation of Quantum Physics......
A story for you. When I first learned about construction at the quantum level (I think it was a violin) I explained it to Newton who was definitely Old School. He showed no surprise and took it all in. Same thing happened when I told him about the variations between String Theory and Brane Theory. All it needed was an open mind!

[Tizer]

I'm biology rather than physics and I'll leave the physics to Bruff who's much better at it than me!

[Stanley]

Report this morning that by 2020 50% of the population can expect to have an episode related to cancer during their lives. Don't you just love vague and alarmist pronouncements like this that don't actually do anyone any good!

[Stanley]

Fascinating report on R4 Today this morning about 'brain soup'. A nice lady scientist from South America is attending a conference and has brought a mouse brain with her reduced to a soup by dissolving the fatty substructure using a detergent. The point about this is that it makes it possible to count the number of neurones in the brain once they are separated from the base. Her conclusions are that there are the same amount of neurones per unit of weight of brain in all primate brains. The point of this is to demonstrate that the number of neurones isn't necessarily a good measure of how the human brain differs from other4 primates.
Now this is the bit I like... She says that the most likely mechanism that guaranteed human success was the fact that they discovered fire and cooking food. She says that cooking is a form of pre-digestion that breaks down the elements in food and allows the human gut to be more efficient in extracting energy to support life. Once this had been achieved it meant that there was more time for doing other things, life was not simply one long round of food-gathering. This time allowed humans to develop other cognitive and physical skills and she reckons that this is most likely to be the prime reason why humans became superior users of the available neurones. She points out that we are now suffering the big drawback of this development process. Her illustration is a fat person sitting in a fast food joint and in a short amount of time ingesting more than enough nutrients to keep them going for the day. Anything extra is stored as fat and becomes a liability.
This seems to me to be simple and beautiful science which allows accurate measurement of one parameter and thus allows a new hypothesis. I think I've understood and reported accurately what she was trying to convey and if this is so it's a good illustration of how a concept can be explained and conveyed in a very short space of time. Lovely stuff!

[Tizer]

Accurately reported, I heard it too! Let's just add that although she was talking about primate brains she brought a non-primate brain with her...simply because she could use a test-tube instead of a bucket!

I agree with it was well-presented, clearly and with enthusiasm. In the same vein I would recommend listening to the presentations on how flies could help feed the world and how bees find their food in the Radio 4 `Material World' episode of 20 September 2012. The podcast is available on this BBC page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/material/all
Both are great examples of putting over science to the layman.

[chinatyke]

....In the same vein I would recommend listening to the presentations on how flies could help feed the world and ...

I might go vegetarian!

Australia would benefit in a big way by exporting its excess nuisance crop.

[Stanley]

There was an omission in my report. The theory is that because we extracted more nutrition by pre-digesting food by cooking it enabled our brains to grow bigger to the point where we went over some sort of tipping point and began to think logically. Never thought of cooking as pre-digestion before.....

[hartley353]

Many ruminants have a very clever digestive system, why aren't they smart. Dolphins Porpoise and whales eat large quantities of raw fish and are considered to be intelligent. The only proven fact about cooked food is that it loses nutrition.

[plaques]

If you ever feel like giving yourself a good headache get a suitable book by Sir Roger Penrose. His last book "Cycles of Time" explains how the universe will come to an end when entropy equals zero. Ie. absolute zero temperature. Anyhow, that's what I think he said. Fortunately, it may be a few billion billion years away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

[Tizer]

Many ruminants have a very clever digestive system, why aren't they smart. Dolphins Porpoise and whales eat large quantities of raw fish and are considered to be intelligent. The only proven fact about cooked food is that it loses nutrition.

The ruminant digestive system evolved to extract a relatively small amount of nutrients out of a very large amount of cellulose-rich grass. It might be considered `clever' because it can at least get something out of grass but it still means that the animal has to spend all day eating, which is a lot less efficient in general terms than a non-ruminant system. Dolphins, porpoise and whales eat large quantities of raw fish but that doesn't tell us anything about how efficient they are at extracting nutrition out of what they eat.

[hartley353]

Thankyou Tizer. Ruminants also have a useful habit of twice chewing their food, if many humans could only chew theirs once it would be beneficial. The afore mentioned marine mammals are vey good at extracting nutrients from their diets, the amount of waste matter produced to food taken in shows efficiency.

[Stanley]

LINK. Have a look at this for news of the conference held yesterday. As I've suspected for a long time there is a possibility that the course of the jet stream is changing due to influences far from these shores. If the Atlanic Conveyor system is as poorly as the scientists suspect the variations could get worse but nobody is making any firm predictions about this.

[Tizer]

It's interesting how the media are reporting "A decade of wet summers!" when the Met office says: "These [long-term Atlantic currents] are understood to operate on cycles of a decade or more, which suggests that we may see their influence on our summers for a few more years to come. While these influence the odds of a wet summer, it doesn't rule out the possibility of decent summers over the next few years." Typical news media hyperbole and distortion!
The Met office's own press release is here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releas ... al-seasons

[Bodger]

An interesting 16 min of maths/ technology, the mind boggles at the potential possibilities
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ

[Stanley]

Beyond my pay grade Bodge!