Recently in Science Category
Well don't bother. Instead, just lead a healthy lifestyle (I know, I know: pot, kettle, black, etc.).
The word "detox" really annoys me. It's pretty meaningless in the sense that it's most used. This morning, free newspaper Metro had a wraparound sponsored by Evian. They're once again asking us to "Detox with Evian" which makes no sense whatsoever. Drink bottled water if you like the taste, but it's no more or less healthy than any other kind of water in the western world.
On Radio 4 and Five Live this morning, a lady from a company who sell something called "a detox in a box" (nice aliteration), was roundly trounced by different people on both channels. Ben Goldacre of The Guardian's Bad Science was on Radio 4. You can read about the fun he had here, including the palpable untruths spouted by the detox defender.
Senese About Science has more, including a dossier that investigates many individual detoxing claims and a leaflet explaining all the nonsense.
Another old favourite. There's good news that the BBC is going to produce a new popular science show for BBC1 provisionally titled "What? Where? Why?" to replace the late, and sometimes lamented, Tomorrow's World. Science has been critically missing from our screens for too long now. We certainly get plenty of natural history, but that's only part of the story. Hopefully that'll also allow some of the more frivalous topics that Horizon's covered of late be incorporated into a more popular show and provide some serious, and more difficult science over on BBC2.
These days, the only place you can get really good and consistent science coverage is actually on the radio, where Radio 4 does a good job as does the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast.
There was a cracking In Our Time last week on probability, incidentally - it's available to listen again to here.
There was an excellent long piece by Bad Science's Ben Goldacre in yesterday's Guardian about the perils of homeopathy. Not only is there no evidence that it works (mainly because it's founded on nonsensical designs), but homeopathic practitioners have actually suggested using their remedies for such killer diseases as malaria and even AIDS.
Don't forget, this "medicine" which remains unproven, is actually funded by the NHS!
At the same time proper hospitals are being closed down or downgraded - including my own local establishment. There was a march protesting against closure of services at Chase Farm today.
Vivienne Parry, one time Tomorrow's World presenter, bemoans the state of science on television. And has anyone seen one of these Maggie Philbin pieces? See also here.
And yes, I know that BBC Four is partway through an excellent Science You Can't See season.
[Update] The BBC - just to be clear - has insisted that Tomorrow's World is absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly, not returning. Well, thanks for clearing that up!
In this false-color image, the Cassini spacecraft captures Saturn's glow, represented in brilliant shades of electric blue, sapphire and mint green, while the planet's shadow casts a wide net on the rings. The colors represent different wavelengths: red is thermal heat originating within the planet; in blue, icy ring particles shimmer in sunlight scattered through the rings; in green, a thick covering of high-altitude hazes strongly reflect sunlight.
This is quite easily the single worst "scientific" article I can remember ever reading. I really simply don't know where to begin.
Why is it acceptable for journalists on a national newspaper to write about science when they clearly have no qualifications, background or plain and simple knowledge of the subject? In any other sphere, you'd be laughed out of court if you came up with such nonsense.
I've got the paperback of Richard Dawkins' God Delusion at home in which he expounds on the dangers of religion. I'll withhold judgment until I've read it, but to my mind he's going after the wrong people. It's the singular lack of scientific understanding that's the biggest problem society faces today. [Update: It seems he pretty much said precisely this at the Hay Festival]
It took until the 18th century before England stopped trying witches, but it might as well be witchcraft that explains how some of these ridiculous new-age pseudo-scientific devices work.
I think it pains me that The Independent should publish such nonsense because even though I don't read The Independent as much as I used to, I've still got issue 1 bought when I was at school, and I've always thought of it as a paper of my time.
I will be buying it tomorrow in the hope that plenty of letters appear pointing out the error of its ways.
[Incidentally, while Googling around to find out when the last witch was hanged in England, I was aghast to discover that the last person to be tried under the British Witchcraft Act was Helen Duncan in 1944. If we bring the act back, can we lock up that stupid lot over on Living TV from Most Haunted and other shows, to prevent them, oh I don't know, giving away troop movements in Iraq or Afghanistan?]
There was a lunar eclipse this evening. Indeed it's still going on as I type this.
I took a bit of a sequence of photos of it which you can see over on my Flickr stream, but here are one or two of the best.
A lunar eclipse is caused when the Earth completely blocks out all the light from the Sun on the Moon - all three are lined up. Because the Earth's that much bigger, it completely obliterates the Moon's light (the reason we see the Moon is because sunlight is falling on it). However the Sun's light refracts in the Earth's atmosphere. Red light refracts more than any of the other colours, so the Moon appears red to us looking at it from Earth.
Anyway, here are the photos:
This looks almost completely like a full moon. In fact there's a little darkness in the bottom left hand corner.
The moon darkens in an unusual manner. You don't see the normal "crescent" that you would during the normal phases of the moon. In any case, just a little earlier it was a full moon. This picture was taken at 22:26.
Taken during "Totality" only a few minutes before the mid eclipse, this shows the red colouring caused by light refracting in the Earth's atmosphere. Note that I've only played around with the exposure in these photos and haven't touched the colouring at all. You really would have seen this red colouring if you'd been looking at the time.
Here's the whole sequence I shot in one go...
[UPDATE]
And I couldn't not put up this incredible Cassini photo of Saturn. Yes, it was in all of Saturday's newspapers, but it's still stunning.
Everyday The Independent shouts its environmental credentials, taking a sometimes very contrary view over what should be that day's headlines. I think their shouty issue-led headlines actually wear the reader out over time and they should be used a bit more sparingly, but it's fair enough that they bang their drum about what we're doing to the environment.
Which is why I found it very curious on Saturday to read some of the destinations that The Independent suggested would make great weekend locations. They included South Africa and Hong Kong amongst others. Surely, if you're going to fly half way around the world, even if you're offsetting your carbon footprint, you have some kind of duty not to just bugger off for the weekend but spend a bit of time there? You'll only be wanting to go back again at another time.
There's much coverage about The Sky At Night celebrating it's 650th edition yesterday (well, very early this morning actually) in the fiftieth year of its broadcast, and the fact that Sir Patrick Moore is annoyed that the programme went out at 1.55am without any fanfare.
Well of course, even by Sky At Night standards, that's pretty late. But nobody seems to be mentioning the fact that it gets repeated at the somewhat more respectable 12.30pm this Saturday on BBC Two, and a couple of airings on BBC Four, including this evening at 7.30pm. You can also watch the programme online.
More than that, it seems that the big show is going to be in April when the programme really is 50. Co-presenter Chris Lintott explains as much in his blog in an entry from a few days ago.
Four years on - nearly to the day - and Media Guardian is reporting that Tomorrow's World is returning.
Well - sort of.
The programme itself isn't returning - just elements of it including the title sequence, and, well, the name. Effectively, the brand, then.
This is better than nothing, but not really that great. We're really crying out for a popular-ish science programme; something that can explain to the public what stem cell research is about, or what NASA's plans for a moonbase really mean. Programmes like The Gadget Show on Five are fine, but they're talking about devices currently on the market. What's coming around the corner? What are the issues in science today?
A popular Tomorrow's World would also allow Horizon to return to the higher ground from where it has fallen.
There's more at the BBC's Press Office.
I guess Maggie Philbin impressed after her appearance on It Began With Swap Shop over Christmas. I found that programme both interesting and nauseating in equal amounts, despite being an avid viewer of many of the shows. But I did wonder what had become of her, and why she hasn't been on television since (aside from the obvious fact that if you're female and over about thirty-five, you're over the hill for television presenting seemingly).
What a fantastic idea! Reykjavik is turning all its street lights out on Thursday evening at 10pm for half an hour, and encouraging homes to as well. Then on national radio, astronomers will talk people through the night sky.
Last week, when I was trying to take photos of the night sky, I was enormously aware that I had to take advantage whilst I was outside the city. Even on the very edge of London suburbia is completely hopeless.
Sadly I suspect that a similar initiative in London would lead to concerns about car accidents and massed looting or something. Maybe in a smaller town it could work?
I love the fact that Wikipedia is already completely up to date following today's news that Pluto is no longer a fully-fledged planet. It's now a dwarf planet, although I'll be sad to lose it somehow.
Well worth a read or a listen.
I'm really glad these doctors have come out to speak up against the pointless waste of the NHS spending on "alternative" medicines that offer absolutely no proof of actually working.
They're in my Flickr stream anyway, but here are the best of the photos I took this morning out in Golden Square of the eclipse.
I'm pretty pleased with the results considering the lack of proper equipment and heavy cloud cover.
The maximum magnitude of the eclipse in London was only 16.8% at 11:33 BST and, as you can see, the sky was pretty cloudy. I had to wait quite a few minutes before a sudden opening in the clouds allowed me to glimpse the eclipse.
This shot was achieved simply by pointing by Nikon Coolpix straight at the sky with no filter. It's probably the best of the three decent shots I managed to get.
I've kept my mylar glasses from a nice little book I bought around the time of the 1999 eclipse produced by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. I dug the book out the glasses were unscratched so still safe to use.
In between taking photos, I used them to observe the eclipse with my own eyes rather than via my camera's LCD.
Then I simply held the glasses plush to the camera's lens, and of the ten or so photos I attempted, this was the better of the two that actually worked. This was in fact the last photo I took before cloud cover came in and didn't look like lifting.
So Easter Island in 2010 perhaps?
More in the full entry...
This week's Horizon squarely took on creationism "Intelligent Design", and in many respects it's a shame. A shame that a science programme had to give up an episode to explode the myth of something that's propogated by fundamental Christians.
The programme didn't shirk its responsibility to the subject, and the programme took a familiar structure: spend around half the episode setting up the seemingly damning evidence that makes, in this case, evolution worthless, before taking that evidence apart piece by piece. In this case, it was against the background of the Dover High School court case.
It is scary that in some parts of the world - well America - understanding of science is being replaced by belief in what might as well be "magick".
It's fair to say, as Ben Goldacre says at the start of his column in today's Guardian, that today nobody can understand the broad workings of most things around them. While science becomes marginalised in schools, even those who become specilists in some scientific spheres, may know pretty much nothing about others. There's too much! But that doesn't mean we all have to bury our heads in the sand and proclaim no knowledge.
A very worthwhile programme.
But I am concerned about a BBC News website piece seemingly tying itself in with this programme highlighting the fact that only 48% of the British population chose evolution as their view of the origin and development of life.
The research was carried out by Ipsos MORI for the BBC programme, and was among 2,000 people. Of the remaining 52% of the population, 17% said Intelligent Design, 22% said Creationism, and the remainder did not know.
Now that seems to me to be a strange finding. It suggests that 39% of the British population has chosen a minority Christian viewpoint of the origins of life. This is in a country in which, a previous BBC survey tells us, that while only 17% of the country goes to church regularly (once a week or more), 67% calls itself Christian, with only 22% saying they have no faith. Fortunately, in this previous instance, the full tables were actually made available. So we can quickly see that this was a mutliple choice question with other options including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Other. Presented with that list, someone is far likelier to say that they're Christian than say they have no faith - unless they're ardent atheists or agnostics (and actually understand those words). Christian becomes the easy default choice.
I simply don't find it credible that 17% of the UK population have even heard of Intelligent Design, much less understand what it means. And the majority of those who have heard of it, are far more likely to believe that it's a baseless attack on evolution. Even Creationism would need some explanation to the man on the street.
We really need to see the full questions and table to understand how these results came about. I'll drop an email to BBC News Online to see if I can get hold of the full tables.
If this survey highlights one thing, it's that science has fallen off the agenda for a lot of people and they simply don't understand. That's why there is still a big job to explain some of the fundamentals of our world, to prevent "magickal" reasons being propogated by people with other axes to grind.
51% of Americans don't believe in evolution. I wonder how many don't believe in gravity, or maybe eschew the idea that the earth travels around the sun?
In the meantime, a trial reaches its conclusion.
Mars really is spectacular at the moment. Without even trying, and just looking up in a firework filled, and streetlight heavy London sky, it's very easy to spot - just near The Pleiades.
In other news, Inmarsat is launching a massive satellite on Monday afternoon which is part of their global broadband system. It's being launched from the massive Sea Launch platform and can be watched live on the internet from 1400 GMT today. I know a couple of people over at Inmarsat, so good luck!
I know that The Guardian published this picture of Dione in their double-page spread on Thursday, but it's still worth a look. It's spectacular.
And this video from the flyby is also worth a 10MB download. Just wait until Cassini flys past Dione.
This is sad news. I met someone who works for a satellite company the other day and she was speaking about how risky a business it is, and what kind of insurance premiums you have to pay. So let's hope that if CryoSat truly is lost, that its worthwhile job is done by a follow-up satellite.
It's probably been ten years since I last visited Bletchley Park, so it was high time for another visit. They've done quite a lot to the site in the meantime. Last time I went, it was only open on alternate weekends over the summer. Now it's open everyday except Christmas. Last time I visited the site also bore reminders of a more recent previous existance as a BT training area. Now it's home to whole host of different societies and little museums, along with its main function as the home of the Enigma decryption exhibit and historical computers - the National Codes Centre.
As well as the fascinating collection of Enigma machines and replicas and rebuilds of the devices invented to solve them, there's a host of other exhibits. For example, a Churchill collection, a film projection collection (I watched a couple of fascinating 1960s newsreels), a diplomatic wireless collection (where one of the other visitors recognised one of the machines from his time in Germany) and even a railway collection.
Outside a building where they're painstakingly rebuilding Turing's Colussus there sits, somewhat mournfully, a replica of the top of a German U-Boat which I belive was used in the film Enigma. It sits atop a lorry trailer, and was obviously used for closeups alongside minitures of CGI in the film.
Overall, a fascinating experience. And they provide those handsets which give you more information than you could possibly need as you wander around the exhibition.
See a Flickr slideshow of some of my photos here.
Sadly it was too cloudy here in north London to see the partial annular eclipse this morning. A shame really, because I found my mylar eclipse viewer glasses from an RGO guide that I bought for the 1999 total eclipse of the sun. I could have done with them for last year's transit of Venus.
I've just been watching the Space Shuttle successfully landing on what NASA are calling a test flight.
There's still quite a lot of questions in the air about both the future of the Shuttle and indeed of manned missions in general.
Last week I read a well-argued article questionning the worthiness of what's been happening, and in particular the Shuttle and the International Space Station.
I suspect that whatever NASA might hope, the Shuttle is coming to the end of its workable life, but what's coming next?
A couple of weeks ago, I listened to Stephen Baxter's Voyage, as dramatized by Dirk Maggs and broadcast on BBC7 a month or so ago. The original novel is now near the top of my "to read" list.
And only today, I was reading Arthur C Clarke's famous article where he suggested what is now known as the Clarke belt to place a geostationary satellite. This year is the 60th anniverary of that paper, and if you read it, you see that rather than broadcasting 24/7 shopping and gambling channels, Clarke talked about placing a series of space stations in orbit using technology built upon that which the Germans had developed with their V2 rockets.
Bush has talked about a manned Mars mission, but you get the feeling that we're a little way off it yet. Indeed even a return to the moon would be great. The "trouble" is that we can do some fantastic things by remote control. For example, look at the recent fabulous photo taken by Mars Express below.
More rovers and landers are on the way because they're relatively cheap, and we don't have to get the craft home again, or keep anyone alive on board. But man is an explorer, and we shouldn't be limited to just this planet.
The live Nasa TV feed of Discovery docking with the ISS makes for fascinating viewing.
This is a spectacular photo of comet Tempel 1 taken from the flyby craft just after the impactor craft had hit the comet - actually 67 seconds afterwards.
The New Scientist has a piece about urban gaming which I found especially interesting as I'm in the very early stages of designing an "experience" myself. It's quite exciting.
There's a nice piece by Simon Singh in today's Times about junk science. He calls for proper checks and trials such as those that real medicines have to go through before alternative remedies are flogged.
It's for stories like this one, that I read the Bad Science column in The Guardian. And what a charming bunch some of those Penta water people sound like. For those who are unaware, Penta water is an "ultra premium purified" water. Their site is full of scientific bollocks giving reasons why this water should be any better than any other bottled or tap water. (Long time readers may know that I find the water industry peculiarly interesting. Was it really just a year ago that Dasani was pulled?)
Anyway, as the various Guardian columns demonstrate, it's all nonsense. Indeed their claims have also caught the ear of James Randi - famous for bashing pseudoscientific rubbish.
Well today the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) have weighed in :
The Authority took expert advice and understood that the scientific evidence submitted did not prove that Penta had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water or had been restructured to form stable smaller clusters. It also understood that hydrogen-bonds in ordinary water were a weak type of chemical bonding that allowed the formation and reformation of temporary clusters of water molecules in liquid phase water many times per second.
Continuing:
The Authority concluded that the information submitted was not sufficient to prove Penta water had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water or was structured differently from ordinary water. The Authority told the advertisers not to repeat claims that implied the product was chemically unique, had been restructured or molecularly redesigned, or hydrated cells and improved physical performance better than tap water.
For more on this check out here, and here.
Incidentally, it's good to see that The Guardian's Bad Science columns are ranked nearly as highly as Penta's official website when you do a Google search.
I learn from listening to Material World on Radio 4 that the digital camera on the Cassini and Huygens probes have lower mega-pixel ratings than the average mobile phone (Cassini is 1 mega-pixel and Huygens, much smaller) - and of course they're black and white. Obviously this is a combination of things like data rates and available time to transmit (in the case of Huygens), as well as what was available to put on a probe in 1997.
This piece from Slate details exactly what Cassini and Hugens have been through to get where they are. Even though none of it is "news" to me, it does put in perspective what our society has achieved.
It's all very exciting today with the Huygens probe landing on the surface of Titan. What will it find? Will it all work? We'll find out later today, and in the meantime, I'll be looking at the Cassini-Huygens website quite a lot.
There's a lot more to randomness that you might realise. I actually did a course in it once, but I've mostly forgotten it all. This is a good primer (via Boing Boing). Incidentally, it seems that coin tossing isn't fair.
Go to the NASA site to see this picture of one of Saturn's moons as seen by the Cassini probe.
Actually Mimas looks quite a lot like the Death Star...
(Obviously, I'm not the first to notice this resemblence)
The Cassini probe has been sending back some spectacular pictures of Titan from its first close flyby. (Incidentally, last week's Horizon was all about Saturn and Cassini. If you missed it, you can either read the transcript or watch the signed version very late next Monday night or very early Tuesday morning depending on how you look at it).
The press is full of stories today about a new small species of human that was alive in a remote part of Indonesia 18,000 years ago. Both The Guardian and The Independent had pictures of it on their front pages today. And Nature, where the findings are published, has a special section with a certain amount of free content.
So how does this all compute with creationists? I've just read the October Wired cover story about the ongoing fight to get Creationism kicked out of the school rooms.
OK - from the outset, can I just point out that I seriously don't recommend that you attempt to replicate the "experiments" I'm about to describe. I should also point out that while I didn't plan on doing either of these things, it doesn't take a genius to work out that it's possible.
Experiment 1 - Electrocuting yourself with a disposable camera
I love taking apart disposable cameras. Last weekend I was finishing off a camera that I'd kicking around as we sat down for a meal. It was one of those models with a flash, and I'd been trying to get the thing to charge for ages by holding down the "charge" button. But the light was resolutely refusing to come on. After about a minute of this, I suddenly realised that I was looking in the wrong place, and the camera was charged. Photo was duly taken and I finished the roll.
If you haven't been quite as inquisitive as me, then you may not have taken a disposable camera apart before. As an aside, you should note that I was the kind of boy who took apart his first calculator in around 1982 when they were quite expensive and had those glowing red numbers. It made a lovely "Book" for my primary school fancy dress party, where I came as Arthur Dent dressed in a dressing gown from Hitchhikers.
Anyway, once you've removed the cardboard outer, you have to prise open the plastic case. Inside you'll find a AA battery which makes it worth opening alone. The film is quite safe, since the act of winding the film on, returns the unravelled roll back into a standard 35mm film which you can remove for processing. The rest of the camera is made up of various plastic bits, and a circuitboard. I was playing with said circuitry when I manageed to electrocute myself. Nothing too powerful, but something similar to touching an electric fence on a farm.
Once we'd finished electrocuting ourselves a couple more times, we'd worked out the contacts that shorted the circuit. We insulated ourselves with a handy paper napkin and crossed the contacts with a 2p coin. This resulted in a massive flash and close examination of the coin revealed small burn marks that were immovable.
The reason? Well getting the flash to work, means that you have to charge a fairly decent sized capacitor, and the action of me holding down the charge button for such a long time left it pretty full. We managed a couple more sparks before it flattened.
It's worth noting that the strong charge was generated by a 1.5V battery, but unfortunately I didn't examine the capacitor closely. But the charge (Q) is directly related to the battery's voltage (V) and the capacitor's capacitance (C): Q = C x V.
For the record we used an Agfa camera, but I really don't recommend repeating this experiment.
Experiment 2 - Electrocuting yourself with a AA battery
For reasons that aren't important here, I've spent the last few days wandering around with a pair of fully re-charged AA batteries in my trouser pockets.
Earlier today, I sat down after a meeting and suddenly felt a massive burning sensation in my leg. I put my hand in my pocket and quickly pulled out the full contents of batteries, mobile, keys and loose change. One of the batteries was really hot, as were my keys and several coins. I'd completely shorted one of the batteries with my keys.
What I was staggered by was the amount of heat the battery was able to create. The battery is a Ni-MH Uniross 1300mAh. In small lettering on the battery, it warns you not to short circuit the battery. Now we know why.
I know, I know. I'm always going on about this. But I don't apologise for revisiting it, because it's so important.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Horizon, and the new series started a few weeks ago, and has already produced a couple of very interesting episodes. This week's was an examination of whether a meteorite really did kill the dinosaurs. But, Horizon aside, TV science is pretty scarce. There are the various non-historical Adam Hart-Davies programmes, many of which are actually produced by the Open University. And, if we exclude nature programming, which I am, that's just about it (Although, while I'm specifically exclusing natural history programmes, I'm looking forward to the Blue Planet followup, Planet Earth).
ITV's science programming is basically limited to the odd weather/volcano type documentary (and they've been few or far between), whilst Five hasn't really gone there yet.
Channel Four used to have the excellent Equinox, and as a brand name it still exists (there was a special on a replacement for the twin towers last month), although the regular seems long gone, and we're left with Scapheap Challenge and its ilk to fill the void, maybe with the odd three parter about space squeezed out once a year, and something about Hitler and science.
This article (sorry, once again registration required) was written in June last year, and I don't think an enormous amount has changed. Weren't we told that Tomorrow's World would live on as a brand when it was scrapped?
Earlier today, John Willis, the BBC's director of factual and learning was quoted as saying science and personal issues could become the next big hits, and we learnt that programmes on energy and light, as well as the 100th anniversary of Einstein's most famous work. I look forward to this good work.
So thank goodness for BBC Radio that regularly produces hours of science programming. Every week throughout the year, there's Material World and Leading Edge on Radio 4, and Science in Action on the World Service. That's aside from the regular documentary slots on both channels with limited run series, such as the current Losing the Past on Radio 4, and the various Discovery runs on the World Service. Radio gives us an enormous quantity of science programming, most of which is permamently archived, and we thank it!
Great article on the DES or Data Encryption Standard - neatly summing up where we are with cryptology.
This makes a nice follow up to the pieces I talked about previously on hash functions.
I happened to pass by Waterstones on Friday and couldn't help but notice a display of copies of the new Roger Penrose book, The Road to Reality. This enormous book is 1000 pages long and copiously illustrated.
So I picked it up and flicked through it. Let's just first reiterate that even picking it up is not something to do half-heartedly. Then you look at it, and are immediately taken back to college, as the whole thing feels like some kind of set text. But I was in a Waterstones on Oxford Street - not a shop that ordinarily does an enormous trade in set texts (that'd be the Gower Street branch of what was once Dillons).
I went away thinking "Woah! I must find out more about it." The Amazon blurb from the publisher says that it's a book for everybody, although I couldn't help but notice quite a lot of maths included. The only review that I've seen of the book so far is this one in Scotland on Sunday (official publication is still a few days off). It explains that the first few hundred pages are indeed all maths and physics that enable the reader to get up to speed for the latter part of the book.
I must admit that I'm quite keen to have a read, but at a cost of £30 and the detail it's presented in, aside from actual students, I'd have thought that the audience for this book is going to be quite limited.
This month's Computer Arts magazine has Stitcher 3.1 cover-mounted, and I've been having some fun creating those 360 degree QTVR images. I was rather pleased with an effort I created based around our tent at the V Festival.
And then I was looking at some of the unfailingly fabulous images at Panoramas.dk and noticed that they had an Apollo 11 panorama (you will need Quicktime installed), which includes audio as well. Stunning. And follow the links from that to really large images of the Lunar Module and the famous image of Buzz Aldrin (they refer to them as "super resolution). In fact this site is amazing. You should also check out the linked Apollo 17 panorama too - it's even better. (And then later you can look at the Mars imagery from earlier in the year, and many many other amazing panoramas).
And over at Space.com they've got lovely wallpapers.
And while I'm a science theme (and I must warn you that I've just finished the glorious A Short History of Nearly Everything) it was good to note today that MPs are getting onto the outrageous costs of journals at universities. Vast amount of funds for higher education line the pockets of the likes of Reed Elsevier who get all their content free, get it peer-reviewed free and then charge the earth for access to essential data - which for the most part, some other body has paid for. The full report is to be found here (as a PDF). It makes fascinating reading, particularly in regard to bundling titles and access in the future to electronic archives to titles that libraries have since stopped subscribing too. It strikes me that some of these publishers are going to do themselves out of an industry if they're not careful, as new models for scientific publishing come to pass, opening up the archives to a far greater number of people across the planet. Let's face it - if you're published, you want as many people to read your work as possible!
Interestingly, this report comes in the same week that the music industry in the UK is getting into a palaver about the music that is coming out of copyright from next year. This week's Music Week (the trade magazine of the music industry) devotes its front page and several inside pages. What it boils down to is that the first Elvis tracks exit copyright next year. The arguments are quite interesting - in that they seem to boil down to the fact that the record companies are still making money out the albums, so why should they lose this income?
Maybe instead of trying to sell us the same old music over and over, they ought to be concentrating on their newer fare. Yes, other countries have much tighter rules, but that's not a good enough reason.
Another argument is that margins are shrinking due to people like Apple. Well if the industry had got off its backside a bit earlier, they could have been the dominant force in electronic music sales rather than letting Apple in at the last minute and watching as it basks in the associated glory.
Then there's the fact that the majority of musicians earn very little - the article in Music Week says 60% earn less than £10,000 a year. Undeniable then that they're going to lose out? Well not really. Because it's not performers who are at the margins who are going to see their back catalogues reissued by all and sundry. It's going to be Elvis. And assuming that these re-issues aren't going to have access to the masters, I'd assume that RCA or whoever Elvis' label was, are going to be able to continue to put out better quality versions.
Then there's the international issue. If an album is copyright free in the UK, but not in the States, how do they stop albums being sold internationally. Well we have the same issue with DVDs - don't bother trying to stop it, because people will get around it. Instead, offer better products in your market at better prices. When DVDs first started, UK editions were often inferior products in terms of features, and released months or years after US releases (I use the DVD analogy, incidentally, since a film may well have different distributors in different countries who hold the rights to that film in that country). Well we've quickly seen that the time delays have closed up, and in the UK we get equally as good releases for the most part. This all means that I rarely feel the need for a US import.
It's not even as though song writers and composers won't receive payments. It's the performances. Frankly, the sooner The Beatles come out of copyright, the sooner I might actually purchase a Beatles album. With record companies cynically squeezing every penny they can out of a property, it's not surprising that I don't empathise too much with them.
The sole reason that this is an issue as that it'll be 50 years since the start of Rock and Roll, and that's where money is still to be made. Plenty more songs have gone out of copyright in the UK before now, and this means that HMV has plentiful sections in it's Easy Listening and Nostalgia areas where companies have moved in to sell copyright free material cheaply.
In Music Week's "More Views From the Industry" I note that they singularly failed to find a single dissenting voice from the view that the 50 years should be extended (and preferably to the ridiculous 95 years that the US has to prevent the poor little Disney organisation losing out). Even though they interviewed a guy from Prism, who regularly reissue material, they couldn't find anyone who was happy with the rules as they are.
Last Sunday, The Independent on Sunday published a comment piece by the Prince of Wales about nanotechnology. It's a well argued piece, although while we don't get the histrionics of "grey goo" that accompanied the Prince's last thought on the subject (not something he claims to have ever believed incidentally), he does mention thalidomide as one of the potential sorts of hazards.
In a couple of places in the article he talks about not being a Luddite, and yet he seems very cagey about some of this technology. Indeed he even wonders what will happen to the companies that rely on previous technologies that are possibly made redundant by the onset of nanotechnology. Well that's science isn't it. Did anyone worry about horse-drawn carriage manufacturers when the petrol engine was built?
We evolve our technology and it moves on. Of course we must be sensible, and sometimes "bad" things come of new technology. Although I note that Britain is a major international arms manufacturer constantly improving our weaponry to be bigger and better.
But always remember, that nanotechnology is really just an almagam of the basic sciences - chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, materials science and molecular biology. It's a great word, but we've been doing other work at a molecular level for some time now. It's also a somewhat broad term covering many different types of technology - some traditional chemistry, and some technology at a microscopic level. This response to The Royal Society is quite enlightening.
Meanwhile, across the pond, scientists are getting concerned about the way science is being misused when making policy decisions. They've published a report which follows an earlier report, detailing incidents of scientific misuse.
I have to begin to wonder how much this really is "scientific illiteracy" and how much it's just willful ignorance of the issues.
There's an excellent series on the World Service called Discovery which is in the middle of a four part strand called The New Space Race. If it hadn't been for the fact that I'm only now catching up with my recordings, I'd have mentioned this before. The full series is/will be available to listen from this address - the final part is broadcast on July 14.
The Cassini-Huygens probe has successfully entered orbit around Saturn after it's four year journey to the planet, taking the first of what will undoubtedly be a great set of photos. Cassini was a Genoese astronomer who amongst many achievements, discovered four of Saturn's moons in the late 17th century. Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, discovered the largest of Saturn's moons, Titan, in 1655 becoming the first to discover a moon of the planet using one of his own lenses.
It's fantastic that the probe has been placed so accurately, negotiating plenty of pitfalls to get into orbit. This kind of thing really does excite me. It's now going to spend another four years in orbit around the planet, including many orbits of Titan where it'll deposit the Huygens probe.
It may have cost NASA and the ESA several billion dollars to get it there, but it has to be worth it. The various websites have some wonderful background info including this enormously informative press pack which I read at lunchtime, some wonderful images (either press images, raw images or wallpaper images) and a nifty 3D model to spin.
The imagery is now coming out thick and fast with plenty of black and white photos of the rings from close up.
I guess I'm in a space mood at the moment. I've just started Bill Bryson's new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is enormously readable. He won the Aventis prize for science books a couple of weeks ago, and reading it now you can easily see why. I'll say more about this book when I've finished it.
Then I went and finally watched Pitch Black last night which my brother's been trying to persuade me to watch for absolutely ages. A good small(ish) thriller which you could nearly believe in. Very much in the Alien vein. The sequel is due soon, and one suspects that it'll be somewhat brasher, and frankly I don't really like Vin Diesel in anything he's done.
But returning to Cassini for the moment, the one place where you really do get decent science coverage is the radio. Radio 4 does loads of science - I've just downloaded Test Tubes and Tantrums (well streamed and recorded). What a wonderfully exciting age the 17th century must have been. And sometime late on Sunday night on BBC1 there's a Sky At Night on Saturn (which I'm pleased to note is viewable online, with a full archive).
On my way into work of a morning, I tend to flick around the radio listening to maybe Danny Baker on BBC London, sometimes Radio Five Live and of course our very own Pete & Geoff on Virgin. But halfway through my journey, I head downwards and complete it on the underground meaning that I either listen to music on MD or maybe audio via my Palm.
One of the ideas I've been toying with recently is scheduling an automatic recording of, say, the BBC World Service News at 6.00am, which I'd then need to copy from one PC to another, before converting to mp3 and then adding to the automatic hotsync of my Palm. The trouble is that this is involves a multiplicity of programs to do all the intervening bits. I'm told that a program called KeyText might be the thing to try - so that's my next little project.
It's just a shame that there's not more readily available good audio to download and play. I'd love to be able to download, say, the latest edition of Material World from Radio 4 and listen to it on the way home. I can stream it, record the stream, and covert that to an MP3, but that's not really the same thing. I just want a quick download before I leave the office. Anyone got any good places to go for non-streaming serious audio?
Congratulations to the team of SpaceShipOne (I'll even forgive the needless nospacesrule in their name).
I did try to listen to live audio at work, but had problems, and only saw the video on the news earlier on. Quite a good source of coverage here (via Boingboing).
There are some wonderful images from the Transit of Venus across the Sun on Tuesday. Obviously I wanted to observe this myself in the best possible way. On Monday I read an article in Astronomy magazine that said I need a solar filter. OK, where do I get one of those for my camcorder at short notice in North Norfolk? Well there's a place called Cley Spy (in a village quite close to Cley-next-the-sea) which sells a massive range of binoculars and telescopes. Why should such a good shop exist in such a remote location? Becaue North Norfolk is bird watching country (Sidebar: "Twitchers" are something entirely different to your average bird watcher. Don't confuse the two). Anyhow, they didn't have a filter.
Step two was to design some kind of tripod to hold a pair of binoculars. Sadly, without either a full workshop to build such a contraption, or indeed the skills to make it, I had to forget about this idea. Next up was to make my own filter after watching a bit of Adam Hart-Davis on the BBC's coverage of the transit. You have to filter out 95% of sunlight or so. I can now reveal that three blue-tinted freezer bags folded back on themselves many times, and secured around the lens of a camcorder does not work.
Finally it was a pair of binoculars with one lens covered up projecting the image onto white card. This worked fine, but required two hands so I couldn't get any photos of it.
Now roll on the Cassini probe.
Good to see that Bletchley Park have finished rebuilding the Colussus Mk2. Must revisit Bletchley soon...
Living TV is making a very good living with all it's "psychic" nonsense. This weekend was "paranormal weekend" with such shows as Street Psychic, 6th Sense with Colin Fry, and The Antiques Ghost Show (which I thought was a made up name when I first read it), as well as such American fare as Crossing Over, and Beyond with James van Praagh.
Quite how we've got to the point where this is acceptible television, I don't know.
Meanwhile Saturday night was "Psychic Night" on Channel 4. I only caught The Ultimate Psychic Challenge which I happened to know was going to feature James Randi. In fact it was reasonably skeptical in the first half of the programme, with some detailed descriptions of some of the fake and fraudulent activity that goes on. But quite a number of the audience seemed to be devout believers, and explanations of what they're seeing in front of them are simply not enough it seems.
Anyway, I'm happy to report that the very same Sky One that I was so scathing about earlier, aired Secrets of Psychics Revealed. I didn't catch the whole programme, and had evidently just come in after a demonstration of a "hot reading", but it's all to be encouraged. It's just a shame that a lot of the "Psychic Secrets" were nothing more than magic tricks. Yes I know that a lot of psychic chicanery is precisely that, but I wanted more of the John Edwards variety. I did quite like the example given which detailed the tricks that these shows use interviewing people outside the studio before they go in.
But the problem is that the shows that expose this nonsense are just one-offs. In the meantime, Crossing Over and it's ilk is on every day of the week, and gains credence accordingly.
Sadly Iceland have restarted whaling. Frankly, even if there are more minke whales alive than are stricly necessary to keep the species alive (a great state of affairs!), that doesn't take away from the fact that they die a cruel and painful death.
I should start supporting the WDCS again.
There are few interesting books on this Aventis Science Books Award shortlist. In particular Small World looks interesting.
Lots of DNA news happening at the moment. As I said, I've just started the Rosalind Franklin biography, someone I've been interested in ever since I saw Life Story back in 1987.
There's also the small fact that it's the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the makeup of DNA. The full model has just been published complete to a 99.999% level of accuracy in time for the celebrations.
I'm pleased to see that BBC4 are showing a season of programmes to mark this occassion including both a documentary based around the aforementioned book, and a reshowing of Life Story. My video could be busy in a couple of weeks' time.
Spending a little time reading the Franklin book at lunchtime left me thinking that I don't do enough to stay current in terms of scientific advances.
Yesterday's Guardian also published an article about whether homeopathic medicines do any good. But the story goes around in circles. It first reports the story that something called armica doesn't work, and mentions the Horizon from last year which dismissed homeopathic claims.
And yet after all that, the author's still too scared to really go the whole hog. There are a couple of points that I don't really understand. Professor Ernst dismisses the Horizon experiment calling it "trial by media". How exactly? It was a scientifically rigourous experiment covered by the media. No different to any other experiment surely?
He then went on to say, "It was excellent journalism. Whether it is science, I don't know." This doesn't make any sense to me. If it is excellent journalism then surely that's enough?
The author of the piece really let's herself down with her last line though: "So don't throw away the arnica just yet, perhaps." So a perfectly good piece of research is dismissed like this!
Tragically the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost on Saturday, and the inevitable recrimonations have begun.
There have been the inevitable calls for the termination of the manned space programme. But this seems unduly reactionary, and one hopes that the accident will be carefully studied and any mistakes made, remedied. Overall the Shuttle has proved to be a very safe design, if expensive. Should it be pensioned off? Probably given it was designed in 1979.
The other argument is about the benefits of space travel, and you could probably always argue a case for not doing something. But should we travel to Mars? Absolutely! It's the human spirit. Some are explorers and we should let them explore.
I'd imagine that every one the seven astronauts who died realised there was an element of danger in what they did. But every time we get in a car, the same is true.
Tragically, Tomorrow's World has been cancelled by the BBC.
This is a terrible state of affairs, leaving no popular science programmes on mainstream terrestrial television. We have hour long specials with Horizon on BBC2, and that's about it. We're told that the programme name will remain for specials, but the problem with these is that they'll concentrate on single issues. Science is becoming more and more important in society and yet there is no programming on television covering it.
Only this week, China has announced its first manned space mission, and a dodgy religious sect claims to have cloned the first human. This is the tip of the iceberg, and a science correspondent on the news is not enough.
BBC News Online recently broke out Technology from the Science and Nature section which would suggest that they're both popular sections. Intrinsically people want and need to know about this stuff.
Certainly ratings have been poor, but then it's up against ITV's biggest programme, Coronation Street.
I am well and truly shocked.
