bluesci issue 03 - easter 2005

Issue 3 Easter 2005

in association withCambridge’s Science Magazine produced by

www.bluesci.org

• Hollywood • Science & Subtext •• Synaesthesia • Mobiles • Proteomics •

Looking BeyondCrossing the great divide:the art of astronomy

Mars or GloryA giant leap or a distant view?

Editorial ..............................................................................................................................Cambridge News .............................................................................................................Focus ...................................................................................................................................On the Cover ...................................................................................................................A Day in the Life of... ......................................................................................................Away from the Bench .....................................................................................................Initiatives ............................................................................................................................History ...............................................................................................................................Arts and Reviews .............................................................................................................Dr Hypothesis ..................................................................................................................

Giving Elephants Wings:The Science of ProteomicsNicholas T. Hartman reports on the next big challenge for modern biology.............................

What Does F# Taste Like?Andrew Lin examines the phenomenon of synaesthesia.................................................................

The Killer WithinBojana Popovic goes hunting for superbugs.......................................................................................

Dude,Where’s My Phone?Ramsey Faragher pin-points the latest innovation in mobile phone technology.......................

The Quantum ConundrumPeter Mattsson looks at Einstein’s battle with quantum theory....................................................

Of Flies and MenZoe Smeaton explores how the fruit-fly revolutionized experimental biology..........................

Waters of the MediterraneanLila Koumandou discovers why the Mediterranean Sea is quite so clear..........................................

Features

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The front cover shows an aluminium sample imaged by polarized light microscopy. Individual aluminiumcrystals of a few microns in diameter can be seen.Turn to page 20 to find out more.

Contribute to BlueSciWe are now accepting submissions forour Michaelmas Term issue, to bereceived by 5pm on 11 July 2005.Wewant articles on all kinds of science.Whatever your scientific passion, whydon’t you seize the chance to share itwith our readers?

Next Issue: October 2005

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Article enquiries: [email protected] enquiries: [email protected]

Photograph CompetitionWould you like to see your photograph on the cover of

BlueSci? With an extensive website and a print run of thou-sands, the cover of BlueSci is the best way to publicize your

work throughout Cambridge. Microscopy, high-speed orsatellite photography, views of the cosmos… Whateveryour field, send your picture and a brief explanation to

[email protected] by 11 July 2005.

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Termly popular science from Cambridge

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From The Managing Editor

The transition from issue 2 to issue 3 hasmarked an exciting period of evolution forCambridge’s first popular science magazine.One of our goals from the last issue was toredress the balance of biological and physi-cal sciences articles, which I hope you willagree we have markedly improved upon forthis issue.

Secondly, we hope that you have had achance to visit BlueSci Online, launched inJanuary.This term we plan to include extramaterial online — the latest news storiesand up-to-date events listings — as well asall our print edition articles and PDFs ofback issues. So bookmark our site in yourbrowser: www.bluesci.org.

We’ve also made some changes to themagazine team — we’ve amalgamated news

and events and to give our news reporting amore ‘journalistic’ feel we’ve also recruited asmall news team to report on events. So ifyou have something you’d like us to coverplease email [email protected].

Finally,we’ve also made it possible to sub-scribe to BlueSci, so that alumni and localschools — indeed, anyone interested inreceiving their own hard copy of the maga-zine — can receive three issues straight totheir door. For more information please seeour website or email [email protected].

Many thanks for all the positive feedbackyou have sent in, as well as technical correc-tions and comments — we are still strivingfor perfection!

Louise [email protected]

Issue 3: Easter 2005

Produced by CUSP & Published by

Varsity Publications Ltd

Editor: Jonathan Zwart

Managing Editor:Louise Woodley

Submissions Editor: Ewan Smith

Business Manager:Eve Williams

Design and ProductionProduction Manager:

Tom WaltersPictures Editor:Sheena Gordon

Production Team:Victoria Leung, Helen Stimpson

Section EditorsNews Editor:

Laura BlackburnNews and Events Team:

Carolyn Dewey, Bojana Popovic,Alan Forster, Lucia Alonso-Gonzales

Focus:Ewan SmithFeatures:

Joanna Maldonado-Saldivia,Helen Stimpson, Owain Vaughan

On the Cover:Victoria Leung

A Day in the Life of…:Nerissa Hannink

Away from the Bench and Initiatives:Tamzin Gristwood

History:Emily Tweed

Arts and Reviews:Owain VaughanDr Hypothesis:

Rob Young

CUSP Chairman:Björn Haßler

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luesci 03www.bluesci.org

Cambridge is teeming with fascinatingresearch and,as ever,our amazing cover pho-tograph shows an example of what’s goingon. ON THE COVER will tell you all about it.

If you’re a DR HYPOTHESIS fan, don’t skipto the back page just yet because there’splenty more between here and there. In par-ticular our enlarged FOCUS explores the sci-ence behind, and the competition between,Hubble Space Telescope and the increasing-ly prevalent missions to the planets.

If exam season is getting to you and youcan’t stop texting in the UL, then watchout: according to DUDE, WHERE’S MYPHONE?, that patrolling librarian may oneday be able to track you to your desk.Takea break and read about Owain VaughanLOOKING BEYOND the arts-sciences divide.With revision over, perhaps you’ll be jettingoff to a sunny beach. Lila Koumandoureveals why the WATERS OF THE MEDITER-RANEAN are so blue. If you’re in Cambridgethis summer, there’s lots to read: I’ve alwaysassociated colours with particular letters ofthe alphabet, but it never occurred to methat taste could come into it. If you’re will-ing to take on a diet of musical notes, then

you must read WHAT DOES F# TASTE LIKE?THE QUANTUM CONUNDRUM examines theimplications of some peculiar quantumeffects that Einstein himself struggled tomake sense of. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF… aHollywood science advisor may persuadeyou to consider an alternative career nextyear. Or perhaps you’re going into researchin the autumn. In SCIENCE AND SUBTEXT,Emily Tweed discovers why that could bean explosive option.

Communication is crucial to scientificresearch. If you’re driven by enthusiasm foryour field, as we are, you’ll want to tellpeople about it. BlueSci is your platform; Ihope you’ll take advantage of it. If you justwant to get on with your research, thensend us your news and give others theopportunity to read about it.We’ve workedhard to put together a magazine for you. Ifyou’re passionate about communicatingscience and think you can do better, we’dlove to hear from you.

I very much hope you enjoy issue 3.

Jonathan [email protected]

BlueSci is published by Varsity Publications Ltd and printed byCambridge Printing Park. All copyright is the exclusive property ofVarsity Publications Ltd. No part of this publication may be repro-duced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or

by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Cambridge NewsWorld-renowned primatologist Dr JaneGoodall DBE visited Cambridge on22–23 February to lecture on her currentwork and on the Roots and Shoots pro-gramme, an organisation that encouragesyoung people to become more involvedin their communities. Dr Goodall gainedher PhD from Cambridge in 1965,unusually without having studied for anundergraduate degree beforehand.

Roots and Shoots started in 1991 with16 Tanzanian students and has sincegrown to a membership of around 6,000groups in 87 countries. It helps youngpeople to take an active role in theircommunities by undertaking projectsthat will benefit people and animals, andthe environment they live in.The goal isto promote understanding and also togive people self-respect and hope for thefuture, fostering the belief that the indi-vidual matters and can make a difference.

Whilst Roots and Shoots takes up mostof Goodall’s time — she is on the move300 days a year — her research station inGombe, Tanzania, is carrying out vitalresearch into chimpanzees in the sur-rounding area.There are many questionsabout the chimp family structure thathave remained a puzzle up until now.“With new DNA profiling techniques,we can take DNA from faecal samplesand this can tell us exactly who thefathers are, which we could only guessbefore,” says Goodall. “This opens up awhole new question of whether there isany kind of bond between a father andhis offspring, and if there is, how do theyknow?” she says.The behaviour of knownindividuals is being monitored over a

long period of time, so the researcherscan find out what effect the type ofmother and family experience has onyoung chimps.

Goodall has been studying the chimps atGombe for 40 years and in this time therelationship between scientists and themedia has changed dramatically. “My firstbook, ‘My Friends the WildChimpanzees’, with National Geographic,made Robert Hinde [her PhD supervisor]furious! Everything in the book was accu-rate, just in a different format — scientistsdidn’t write popular books then.” Shebelieves that the interaction between sci-entists and the media is important, butoften misused.“The media can play a huge

role in the shaping of public opinion”, shesays. It’s important that people have theknowledge to be able to make informeddecisions about the science that is beingpresented to them, the danger being thatthey will choose charisma over substanceif they don’t understand. “Also, scientistsshould keep an open mind, and be first ahuman being, and second a scientist.That’sreally important.” LB

www.janegoodall.orgwww.srcf.ucam.org/curas

BlueSci would like to thank the StCatharine’s College Amalgamated Societiesand Cambridge University Roots and Shootsfor their kind invitation to this event.

On 28 February, Professor SimonBaron-Cohen presented his case forautism being an extreme form of themale brain, discussing the sometimescontroversial issue of the differencesbetween male and female brains. In alecture hosted by the CambridgeUniversity Scientific Society, he arguedthat males are generally more prone to‘systematic’ thinking, showing a prefer-ence for toys such as Lego and cars,whereas females show a preference formore ‘emotive’ toys that involve socialinteractions. Autism sufferers havebelow-average empathetic (social) skills,but usually have above-average system-izing skills, which would indicate anextreme form of the male brain.According to Professor Baron-Cohenthere are four males displaying autistictraits for every such female, and malesaffected by Asperger’s syndrome out-number females by nine to one.

One piece of evidence that points tomale-female differences involves pick-ing out a simple shape buried within a

The causes of polar ice melting, past andpresent, are being investigated by scien-tists working at the British AntarcticSurvey (BAS).“In the past two decades alot of the ice-shelves along the spine ofthe Antarctic Peninsula have been break-ing up and disappearing,” says DrDominic Hodgson from BAS. By study-ing the marine sediments underneathand near current ice-shelves, and shelvesthat have recently broken up, the scien-tists can tell when they had previouslybroken up, and whether or not thesewere random events. “Previous break-ups of both kinds of ice-shelf corre-sponded to periods of extended globalwarming,” says Hodgson. One of thebreak-ups occurred when an ice-shelfwas being warmed from below by theocean, and from above by an increase inatmospheric temperature. “When ice-shelves break up completely, the flow ofinland glaciers into the sea increasesgreatly, and this is what causes the rise insea-levels.” These collapses can occurvery quickly once the shelf becomes

unstable: in March 2002 the Larsen Bice-shelf collapsed in the space of amonth. “By studying previous collapses,we can understand how ice-shelvesresponded in the past, and therefore pre-dict how they might respond in thefuture.” It is clear that we are going tosee significant effects on the Antarcticice-shelves if global temperatures con-tinue to rise. LB

www.antarctica.ac.uk

Goodall in Cambridge

Ice-shelf Melting The Male Brain

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Dr Goodall, who does not handle wild chimpanzees, with a sanctuary chimpanzee

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The properties of mysterious particlescalled neutrinos will soon be unravelledby a multinational collaboration based atFermilab near Chicago, US. The MainInjector Neutrino Oscillation Search, orMINOS, will look at the phenomenon ofneutrino oscillations, where neutrinoschange between one of three flavours —electron, muon or tau — as they travelthrough space or matter.This has implica-tions for the Standard Model, whichdetermines how the different particles thatmake up matter interact with each other.Dr Mark Thomson from the CavendishLaboratory has been looking at the dis-tinctive patterns generated when neutri-nos produced at Fermilab crash into twohuge detectors at almost the speed oflight.“We have written software to try andwork out what these patterns mean, test-ing it using sophisticated simulations sowe can make the best of the data.”Neutrinos rarely interact with matter, soto increase the chance of one hitting thedetectors the latter weigh in at a massive1000 and 5500 tonnes. “The experimentis very neat; we will be able to comparethe energy spectrum of neutrinos at thefirst detector — before they have had achance to oscillate — with the spectrumat the far detector.”This will enable scien-tists to work out the differences betweenthe squares of the masses of the differenttypes of neutrino, which could then beused for the Standard Model. LB

www-numi.fnal.gov

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) isthe first University of Cambridge spin-outcompany to be floated on the US-basedNASDAQ exchange. Trading under thesymbol OLED commenced in December2004 and this initial public offering raised$30 million.CDT’s chief technology officerDr Jeremy Burroughes discovered thatLight Emitting Diodes (LEDs) could bemade using conjugated polymers — mate-rials which can conduct electricity and emitlight when a current is passed through them— when he was working in ProfessorRichard Friend’s group in the CavendishLaboratory; this led to the first of many

patents being filed in 1992.CDT’s Polymer LED technology ‘PLED’

can be used to make thinner and moreenergy-efficient displays that are alsobrighter and have higher contrast than con-ventional LCD displays. In addition, theyhave superior video-imaging performanceand give a very wide viewing angle. PLEDtechnology is already available in manyexisting products including Philips mobilephones and MP3 players. Manufacturinglicences have been granted to companiesinvolved in information management,communication and entertainment, such asOSRAM and Seiko-Epson. AF

www.cdtltd.co.uk

Dr Jenny Morton in the Department ofPharmacology and her colleagues from theBrain Repair Centre and the MRCLaboratory of Molecular Biology haveobtained breakthrough results in their studyof Huntington’s disease (HD). They haveidentified sleep disturbances in human HDpatients to be a pathological feature of thedisease.This has significant potential for thetreatment of HD and in improving thequality of life for sufferers and their carers.

Sleep disturbances in neurological disor-ders are common, not only in HD, but forother disorders such as Alzheimer’s andParkinson’s. Using mice carrying the HDmutation, the researchers found that HDmice had profound abnormalities in theircircadian rhythms, reflecting those seen inHD patients.They also found that behav-ioural disturbances were accompanied bychanges in the expression of circadian clockgenes. These genes are involved in main-taining the internal biological clock funda-mental to all living organisms, influencinghormones that play a role in sleep andwakefulness, in metabolic rate, and in bodytemperature.The researchers plan to followup this work by studying circadian rhythmsin HD patients and determining if sleepabnormalities contribute to cognitivedeficits.The long-term goal is to find treat-ments and new drug targets for this devas-tating neurological disorder. BP

Further information can be found in Mortonet al., J. Neurosci. 25: 157–163 (2005)

DiagnovIS, a recently establishedCambridge start-up company, promis-es an inexpensive diagnostic tool withthe potential to cure millions. Thebusiness idea sprang out of a researchproject headed by Dr CharlesPritchard and Dr David Rubin at theUniversity of Witwatersrand,Johannesburg. At the time Nic Ross, astudent of Dr Pritchard, was develop-ing software algorithms that examinetissues under a digital microscope andthen screen them for malaria. Thistechnology is the basis of the business.The integrated, automated, diagnosticplatform makes use of advances in

computational mathematics, digitalimaging, automated electronmicroscopy and proprietary opticalrecognition software.

DiagnovIS has recently designed aninnovative hardware unit, through par-ticipation in the IfM DesignChallenge, as well as through inputsfrom Cambridge-based technologyconsultants and a local microscopydeveloper. The platform is currentlybeing tested on a model system of fourdifferent strains of malaria and isalmost ready for phase one clinical tri-als. In parallel, the method is beingdeveloped for the diagnosis of a widerange of infectious and parasitic dis-

eases including tuberculosis and STDs.DiagnovIS was founded in 2004 by

Pritchard, Ross, Sonja Marjanovic andIlian Iliev, after they entered the 2003Cambridge University Entrepreneursbusiness plan competition, sponsoredby The Cambridge-MIT Institute.They won the ‘People, Planet andProductivity’ category, and the prize-money was used as start-up funding.Since then the company has gonefrom strength to strength. Its nextaims are to secure further financialbacking for broadening the diseasesoftware portfolio, and hardwaredevelopment. BP

www.diagnovis.com

number of other shapes. Males — andto a greater extent autism sufferers —are on average quicker than females atpicking the shape out, and this is due tothe more ‘systematic’ style of thinkingof people with autism. Research carriedout by Baron-Cohen and others onfoetal testosterone has provided apotential physiological explanation forautistic traits such as little eye contact atan early age and speech developmentproblems. These correlate with theamounts of foetal testosterone presentduring pregnancy, adding furtherweight to the male brain hypothesis. AF

www.autismresearchcentre.com

Spinning Out

Disease Diagnosis for All

Mystery of Neutrinos Huntington’s and Sleep

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Kennedy did it in 1961. George BushSr did it in 1989. Last year, GeorgeBush did it once again, and heraldedthe start of a great journey to sendmen to the moon and then on to Mars.Just days later, it was announced thatthe famous Hubble Space Telescopewould not receive its planned lifeline.We examine both Hubble’s achieve-ments and the new plans for spaceexploration and ask: does Nasa have itspriorities right?

To many the most important scientificinstrument of recent times, the HubbleSpace Telescope has revolutionised ourunderstanding of the universe and theprocesses that go on within it.Yet despitethese impressive credentials, the future ofthis extraordinary telescope remainsuncertain. In January 2004, the US gov-ernment outlined an ambitious new spaceprogramme focused around mannedexploration of the moon and eventuallyMars.Although likely to capture the imag-ination of the taxpaying public, these boldendeavours will undoubtedly put pressureon other science projects. Already, sevenmissions including JIMO, Ulysses andGeotail have been cancelled in a bid toconserve funds. It is against this backdropof a new vision for space exploration thatthe latest servicing mission for Hubble hasbeen indefinitely postponed.The cancella-tion of manned shuttle servicing last yearcame amidst safety fears fuelled by the ill-fated Columbia service mission of 2002when the shuttle disintegrated on re-entry,killing all on board. Nasa now requiresshuttles to be within reach of theInternational Space Station (ISS), to pro-vide a refuge for astronauts in the event ofa technical emergency. Hubble, however, isin orbit above the ISS so any servicingmission would be in breach of the newguidelines. A safer but more technicallydemanding option would be robotic serv-icing, but this now looks increasinglyunlikely given the recent announcementof Nasa’s budget, which made no provi-sion for future servicing missions to thetelescope, either manned or robotic.

Eye in the SkyLaunched in 1990, the Hubble SpaceTelescope is a 2.4-metre optical reflectingtelescope that operates from ultra-violetto near infrared wavelengths. It orbits theEarth every 95 minutes from its position600 kilometres above the surface. Thesimple modular design of the telescopehas helped it to keep pace with innova-tion by allowing new components to beadded with ease. Regular servicing everyfew years means that astronauts can addinstruments and replace or repair outdat-ed equipment. If servicing stops thenHubble will rapidly fall into disrepair.Themost pressing requirement is for newgyroscopes. These allow the telescope toorientate itself and point towards objectsof interest. Hubble has six gyroscopes intotal and uses three at any one time.Unfortunately, only four of these are nowoperational. In an attempt to extend theuseful life of the telescope, programmershave experimented with using just twogyroscopes at a time. Initial tests haveworked well, and this new measureshould keep the telescope working for anextra year — until the end of 2008.Eventually, a robot will be dispatched tode-orbit Hubble, which will then crashsafely into the ocean.

Hubble provides the deepest glimpsesinto our visible universe by virtue of itsvantage point above the atmosphere.Thisfrees it from the distortion caused by airmotions at optical wavelengths, which alsomakes stars twinkle. Turbulence in theatmosphere causes packets of air of differ-ent densities to mix.These refract the lightfrom stars by different amounts, producingthe ‘twinkling’. Hubble’s position gives anuninterrupted view of the infrared spec-trum. Infrared radiation is the most impor-

tant part of the spectrum for viewing dis-tant galaxies, because the further an objectis from Earth, the more the light from it is‘redshifted’ — shifted towards the red endof the spectrum — by the Doppler effect.Although Earth-bound telescopes can seein the infrared, they are at a disadvantagebecause at these wavelengths the atmos-phere is relatively opaque and absorbs thisradiation before it reaches the surface. Forthis reason, most Earth-based infrared tel-escopes are positioned on mountain tops,high in the atmosphere and above cloudcover, in order to reduce the opacity.

Hubble’s ability to see more clearly andmuch further has numerous advantages,one of which is that it has enabled scien-tists to calculate the age of the universe.Because the universe is expanding, thefurther a galaxy is away from us, the fasterit moves away and the redder its lightbecomes. To visualise this, imagine thesurface of a balloon with dots drawn allover it.The galaxies in the universe moveapart in the same way as the dots on theballoon move as it is being blown up. Anequation known as Hubble’s Law relatesthe distance to and the redshift of a distantgalaxy, in a way that depends on the age ofthe universe. Hubble measures the red-shifts of certain objects called Cepheid

Variables, whose distances astronomerscan find straightforwardly. CepheidVariables are pulsating stars that are soluminous — up to 10,000 times brighterthan the sun — that they can be seen upto 65 million light years away.The pulsa-tion is due to physical changes in the sizeand surface temperature of the star overthe course of just a few days.The fluctua-tion period is roughly similar for allCepheids of the same brightness. Weknow how bright a star should be by

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In January 2004, the US government outlined anambitious new space programme focused around

manned exploration of the moon and Mars“

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Virginia Hooper,Alistair Crosby andLouisa Dunlop investigatethe pros and cons of fundingfor manned exploration ofthe solar system versus continued support of theHubble Space Telescope andother unmanned,space-borne observatories

A Giant Leapor a Distant View?

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measuring how long it takes to pulse. Ifwe compare the observed luminosity of aCepheid as seen by Hubble with its mod-elled luminosity, we can calculate theCepheid’s distance from the Earth.Hubble has been able to detect Cepheidsup to 10 times further away than anyground-based telescope. Using its data,astronomers obtained an age of approxi-mately 13 billion years for the universe.This new figure solves one of the greatproblems in astronomy as previous esti-

mates had suggested that the universe wasyounger than its oldest stars!

Hubble has also allowed research into‘dark matter’, the most elusive but mostabundant form of matter in space. This,together with the even more mysterious‘dark energy’,makes up more than 90% ofthe mass of the universe. Exactly whatthey are remains uncertain, and it is onlyrecently that Hubble has provided con-clusive evidence for their existence, whichcan only be explained if there were moremass in the universe than can be account-ed for by conventional methods.The pres-ence of dark matter can be inferred fromthe gravitational lensing of far galaxies:gravity deflects passing light rays from

objects behind the galaxies and focusesthem into bright curves imaged byHubble.The mass needed to produce suchan effect is 10 times more than the massassociated with the visible galaxy, suggest-ing the presence of additional, dark, mat-ter.Astronomers showed in 1998 that theexpansion rate of the universe wasincreasing with time, using Hubble obser-vations of exploding stars called ‘type IAsupernovae’. It is thought to be dark ener-gy that causes this acceleration.

With its incredible resolution and thefar-reaching field of view of its ‘NearInfrared Camera and Multi-ObjectSpectrometer’,Hubble has witnessed someremarkable events.These include images ofthe Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashinginto Jupiter, dust storms on Mars, andrecording the births and deaths of stars.This constant stream of information is ofvital importance to astronomers trying tounderstand the universe.As we have seen,Hubble will fail within the next few yearsand its supply of data to the astronomicalcommunity will cease, making newresearch more difficult.Not only the pure-ly scientific impact of Hubble will bemissed, but also the inspirational and cul-tural influence of this modern icon.Images from Hubble have permeated intopopular culture and increasingly defineour mental picture of the cosmos.

Hubble was never intended to lastindefinitely and the scientific communitywelcomes the prospect of a new and moresophisticated telescope. But astronomerswill have to wait until at least 2011 for thelaunch of Hubble’s successor, the JamesWebb Space Telescope.This significant gapafter Hubble’s final years is due to a changein priority: the US is redirecting Nasa’sfocus to manned rather than roboticexploration of the near planets with a viewto eventually setting a man on Mars by

2035. The first step will be to send menback to the moon by 2020 at the latest.This will be achieved by phasing out themuch-criticized ISS and the space shuttleand concentrating resources on develop-ing new technologies to allow mannedexplorations beyond the first few hundredkilometres of space (low Earth orbit).These plans come at enormous expensewithout any significant increase in theoverall budget. Funds are to be squeezedfrom other areas; for instance, current plansare for Nasa’s research into the Earth’senvironment to have its funding cut by$1.1 billion between 2005 and 2009.

Return to the MoonBut it was Bush’s vision of sending men tothe moon and thence to Mars that reallysucceeded in grabbing the headlines.However, can the White House really jus-tify such a grand commitment? The offi-cial report of the President’s Commissionon Moon, Mars and Beyond implies thatcrews carry out better science than probes,and that human habitation in space is bothfeasible and desirable. Is what it says true?

The Commission advocates astronautsoperating observatories on the moon, butit would surely be better — not to men-tion cheaper — to position those tele-scopes in space, well away from anyhuman activity. In order to be as sensitiveas possible, telescopes need to be kept coldand free from vibration, and it is difficultto see how an expensive and noisymanned presence nearby would help.Hubble’s successor, for instance, will bestationed 1.5 million kilometres from theEarth and will be kept at a temperature

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Hubble has witnessed some remarkable events:Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter, dust

storms on Mars, and the birth and death of stars“

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Hubble Space Telescope

First proposed: 1962First cancelled: 1973Eventually launched: 1990Cost: $2 billionManned servicing missions to date: 4Papers published using Hubble overthe same time period: 2,651Proportion of proposals for usingHubble accepted: 10%Nasa

Percentage of federal budget spent onNasa: 0.6Money requested for manned space-flight in 2006: $6.76 billionCost of manned upgrade of Hubble:$300 millionYear Nasa first put a man on themoon: 1969Year by which Nasa wants to putanother man on the moon: 2020Total hits to Nasa’s website during thefirst six weeks of 2004: 6.53 billion

just 35 degrees above absolute zero.It is true that astronauts would be much

better than robots at making detailed inves-tigations of the Martian surface, but robotsare cheaper, safer, and improving rapidly incapability. Unmanned missions can be pre-pared much more quickly than manned

ones, and planners can then use data fromprevious missions to select new researchpriorities. A manned mission, by contrast,would be decades in the making and couldbe seen as redundant before it even left theground. At today’s prices, the ApolloProgram (1963–72) to send men to themoon cost $100 billion.Mars is much hard-er to get to,yet Nasa’s current robotic roverscost less than 1% of the price of Apollo.They have been able to crawl more than 7kilometres over the surface of Mars, andprovide detailed field evidence of how parts

of it were once covered by water.The case for government investment in

human habitation and mining in space ismore shaky. Proponents of space explo-ration sometimes argue that we might oneday run out of places to live on Earth, butliving in space would be profoundly

expensive. Presently, it costs$10,000–$30,000 per kilogram to put aload into space, a figure that has barelyfallen in 20 years. Launching five spaceshuttles requires as much energy asreleased by the bomb that destroyedHiroshima.A recent UN report estimatedthat by 2300 the world’s population willlevel out at about 9 billion — this is 50%higher than today, but does not necessari-ly mean that inhabiting space is the only,or the best, option. Finally, for those whostill dream of space, we may soon see theemergence of a private market in spacetravel. In June last year, Burt Rutan, anAmerican, became the first individual toreach space in a privately funded space-craft. Richard Branson has ordered five:prices will start at about £100,000 for a3-hour hop, but are expected to fall asdemand increases and the technologyimproves.

But to some extent such criticism miss-es the point. Government space pro-grammes have never been just about sci-ence and they have certainly never beenabout economics. They are about explo-ration and the inspiration of nationalpride, and Bush is correct that Nasa’s cur-rent manned programme fails to doeither. But there are cheaper, more novel,and more deserving sources of inspirationthan sending men back to the moon, andthey include attempting to answer thebiggest question of all: are we alone?

It’s life, but not as we know itIn our own solar system, there are twocandidates for life.The first is Mars. Marsmay be cold (as low as -140°C at thepoles) and have a surface atmosphericpressure one two-hundredth that of theEarth; but we know from probes in orbitthat it has subsurface water ice, and it hasbeen volcanically active within the recentgeological past.There may well be hardyorganisms living deep in the soil or infractures flushed by hydrothermal fluids.Nasa’s next Mars rover, to arrive in 2010,will carry instruments to detect organicmolecules in samples it collects.

The second is Jupiter’s moon Europa.Europa is even colder than Mars, and hasno atmosphere at all, but underneath itsicy surface there appears to be an ocean:observations of Europa’s magnetic fieldtaken by the Galileo probe in 2000 indi-cate a fluid conductor fairly close to thesurface. Sending humans there is out of

the question: one day sending a robot toslowly melt its way through the ice andlook for life is not. Indeed, a workingteam is being set up to look at the possi-bility of a joint venture to Europabetween the European Space Agency(ESA) and Nasa.

But it is the idea of other Earths thatreally gets people excited. In the last fewyears, astronomers have realised that plan-ets are both a lot more common and a lotmore diverse than once thought: to date,145 (decidedly non-Earth-like) planetsaround nearby stars have been identified.Imaging Earth-like planets around nearbystars would require unfeasibly large mir-rors or lenses, because the resolution of atelescope depends on its diameter.However, instruments known as interfer-ometers may be up to the job, and Nasaplans to start flying them in orbit within20 years. Interferometry is a technique inwhich one recovers information about asource by combining several observationsof the source taken far apart but at exact-ly the same time. It has been used by radioastronomers to produce images of brightradio sources with a hundred times theresolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.Achieving the same with light, which hasa much shorter wavelength, is much trick-ier, but possible, as a recent experiment bythe University of Cambridge’s CavendishAstrophysics group, COAST, showed.Their interferometer, less than 100 metresacross and costing just £850,000, was ableto image the surface of a star for the firsttime: a task far beyond even Hubble.

Unfortunately, Nasa has a history ofwasteful investments and overblownrhetoric. It also has some of the bestengineers in the world and no shortageof worthwhile projects that won’tdemand that astronauts risk life and limb.The circus that surrounds sendinghumans into space is both inefficient andscientifically unrewarding; George Bushshould give Hubble a few more years,and then have the courage to leavemanned spaceflight behind. The astro-naut is yesterday’s icon.

Virginia Hooper is a fourth year NaturalScientist, specialising in Geology;Alistair

Crosby is a PhD student in the Departmentof Earth Sciences; Louisa Dunlop is a PhD

student in the Department of Physics

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At today’s prices, the Apollo Program cost $100billion. Nasa’s current robotic Mars rovers cost

less than one percent of that price“

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Mars Milestones1964: First successful fly-by, byNasa’s Mariner 4, shows parts ofMars to be desolate and cratered, farfrom the popular stereotype of aninhabited and fertile world.1971: Soviet Union successfully landsa spacecraft on Mars, but transmis-sions stop after just 20 seconds.1975: Nasa successfully lands thetwo Viking spacecraft on Mars. TheViking 1 lander returns data for oversix years, whilst the orbiters map thewhole of the Martian surface. For thefirst time, features caused by water— such as dried-up river beds — arephotographed.1989: George Bush Sr pledges tosend men to Mars but, at a cost ofmore than $400 billion, Congressrejects the plans.1996: Scientists make controversialclaim that Martian meteoriteALH84001 contains fossilized alienbacteria (see History, pages 24–25).1997: Nasa’s Mars Pathfinder missionsuccessfully lands on Mars. It carries asmall rover, which returns data fornearly three months. The MarsPathfinder website gets 30 million hitsin a single day.2003: European Space Agencylaunches the Mars Express Orbiter,which provides the best evidence todate that water ice is buried beneaththe Martian soil. The UK’s Beagle 2lander is lost without trace.2004: Nasa successfully lands twogolf-buggy-sized rovers on theMartian surface, which have sincecrawled more than 7 km and provid-ed conclusive evidence that the sur-face of Mars was once wet.

Further ReadingHubble Space Telescope

http://hubblesite.orgJet Propulsion Laboratory

www.jpl.nasa.govPresident’s Commission on Moon,Mars and Beyond

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/moontomars

A Budgetary Analysis of NASA’s NewVision for Space Exploration

www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5772&sequence=2

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Would you advise that future missions to space should concentrate on understanding thecosmological history of the universe, or instead on exploring our planetary neighbours,perhaps by sending humans there?

Professor Sir Martin Rees,Astronomer Royal

Those of us who are now middle-aged can remember the murkylive TV pictures of Neil

Armstrong’s ‘one small step’ in 1969.We imagined follow-up projects: a per-manent ‘lunar base’, rather like the oneat the south pole; or even huge ‘spacehotels’ orbiting the Earth. Mannedexpeditions to Mars seemed a naturalnext step. But none of these has hap-pened. The year 2001 didn’t resembleArthur C. Clarke’s depiction, any morethan 1984 (fortunately) resembledOrwell’s.

But the use of space for communica-tions, meteorology and navigation hasforged ahead in the last three decades— as of course has astronomy, andsurveys of the planets. Space explo-ration for scientific purposes can bebetter (and far more cheaply) carriedout by fleets of unmanned probes,exploiting the advances that have givenus mobile phones and powerful laptopcomputers.

The practical case for manned space-flight gets ever weaker with eachadvance in robotics and miniaturisation.Indeed, as a scientist, I see little purpose

in sending people into space at all. Butas a human being, I’m nonetheless anenthusiast for space exploration — tothe moon, to Mars and even beyond —as a long-range adventure for (at least afew) humans. But this will only happenwhen costs come down drastically.Present launching techniques are asextravagant as air travel would be if theplane had to be rebuilt after everyflight. Manned spaceflight will only beaffordable when its technology comescloser to that of supersonic aircraft.

The International Space Station isneither practical nor inspiring — morethan 30 years after Apollo, it merelyallows astronauts to circle the earth atinordinate cost.There is maybe just oneargument for it: if one believes that inthe long-run space travel will become

routine, it ensures that the 40 years’experience of the US and Russia isn’tdissipated.The next humans to walk onthe moon may be Chinese — onlyChina seems to have the resources, thedirigiste government, and the willing-ness to undertake a risky Apollo-styleprogramme. If Americans or Europeansventure to the moon and beyond, thiswill have to be in a very different style,and with different motives.

Costs must come down to the levelwhen the enterprise could bebankrolled by private consortia. Andthere must be an overt acceptance thatthe enterprise is dangerous. The USpublic’s reaction to the shuttle’s safetyrecord — two disasters in 113 flights— suggests that it is unacceptable fortax-funded projects to expose civiliansto even a 2% risk.And the first explor-ers venturing towards Mars would con-front — and would surely willinglyaccept — far higher risks than this.

Future expeditions to the moon andbeyond will only be politically and finan-cially feasible if they are cut-price ven-tures, perhaps privately funded, spear-headed by individuals who accept thatthey may never return.

Ask the Experts

Professor Monica Grady, Open University

Iwould hesitate to suggest that cos-mology is completed, but that is theimpression that I frequently come

away with after listening to descriptionsof the Big Bang and similar topics. Wecan only explore so far back in time(space), before the laws of physics, bothclassical and quantum mechanical, canno longer be applied with any realism.Theory then comes into play, withstrings, branes, multiverses and thespectre of time travel through worm-holes perhaps bringing us closer to sci-ence fiction than reality. So althoughunderstanding the cosmological historyof the universe is an important goal, itis, at the moment, theoretically impossi-ble to achieve.

In contrast, human exploration of oursolar system is, for the time being, tech-nically difficult to achieve. But certainlypracticable in the not too distantfuture. And there is certainly a hugeamount that we still need to learnabout our local neighbourhood.Was oris there life on Mars? What is belowEuropa’s icy ocean? What is the struc-ture of Callisto? Why does it have amagnetic field? Why doesn’t Venus havea magnetic field? What is the other sideof Mercury like? Is Pluto a small planet,or a large Kuiper Belt Object? These

are just a few questions outstandingwithin our own solar system.

Why send humans to explore,though, and not robots? Both types ofmission are necessary. Robotic explo-ration must be a pathfinder beforehumans can venture onto other plan-ets.This will give us the confidence thatwe understand the measurable proper-ties (temperature, pressure, gravity, lightlevel, wind speed and so on) of a planetbefore we suffer the psychological andphysical problems of the journey.

Why do humans need to go? Robotsare only as clever as the program thatcontrols them. Humans exercise judge-ment and make decisions.Without this,planetary exploration is likely to be lim-ited to drilling holes in rocks and takingphotographs.

ESA and Nasa have announced ambi-tious plans for the human explorationof space. Russia, China, India and Japanare also investing in space exploration.It is likely, probably necessary, and cer-tainly desirable that any missions involv-ing human space exploration should be

multinational, and undertaken in thename of humanity in general and not ofone nation, or group of nations in par-ticular. Only in that way would I be awhole-hearted and enthusiastic sup-porter of human space exploration.

Dr Michael Foale, Astronaut and DeputyAssociate Administrator for ExplorationOperations, Nasa

Space science, including both cos-mology and the study of our solarsystem, is part of human explo-

ration, driven by curiosity and a need tomaster our environment, for security.When exploring space, both new under-standing and vicarious personal explo-ration of planetary surfaces, oceans oratmosphere serve to motivate andinspire us. So when we have limitedresources for exploration and scientificinquiry, immediate questions and eco-nomic possibilities involving the solarsystem need to be balanced with thepotential of discovering fundamentallaws through new understanding of cos-mology and unification of physical theo-ries. In simple language we should keepour options of discovery open, but con-centrate on those areas providing near-term results.This includes human explo-ration of the south pole of the moon,and human exploration of Mars.

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In many ways a living cell is analogousto a computer.The DNA, or hard disk,stores the necessary programmingcodes to produce the proteins, or pro-grams, found within the cell.Proteomics is the field focused on iden-tifying all the proteins in an organismor cell type, what their functions are,how they interact with one another andhow their expression level varies inresponse to environmental changes.Proteomics is considered one of thehottest areas of science today. A searchof the scientific publications databasePubMed for the terms ‘proteomic’ or‘proteomics’ yielded 373 articles pub-lished prior to 2001. By comparison, injust the first two months of 2005, astaggering 393 articles have been pub-lished on the subject. This is the storyof how the physical and biological sci-ences join forces to create such adynamic field.

Proteins consist of chains of amino acidsstrung together via peptide bonds. Mostcells use a palette of around 20 aminoacids to assemble each protein accordingto the instructions permanently encodedin the cell’s DNA. In addition to a com-mon backbone that holds the long chaintogether, each amino acid contains a func-tional group featuring a wide variety ofdifferent chemical species. Just as a skilledartist can create a complex painting froma small set of basic colours, the cell canjoin together different amino acids in aprecise order to create a set of complexbiopolymers. These are essential for thewide range of chemical reactions that sup-

port life. An ‘operating system’ of spe-cific proteins is

required by almost every cell for essentialfunctions such as energy metabolism,DNA replication or cell division.However, different cell types can synthe-sise the other proteins that are required toperform more specialised tasks.

The science of proteomics is groundedin the ability to identify a protein rapidlyby analysing portions of its sequence.Historically, proteins could be sequencedthrough a chemical reaction called EdmanDegradation, by which amino acids areremoved and identified one by one fromone end of the protein. Dr Kathryn Lilley,head of the Cambridge Centre forProteomics, says that although this tech-nology has been used successfully, it is verylow throughput and does not work wellfor all proteins. However, the advent ofmass spectrometry (MS)-based proteinanalysis in the 1990s set the stage for theexplosion of proteomics as a field.

In its most simplistic form, MS can beviewed as a very accurate balance capableof measuring the mass of individual mole-cules and even atoms.The first generationof MS instrumentation was designed by J.J. Thompson and his associate FrancisAston at the Cavendish Laboratory aroundthe beginning of the twentieth century.MS relies on the ability to manipulate anddetect electrically charged molecules,called ions, moving through a vacuum.Through the use of ‘ion optics’, a beam ofions can be pushed, pulled and focused byforces from magnetic fields and electrical-ly charged plates.

One of the most common designs ofmodern mass spectrometers is based onthe principle of time-of-flight.A time-of-flight instrument measures the time it

takes an ion, accelerated with a specif-ic amount of energy, to travel a setdistance in a vacuum.When the same

force is used to push a set of ionswith the same charge but dif-ferent mass, the lighter ionswill travel faster.With a prop-

erly calibrated instrument, trav-el times can be used to calcu-

late an ion’s mass-to-charge ratio and ultimate-ly its mass.

Ion creation is thefirst and most diffi-cult step in analysinga molecule by MS.Although newerinstrumentation has

allowed for better sensitivity and massaccuracy, the inability to form ions fromhigh molecular weight species generallylimited this technology to the analysis ofsmaller molecules.A ‘small’ molecule suchas Vitamin C weighs about 176 Daltons

(Da), but a single protein can easily weighupwards of 100,000 Da. Some of the orig-inal ionization techniques, which usedharsh conditions such as heat or collisionwith energetic electrons to form ions,failed for molecules with a mass of morethan around 1000 Da.

In the 1980s there were several majoradvances including the development oftwo techniques called ElectrosprayIonization (ESI) and Matrix Assisted LaserDesorption Ionization (MALDI) thatincreased, by several orders of magnitude,the mass range of molecules that could beionized successfully. For the first time sci-entists could introduce very large mole-cules, including whole proteins, into theMS: John Fenn, the developer of modernESI, commented that it was like “givingelephants wings”. Signifying the impor-tance of these advancements, Fenn andKoichi Tanaka shared a portion of the2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for thedevelopment of methods for identificationand structure analyses of biological macro-molecules”.

MS-based protein sequencing relies onthe principle that ionized chains of aminoacids in a vacuum can be fragmented in apredictable manner. In practice, samplesfor analysis are often first digested with theenzyme trypsin (left) in order to cut a pro-tein (top right) into specific smaller sections(peptides, right) with masses in the optimalfragmentation range of 500–5000 Da. Amass spectrum is taken of the products andcompared to a database of predicted spec-tra for peptide sequences from all the pro-teins in the organism being studied.Thesedatabases are compiled from a sequencedgenome by identifying possible peptidesthrough bioinformatic predictions. In thefinal analysis, sequences of the peptides arematched up with the proteins from whichthey originated to generate a catalogue ofproteins, along with statistical scorings

luesci Easter 2005

Proteomics is revolutionizing theprocess of drug discovery“

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Giving Elephants Wings: The Science of After the sequencing of the human genome, the next big challenge for modern biology is to uncover our ‘proteome’, the identity of the proteins in our cells. Nicholas T. Hartman reports

The DaltonThe unit of measure for atoms. rough-ly equal to the weight of one protonor hydrogen atom. One Daltonweighs 1.066 x 10-24 grams.

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indicating the confidence of identification.Proteomic analysis ranges from identify-

ing a single unknown protein to studyingas many proteins as possible in a particulartissue sample. Most proteins live a verysecretive life, and although scientists canpredict the existence of novel proteinsfrom genomic analyses, it is difficult toobserve their presence experimentally andinvestigate their role in the cell withoutproteomics.

With the sequencing of entire genomesnow almost routine — mainly a matter oftime and money — the next frontier inbiotechnology is the identification of allthe proteins in a cell: its proteome.Analysing the proteome is, in many ways,a much more challenging problem thananalysing a whole genome.Through alter-native splicing of the RNA template andpost-translational modifications of theprotein itself — which are not obvious bylooking at the DNA sequence alone — agenome of 22,000 genes can produce over500,000 different protein forms! A dis-eased state or other condition may involveonly certain spliced forms of a gene oralterations in post-translational modifica-tions. Thus, proteomic analysis is on thefront line of identifying cellular changesthat can be difficult, if not impossible, toanalyse by genomic approaches alone.

More recently the concept of ‘quantita-tive proteomics’ has greatly expanded ourability to study challenging biologicalquestions not only by identifying proteins,but also by studying the relative abun-dances of two or more different samples, inorder to ask questions such as what hap-pens to the expression levels of specificproteins in response to environmentalstress or when in a diseased state.According to Lilley,“the ability to measuredynamic changes in protein abundanceprovides much more information than justcataloguing which proteins are found inthe cell”.

You can’t fix something if you don’tknow what’s broken. Understanding howcells respond to stress increases our gener-al knowledge of how cells work, and canyield valuable clues towards developingtreatment options for a wide variety ofconditions.Thus proteomics is revolution-izing the process of drug discovery by pro-viding researchers with tools to identifywhich proteins are at the core of the onsetof disease. Once targets have been identi-fied, novel drugs can be designed to inter-act specifically with these proteins. Severalcompanies have successfully designedextensive profiling technologies to identi-fy the expression and activity of proteinswithin a sample, often with drug discoveryin mind. For example, the Canadian com-pany Kinexus offers customers the ability

to create expression and activity ‘finger-prints’ for different protein families, such askinases. In one example of their work,Kinexus has developed assays to screen formolecules that interact with specific pro-teins as a route to identifying potential tar-gets for future drugs.

One promising but controversial area ofproteomics research is focused on identi-fying ‘diagnostic biomarkers’. This is theidentification of specific biological mole-cules, such as proteins, which have repro-ducible changes in abundance betweendiseased and normal patients, thus allow-ing a biomarker assay to make a diagnosisbefore any obvious symptoms appear.Although many experiments have suc-cessfully observed changes in proteinexpression in mutant or diseased cells,many scientists and investors have beenskeptical of the technology’s ability toallow accurate and early diagnoses inpatients. To date, many publicly tradedbiotechnology companies such asCiphergen, Compugen, Icoria, andLuminex have had difficulty convincinginvestors of their visions for biomarkertechnology and consequently have expe-rienced significant decreases in stock pricesince their initial public offering.Ciphergen produces protein chips inte-grated with MS analysis and software toanalyse complex protein mixtures for bio-markers. Wall Street has certainly beenwrong in the past, and with the develop-ment of these and other promising tech-nologies across the board, only time willtell if diagnostic biomarkers have a long-term viable business future.

Although the sequencing of a specificgenome can be finished, it will be muchharder to say when, if ever, the analysis ofan organism’s proteome is officially com-pleted. Some of the cell’s most importantand complex proteins are only present atvery low levels, and just as each new tele-scope unveils a whole new cosmos toastronomers, improvements in sensitivitywill open up a whole new world of fasci-nating proteins never before observedexperimentally.With continuing advancesin MS technologies, ongoing genomesequencing projects and the ever-increas-ing number of labs using MS-based pro-tein analysis in their research, the future ofproteomics looks bright. Who would haveever thought that ‘flying elephants’ couldtell us so much.

Readers interested in a more technical explana-tion of proteomics should refer to NatureReviews Molecular Cell Biology 5:699–711 (2004)

Nicholas T. Hartman is a PhD student in theDepartment of Biochemistry

luesciwww.bluesci.org

of Proteomics

What colour is the letter D? To mostpeople, this question is meaningless, butsome would feel confident saying thatD is yellow, or that F-sharp is spicy andsour.These people have synaesthesia —literally, ‘joined sensation’ — a rare andfascinating condition that mixes differ-ent senses, so that a perception that nor-mally occurs in just one sense, like hear-ing, also triggers secondary perceptionsin another such as taste. Though thesemixed perceptions may seem simply likeoverextended metaphors, they are veryreal to synaesthetes, and may even pro-vide insights into human consciousness.

All combinations of senses are possible insynaesthesia, but the most common form,in two-thirds of cases, is letter-coloursynaesthesia. For these synaesthetes, eachletter or digit evokes a perception ofcolour: the letter K might be lime-green,or the number 6, sky-blue.Words can havecolours too, usually determined by the firstletter of the word. These colour percep-tions might be elicited by either printed or,more rarely, spoken words. Less commonly,some synaesthetes see specific colourswhen perceiving musical pitches, everydaysounds like a car horn,or odours and tastes.In some cases, synaesthetic perceptions canbe quite complex, combining shapes,colours and textures, so that one might saya sound “looks like red, jagged triangles”.

There are plenty of more exotic combi-nations. For example, some people per-ceive numbers as existing in a highly spe-

cific spatial pattern. Xavier Seron and col-leagues at the Université Catholique deLouvain, in Belgium, described one manfor whom numbers existed on a line, with1–10 going 45° up to the right, then after10 turning abruptly to proceed straight tothe right. Neurologist Richard Cytowicrevealed how one man complained that adish he cooked tasted wrong because“there weren’t enough points on thechicken”.The man also described the taste

of mint as having the texture of “cool glasscolumns”. Cytowic even reported oneteenager who adopted specific postures inresponse to the sound of different words.

Given the difficulty of understandingsomeone else’s subjective perceptions, youmight wonder if these sensations are ‘real’or just especially vibrant metaphors. Infact, the perceptions are highly repro-ducible: synaesthetes immediately reportthe same associations when tested unex-pectedly years later. Moreover, psycholog-ical experiments have established thatsynaesthetic perceptions occur automati-cally and strongly influence sensory pro-cessing. These experiments adapt a taskcalled the Stroop test, where subjects see

names of colours printed in coloured ink,and are asked to name the colour of theink, not the name printed. For example, ifthe word red is printed in green ink, onewould answer “green”. Ordinary peopleare much slower to respond when the inkcolour does not match what is printed,because reading the printed word is soautomatic that it interferes with the cor-rect response.

The Stroop test can be adapted for let-ter-colour synaesthetes: a subject is asked toname the colour of the ink of a single let-ter, where the letter is printed in a colourthat either matches, or does not match, thatperson’s synaesthetic colour perception.So,if someone perceives the letter K as green,they will be slower to name the ink colourpresented if K is printed in red than if it isprinted in green. The result indicates thatthe synaesthetic colour perception associat-ed with specific letters is automatic.

Another experiment that shows thatsynaesthetic colour perceptions are gen-uine involves a ‘search’. For normal sub-jects, it is easy to spot a pink dot in a sea ofyellow dots relatively quickly, but it takes along time to search out the number 2 in afield of 5s.But for a synaesthete who sees 2as pink and 5 as yellow, it is relatively easy

to find the 2 in a field of 5s. The addedcolour feature on the numbers makes thevisual search much more efficient.

The causes of synaesthesia are still large-ly mysterious. There is likely to be somegenetic component: synaesthesia runs infamilies, with an inheritance pattern thatsuggests that the genetic factor may be onthe X chromosome. Also, though mostsynaesthetes report having their uniqueperceptions as long as they can remember— many, in fact, are surprised to find thatother people do not share their percep-tions — synaesthetic experiences can alsobe induced by neurological conditionssuch as epilepsy.

Some researchers have speculated thatsynaesthetes may have extra connectionsbetween brain circuits that normallyprocess different sensory modalities.Interestingly, babies have a large excess ofneural connections that later get pruned asthe circuits are refined. Professor SimonBaron-Cohen, working at the AutismResearch Centre here in Cambridge, hassuggested that all babies might be synaes-thetic because of extra connectionsbetween sensory circuits, and that adultsynaesthesia occurs when some of theseconnections are not pruned.

Intriguingly, synaesthetic associationsoften tend to follow associations made by

non-synaesthetes. Sound-vision synaes-thetes tend to see light colours and angu-lar shapes upon hearing high-pitchedsounds, and dark colours and roundedshapes for low-pitched sounds. If forced tochoose, non-synaesthetes tend to do thesame, and even show interference in theStroop test — delayed reaction times tovisual stimuli that don’t match an accom-panying sound. These spontaneous biasessuggest that there may be some uncon-scious connection between hearing andvision in everyone, which reaches con-sciousness only in synaesthetes.

Indeed, synaesthesia puts a wrinkle inone of the main problems of human con-sciousness, the so-called binding problem.After sensory input has been split up by allthe specialised processing areas of thebrain, how does it all come together into aunified subjective perception? In synaes-thesia, apparently extra sensory features are‘bound’ to the normal set, so understand-ing what happens differently in synaes-thetic brains could provide clues as to howconscious perception arises in ordinarybrains.

Andrew Lin is an MPhil student in theDepartment of Anatomy

12 Easter 2005

One man complained that adish tasted wrong

because ‘there aren’tenough points on

the chicken’

A Stroop test: say each word out loud, then the colour of each word in turn

What Does F# TasteLike?

Andrew Lin examines the phenomenon of synaesthesia

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Antibiotics, from the Greek wordsanti (against) and bios (life), are chem-icals produced by microorganismsthat are capable of killing bacteria orinhibiting their growth. They haveenabled the effective treatment ofonce life-threatening infectious dis-eases such as tuberculosis. Over onehundred years after the discovery ofpenicillin, the role of antibiotics inthe treatment of infectious diseases isstill as important today. An unfortu-nate side-effect of widespread antibi-otic use has been the appearance ofbacteria that are resistant to mostcommonly used antibiotics. Veryrecent examples of this type of resist-ance are the methicillin-resistantstrains of Staphylococcus aureus, the so-called MRSA superbugs.

S. aureus usually lives harmlessly in thenoses of 20–30% of healthy people. Itonly poses a threat if it invades openwounds, where it will cause infections.The use of penicillin revolutionizedtreatment of S. aureus infections, butshortly after its introduction to clinicalpractice, penicillin-resistant strains of S.aureus emerged. Alternative antibiotics(primarily methicillin) were employed tofight these infections, but MRSAevolved soon after. During the 1960s,MRSA was relatively uncommon. Morecases appeared in the 1980s, but theproblem exploded in the mid-1990swhen particular ‘epidemic’ strains of

MRSA became established in hospitalsin the UK. These strains now representover 40% of the S. aureus that causebloodstream infections in England.Recently MRSA has acquired multipleantibiotic resistances, leaving its infec-tions virtually untreatable.

Resistance is transmitted genetically bya bacterium to its progeny. Importantly,genes that carry resistance can also betransmitted from one bacterium toanother by plasmids — carriers of chro-mosomal fragments containing just a fewgenes. Evolution of resistance providesbacteria with a competitive advantage inthe environment and better subsequentsurvival chances. Bacteria reproduce at astaggering rate, so antibiotic resistancespreads very quickly once it evolves.

One of the main ways in which bacte-ria become antibiotic-resistant isthrough evolution of a mechanism thatinactivates the drug, and it is in this waythat S. aureus developed resistance topenicillin. S. aureus acquired the abilityto produce β-lactamase — an enzymethat inactivates penicillin and otherantibiotics such as ampicillin — byhydrolysing the β-lactam ring that iscentral to their structure. Most S. aureusstrains are now β-lactamase producersand thus are resistant to penicillin andampicillin. However, these strains aresusceptible to some β-lactam antibioticssuch as nafcillin, methicillin or oxacillin,which are all β-lactamase-resistant.Methicillin resistance in Staphylococci isdue to the acquisition of the mecA genewhich encodes for the penicillin-bind-ing protein (PBP) 2A. PBP 2A has a lowaffinity for all β-lactams, and confersresistance to all β-lactam antibiotics,including those that are resistant to β-lactamase such as methicillin.

The antibiotics of last resort that canstill treat MRSA are vancomycin (left)and teicoplanin (below). These are bothglycopeptide antibiotics and membersof a vancomycin-like family of antibi-otics that inhibit synthesis of the bacte-rial cell-wall.Vancomycin was originallyisolated from soil taken from the junglesof Borneo. The purified compoundexhibited lethal properties against alltested strains of Staphylococci as well asother bacteria which share the samecell-wall structure. Vancomycin is pro-duced by the fungus Amycolatopsis orien-talis and was first used in the clinic in1959, in response to the strains ofStaphylococci that were becoming resist-ant to penicillin. Teicoplanin — verysimilar to vancomycin — was isolated inthe mid-1970s as a fermentation prod-uct of bacteria Actinoplanes teichomyceti-cus. The introduction of methicillinreduced the use of vancomycin forsome years, but it was reinstated as atherapeutic agent when methicillin-resistant S. aureus, MRSA, strainsappeared. The acquisition of resistanceby S. aureus to virtually all antibiotics inclinical use has propelled the van-comycin group of antibiotics to theforefront in the fight against MRSA.Experts have so far uncovered 17 strainsof MRSA, with differing degrees ofdrug resistance. Frighteningly, US scien-tists have isolated VRSA, a strain resist-ant even to vancomycin. Teicoplanin-resistant strains have also been detected.

The most obvious way to address theproblem of antibiotic resistance is todevelop new kinds of antibiotics.Unfortunately, wider antibiotic use couldshorten the cycle time for developmentof resistance, making antibiotics into afinite resource.This makes the search fornew antibiotics financially unattractive,and it may be that the only sustainableoption for combating resistance in theshort- to long-term is to return to oldstrategies of fighting disease, namely sur-veillance and education.

Bojana Popovic is a postdoc in theDepartment of Biochemistry


The Killer WithinBojana Popovic goes hunting for superbugs

MRSA in the UK• Deaths from MRSA infections have doubled from 1999–2003: 487 deaths wereattributed to MRSA in 1999, compared with 955 in 2003.This is in part due tobetter reporting.

• Recording of MRSA infections in UK hospitals has been mandatory since 2001.

• More than 7,000 hospital patients have been affected by MRSA in the UK eachyear since 2001.

• Recent reports show that infections in England and Wales dropped by 6% in thelast 6 months, when compared to the same period last year.

Source: BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk

Experts have so faruncovered 17 strains

of MRSA

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You have arranged to meet a friend ina busy high street in London. She isn’tanswering her phone, and you haven’tgot a hope of finding her just by wan-dering around.Wouldn’t it be handy ifyou both had mobile phones thatcould be instantaneously and accurate-ly positioned? The applications forsuch a technology are endless: keepinga watchful eye on your children; track-ing goods and deliveries; seeing exact-ly where the bus you are waiting for is(and being able to decide whether towait for it any longer); navigatingwhen you are lost; finding a cashmachine, petrol station or hotel; andperhaps, crucially, enabling the emer-gency services to locate you immedi-ately when you call them.

Currently, any mobile phone can bepositioned to within the cell it occupies,i.e. the area of coverage of the base stationthat is serving the mobile phone at agiven moment (see figure below). This iscalled the Cell-ID method. In rural areas,where there are few tall buildings toblock signals, powerful macrocell trans-mitters can be used to provide coveragefor 35 kilometres or more.Within cities,where buildings are densely packed,macrocell coverage is enhanced by plac-ing microcell transmitters every few hun-dred metres or so.There are even picocelltransmitters in use inside buildings, intunnels and on cruise-liners to providecoverage within a 50-metre range.However, Cell-ID determines only theposition of the base station that is servingyour phone, and so the accuracy isdependent on the range to the base sta-tion. If a person happens to be using thetube, being served by picocells, they canbe located quite accurately, but in mostcases you cannot rely on Cell-ID to givea useful position fix. It is only adequatefor tracking goods and looking up infor-mation on the local area. Vodafone, forexample, uses Cell-ID for their Find andSeek service, which is regularly used bythe police to determine the last knownposition of an abducted person.

Improved accuracy can be achieved bycombining Cell-ID with further infor-

mation from the network.Whilst makingcalls on the move, your mobile is con-stantly monitoring the network, decidingwhen it needs to be handed over to a newserving base station. The changeover isdetermined by the signal strengths of thenearby base stations.The time it takes forsignals to get to and from the base stations(the Timing Advance, TA) is also meas-ured. Enhanced Cell Global Identity (E-CGI) uses these measurements to make amore accurate estimate of the position ofthe mobile. The accuracy is better thanCell-ID, but is limited by the large errorin relating signal strength directly to dis-tance and by the resolution of the TAtimings. Signal strength is strongly affect-ed by the environment the phone is in:moving a few metres in open space out-side will not change the signal strengthsignificantly, but moving a few metresinto a building from outside causes anoticeable reduction. Signal strength,therefore, can provide only a very roughestimate of the distance from the phoneto a base station.

TA allows your mobile to compensatefor the time-of-flight of the signals to andfrom the base station. This is needed toprevent the signals from all mobiles usinga particular base station at a given

moment from arriving at different timesdepending on their distances from thebase station, as these times would keepchanging if the mobiles were moving.Each kilometre of distance delays the sig-nals by a little over 3 microseconds, so abusy cell would have to deal with signaldelays ranging from almost zero, for acaller right next to the base station, to100 microseconds, for someone right at

the edge of a rural cell. The additionalprocessing performed by the base stationswould increase costs and complexityconsiderably.To overcome this, the hand-sets are asked by the base station toadvance their times of transmissions (bythe TA value) so that everyone’s signalsarrive when the base station is expectingthem. These timing adjustments corre-


Dude, Where’s My Phone?Ramsey Faragherpin-points the latest innovation in mobile phone technology

Cell-ID tells the user the area they are in,determined by looking up which base sta-tion is currently serving them

Wouldn’t it be handyif you both had

mobile phones thatcould be

instantaneously andaccurately positioned?

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spond to an error of 570 metres on theground — helpful for positioning pur-poses, but still not that accurate.

Triangulation has always been astraightforward positioning method innavigation, but is not very practical in amobile phone system. One must calculatethe directions from which the signalsarrive at the mobile or at the base station.A large antenna (or two smaller antennasfixed a long way apart) is needed in orderto measure this. Such an arrangement issensitive to the direction of arrival of asignal, and the larger the antenna — orthe wider apart the two smaller ones —the finer the angular resolution. Largeantennas are impractical for mobilephones and large antenna arrays on thebase stations further increase costs andcomplexity.

Another idea is to equip mobilephones with small Global PositioningSystem (GPS) receivers so that you canuse your phone like a ‘sat-nav’ device ina car. GPS works out your position viasatellites orbiting the Earth.There are 24active satellites in the GPS constellation,but at any one time a GPS device cangenerally only see about one-third ofthem. Positioning this way requires directlines of sight to at least three satellites, astheir signals are very weak by the timethey reach the Earth’s surface. GPS workswith high accuracy outdoors in rural andsuburban areas where there is always areasonably good view of the sky.However, if the phone is in your pocketor bag, or you are indoors or in an areawhere the sky is obscured by tall build-ings, the system does not work — a seri-ous limitation when considering the typ-ical scenarios for positioning a call to theemergency services, or locating anabducted or lost person. This is partlyameliorated by adding ‘assistance’ to thesystem, in which the GPS receiver is toldwhere to look for satellite signals by mes-sages sent from a central point in themobile phone network. However, evenwith assistance the reception is oftenvery poor and the caller has to wait along time for a position fix, if one isavailable at all.

The most promising technique today iscalled Matrix and was invented here inCambridge. Matrix was developed by DrPeter Duffett-Smith of the CavendishLaboratory as an offshoot of positioning

work he did during a radio astronomyproject. Dr Duffett-Smith was using atechnique called aperture synthesis tostudy distant radio sources. The methodinvolved simultaneously gathering datawith two or more radio telescope anten-nas that were separated by some distance.The resolution of the images improves asthat distance increases. However, for themethod to have worked the distancebetween the antennas had to be known tothe nearest metre, even when they weremore than 1000 kilometres apart. Duffett-Smith found that not only could he usepublic broadcast FM radio signals, such asBBC Radio, to position a radio receiverattached to his telescope, but that thistechnique could be adapted to positionany mobile radio device. In order todevelop this technique for mobile phoneshe established Cambridge PositioningSystems Ltd. However, mobiles just meas-ure the intensity of the signals they receiveon one channel, whereas Duffett-Smith’soriginal technique required phase meas-urements on multiple channels. Matrixgets around this problem by solving a setof non-linear simultaneous equationsusing timing measurements made by thehandsets on signals received from the basestations.A derivative of this system is SoloMatrix: a single handset can be positionedas long as it is moving, building up its ownnetwork timing model with the data itgathers on the move.

Another enhancement of Matrix cur-rently under development is calledEnhanced GPS (E-GPS), which com-bines the high accuracy of GPS in ruralareas with the high availability of Matrixin urban areas. The timing data gatheredduring Matrix calculations can also pro-vide assistance data for a faster GPS fix.

The Matrix equations assume that sig-nals travel in straight lines directly to themobiles from the base stations, but inurban areas and indoors the signals canundergo reflections and diffractionsbefore reaching the mobile, leading tolonger, more complicated propagationpaths. By determining what the domi-nant delay processes are, and when signalstransmit straight through a building andwhen they do not, these extra time delayscan be modelled and incorporated intoMatrix and E-GPS in order to improvethe positioning accuracy further. Truly,the Matrix revolution is coming.

For more information on Matrix go towww.cursor-system.com

Ramsey Faragher is a PhD student in theDepartment of Physics

A mobile tracked on a journey aroundCambridge using Solo Matrix

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Rough measurements of the signalarrival times are possible using TimingAdvance, but its timing resolution ispoor, which in turn limits the posi-tioning resolution.

Measurements of the Angle of Arrivalof signals (triangulation) is not possiblewith current handsets and the currentGSM network. This system could onlybe implemented with networkchanges or new handset technology.

Matrix builds up a database of timingmeasurements from a network ofmobiles, or from a single movingmobile, in order to solve a set of non-linear simultaneous equations and cal-culate the positions of the handsets.The dashed arrows represent thetiming measurements of each basestation at each mobile. Once thereare enough timing measurements, therelative positions of all the handsetsand base stations from any arbitrarypoint can be calculated (black lines).Since the exact positions of the basestations are known, and their posi-tions relative to the handsets can becalculated, the exact positions of themobiles can be determined.

15luesciwww.bluesci.org

The most promisingtechnique today iscalled Matrix and

was invented here inCambridge

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Einstein is most famous for his twotheories of relativity — special andgeneral — but he also made signifi-cant contributions to quantum theo-ry. In fact, his Nobel Prize wasawarded for his quantum explanationof the photoelectric effect in 1905.Despite his initial contributions,however, he came to be deeply con-cerned about some of the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum the-ory. He became so disillusioned thathe spent much of his later life devis-ing thought experiments to show theapparent absurdity of quantum theo-ry.

In particular, he was concerned about‘non-locality’: the apparent ability ofsome quantum effects to be transmittedinstantaneously through space over arbi-trarily large distances. To the man whodiscovered that the universe’s ultimatespeed limit was the speed of light, thismade no sense. As we shall see, these

quantum effects are very unusual, butdo not really break the speed limit; tosee that, however, we have to go on amiraculous journey, beginning rightback in 1905.

Shining light onto a piece of metalcauses electrons to be ejected from theatoms at the surface, generating a meas-urable current (below left). This ‘photo-electric effect’ was discovered byHeinrich Hertz in 1887.

This in itself was not a surprise: lightcarries energy and transferring this tothe electrons in the metal could havegiven them the impetus they needed toescape. The real surprise came when

experimenters tried using light of dif-ferent wavelengths: in the case of sodi-um, for example, red light would notcause any electrons to be ejected, nomatter how bright it was, but violetlight would, even if it was quite weak.This made no sense.The current causedby the light beam should have depend-ed only on its brightness and not on itswavelength.

Einstein’s insight was to consider lightnot as a wave, but as a stream of particlescalled ‘photons’. Max Planck had intro-duced this idea in 1901 to explain thespectrum of radiation given out by hotbodies and one of its key elements wasthat each photon carried an amount ofenergy that was inversely proportionalto its wavelength. Applying this to thephotoelectric effect, Einstein imagined

the electrons being ‘kicked out’ by indi-vidual photons. For sodium, photons ofred light, which have relatively longwavelengths, have too little energy toeject any electrons, no matter howmany photons there are. By contrast,photons of violet light, which have ashorter wavelength, do contain enoughenergy, so that even a few of them ejecta few electrons.

Put like that, Einstein’s idea seemsvery simple, but it had at its heart a rad-ical idea: that light was a particle, not awave. This was a problem. Einstein andPlanck had both applied the idea tophenomena that could not be explainedby a wave theory, but what about all theother phenomena that were welldescribed in terms of waves? In particu-lar, what about interference?

Imagine what would happen if abeam of light was shone through a pairof narrow slits and onto a screen. Withonly one slit, the results would be ratherdull: just a bright patch on the screen.With two slits, though, the result is apattern of bright and dark bands, knownas interference fringes (below). As withwater waves, light waves have peaks andtroughs, and when the peak of the wavefrom one slit encounters the trough ofthe wave from the other, the twoextrema cancel out to create a darkband. Conversely, when a peak fromone slit meets a peak from the other, abright band is created.

With a wave theory, interferenceseems ordinary and natural, but how dowe square all this with the concept ofphotons? Particles cannot interfere witheach other in this way; while they couldpossibly bounce off one another, thiswould be a rare event for such small par-ticles. Any ordinary particle theorywould predict that two slits would sim-ply produce two bright patches, one perslit (below right). Indeed it was experi-ments such as this, performed by Youngin 1803, that helped to establish thewave theory of light, overturningNewton’s earlier theory in which lightwas described as a stream of particlescalled corpuscles.


‘Non-locality’ is the apparent ability ofsome quantum effects to be transmitted

instantaneously through space over arbitrarily large distances

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The QuantumConundrum

Peter Mattsson looksat Einstein’s battle

with quantum theory

This awkward situation was eventuallyresolved, independently, by Heisenbergand Schrödinger in the mid-1920s, butthe cure initially seemed worse than thedisease. In the everyday world, objectshave definite positions and speeds, andwe might expect that what is true forsofas and cars should also be true forelectrons and photons. Heisenberg andSchrödinger, however, said no to this. Intheir theories, it was not possible —even in principle — to know bothwhere particles were and where theywere going at the same time. Instead,they introduced a ‘wavefunction’ whichdescribed the likelihood of a particlehaving a given position or a given speedwhen measured. The truly radical partwas that the particle had no definiteposition or speed before measurement. Itmade no sense to argue that we simplydid not know where the particle was; itwas genuinely spread out like a wave.This was the key to allowing particles tobehave in ways that were previouslyreserved for waves.

None of this pleased Einstein one bit.Despite helping to promote the case ofphotons, he was far from happy with thenew theory.Whenever anyone looked atthem, electrons and photons seemed realenough, making definite blips on detec-tor screens, but in-between they seemedonly to have a nebulous sort of half-exis-tence, scattered through space. This didnot seem at all right to Einstein and fromthen on he spent his time trying todemonstrate why it did not make sense.

His most famous effort in this regardwas the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen(EPR) thought experiment. The aimwas to show that quantum mechanicsallowed for quantum effects to travelinstantaneously from one place toanother, violating the ultimate speedlimit — that of light, an essential com-ponent of Einstein’s theory of specialrelativity.A simpler version of the exper-iment was later proposed by DavidBohm and that is the one we will lookat here.

Bohm’s version of the experimenttakes advantage of a property of all sub-

atomic particles known as ‘spin’. At onepoint, it was thought that these particleswere literally spinning like miniatureplanets; this later turned out to be wrongbut is still a useful picture. Like planets,which can spin either clockwise or anti-clockwise, most can have one of twospin values. These are usually known as‘spin-up’ and ‘spin-down’ and areassigned values of +1/2 and -1/2. Spin is aconserved quantity in that the totalvalue of the spins of a group of particlesstays the same over time.

Bohm imagined an unstable atomwith a total spin of zero that decayed byemitting two electrons in oppositedirections. The details of the decayprocess were such that the atom leftbehind still had a spin of zero, meaningthat one emitted electron must havebeen spin-up and the other must havebeen spin-down, as shown above right.But nothing told him which one waswhich. In fact, quantum mechanicsspecifically told him that the electrons’spins had no definite values: they werespread out between spin-up and spin-down.The only thing that could be said

for sure was that if the spins of the twoelectrons were measured they would befound to have opposite values. Thisproperty of quantum systems is knownas entanglement.

Einstein was troubled because beforemeasurement neither electron had a def-inite spin. As soon as the spin of oneelectron was measured, the experi-menter would know the value of theother one — the opposite of the first. Inother words, measuring the spin of oneelectron caused the other electron to fallout of its nebulous state and acquire adefinite spin. Curiously, the effect wasimmediate, despite the fact that nothingin the experiment required the twoelectrons to be anywhere near eachother when the first measurement wasmade. They could be on opposite sidesof the solar system — or in different starsystems entirely — and the effect wouldstill have to be immediate. For Einstein,this was profoundly disquieting; it is nowonder that he felt the theory must bemissing something crucial. Among themany strange things that would be pos-sible if we could send signals instanta-neously from place to place is that infor-mation could also be sent back in time.The reply to a letter could come backbefore the original message was evensent and normal causality would go outof the window.

Fortunately, this ‘action at a distance’turns out to be a very unusual beast. Atfirst sight, it might appear to be verypowerful. However, that is not so: thesecond electron’s change in state cannotbe used to transmit any sort of message.Before the experimenter measures thespin of the first electron, the secondelectron has no definite spin value; if itsspin were to be measured at this point,there would be an equal chance of find-ing it to be spin-up or spin-down. Afterthe measurement on the first electron,the second electron suddenly acquires adefinite spin value, opposite to that ofthe first electron. However, there is noway to distinguish between these twostates of affairs with only one measure-ment. Just as detecting a photon on ascreen pins down its position, measuringthe spin of a particle pins that down also,

kicking it out of its previous state.Subsequent measurements will alwaysfind the same value. If we could makecopies of the second electron before wemeasured it, we could do it — if thespins of all the copies came out thesame, we would know the state of thefirst electron had been measured — butquantum mechanics tells us that there isno way to copy an unknown state. Thisis known as the no-cloning theorem,and is quite inescapable.

The end result is that, although quan-tum mechanics appears to allow quan-tum states to change instantaneously overarbitrarily large distances, this mechanismcan never be used to transmit informa-tion. Any scheme that is designed toallow the flow of information turns outto obey Einstein’s speed limit and causal-ity is perfectly safe. Quantum mechanicsremains a deeply counter-intuitive theo-ry, but it works and despite the bestefforts of Einstein and others no one hasyet found a flaw. It just goes to prove theold adage that fact really can be strangerthan fiction.

Peter Mattsson is a researcher currently visit-ing the Centre for Quantum Computation

as part of a ‘knowledge integration inQuantum Technology’ project funded by the

Cambridge-MIT Institute


If we could send signalsinstantaneously, information could be

sent back in time

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The science fiction author IsaacAsimov once said: “The most excitingphrase to hear in science, the one thatheralds new discoveries, is not‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’” In mod-ern science’s quest for progress, exper-imentation undeniably takes centrestage and sometimes the results ofeven a single experiment can proverevolutionary. Classic examples aside,one of the most exciting experimentsof recent years remains relativelyunknown outside the scientific com-munity. It involved the geneticists’favourite pet, the fruit-fly Drosophilamelanogaster (above), and the resultsfundamentally altered scientists’ atti-tudes towards the usefulness of‘model’ organisms in studying primaryprocesses such as development. Theresults also provided further evidenceto support the theory of evolution.

It all began in 1894 with the publica-tion of Cambridge geneticist WilliamBateson’s book, Materials for the Study ofVariation. Bateson catalogued a hugenumber of abnormal variations —caused, he thought, by genetic mutations— that he had observed in organisms. Inparticular, he was interested in mutationsthat caused a part of the body to appearin an abnormal location, which hetermed ‘homeotic mutations’.

A striking example of a homeotictransformation occurs when theDrosophila’s Antennapedia or Antp gene ismutated, causing legs to develop on thefly’s head in place of antennae (top left).Atfirst, little was known about the Antpgene, but subsequent experimentsrevealed it formed part of a gene clusternow known as the Hox gene cluster,homologues of which have since beenfound in a huge variety of organismsincluding mice and humans.

Hox genes are spatial awareness genes; itis their job to determine where in anembryo a certain cell is, and then to relaythis information to other genes of the

cell. This spatial awareness is a crucialfunction in development. Cells must dif-ferentiate into different types correspon-ding to their position within the growingembryo, which is achieved by specificallyregulating gene expression levels in anyone cell.

For example, in Drosophila the body ispartitioned into segments from the head(anterior) to tail (posterior) of the fly.Cells must ‘know’ which segment theyare in so that they may develop to formpart of the correct organ. Simply put, dif-ferent Hox genes are expressed at differ-ing levels in each of the segments, there-by producing segments with differentenvironments.This is controlled by vary-ing levels of other key substances usuallyalong a concentration gradient, in whichthe substance is secreted at either thehead or the tail and so gradually decreas-es in concentration towards the oppositeend of the larva.

Edward Lewis conducted pioneeringresearch into the nature of homeoticgenes, sharing the 1995 Nobel Prize inPhysiology or Medicine for discoveringthat these genes were arranged on chro-mosomes in the same order as the bodysegments they control, with the firstgenes regulating head structures and thefinal genes controlling tail features.

Further experiments revealed that theAntp gene product prevents the forma-tion of leg structures in the anterior seg-ments, but allows them to grow nearerthe tail end of the larva where it is notexpressed as strongly. This explains thefact that when this gene is deleted, legdevelopment is not suppressed in theanterior segments and hence leg struc-tures grow in place of antennae.

Armed with this knowledge, and awareof the apparent similarities between Hoxgene clusters in various different organ-isms, Walter Gehring performed anexperiment in which he replaced theDrosophila Antp gene with the correspon-ding gene of a mouse. Amazingly themouse gene functioned exactly as theDrosophila gene would have done withinthe fly.Whilst this is not evidence that theproteins encoded by the Antp genes per-form the same function in mice and flies,it does show that the protein structureitself is conserved within both organisms.

The fact that a protein structure hadapparently been so highly conserved intwo organisms after 500 million years ofevolutionary divergence was a huge dis-covery providing much support for theevolutionary theory.

The case of the Hox genes clearly illus-trates the significance of even individualexperiments. Professor Michael Akam, adevelopmental geneticist and Director ofthe University of Cambridge’s Museumof Zoology, says, “The discovery of theconservation of the Hox genes marked acomplete turning point from the pre-sumption that the development of differ-ent organisms is basically very different,with no specific equivalences betweenthem.”

The Hox studies highlighted the strik-ing similarities in geographical controlwithin the developmental processes offlies and vertebrates. These similaritiesmean that the study of model organismssuch as Drosophila (which are easy towork with in laboratories) may be moreinsightful than we had first thought inunderstanding processes such as our owndevelopment which, as Professor Akampoints out, has an “applied medical inter-est — lots of medical problems relate toabnormalities in development”.

In today’s scientific community, inwhich many biologists spend theirworking lives studying model organ-isms, it is hard to imagine disciplinessuch as developmental biology beingcarried out in any other way.The use ofmodel organisms is in fact a fairlyrecent approach, and the story of itsemergence illustrates just what makesscience exciting: the ever presentprospect that even a single set of exper-imental results could have a dramatic, oreven revolutionary, impact on the verynature of science itself.

Zoe Smeaton is a second year Natural Scientist


Of Flies and Men

Zoe Smeaton explores howthe fruit-fly revolutionized

experimental biology

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Have you ever wondered why thewaters of the Mediterranean Sea are soblue and crystal clear? Is it because thesun is shining so brightly whenever yougo on holiday there? Or because thereis little pollution? These factors mayhave something to do with it, but themain reason is that the MediterraneanSea is oligotrophic. The word ‘olig-otrophic’ comes from the Greek for ‘lit-tle, or not enough, food’ and it meansthat the waters of the Mediterraneandon’t contain enough nutrients to sup-port massive growth of algae — or phy-toplankton — leaving the waters clear.

The opposite effect (eutrophication,from the Greek for ‘plenty of food’) caus-es excessive algal growth, turning thewater a turbid green. Eutrophication oftenoccurs in lakes and coastal areas when highlevels of fertilisers are discharged into thewater as waste from nearby human activi-ties. Fertilisers and other organic wastecontain high levels of phosphorus andnitrogen which marine organisms need togrow. Algae, which form the basis of themarine food chain, grow by photosynthe-sis so, very much like plants on land, theyneed light and carbon dioxide. There’salways enough carbon dioxide present inthe water, and enough light at least inspring and summer, for plankton to growefficiently.Along with the light and carbondioxide needed for photosynthesis, algaealso require nutrients. The two mostimportant, which are often in short supplyin marine waters, are nitrogen and phos-phorus, in the form of nitrates or ammo-nia, and phosphates, respectively. Whennitrogen or phosphorus are in short sup-ply, the organisms are limited in theirgrowth, no matter how abundant light and

carbon dioxide. In eutrophic lakes, fertilis-ers and other organic waste bring highlevels of nitrogen and phosphorus into thewater. The algae feast on these nutrients,grow and divide rapidly, and so the popu-lation expands.When the algae die as partof their natural life cycle, they sink to thebottom of the lake where they are brokendown by bacteria. Many bacteria use oxy-gen to release energy from their food byrespiration, and soon enough the bacteriause up all the available oxygen and thebottom of the lake becomes anaerobic —without oxygen. Many of the plants andfish that normally grow in the bottomwaters can no longer survive in theseanaerobic conditions. Anaerobic respira-tion by the bacteria also produces foul-smelling by-products, such as hydrogensulphide and methane. The effects ofeutrophication are dramatic and can onlybe reversed by massive cleaning efforts.

The processes involved in eutrophica-tion point to another factor important tooligotrophication: the water column isstratified both in lakes and in the sea. Mostof the time the top of the body of water iseffectively separated from the bottom.Thisis partly because the surface waters tend tobe warmer, making them less dense thanthe colder bottom waters. Mixing of thesetwo layers of water only occurs duringsevere weather conditions, and in areas ofupwelling and downwelling; this respec-tively forces the bottom water layers up, orthe surface waters down, due to a combi-nation of geographical features and oceanand atmospheric circulation.

So, how does this explain why theMediterranean is so blue? We have seenthat algae need nutrients to grow, and thelower waters are, for the most part, sepa-rated from the surface waters. Since algaeneed light to grow, they prefer to be in thetop waters where the sun shines, but mostof the nutrient supply is in the bottomwaters, where bacteria decompose organ-ic matter and release nutrients. Looking ata map of the Mediterranean Sea revealsthat it’s really more like a big lake —almost landlocked — with very limitedwater exchange through the Suez Canal

to the Red Sea, or to the Black Seathrough the Bosphorus strait. The mainpoint of water exchange for theMediterranean is through the Straits ofGibraltar to the Atlantic Ocean. TheAtlantic has plenty of nutrients to offer,but these are mostly found in the deepwaters because algae out in the oceangreedily consume the surface nutrients.The Gibraltar Straits are relatively shallowthough, so very little deep-waterexchange — and thus nutrient exchange— takes place. In addition, theMediterranean surface waters are moresalty than those of the Atlantic because theMediterranean is relatively warm and itssurface water tends to evaporate in the

summer leaving the salt behind.You candefinitely taste this if you swim on a beachoff the Atlantic coast, compared toMediterranean waters. This more saltywater ‘attracts’ freshwater, which meanssurface waters from the Atlantic rush intothe Mediterranean at the Straits ofGibraltar, and in return bottom watersfrom the Mediterranean exit into theAtlantic. Hence the vital nutrientsrequired for growth by algae are constant-ly depleted from the waters of theMediterranean.

This makes the waters of theMediterranean oligotrophic, so they don’tsupport high growth of algae. In turn fewerpredators that feed on these algae, such aszooplankton, can survive. Thus there arefewer zooplankton in the Mediterranean,and the fish tend to be smaller.With fewerplankton present, the waters of theMediterranean don’t turn green andmurky, and are crystal clear and stunninglyblue instead.This affords good pictures andlovely swimming conditions!

Lila Koumandou is a PhD student in theDepartment of Biochemistry


Nutrients requiredfor growth by algae

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Waters of the Mediterranean

Lila Koumandou discovers why the Mediterranean Sea is quite so clear

In lakes and in thesea, the water

column is stratified

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The office of the MicrostructuralKinetics Group is a spacious room in theotherwise labyrinthine Annexe of theDepartment of Materials Science andMetallurgy, and houses five researchers,piles of paper, computers and the oddmicroscope. This is home to TomQuested (right), the materials scientistresponsible for our cover image, whoworks on simulating the behaviour ofliquid aluminium as it cools into itssolid, crystalline form during the indus-trial process known as casting.

Pure aluminium is not easily manufac-tured into goods as it breaks easily understress.Aluminium,both in its pure form andas an alloy, has a stable, protective layer ofaluminium oxide on its surface, which

makes it highly resistant to corrosion andallows it to reflect heat and visible light. Byadding small amounts of other elements,such as copper, aluminium can be madeinto strong, lightweight, malleable alloyswhile retaining its corrosion-resistant andreflective properties — very useful for aero-space, packaging and construction.Aluminium alloys typically contain less than10% other metals, and are what Quested isinterested in.

Casting is the first step in creating alu-minium products: after extracted or recy-cled aluminium is melted and mixed withthe other elements, it is poured into amould where it cools from about 50°Cabove its melting point (typically about650°C), to below it, where the metal solid-ifies. Sometimes this mould is in the shapeof the final product, such as a car engineblock, but in the sort of casting thatQuested studies, the ingots produced areshaped later. In ‘direct chill casting’, water issprayed onto an ingot in order to lower itstemperature and hot, molten metal ispoured in at the top of the mould as thesolidified ingot below is lowered. In indus-try,a 10-metre ingot is produced after manyhours, but a scaled-down, laboratory ver-sion of these industrial moulds can be usedto produce palm-sized pieces of alumini-um.The shape of the individual crystals inthese pieces can be quite different depend-ing on how they were cast, and Quested’sjob is to explain how and why.

Two cast pieces are pictured left.Questedexplained that the right-hand sample ismore useful, as the crystals have roughly thesame size in each dimension, giving thealloy consistent material qualities in everydirection across the whole sample; its smallcrystals also mean that the material is lesslikely to crack when deformed. For thesame reason, large crystals make the materi-al brittle and therefore undesirable if thealuminium is to be shaped further; fordirect chill casting, the ingot will be reject-ed if the crystals are bigger than one fifth ofa millimetre.

When molten aluminium cools below itsmelting temperature, crystals of solid alu-minium are seeded,or ‘nucleated’,and growuntil they occupy the whole casting.As wehave seen, they can take a number ofshapes, and their size can range widely froma few micrometres to several centimetres. Inthe casting of the sample pictured, smalltitanium boride particles acted as sites ofnucleation, as it takes less energy for a crys-tal to form there; instead of atoms cluster-ing into seed crystals purely through ran-dom motion, titanium boride particles pro-vide a solid surface for atoms to bond to

and cluster on.Without these particles thevariation in crystal size across the sample,due to the variation in cooling rate, wouldbe larger.The fractions of other elements inthe alloy also affect crystal formation.Quested’s computer simulations must takeinto account all these factors, as well as heatflow and solute movement, in order to fore-cast nucleation and growth and thus themicrostructure of the cast aluminium.

Photographs such as the one on the coverallow Quested to measure the size of thealuminium crystals.After grinding and pol-ishing samples to form a flat, smooth sur-face, he puts the samples under a micro-scope and shines polarized visible light ontothem.Usually, the layer of aluminium oxidethat lies on the surface of the crystals is onlyabout 10 atoms thick, and therefore cannotbe seen with the eye. When the oxide isgrown instead by a technique known aselectrolytic anodising, its thickness becomescomparable to the wavelength of visiblelight.The colours in the picture arise whenthe polarized light beams reflecting off thetop of the aluminium oxide layer interferewith those reflecting from the bottom ofthe layer. In exactly the same way, sunbeamsreflect from the surface of a thin film of oiland interfere to make rainbows. Each crys-tal looks a different colour, although there isno difference in the material; the colouronly depends on the orientation of the

oxide layer relative to the direction of polar-ization of the light.The twist in the sample,seen on the cover, comes from cutting withscissors.

Ultimately, the casting process deter-mines only some of the properties of thefinal product. The many other stages thatthe aluminium goes through before beingpressed into the form of the heat sinks thatkeep your computer circuits running willbe equally important. Good casting prac-tice makes the later processing steps easier.Although Quested plans to write up hiswork and then perhaps move into a careerin teaching, he is still working towardsbeing able to predict with confidence themicrostructure of aluminium once themanner of cooling in the casting processand alloy composition are known.

www.msm.cam.ac.uk/mkg

Victoria Leung is a second year Natural Scientist

On

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Illuminating AluminiumVictoria Leung speaks to the materials scientist Tom Quested, who took our cover image

The layer of aluminium oxide onthe surface of the

crystals is only about10 atoms thick

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The colours arise inthe same way thatlight reflects from afilm of oil to make

rainbows

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H o l l y w o o dneeds to c o n t i n u a l l ydeliver inter-esting storiesin order to attractmovie-goers,and what bettersource of grip-

ping plots thanscience? To add

some realism, movie-makers oftenemploy scientists as advisors. The ani-mators on Finding Nemo had 20 lecturesfrom marine biologists, and Nasa has itsown ‘Entertainment Industry Liaison’.Professor Wayne Grody is the directorof the Medical Molecular PathologyLaboratory at UCLA, and also workspart-time as a scientific technical advi-sor. He has contributed to the NuttyProfessor movies and TV’s CSI: CrimeScene Investigation, for which he is cur-rently devising his own storyline.

What led you to become a technical advisor?I began my medical training and went

on to do a PhD in molecular biology, butI’ve always loved film, so during graduateschool I became a film critic for a leisureand topical magazine for physicians.ThenI came to UCLA to do further medicaltraining, partly so I could be closer to themovie studios. In the 10 years I worked forthe magazine, I interviewed directors andactors and began to set up a network, sothat when people had questions in myfield they knew to call me.How would you describe your role as anadvisor?

To give advice on the storyline and spe-cial effects, so they are not too far fromreality. I realise it’s not a scientific seminar,but I’d like to avoid something ridiculouswhere the audience comes away with acompletely wrong view of science. I’musually looking at the most egregiouserrors or assumptions and correctingthose, but I’ll let some smaller details slipthrough. I write and change dialogue, butit’s very clearly spelled out that I am not awriter. And even if they use my lines Ican’t share in the profits as writers dobecause I’m paid a flat rate.When do you find out if they have used youradvice?

It varies according to the personalitiesinvolved and how closely I work with theproject. Sometimes I don’t know until I seethe final production, and at other times I’minvolved in every draft of the script.Therewas one TV movie called Condition Critical

that involved researchon prions (a type of pro-tein believed to causemad cow disease).Therewas a scene of a techni-cian walking through thelab with a tray of coffeethat wasn’t in the script. Iprotested but there wasnothing they could do atthat stage.What stage of productionare you involved in?

It depends who I amfirst contacted by; it maybe the writer, producer ordirector. For The Nutty Professor I wasapproached by the art department becausethey wanted me to design the professor’slab.That was fun because I went throughthe same catalogues I use to outfit my ownlab and chose whatever I wanted becausemoney was no object. Then they invitedme to help dress the set, putting in Post-itnotes and details like that. Once I was on-board they gave me the scripts, so I alsoended up critiquing dialogue.Do you show people how to use equipment,so it looks convincing?

Yes,one of my jobs is to help actors withphysical roles.You often have actors whoare extras, just sitting there pipetting, butthey don’t know how to do it.That part isfun too.Apart from the scientific accuracy, it seemsadvice isn’t taken about how long a scientif-ic experiment would really take?

No, I’ve given up even trying, especiallyin a comedy. They do experiments thatwould take years or decades in an hour,but they’ve got to keep the story movingalong, it’s unfortunate.Do you think some of your work encouragespeople to go into research or forensics, sayfrom your work on CSI?

I don’t know if I can take credit for thatbecause it’s the creators of the showwho’ve done the framework. If I givethem a story that intrigues people, maybeI’ve helped. But there’s no doubt that CSIhas increased the number of people whowant to be criminologists.With all of your jobs it sounds as if youdon’t have a typical day but could youdescribe what happens during a day of con-sulting?

A day of consulting may be as brief as aphone call to answer a question, whichoften happens with CSI, or it might bereading a script and marking it up. If it’s onset, it’s usually several hours to a whole day.Outside of medicine, they are the hardestworking people I’ve ever seen. I liken theset to an operating room, with the direc-tor like the surgeon in charge. It’s fast-paced and there’s a lot of tension andunexpected events. It’s controlled chaos.But I love the excitement and profes-sionalism.Don’t some scientists like consulting somuch that they quit ‘day jobs’ to do it?

Yes, it happens, but I don’t think Iwould want to be a technical advisorfull-time. Aside from the good pointsthere is a real sense of insecurity in themovie industry: people are employedfor one project and, as soon as it wraps,

they’re looking around for the next job andthat could take months. I’m alwaysrefreshed when I come back to the medicalcentre and people are unpretentious. In aca-demic medicine we consider it to be one ofour primary roles to train our replacements,and teaching is a noble calling, whereas inHollywood no one wants a protégé toreplace them, so I find there’s not a lot ofmentoring or collegiality.Research from David Kirby at the Universityof Manchester has shown that science inmovies, produced with the help of scientists(e.g. Deep Impact and Jurassic Park) canincrease public and even political awarenessabout a research area, which can in turnincrease funding. Are you ever conscious orwary that your work can have such an effect?

I don’t deny that some of that happens.I think some of the funding for AIDS inthe US, which was originally pretty mea-gre, may have been increased due to thevarious dramatisations on TV and inmovies.What response have you got from otherresearchers about contributing to the percep-tion of science?

In general my own colleagues havefound it exciting. I had some nice feed-back for the movie on prions. StanleyPrusiner, who discovered prions, hap-pened to catch it on TV and he contactedme to say it was a good portrayal. It wasquite an honour.

For more information on the work ofscience advisors and science in film,

see David Kirby’s websitewww.davidakirby.com

Nerissa Hannink is a postdoc in theDepartment of Plant Sciences

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luesci 21www.bluesci.org Easter 2005

Nerissa Hannink talks to WayneGrody about his work as a sci-entific advisor for film and tele-vision

Jon

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A HollywoodScience Advisor

Siberia has long had the reputation ofbeing a cold, inhospitable wilderness.Nonetheless, it is to be my destinationfor the summer of 2005.

I, along with six other Cambridge stu-dents,will be travelling to the Tomsk regionof central-southern Siberia to carry outecological monitoring of the area’s taigaforest. Fred Currie, Wildlife andConservation Officer with the ForestryCommission, and our Senior Leader, KevinHand, from the Tree Council, will accom-pany us.Our work will mark the beginningof a 3-year project aimed at securingForestry Stewardship Council (FSC) statusfor a region of the Tomsk taiga forest.

The Siberian taiga forms part of thelargest tract of unbroken forest in theworld, stretching more than 1,500,000square miles.The word ‘taiga’ describes themix of tree species found in the forest.Thefreezing temperatures and seasonaldroughts favour coniferous forests of larch,spruce, fir and pine. Despite Siberia’s repu-tation as a hostile wilderness, the region isactually bursting with life. The taiga ishome to elk,wolves, lynxes, red foxes, rein-deer, sable and Russia’s largest populationof brown bears.Many rare birds also inhab-it the taiga, including white-tailed eaglesand ospreys; both of which are ‘Red DataBook’ species (see box).

Unfortunately, there is a dark side toTomsk.The region has gained notoriety asa location of highly polluting chemical fac-tories, nuclear weapons testing, oil and nat-ural gas plants and extensive coal mining.Also, along with the rest of Siberia, illegallogging and poaching are rife.WWF esti-mates that at least 30% of all logging inRussia is illegal.This is believed to result inan annual state loss of over $1 billion.Another potential cause for concern isPresident Putin’s closure of the Federal

Forest Service in 2000, passing its responsi-bilities to the Ministry of NaturalResources. Thus, one agency is nowresponsible for both protecting and harvest-ing the forest!

FSC, founded in 1993, is an independent,not-for-profit organisation.FSC’s mission isto promote environmentally appropriate,socially beneficial and economically viablemanagement of the world’s forests.Productscertified with the FSC trademark are guar-anteed to meet these criteria, opening upnew ‘socially responsible’ consumer marketsfor the producers, and thus adding value toan intact, FSC-managed forest comparedwith an illegally logged one.

One stipulation of FSC certification isthat 10% of the forest is managed solely forconservation. This is where our summerresearch will be particularly valuable. Onarrival in Siberia, we will be joining stu-dents and scientists from Tomsk StateUniversity.Together we will travel deep intothe Tomsk taiga and use techniques such astransects and quadrats to monitor birds,mammals, plants, lichens and butterflies.This information will be used to assess theregion for biodiversity and for the distribu-tion of rare and endemic species. This isvital to determine which specific areasshould be designated as conservation zones.

We shall be collaborating with membersof a team who, in 2000,helped achieve FSCcertification of the Kosikhinsky forest inAltai, southern Siberia. Subsequent inspec-tions of Kosikhinsky have demonstrated thebenefits that can be achieved through FSCstatus.

Since FSC certification, botanical surveyshave been carried out in Kosikhinsky.Thesehave identified eight regional Red DataBook species, and specific protection areas

have been established for them. Areasmaintained solely for conservation nowexceed 15% of the managed forest.The

forest is protected by guards who restrictinappropriate hunting and fishing, and the

FSC believes that illegal logging is now vir-tually impossible in the region.

Local people in Altai have also seen ben-efits.To maintain FSC certification — andhence the use of the FSC trademark — thelogging company must follow rigorousrules concerning the local community.Thecompany is a major employer in the regionand all the staff are local. National legalrequirements are met with regard to healthand safety issues. Workers are better paidand receive their wages on time. AnotherFSC stipulation is that the forest providesnon-timber benefits; locals are free to col-lect berries and mushrooms, and use theforest for honey production and grazing.

We are very excited to be visiting Tomskand are committed to doing our part ingaining FSC certification for the Tomsktaiga forest.This has the potential not onlyto protect the plant and animal life forfuture generations, but also to improve thecurrent living and working conditions oflocal people.

If you are interested in sponsoring the trip,please visit www.tomsktaiga.com

www.fsc.orgwww.panda.org

Sophie May is a second year Natural Scientist

Expedition members Katie Marwick, Sophie May, Lucy Taylor and Wing-Sham Lee, to be joinedby Kate Cochrane, Sarah Parker and Hannah Allum

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The Red Data Book• The ‘Red Data Book’ (now also known as the

‘Red List’) contains a list of species whose con-tinued existence is under threat.

• The list is produced annually by The WorldConservation Union (IUCN).

•The IUCN Red List is the most comprehensive,apolitical, global approach for evaluating theconservation status of plant and animal species.

• There are 15,503 species on the IUCN 2004Red List of Threatened Species.

• 882 species are listed as Critically Endangeredincluding the Chinese Alligator, BrazilianGuitarfish and Philippine Eagle.

• In the Tomsk taiga, Red-Listed species includeJuniper (Juniperus communis), several Lady’sSlipper orchids, Black Stork (Ciconia nigra),Osprey (Pandion haliaetus, pictured on the left),White-tailed Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) and thebutterfly Erebia cyclopia.

www.redlist.org

Saving theTaigaSophie May gets involved inSiberian conservation

Part of the largesttract of unbrokenforest in the world

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Initiatives

luesci [email protected]

We’veall heard of

famous Cambridge sci-entists such as Isaac

Newton, Henry Cavendish andErnest Rutherford — to namebut a few. But do we reallyknow what they did, and where

their ground-breaking researchtook place? In a twist to the stan-

dard Cambridge tour, SeeK (Scienceand Engineering Experiments forKids) is hoping to address such ques-tions by developing ‘walking anddoing science’ tours of Cambridgescientists past and present.

SeeK was founded in 1997 by DrRob Wallach (Senior Lecturer,Department of Materials Science andMetallurgy) with the aim of promotingthe fun of science and engineering tochildren, their families and teachers.However, it is hoped that the walkingtours will reach an even wider audi-ence. “The idea came about as a resultof comments made by tourists. Many

were keen to find out more about theuniversity buildings and the peoplewho worked there, rather than justtrailing in and out of the colleges”, saidSeeK Director Lianne Sallows.

The prototype ‘walking and doingscience’ website, which it is hoped willbe officially launched later in the year,currently offers five themed walks; top-ics include ‘Human Evolution & DNA’and ‘Atomic Physics’. For example, onthe ‘Historic Highlights’ walk, sites vis-ited include the Eagle pub, legendaryfor its role in the story of Watson andCrick’s discovery of the DNA doublehelix, and the Hopkins Building, namedafter Frederick Hopkins who openedthe building when he founded theUniversity’s Department of Biochemistryin 1914.

For each walk, the website includeslinks to biographies of the featured sci-entists and in keeping with the hands-on spirit of SeeK, tours will be accom-panied by activities relevant to each sci-entist’s work. SeeK intends to provide

activities to be done both during thewalk and at home, thereby makingthem accessible to children unable tovisit Cambridge. The tours and activi-ties will be linked to the currentNational Curriculum making themparticularly pertinent to school groups.

If you’re interested in gettinginvolved, SeeK is now looking for vol-unteers with ideas for the activities tohelp write biographies and take photo-graphs. The work available will beextremely flexible, with the degree ofcommitment up to each volunteer. Formore information, to volunteer, or tosponsor the walking tour website, pleasecontact Lianne Sallows through theSeek website, www.msm.cam.ac.uk/seek.

So, get your walking boots ready andkeep an eye out for the official launchof Cambridge’s first ‘walking and doingscience’ tours.

Tamzin Gristwood is a PhD student inthe Department of Biochemistry

For the school-child, the word ‘scien-tist’ tends to conjure up images ofmad, test-tube-waving old men whosebubbling cauldrons may contain theelixir of life or the ability to reducethe world to dust. In an effort tocounter such opinions, the scientificresearch councils are keen to involvePhD students in Researchers inResidence (RinR), a scheme toencourage interaction between chil-dren and genuine researchers.

RinR involves putting real researchers,preferably young trendy specimens, intoclassrooms to speak to students abouttheir research. It is hoped that suchexchanges will break down stereotypesand so inspire the future generation ofscientists.

Before a RinR placement, volunteersattend a training day; mine took place atBrunel University. The post-apocalypticlandscape that is the Uxbridge Campuscontrasted with the enthusiastic deliveryof the organiser.He aimed to inspire us togo bravely forth unto classes of raucouschildren who only like science becausethey get to set light to each others’ hairwith Bunsen burners! We also gainedsome practical examples of how science istaught in schools and ideas for projectswe could do with the students.

For my RinR placement, I decided toreturn to my former Glasgow secondaryschool. Before arriving, I had discussed

lesson ideas with the science teachersthere.With the older students I shared myown research experiences and helpedthem choose topics for their final-yearscience projects. With younger classes Ihelped make crystals (being a crystallog-rapher) by evaporation, and took a classon extracting DNA — probably with therest of the cell contents — from fruitwith washing-up liquid.

A major challenge was deciding what Iwanted the class to learn from my talks. Iwas careful to remember that not havingprior knowledge of a subject doesn’tmean the person is stupid, and recalledmy exasperation at speakers who used too

simplistic a tone for my liking. I found itvital to make talks visually interesting andto maximise my interaction with thechildren.The students were happy to haveany sort of distraction from their normaltimetable and really liked the practicalelements. I enjoyed the RinR experienceand it made an interesting change to thelab routine. Oh, to be back in the dayswhen you were told to “pick up thebeaker and pour carefully…”

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/rinr

Lucy Adam is a PhD student in theDepartment of Biochemistry

Back to SchoolLucy Adam goes back to the classroom to inspire the next generation of scientists

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Tamzin Gristwood investigates a new way to explore science in Cambridge

Walking with Scientists

Journals, papers and articles are theday-to-day battleground of the sci-ences; places where discoveries areannounced, debates rage and reputa-tions are made. What can they revealto us about the personal motivationsand preconceptions of their scientistauthors?

In his new book, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, who studied Natural Sciencesat the University of Cambridge, takes aseminal paper from each decade of thetwentieth century and subjects them toa scrutiny worthy of any literary critic.Beneath the precise formulae and spe-cialist terminology he finds a world ofrivalry, prejudice and political bias.

Also in this section, BlueSci takes alook at some of the scientific events fea-tured in Findings, with expert opinionson each paper’s impact.Where did you get the idea for Findings,and what is your aim in analysing scien-tific papers in this way?

It began with my previous book, TheMost Beautiful Molecule, which describedthe Nobel Prize-winning discovery ofthe carbon molecule buckminster-fullerene. I found that the paper inNature announcing this new moleculewas full of unexpected treats: the scien-tists’ glee and good humour at their dis-covery, veiled references to arch-rivals,errors made in haste and so on.

In Findings, I try to show that this wasnot a one-off and that any scientificpaper is liable to contain its own subtext.By approaching the idea fairly rigorous-ly, i.e. by performing the deconstructionmany times over for key twentieth-cen-tury breakthroughs, I hope to convincescientists that the analytical techniques

of literary criticism have more powerthan they might think. There has beenmuch talk in the humanities about sub-jecting science literature to this kind oftreatment, but no-one really seemed tohave done it properly.

So the main aim is to show that theseare intrinsically human documents, notutterly dispassionate, objective accounts.Some scientists still believe the latter, butthe meanings are in there and they willbe there in all scientific papers, as theyare in anything we write. The idea thatthe author can rise above personality is amyth, even in science literature.

For example, the animosity that JamesChadwick — whose 1932 paper estab-lished the particulate nature of the neu-tron — felt for his French rivals Irèneand Frédéric Joliot-Curie is clear in histext from the way that he refers to them,even getting their names wrong. TheFrench were convinced the neutron wasa ray-like phenomenon, whereasChadwick and his mentor ErnestRutherford at the Cavendish Laboratoryin Cambridge believed it was a particle[although nowadays it is thought that itcan be both, a paradox known as wave-particle duality]. It’s clear from readingthe papers by both groups that eithergroup might have made the discoverysooner if they’d been a bit less dogmatic.How did you choose the papers featuredin the book?

I tried to pick papers announcingmajor, and to some extent familiar, dis-coveries. Readers might have readaccounts of them, but probably won’thave read the actual papers. For example,Watson and Crick’s discovery of thestructure of DNA has been describedmany times in popular books, includingby the scientists themselves, but Findingsdeals directly with their original paper.Personally I was struck by the authors’cleverness: in Findings I argue that theyuse literary artifice to disguise their debtto the crystallographer RosalindFranklin while pretending a grand rival-ry with Linus Pauling, and repeatedlyswitch between descriptions of DNA innature and the molecular model theyhave built of it, so as to confuse (andfuse) the two in readers’ minds.What value do you think the history ofscience has to the student of science andto the research scientist?

Scientists should definitely know thehistory of their field, and the broader his-tory that gives it a cultural context.Theywould avoid some embarrassing pitfalls.

My best example of this is the 1996paper in Science by the Nasa team thatclaimed to have found evidence of fossillife on Mars. I think there was a majorflaw in the scientists’ logic; they build

their claim for life on the formation ofcertain carbonate globules, but theseglobules they first state as having beenformed by ‘biogenic activity’ — a com-

pletely circular argument. What’s reallyastonishing though is that this is exactlythe same false logic that was used by theAmerican astronomer Percival Lowell inthe 1890s when he used GiovanniSchiaparelli’s discovery of so-called‘canals’ on Mars to claim them as evi-dence of intelligent life there. NowadaysLowell’s claims are a notorious exampleof circularity, but the 1996 paper makesexactly the same mistakes. If the Nasateam had known this story, they mighthave constructed their own argumentmore carefully.Do you have a particular favouriteamong the papers you discuss in thebook, one whose style, content or subtextyou find especially interesting?

I think the 1910 paper by theAmerican zoologist Thomas Morgan,who discovered the link between sexand heredity in his experiments on fruitflies, is beautiful. Its logic is incon-testable, the writing is spare but highlyliterate, and its pace is perfectly judged.And because of this it succeeded in alarger, rhetorical way, sending a signalthat biology was coming of age, matur-ing from an observational pastime ofgentleman naturalists to a rigorousexperimental science.In the introduction to your book youmention the gulf that exists between non-scientists and the scientific literature: whydo you think this exists?

A lot of non-scientists are intimidatedby the initial appearance of scientific lit-erature. You certainly can’t pick upNature and read it like The Times. Andtoo many scientists rather enjoy themystique.

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Science and SubtextEmily Tweed talks to Hugh Aldersley-Williams about subtext in great scientific publications

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Those who speak for science in themedia, for example, often say that thepublic isn’t qualified to comment on thelatest scientific developments. But this is adangerous and disturbing misunderstand-ing of the way democratic society works:the public is ‘qualified’ to comment onanything it damned well wants to.

So these scientists need to changetheir attitude. But then, so do those non-scientists who think it a badge of honourto reveal how totally fazed they are bythe slightest bit of science!What are you working on at themoment?

In June I am co-curating a contempo-rary design exhibition about ‘Touch’.

It’s at the Victoria and Albert Museum,but it is also funded by the WellcomeTrust, so it has a certain scientificunderpinning. I am also writing a bookabout science and nationalism, a set ofbiographical sketches based on four sci-entists whose lives overlap with nation-al interest in very different ways. Theidea is to go from the beginning ofmodern nationalism in the second halfof the nineteenth century up to thepresent day. It begins with AlexanderBorodin, a Russian composer andrenowned chemist, then moves ontoFritz Haber, the German chemistresponsible for Germany’s use of poisongases in the first world war.Then I look

at Chaim Weizman, a fermentation biol-ogist who became the first president ofIsrael, and finally Carl Sagan, who was aspokesman for the US space race butwas also very critical of other aspects ofAmerican political life and used his sci-ence to inform that criticism. Forexample, he was heavily involved inpublicising the idea of ‘nuclear winter’.I think this is interesting as it shows sci-ence as a critical tool as well as aninstrument of the state..Finally, as a former Natural Sciences stu-dent at Cambridge, is there any adviceyou would give to current NatScis?

Get a sense of the bigger picture. Goto lectures outside the subject that fill inthe context.You can luxuriate in the factthat you don’t have to take notes, andwon’t be tested on it.

www.luloxbooks.co.uk

References for all the papers mentioned inthis article can be found at BlueSci Online.

Emily Tweed is a second year NaturalScientist

Histo

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1970s

Seminal papers from this era includeRowland and Molina’s 1974 analysisof the harmful effects of chlorofluo-rocarbons (CFCs) on the atmos-phere; James Lovelock’s proposal ofthe Gaia hypothesis, in which theenvironment on earth behaves as ahuge self-regulating organism; and anew trend towards using mathemat-ical models to describe the process-es of evolution at the level of thepopulation.In a nutshell: Throughout thisdecade scientists became increasinglyinvolved with issues of human impactand sustainability, giving birth to thediscipline of ‘environmental sciences’.What Findings says: “These papersof the 1970s show scientists awaken-ing to a desire to express themselvesin new ways when their research isstimulated by, or raises, concernsbeyond the purely scientific.We haveseen these writers hesitate on thebrink, clearly uncertain whether orhow to broach fears and feelings thatfind no outlet amid the strict andimpartial reporting of scientific data.Some dare to take the plunge andmarry scientific reporting with politi-cal persuasion, even to the extent ofmaking specific policy recommenda-tions, which is no part of the scien-tist’s traditional task in writing apaper for publication in a journal ofthe field.”

1980s

H. Kroto, J. R. Heath, S. C. O’Brien, R. F.Curl and R. E. Smalley,‘C60:Buckminsterfullerene’, Nature 318:162–163 (1985).In a nutshell: Scientists working onthe synthesis of large organic com-pounds in the atmosphere of red giantstars discover a new crystalline formof carbon.What the experts say: “The mostfamous molecule discovered by thisgroup is the almost spherical football-like C60 structure named ‘buckmin-sterfullerene’ after RobertBuckminster Fuller, an engineer whodesigned giant geodesic domes, butother fullerenes differing in the num-ber of carbon atoms also exist.Thediscovery of fullerenes was quiteunexpected and caused a sensation inthe staid world of chemistry, but sometime had to pass until gram quantitiesof pure C60 (and other fullerenes)became available for research purpos-es at a reasonable price. Fullereneshave been chemically derived in vari-ous ways, guest elements were placedinside the cages and superconductingcomplexes of fullerenes have beenprepared by the addition of potassiumand rubidium. C60 and its derivativesmay even be of value as therapeuticagents in medicine; researchers areinvestigating their potential asinhibitors to enzymes specific to HIV.Finally, by-products of the mass pro-duction of fullerenes include carbonneedles (‘nanotubes’) which, in view oftheir potential applications for com-posites and electronic components,have attracted as much interest asC60 itself.Who knows what thefuture will bring.”Professor Jacek Klinowksi,Department of Chemistry

Who,What,Whereand When?

The key publications from three decades

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1990s

D. S. McKay et al., ‘Search for pastlife on Mars: possible relic biogenicactivity in Martian meteoriteALH84001’, Science 273:924–930(1996).In a nutshell: A paper claiming toprovide evidence for life on Marscaptures the media’s attention butdraws criticism from the scientificcommunity for its line of reasoning.What the experts say: “Thispaper had a huge impact on its fieldwhen first published and stimulatedan enormous amount of often acri-monious debate.The authors tookfive separate research findingsregarding the formation and compo-sition of certain carbonates found onMars and linked them together as achain of evidence to argue that theyhad found a fossil of a primitiveMartian organism. I think it would befair to say that hardly anyone in thescientific community was convincedthat the final conclusion of the paperwas true. However, the paper gal-vanised the community into action.This was mostly directed towardsshowing that one aspect or other ofthe findings was incorrect and hencethat the whole chain of evidencewould collapse.After this there was ahuge increase in the amount ofresearch into the possibility of life onMars and how it might be recog-nised.This led to advances in thestudy of extremophile microorgan-isms and, indirectly, to a consolida-tion of the study of astrobiology. Italso served as an additional impetusfor space missions to Mars.Professor Monica Grady,Open University

Artists and scientists, so the storygoes, stand at opposite ends of a cul-tural playground, crossing over onlyto call each other names. The scien-tist, devoid of soul and imagination,sets about dissecting nature in pur-suit of cold hard facts. The artist,unhindered by such niceties as facts,sets about understanding the worldwith their head in the clouds. Thestory is mostly fiction, but for somea mutual incomprehension pervades,stalling any chance of a constructiverelationship. Enter Martha Fleming.As Research Artist in Residence atthe Institute of Astronomy (IoA)here in Cambridge, her life’s workhas been intent on making thisdivide irrelevant.

Fleming is a curatorial advisor for thelatest exhibition at the Design Museumin London, You Are Here. The exhibi-tion offers a journey through humani-ty’s endeavours to communicate infor-mation by visual means. The show’sbreadth is vast, ranging from suchinstantly recognisable designs as HarryBeck’s 1933 Tube Map of London to apeculiarly angular map by Buckminster

Fuller — an effort to express the linksbetween the landmasses of the Earth,rather than their divisions by oceans —and even to a colour-coded map of theemotional states in Shakespeare’sMacbeth by Fang Leo.

Fleming’s section COSMOS beginsthe show. “COSMOS is about howastronomers extract information fromthe physical laws which govern light,”she explains. It is an engaging collec-tion comprising a diverse range ofpieces: an exquisitely simple diagram ofthe evolution of the cosmos by artistAgnes Denes; a NOAO solar spectrumcomplete with absorption lines mark-ing the elemental composition of thesun; stark black-and-white images froma section of the Southern Sky Survey,where the simplistic pictures concealhidden swathes of raw numerical datafor astronomers. As Fleming reveals,“My basic message is: if you think thosepretty pictures from Hubble are amaz-ing, wait till you see how they do it!”

In an artistic career spanning morethan 20 years, Fleming has beeninvolved in numerous projects, includ-ing architectural work, large-scale siteventures and gallery exhibitions.Science, and the similarities that existbetween artistic and scientific pursuits,have frequently been an influence inher work. In 1984 she began a large-scale site project with fellow artist LyneLapointe called Le Musée des Sciences.Created in an abandoned post office inMontreal, it explored the split betweenthe arts and the sciences during theEnlightenment. For Fleming the proj-

ect was “the first public articulation ofthe long-term interest I have in bring-ing the methodologies of artists andcreative people together with themethodologies that scientists in a vari-ety of disciplines use”. In 1997 shebecame Artist in Residence at theScience Museum, London, where sheworked for two years on a highly suc-cessful museum-wide collection enti-tled Atomism & Animism. This projectquestioned how it is that science seesand how we see science, and incorpo-rated, amongst other things, an attemptto relate the quantum and classicalworlds through an examination of his-torical objects.

Having spent many years researchingscience from a historical perspective,Fleming became increasingly fascinatedby contemporary science, and in 2004,supported by NESTA and the CanadaCouncil for the Arts, joined the IoA.

“What first attracted me to astronomywas that, essentially, what astronomersare working with is light, and as anartist this is one of the primordial ele-ments you work with.” ThoughFleming had been interested for sometime in the scientific detection of lightand the act of observation, her collabo-ration with the IoA gave her the

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Solar spectrum showing the absorption lines which mark the presence of individual elements

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Looking BeyondOwain Vaughan talks to artist Martha Fleming about her journey across the great divide

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If you think thosepretty pictures fromHubble are amazing,wait till you see how

they do it

Science, and the similarities betweenartistic and scientific

pursuits, have frequently been an

influence in her work

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opportunity to take this further.Whilst still working at the Science

Museum, Fleming was introduced tothe Scanning Tunnelling Microscope,an instrument that can image and evenmanipulate individual atoms. This dis-covery drew her attention to what liesbeyond that which is visible to the toolartists employ most, the naked eye: “Irealised I wanted to look not just atthings such as refraction, reflection andperspective, but also at what light isactually made up of.” Flemingembarked upon this analysis at the IoA,and proceeded to investigate the actualpractice of astronomy: the methodolo-gies and the instrumentation of obser-

vation and detection. COSMOS repre-sents an early opportunity to expresssome of the information she has gar-nered from the experience.

However, Fleming’s work and hertime spent at the IoA are not just aboutacting on behalf of the astronomers toexplain their research to the generalpublic. Not wanting to be a mere sci-ence tourist, she hopes to communicateto scientists the skills she possesses thatcould be of intellectual service to sci-ence as well as to art.This all forms partof Fleming’s long-term vision, “anunderstanding of shared methodologiesbetween the arts and sciences as a basisfor productive collaboration”. As sheelaborates, “Whether it is in terms ofconflict resolution or of understandingwhat consciousness might be, there aremany complex cultural issues that needto be approached by an interdiscipli-nary team.” This will be no easy task,but Fleming is hopeful. “The thing thatreally holds me is a future interdiscipli-nary practice that is prodigious andproductive, rather than divisive anddestructive.”

Scientists, take note.

You Are Here, sponsored by Microsoft andthe Wellcome Trust, runs until 15 May2005 at the Design Museum, ShadThames, London SE1. For further informa-tion, visit www.designmuseum.org

Owain Vaughan is a PhD student in theDepartment of Chemistry

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Section of the Southern Sky Survey: Orion

Fleming hopes tocommunicate theskills she possessesthat could be of

intellectual service toscience as well as art

MSc in Creative Non-Fiction Writing This is a new course offered by the ScienceCommunication Group at Imperial College.

It is designed for anyone who aspires to write creativenon-fiction, defined as writing at length on factualthemes requiring analytical expertise, factual research,and explanatory skill. Popular science writing is onelarge sub-category of such writing. The course con-tains academic components on popular science writingand publishing, together with further relevant optioncourses, and extensive practical writing developmentexercises. Students also produce an extended piece ofwriting as an assessed project.

For more information contact Paul Wynn Abbott,Science Communication Group Administrator, Room,313C, Mech. Eng. Building, Imperial College, London,SW7 2AZ.Tel: 020 7594 8753 Fax: 020 7594 8763, email: [email protected] web: www.imperial.ac.uk/sciencecommunication

The closing date for applications is 27th May 2005

Valuing diversity and committed to equality of opportunity

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Dr

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Dear Dr Hypothesis,I don’t like to think of myself as asheep that always follows the crowd,but I’ve become aware that I have atendency to unwillingly copy otherswhen I’m in their company. This is aparticular problem with yawning;when one person yawns I always seemto find myself yawning straight afterthem. I’ve tried a number of things toavoid this, including caffeine binges,but nothing seems to work. Could youtell me what’s wrong with me?

Individual Irene

DR HYPOTHESIS SAYS:There’s absolutely nothing wrong withyou Irene. It is common knowledge thatyawning can be contagious. Physicianstell me that there are many possible cuesthat can set off yawning — includingfatigue, boredom or, more seriously, con-ditions such as anaemia — so a disposi-tion to yawn is present in most of us mostof the time. Alternatively, yawns couldhave been used at one time in our evolu-tionary history to co-ordinate the socialbehaviour of the group, so when one per-son yawned so did everyone else. Theyseem to be contagious today because wemight still have this left-over responsewhich we simply don’t use any more.

http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/baillement/texte-yawning-lehmann.pdf

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/yawning.html

Dr HypothesisDr Hypothesis needsyour problems!If you have any worries (purely of ascientific nature, obviously) thatyou would like Dr Hypothesis toanswer, then please email him at [email protected] will award the author of themost intriguing question a £10book voucher. Unfortunately, DrHypothesis cannot promise to pub-lish an answer to every question,but he will do his very best to seethat the most fascinating are dis-cussed in the next edition ofBlueSci.

Think you know betterthan Dr Hypothesis?

He challenges you with this puzzle:

Is there life ‘out there’?

Please email him with answers, thebest of which will be printed in thenext edition.

Dear Dr Hypothesis,I was recently listening to a documen-tary on a well-known radio station,when I was surprised to hear thatLucy was the first human known tohave walked on two legs. Now, I havea very good friend Lucy who has noproblem walking upright. I know for afact that I am older than her and amalso perfectly capable on foot. Cometo think of it, so are my parents, andhers, and many other people… Whowas this Lucy, as she surely can’t be myfriend?

Bipedal Brian

DR HYPOTHESIS SAYS:One of the oldest human skeletonsthought to have walked erect, at 3.2 mil-lion years old, was discovered in Ethiopiain 1974 and given the name Lucy. On thenight of the find, the archaeologists had aparty which seems to have involvedrather too much alcohol and The Beatles’song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds wasplayed several times. No-one knowsexactly who nicknamed the skeleton thatnight, but the name has stuck ever since.I think there is a clear message from thisBrian — don’t drink and dig.

www.asu.edu/clas/iho/lucy.html

Dear Dr Hypothesis,I have just arrived in Cambridge andhave been greatly appreciating thecity, especially the Backs. I reallylove the splendid architecture ofbuildings such as King’s CollegeChapel, which looks wonderfulabove the fields of daffodils and cro-cuses. However, in cold weather Idon’t like to stay out too long toappreciate it. How long will theflowers stay, and why?

Visiting Vivian

DR HYPOTHESIS SAYS:I’m afraid the flowers on the Backs area speciality of spring-time Cambridgeand they won’t last long. It’s all downto competition. The daffodils and cro-cuses use their flowers to attract polli-nators, but the plant needs a lot ofenergy to make these flowers. Theyobtain this from the sun via photosyn-thesis, and therefore have evolved tocomplete this stage of their life cycleearly in the season, before they are out-competed for light by the leaves on thetrees overhead. The only good news Ican give you is that they will be backnext spring.

http://experts.about.com/q/709/3442061.htm

Sorry Fiona!DR HYPOTHESIS APOLOGISES:In the last issue I answered FlightpathFiona’s question as to why planes can flybut unfortunately did not explain it cor-rectly. I have since been reliablyinformed that wings are constructed sothat the path of the air travelling under-neath a wing is curved more than that ofthe air travelling over it.This means thatthere is a greater change in the momen-tum of the air passing under the wing,causing a greater force to act on theunderside of the wing than on the top.This results in a lifting of the aircraft.Many thanks to all those observant read-ers who noticed my mistake.

“My experience of car parking isthat with practice and studying thetheory, the movement of the car isvery predictable, and so, with ele-mentary mechanical knowledge, itbecomes second nature. However,when parking a woman these rulesno longer apply. On the few occa-sions I have tried, the women refuseto move in the way I expect them to,and more importantly don’t staythere!”At the risk of enraging Dr Hypothesis’ bet-ter half, Professor Hypothesis, Dr Hypothesisshares this reaader’s concerns, although itwasn’t quite the answer he was looking for!

Another reader commented on a recent studyon the relationship between foetal testos-terone and finger length:“Spatial skills such as map-readingand parking may be difficult forsome women because they had toolittle testosterone in the womb…Low testosterone levels are alsolinked to shortened wedding ringfingers.”

In the last issue Dr Hypothesisasked you, the reader:

Can men park cars better than women, and if so, why?

Read some of the answers givenbelow…

Liz

zie

Phill

ips

bluesci issue 03 - easter 2005

Documents

science of proteomicsnicholas

kinds of science

cover ofblues

phenomenon of synaesthesia

quantum theory

modern biology

mobile phone technology

art of astronomymars