Philip Ball
Twittering from Mars
Visitors to the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire typically take one look at the gigantic dishes of the radio telescopes and ask the same question: what is it looking at? But it’s not just outsiders who wonder that. Astronomers who have been granted viewing time to look at their favourite objects at the big observatories also want quick notification of when the telescopes have done the job. This is just the sort of question for which the micro-blogging service Twitter was invented. And so radio astronomer Stuart Lowe at Jodrell Bank proposes that the astronomy community set up an AstroTwitter service dedicated to letting followers know in real time what the world’s telescopes are up to.
A service like this has already been created for Nasa’s Mars Phoenix lander, which had 3,000 followers by the time Phoenix touched down on Mars in May 2008. By September it had 35,000. Phoenix is studying the composition of the Martian “soil,” particularly to look for clues about the planet’s suspected watery (and perhaps habitable) past. It’s arguable that Nasa’s decision to write the feeds in the first person (”I’m on M-AAAAARS! Now it’s back to work digging for treasure…”) is over-egging the cuteness, but as a public outreach tool the Phoenix Twitter feed was a triumph. Inspired by this, Lowe fantasises about online mash-ups that show the locations of all the world’s telescopes, each linked to its own Twitter stream. And using the recently launched Google Sky, we could see what’s in the telescope’s sights too. No doubt all the big-science installations will be at it soon.
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Philip Ball
What will 2009 bring for science?
The scientific community must be almost alone in having grounds for optimism about 2009. Finally, science will be taken seriously again in American politics. Barack Obama’s choices of top scientific advisers are impeccable. Physicist Bob Park of the University of Maryland thinks they will lead to “the most influence science has had in the White House since the Eisenhower administration.”
Obama seemed initially to be favouring technologists over practising scientists, but any such misgivings were allayed by the nomination of physicist Steven Chu as secretary of energy. Chu is a physics Nobel laureate (he’ll be the first to serve in a presidential cabinet), and is still highly active in research. His Nobel-winning work was concerned with how to cool and trap atoms with lasers. But Chu has increasingly focused on issues of energy production and use, in particular advocating “green” sources such as biofuels and solar power.
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Philip Ball
What’s the state of British physics?
Is British physics in crisis? You might have thought so, judging by the recent laments of astronomers at threats to curtail projects and withdraw from international facilities. Yet a new report prepared for Research Councils UK by a team chaired by Bill Wakeham, vice chancellor of Southampton University, says the subject is in a “generally good state of health.”
This is not a whitewash. British physicists produce more publications per capita of population than any country bar Germany and the Netherlands, and their university departments enjoy international prestige. So what’s the problem?
At root, it’s that astronomy and particle physics each cost more than most of the other branches of the discipline put together. This is partly why these two fields have their own research council, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Much of its expenditure is on subscriptions to institutions such as Cern, the European Space Agency and astronomical telescopes, all of which amounted to £154m in 2006-7.
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Philip Ball
How lucky was New Orleans?
So New Orleans survived Hurricane Gustav. But was it by dumb luck or foresight? Despite initial fears, Gustav didn’t pose much of a test for the defences erected since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Katrina hit the coast as a formidable category 3 hurricane, whereas Gustav faded to a category 2 by landfall. And while Katrina passed east of New Orleans, pushing the waters of Lake Pontchartrain into the city, Gustav passed south and west. The levees have been strengthened in the last three years, and although the waves from Gustav topped parts of the city’s floodwall, they caused only minor flooding.
Yet there is no cause for complacency. It won’t be until 2011 at the earliest that the Hurricane Protection Office of the US Army Corps of Engineers will finish installing the level of protection that should have been in place for Katrina. And no walls can protect the whole Louisiana coast, which is sinking even as sea levels rise.
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Philip Ball
What to do with our nuclear waste
Now that the climate change bill has cleared its first hurdle in the Commons, it seems likely the government will have to reduce carbon emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. But while you might think this strengthens the case for a new generation of nuclear power stations, they will not necessarily be required. There is nothing in the bill to stop the government discharging its obligation by buying carbon credits from other countries, while not lessening emissions one jot.
Even if this loophole is closed, some people argue that massive investment in alternative energy technologies, particularly carbon capture and storage (CCS), can bring about the reductions instead. CCS, in which carbon dioxide is removed—or “scrubbed”—from power station emissions before it reaches the atmosphere, and is then stored underground, looks increasingly like a technology whose time has come. Veteran climate scientist Wally Broecker of Columbia University has been promoting the carbon scrubber developed by his engineer colleague Klaus Lackner, while the former British chief scientific adviser David King is also a fan of CCS. (As is Nicholas Stern—see our interview in this issue.)
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Alun Anderson
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The Stern review on the economics of climate change irrevocably altered the climate debate when it came out in October 2006. For the first time, environmentalists who had shouted loudly about the dangers of climate change were joined by an apparently hard-headed economist, commissioned by a government and with a team of 15 economic analysts and modellers at his command.
Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist, was working at the treasury when he was asked to look at the economics of climate change. The conclusion of his 700-page report—that the world must act quickly or face devastating consequences—was not new, but the language it used was. Stern presented an economic argument that rapid and affordable action now would prevent huge losses later. That in turn made it easier for politicians and business leaders to back action on climate change.
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Philip Ball
Can Lisa Jardine save embryology?
Historian Lisa Jardine, the new head of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), begins her role ahead of the impending Commons vote on the human fertilisation and embryology bill. The bill crystallises several moral dilemmas about research and practice in these areas, and threatens to intensify the polarisation they induce. Whatever position Jardine takes is sure to upset some vocal group or other.
This is why the appointment of someone used to taking the long view, and accustomed to the hard knocks of public life, probably makes sense. Certainly, Jardine’s popularising instincts seem right for the HFEA just now: she considers public education about fertility issues as important as the regulatory responsibilities. The HFEA has hitherto seldom shown an explicit commitment to inform.
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Philip Ball
A ray of hope for astronomers
Having come to expect bad news, British astronomers were given a ray of hope in February, when the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) reversed its decision to withdraw from the Gemini project. Gemini’s telescopes in Chile and Hawaii offer peerless views of the entire sky at visible and infrared wavelengths, and the original decision of the STFC was seen as devastating.
But sadly it’s now business as usual, as the STFC has said that the e-Merlin project is threatened with closure even before it starts. e-Merlin is an upgrade of Merlin, a system that sends the signals of six radio telescopes around Britain by radio link-up to Jodrell Bank near Manchester. The new system will replace the radio links with optical cables, which will be faster and able to carry more data. It will boost the sensitivity of observations by a factor of 30, revealing things which cannot be seen at present—for example, how discs of dust around stars evolve into planetary systems.
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Stephen Eales
It seems a bit graceless to complain about government funding of science, because since 1997 Labour has been generous to scientists, including astronomers like myself, whose research has no obvious economic benefit. This government seems to realise the importance of scientific research, but a few of its recent decisions suggest it is still uneasy about supporting “blue-skies” research.
A single line in Gordon Brown’s 2006 budget threw British astronomers into a collective tizzy. Brown announced
the government’s intention to merge the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), responsible for funding research in astronomy and particle physics, with the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils (CCLRC), which ran an assortment of government research laboratories, into a new combined grants council, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Astronomers liked the PPARC. When first set up, it was the only grants council without any obligation to pursue research that directly benefited Britain plc, and to astronomers it generally seemed efficient and responsive to the changing fashions of research. Under the aegis of PPARC, British astronomers had done well; by any quantitative measure of research quality, British astronomers are second only to those in the US. The much larger CCLRC, on the other hand, had the reputation for being big, bloated and bureaucratic. The new body, the STFC, has a much stronger obligation to consider the interests of British business.
The optimistic attitude to this change is that by creating a much larger organisation, the government wanted to give British scientists the opportunity to do even better on the world stage. The pessimistic view is that the key to this reorganisation is the third word in the title of the new council, “technology,” and that the government thinks the only real point of research in astronomy and particle physics is the technology on which it is based. At the moment, the pessimists are in the ascendant, because the new council is already in a financial mess. By the time this article goes to press, Britain may well have closed or withdrawn from several important facilities, including the Gemini observatory, which contains two of the largest telescopes in the world, in Hawaii and Chile.
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Philip Ball
Biohazards in central London
When the foot-and-mouth virus, apparently leaked from the Pirbright animal health research laboratory in Surrey, was detected at a nearby farm last summer, a 3km exclusion zone was set up around the site. Imagine a similar containment strategy being used for a lethal human virus leaked from a lab near King’s Cross station. As a recent letter to Nature pointed out, the zone “would reach 10 Downing Street and quarantine most of the UK government’s decision-makers.”
There is no such lab. But there could be soon. The Medical Research Council has decided to move its National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR)—which studies infectious diseases such as bird flu—from Mill Hill in outer north London to King’s Cross. It will be linked to UCL in an effort to give the lab a more clinically aware culture and help it keep pace with cutting-edge research. The plan has been bitterly contested. NIMR staff are said to be unhappy at the prospect of being uprooted from a 47-acre site and squeezed into overcrowded central London. An independent review by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2004 concluded that the move would not be cost-effective and that its rationale was unclear.
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