ISSUE 25 November 07 €3 including VAT £2 NI and UK
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Digging deeper Living in space Biodiversity Whale watch
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St Vincent’s Hospital, Fairview
An illustrated history by Aidan Collins detailing how the hospital, started with money handed over to an informer, provided a safe haven for the mentally ill over the course of 150 years, while shaping the way nurses are trained. The hospital, small by modern standards, looms large in the development of Fairview, and among the well known figures associated with it are James Joyce, and the antiquarian Francis Grose. The original Grose home, Richmond House still stands in good order, and is just one of the architectural features described by Aidan Collins in this unusual book. Available in large format softback and de-luxe hardback. Softback €20. Hardback €35. (144pp) Order direct from Science Spin and post is included in the price.
In a lavishly illustrated paperback, Margaret Franklin and Tom Kennedy explain how we live in a colourful world. The physics, the chemistry and the art, all is revealed. Order direct from Science Spin, €15
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The Exemption, by Vera Hajnal A gripping account of survival through the horrors of World War II.
Rocking around Ireland
A full colour account of Ireland’s geology by Peadar McArdle, director of GSI
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SPIN The International Space Station. Cabin fever can be bad enough on Earth, but staying in space can produce produces additional strains that go beyond human endurance. Publisher Duke Kennedy Sweetman Ltd 5 Serpentine Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. www.sciencespin.com Email: tom@sciencespin.com Editors Seán Duke sean@sciencespin.com Tom Kennedy tom@sciencespin.com Business Development Manager Alan Doherty alan@sciencespin.com Design and Production Albertine Kennedy Publishing Cloonlara, Swinford, Co Mayo Proofing Aisling McLaughlin Printing Turner Print, Longford Contributors in this issue: Lenny Antonelli, Laura Breslin,Tom A Kennedy, John Moore, Marie-Catherine Mousseau, Anna Nolan, C.lodagh O’Brien.
UPFRONT
2
Natural reactions
Seán Duke writes that diversity is under threat
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Less ice could be good for shipping Tom A Kennedy reports that shippers might welcome global warming
Sound of music
Laura Breslin examines the role of music in our lives
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23
Irish science going on show
A sensitive type
Seán Duke reports from NUIM on researchers at work
Seán Duke reports from the launch of the Irish Science Open Forum
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8
Digging deeper
Grey squirrels on the advance The reds are under pressure
Marie Catherine Mousseau writes that prospectors have to go further and deeper
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27
Offshore giants
Lenny Antonelli writes that a watch is being kept out for Fin Whales
Ireland’s glacial map
12
Seán Duke reports on going offshore to complete the picture
Science Foundation Ireland reaches out
Inner conflict in outer space
Presenting a varied programme
15
Auto software
Anna Nolan reports on developing software for safer motoring.
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Articles published in Science SPIN may reflect the views of the contributors and not the official views of the publication, its editorial staff, its ownership, or its sponsors. Geological Survey of Ireland Suirbhéireacht Gheolaíochia Éireann
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 24 Page 1
strain
John Moore reports that going into space can be a
Beyond Darwin
34
Clodagh O’Brien writes that there is more to evolution than survival of the fittest
39
Higher Education Authority An tÚdarás um Ard-Oideachas
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UPFRONT
Nature’s Web
Sherkin Island’s nature newsletter for Autumn is up on the www.naturesweb. ie site and can be downloaded as a PDF.
Ecstacy
WHILe a great deal of the debate on whether or not drugs (of all types, legal and illegal) are harmful to health is anecdotal, researchers at the University and the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, have confirmed that ecstacy interferes with one of our most fundamental body processes. the effect of ecstacy is due to over production of serotonin by nerve cells. Usually, serotonin is kept under control by the action of an enzyme, monoamine oxidase, and because the amounts are not excessive, the process of elimination causes no problems. However, the process starts to give trouble as serotonin increases above normal levels. the enzyme driven reaction produces hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, an aggressive chemical best known for its role in producing ‘peroxide blondes’. Because of this reaction, free radicals are released, and these can attack DNA and other cell components. Some free radicals appear to be essential for normal body processes, but, in excess, they literally run riot, and among their targets are our mitochondria. every cell in our body is packed with mitochondria, and these are the sites of energy production. the mitochondria convert nutrients into energy, so if these are damaged we can suffer the equivalent of a power cut. Giving ecstacy to rats was found to produce obvious damage to their mitochondria, and researchers believe that there is no reason to think that this does not happen in humans as well. As in humans, the rats on ‘e’ heat up, and as researchers elsewhere have found, this is another side-effect, involving a break down in a molecular level process involving conversion of energy into heat. In a follow up study, the researchers, ema Alves, teresa Summavielle, Félix Carvalho and colleagues, are looking at other possible long term effects on memory. Serotonin, they note, is involved in memory, and they are particularly concerned about the possible affects on adolescents because they are at a high risk stage of physiological development.
The green team from Clonmel, Eoin Corby, Finbar Horgan, Peter Quinn, Tiernan Nix, and Cormac Britton.
Hot pole NePtUNe is a chilly place, so far away from the Sun that the average temperature is in the region of minus 200 degrees C. even so, the lonely planet has a relatively hot south pole. Neptune’s
Innovators A teAm of students from CBS High School, Clonmel came first, ahead of 28 other entrants, in a competition to select Young enterprise european Company of the Year. After winning the the RDS Student Innovation Award for their Deutsch macht Spas language teaching pack, the students went on to the european competition. Appropriately enough the finals for the european competition were held in Berlin. In Ireland, 100 companies, set up by students, competed for the most recent RDS Innovation Awards. Local companies help by providing mentoring, and teams compete regionally before entering the finals. progress around the Sun is a lot slower than our own. It takes about 165 earth years for Neptune to complete its orbit, but because of this the south pole has a long summer. For the past forty years the temperature there has been about 10 degrees C higher than elsewhere on the planet, and because of this, a freezing barrier has been breached, allowing methane gas to escape into the upper atmosphere. Astronomers, observing this from eSO’s Very Large telescope, expect this leakage to continue when winter turns to summer at the north pole in another 80 years from now. Neptune has a mixed atmosphere, mostly composed of ligher gases, hydrogen and helium, but due to the escape route, the level of methane is high. methane absorbs red, making the the planet appear blue.
Cancer marker
Ozone hole
AS URINe drains through the prostrate gland it picks up proteins. A research student in UCD, michelle Downes, has used this fact to develop early detection of prostrate cancer. the usual method of diagnosis is to detect cancer markers in blood. However, this is a very indirect route, and before it can be drawn, the blood is a mixture coming from a number of tissues. michelle Downes points out that the use of urine will give better detection. michelle, from the UCD School of medicine and Conway Institute, was presented with the Association for Prostrate Cancer prize at a World Basic Urological Research Congress held recently in Dublin.
COmPAReD to last year the ozone hole over the Antarctic is 30 per cent smaller, but the scientists making the measurements cannot say if this is a longer term trend. One of the factors reducing loss is believed to be a drifting of the hole away from the pole. According to the european Space Agency, Ozone depletion becomes less when warmer air is in circulation. In colder conditions chlorine rich clouds are formed. When warmer sping conditions return, the increase in sunlight causes chlorine compounds to split, releasing free radicals. these attack the ozone, breaking it down into molecules of oxygen. One molecule of chlorine has the ability to break down thousands of ozone molecules.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 25 Page 2
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UPFRONT
European Young Scientist 2007 winnersFirst-prize winners: Abdusalam Abubakar, Florian Ostermaier, Márton Spohn and Henrike Wilms.
Euro Young Scientists THIS year’s top winners in the European Young Scientist contest came from Germany, Hungary, and Ireland. Florian Ostermaier and Henrike Wilms from Germany studied the passage of
light in falling drops of water. Márton Spohn from Hungary looked at how plants respond to attack by release of volatile chemicals. Abdusalam Abubaker, a student at Synge Street in Dublin, was first in Mathematics for his work on decoding RSA encryption, an algorithm widely used to protect electronic transactions.
Prion attack
In response to the current shortage of clinical pyschologisgts in Ireland, a three-year full-time professional training course is being run by NUI Galway. In July the first ten graduates were conferred. Back row left to right: Judith McBrinn, Blackrock, Dublin; Samira Hayes, Killarney; Eoin Ryan, Newcastle Galway; Marie Claire Lagendijk, Roscam, Galway. Front Row l-r: Hazel Moore, Kingston, Galway; Elaine Curran, University Road, Galway; Treasa Ní Uiginn, Castleknock, Dublin; Claire Hogan, Blackrock, Dublin; Clare Thynne, Cappagh Road, Galway and Joanne Byrne, Culmore Rd, Derry.
THE small protein particles triggering BSE in cattle and CJD in humans may be reactivating some old viral diseases. Throughout our evolution we, like other animals, have been subjected to repeated attacks by retroviruses. Retroviruses are extremely efficient because they latch on to the hosts DNA, and in doing so they can become part of the inherited genome. Many of the genes we carry now originated as retrovirus infections in the past. Almost ten per cent of our genome is known to have originated this way, and they remain with us long after the original diseases they caused have vanished. Prof Christine Leib-Moesch, who has been leading a consortium of Bavarian researchers in the study of BSE, now believes that prions may act on these embedded retroviruses. Mouse neural cells were infected with prions, and this was seen to have an influence on old retroviral sequences. According to the researchers, it is possible that the prions could trigger replication of retroviral fragments, which in turn, could act as carriers to spread the infection.
National University of Ireland
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Marine Institute
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Monday 12 Nov. - Friday 16 Nov. The 25 Greatest Science Books of All Time Hume Building, 9 am - 8 pm Tuesday 13 November Superstrings Hume Building, 7 pm - 8 pm Astronomical Observations Science Building, 8.30 pm - 10 pm Wednesday 14 November Celluloid Sums: The Mathematical Magic behind Harry and Frodo Hume Building, 7 pm - 8 pm Thursday 15 November Poteen, Potions and Poisons Hume Building, 7 pm - 8 pm Friday 16 November Surrounded by Science (open labs) Callan and Science Buildings, 7 pm - 9 pm Astronomical Observations Science Building, 8 pm - 10 pm Saturday 17 November National Science Museum St. Patrick’s College, 2 pm - 5 pm
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UPFRONT Moving asteroids We don’t really know when the next big asteroid is going to slam into the earth. Astronomers predict that we can expect a tunguska sized chunk of rock to hit the earth once in every 150 years. this particular asteroid, leveling over two thousand square km of Siberia in 1908, at an estimated 20 metres across, was not particularly big compared to some of the objects orbiting around in space. the european Space Agency reports that a worldwide asteroid watch is being kept on these flying objects, but it’s not easy to predict their behaviour. Larger objects, a km or more in diameter, are easier to track than those of tunguska scale, yet these smaller asteroids have the capacity to wipe out an entire city. Film spectaculars have already been made about last ditch attempts to divert or destroy an asteroid on its way to destroy the earth, and now the european Space Agency has plans to turn this fiction into fact. The Don Quijote mission aims to send two spacecrafts out to a relatively modest sized asteroid. The first spacecraft is to go into orbit around an asteroid, no larger than a few hundred metres wide, and as it keeps watch, the second craft is to slam into the object at a speed of about 10 km a second. the mission team are thinking of targeting Apophis, a small asteroid with a path that brings it dangerously close to earth. the agency is aiming to launch the mission
Irish Science Open Forum
Are you a researcher? Teaching science? Managing scientific projects? If so, register your interest with ISOF, an open and independent forum for science in Ireland. The primary aim of ISOF is to create a big event for Irish science in 2008. Watch out for news on the Science Spin website www. sciencespin.com or register your interest by emailing tom@sciencespin.com
in a few years time, and once underway, the lead craft will take about 25 months to reach the asteroid. What happens when the second kamikaze craft hits its target is anybody’s guess, but one of the primary objects is to knock the asteroid off course. no doubt, there will be some anxious moments as observers track
any change in direction, but the idea is to eliminate, not add, to the threat. At some stage, perhaps sooner than we would wish, an earth bound asteroid will be spotted, and as Ian Carnelli, one of those involved in the project, remarked, it would be a good idea to get the technology ready before we need it.
Life in the round GettInG cells to grow in the lab was a major achievement, and culturing is at the heart of in-vitrio testing. However, one of the problems is that cells in a dish are not growing the same way as the same cells in vivo. the cells in a Petri dish have not much in the way of support, and basically they are confined to two dimensions. In the body, cells not only live in a community, but they often, like bones, grow into three-dimensional structures. At durham University, dr Stefan Pryborski, who is also the Chief Scientist with the spin-off company, ReInnervate, has been working with a team developing a scaffold structure on which bone, liver, bone marrow, and stem cells, can grow much as as they would in our body. According to the university, the technology is cheap, and it works. the scaffold, made of a porous polystyrene, is like a small sponge, riddled with tiny holes. the developers claim that replacing Petri dishes with the porus scaffold will make in-vitrio testing of new drugs more effective and results will be more reliable.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 25 Page 4
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UPFRONT Looking average HUNDREDS of images of Manchester males and females have been combined to iron out the differences and merge them into average faces. The project to create these averaged images was undertaken by a centre for genetics, Nowgen, and the faces have gone on show at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, giving the citizens a chance to look at themselves.
Race to escape The round balls growing on trees are galls, protective growths for insect larvae. Tommi nyman from the university of Joensuu in Finland, together with researchers from Sweden and Germany, have been looking at one particular type of insect, the sawfly, which lays its eggs on willow trees. even though the gall gives protection, various parasites have found ways to breach the armour, and feed on the larvae. over an eighteen year period of collecting willow galls, the scientists found that 72 different types of parasites preyed on 43 different species of gall fly.
Good return
AccordinG to a report issued by the institute of Physics, industries based on the physical sciences are as important to the economy as the building industry. As the institute points out, physics is behind opto-electronics, medical devices, nanotechnology, and aerospace, and returns are high. The report, prepared for the institute by the centre for economics and Business research, states that: “productivity levels in physics based sectors are exceptionally high, almost double the national average.” The report is available from the institute’s web site: http://ireland.iop.org
one of the strategies adopted by the sawflies to keep one step ahead of the parasites, was to develop variations in the gall. According to the scientists, this was probably better than having to find a new species of host tree. The constant war between the sawfly and its parasites, reported the scientists in BioMed, an open access journal, has resulted in greater diversity. “our results,” reports nyman, “indicate that nichedependent parasitism is a major force promoting ecological divergence in herbivorous insects.” Shifts in how the prey presents itself is followed by
a lagged evolutionary response as the parasite tried to catch up.
Wind power
DUblIN based wind energy company, Airtricity, has secured a $330 million energy deal with General Electric in the US. The deal makes Airtricity the fifth largest generator of wind energy in the US. In Ireland, Airtricity, started in 1997 by Eddie O’Connor, operates ten offshore windfarms, the best known of which is on the Arklow bank, ten km offshore.
Tagging cattle
cATTle in the uS are to be electronically tagged with devices made in limerick. Advanced innovation has made a deal with national electronics in the uS to provide radio ear tags for uS livestock. The contract to manufacture radio tags is reported to be worth $29 million to the limerick company. data on body temperature and other vital signs will be transmitted via satellite to a monitoring centre to ensure that herds remain healthy.
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GLOBAL WARMING
Less ice could be good for shipping Tom A Kennedy reports that some shipping companies are likely to welcome news of global warming.
T
he northwest passage between Europe and Asia, historically impassable because of ice, is showing signs of opening up. Because Arctic ice cover has shrunk to the lowest recorded in 30 years of stellite surveillance, shippers may be able to take a long sought after short cut. Shown in this mosaic, created from nearly 200 images acquired in September ’07 by the ASAR (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar) device aboard the ESA’s Envisisat satellite, the dark gray represents the ice free areas, while the green represents areas with sea ice. As you can see, the most direct route of the Northwest Passage (Highlighted by an orange line) across northern Canada is shown to be fully navigable, while the Northeast Passage (Highlighted by the blue line) along the Siberian coast is only partially blocked. The Northwest Passage had been expected to remain closed, even during the periods of reduced ice cover in the
summer seasons. However, this icy barrier is melting. Arctic sea ice naturally recedes each northern summer, and recovers each northern winter. Since 1978, when satellite records began, the loss has exceeded the seasonal gain, and the loss has accelerated.
The Arctic is one of Earth’s most inaccessible areas, so obtaining measurements of sea ice was difficult before the advent of satellites. For more than 20 years the European Space Agency has been helping to monitor the Arctic and Antartic caps, and this watch from above will continue with the launch of CryoSat 2 in 2009. Over a three-year mission period, CryoSa2 observations are expected to provide conclusive measurements on the rate of ice shrinkage.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 25 Page 6
Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said: “We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100,000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.” Because sea ice has a bright surface, most of the solar energy is reflected back into space. When sea ice melts, the dark-coloured ocean surface is exposed. Solar energy is then absorbed rather than reflected, so the oceans get warmer and temperatures rise, making it difficult for new ice to form. This can cause a rapid decrease in ice coverage. The previous record low was in 2005 when the Arctic area covered by sea ice was just 4 million sq km. Even then, the most direct Northwest Passage did not fully open. SPIN
GLOBAL WARMING It has been about 10,000 years since the ice over much of Europe retreated and we are now in an interglacial period. At some stage that ice will return, but in the meantime our climate will fluctuate. This is a perfectly natural process, and it’s been going on long before industry, or indeed recorded history. More than likely these fluctuations are due to variations in the Sun’s radiation, and global warming is nothing new. This is why we find 5,000 year old fields beneath the peat in Western Ireland. Greenland also enjoyed a relatively warm climate, and this is why it was colonised. Later, as temperatures dropped, some of the old colonies were abandoned, and we must assume that people moved back south. The early middle ages in Europe are sometimes described as a mini-ice age. Since then, the average temperatures have moved up, glaciers are melting, and ice in the Arctic is retreating. Leif Toudal, commenting on the recent rapid retreat said that; “The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected and that we urgently need to understand better the processes involved.” If the current rate of melting is maintained, scientists predict that the Arctic could be virtually ice free within the next 30 to 60 years. Exactly when, or how long that situation will last, is anybody’s guess; no one knows for certain. In the meantime, new shipping lanes could open up, and it also means that prospectors may be able to get at new resources, previously inaccessible because they were locked away under the ice.
In October, scientists met at the ESA’s Earth Observation Centre in Frascati, Italy, to discuss the implications of dimishing ice in the Arctic. The decline in ice is expected to continue, and the meeting concluded by stating that greater access to the region means that sea ice and icebergs are likely to become a bigger hazard to shipping. The meeting reported that: “The Arctic is already experiencing an increase in shipping, primarily for oil and gas development and tourism, and we can expect to see further increases as diminishing ice extent makes Arctic marine transportation more viable.”
IRELAND 2007 11th - 18th November 2007
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Irish science to go on show The very best of Irish science will go on show in November ’08 and initial details of the event were revealed at the official launch of the Irish Science Open Forum in October. Seán Duke reports. rish science has never been stronger, there is more funding available, more professional scientists, more PhDs, and more genuine world-class research taking place here than ever before. However, there is no national forum to show the world, or Europe at least, what Irish science is achieving. This is set to change next year, with a largescale event to take place in the RDS that aims to highlight the breadth and quality of research here in a way that will appeal to professionals and the public alike.
I
Background
There has been an explosive growth in Irish science, over the past decade, with lots of different activities now going on in different areas. However, media coverage has not reflected the intensity of what is now happening, and, as a consequence, the public are also largely unaware of developments. “What we want to do with ISOF is to create a showcase, where we present the cream of Irish science in a way that is not just attractive to people in Ireland, but internationally,” said Tom Kennedy, Joint Editor of Science Spin, and member of the ISOF Council, who addressed the launch event. “There are practical reasons for this. I have heard several ministers state that they need scientists to explain what they are doing because when it comes to an election, they may have to decide between a road, or an investment in science,” Tom continued. “If people don’t understand what’s going on, then science will lose out. We can’t just assume that investment in science is going to continue forever.”
Programme
The ISOF Council is charged with producing a dynamic programme that will grab the attention of the media and the public, by presenting material in an accessible manner. Also, because scale is important, the event will take
place as part of Science Week 08, to ensure maximum public impact. Science Week already makes a big impact, aimed as it is, primarily on children, primary and secondary. ISOF aims to enhance the appeal of Science Week by presenting ‘grown up’ science, in a manner that could be compared to the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science event, or the ESOF (European Open Science Forum) event. There will be a wide menu of main events, but also a lot of side events as well. The goal is to appeal to scientists, media and the wider public.
Benefits
The question might be asked, why do we need this new event, when there are so many other events? Tom Kennedy explained that it all has to do with a matter of scale, and that scale is very important. “We are not displacing anything. We are not taking the place of any other organisation or initiative. What we are doing is giving a higher degree of coordination. That is all. Our programme will embrace a lot of activities that were probably going to happen anyway, but they were going to happen before a more limited audience. What we can do through a larger event is create awareness to a wider public.” Certainly, there are plenty of seminars, and conferences taking place around the country throughout the year, but often the focus is narrow, and the appeal is to a limited audience. There are also many initiatives to help promote interest in science, but again, the target audiences can be quite small. The Young Science and Technology Exhibition is extremely successful, of course, but again there is nothing to compare it to at the ‘grown
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up’ or senior level. This is what ISOF wants to create. “Why is it that the press, the international press, will cover something like the British Association for the Advancement of Science event, or ESOF (European Open Science Forum) in Europe?,” Tom Kennedy asked the audience, which came from the universities, IT’s, public bodies, and private organisations. “These (British and European events) get intensive press coverage. The reason for this is that there is scale, there’s a menu of events. The very fact that these things are treated seriously, signals to the press that, look, this is an important event. By giving the (ISOF) event scale and prestige, you will get attention.”
Structure
The ISOF is made up of a small Executive Council of ten people representing different interests in science, and their role is to oversee the development of the programme. There is also a broader Council, which is in the process of formation. “We want lots of people to come forward to join the Council,” said Tom Kennedy. “The idea of the broader Council is to keep expanding out to cover all the institutions, all the bodies throughout Ireland, so all are represented. Within our structure we want to have networking happening between researchers in Ireland and those abroad.” A register of people that have submitted their interest in ISOF is being set up. The people who will go into the broader Council are those with some working background in science, but the register is open to anyone that declares an interest in joining. Those that joint will get occasional email alerts about what ISOF is doing.
Industry
The links between the universities and industry have become more important in recent years, and researchers are also starting to commercialise their intellectual property on a more regular basis. This means that there is a need for a big event that will bring industry and academia together for mutual benefit. An industry exhibition is to be SPIN
At the ISOF launch at the RDS were, from left, Martin Hynes, Director IRCSET; Dr Dagmar Mayer, Madam Curie research mobility Programme; Tom Kennedy, chairman ISOF: Aoife O’Mahony, STEPS to Engineering: John Power, Director General, Engineers Ireland: Peter Brabazon, Director Discover Science and Engineering. Photo: Maxwell. an important part of the ISOF event. This, show, focused on the practical applications of research, will be held at the RDS in the Main Hall, and is being organised by the exhibition company, SDL. Sean Lemass, director of the exhibition company, SDL, said that the campaign to get the industry R&D show launched is already underway. The Main Hall is to have stands from a range of institutions, and around this will be space for break-out sessions, workshops, career advice talks, and one-to-one meetings. “The purpose, he said, “is to give research organisations an opportunity to show what they are doing and to provide a bridge between academic excellence and entrepreneurial needs.”
Maintaining links
ISOF is to have its own dedicated website, and Tom Duke, from the web design company, Digital Revolutionaries, explained how the site can be structured to act as a means through which everyone interested in Irish research, whether at home or abroad, can connect up with the science community. One of the aims of ISOF is to use the website to facilitate networking between Irish scientists, whether they are working at home or abroad.
There is already an ISOF newsletter, which can be downloaded by visiting the Science Spin website (www. sciencespin.com) and visiting the ISOF section there. This will be a regular
Executive Council Dr Peadar McArdle, Director of GSI Paul Nugent, Institute of Physics Margaret Franklin, Athlone Institute of Technology. Aoife O’Mahony, STEPS Avril Kennan, TCD Contract Researchers Association Shiela Donegan, CALMAST Prof Ciaran Regan, Vice Principal, Research & Innovation UCD Catriona Boyle, Teagasc Jenny Melia, Framework 7 National Contact Dr Claire Mulhall, Science Executive, RDS Tom Kennedy, Science Spin
newsletter, free, that will help to bring coherence to ISOF activities in the coming year in the run up to the show. Anyone that has a point to make, or an announcement of some kind is encouraged to submit that information to the editors of Science Spin, and they, in turn, will publish that material in the next newsletter.
Value
One of the primary roles of the ISOF Council, said Tom Kennedy, will be to convince everyone involved in promoting science in Ireland that what ISOF is proposing doing represents great value for money. “We expect to make a lot of the existing initiatives more effective. We will bring science to a wider public, also abroad, and we will bridge a lot of different interests.” “It would be hard to put exact figures on these benefits,” said Tom Kennedy, “but raising the profile of Irish research in Europe alone could be an enormous gain, and this is just one of the many advantages.” To register interest in ISOF, or to download the ISOF newsletter, visit www.sciencespin.com and click on the ISOF button on the homepage.
Grey squirrel, photograph Geoff Hamilton
Red squirrel, photograph Niall Benvie
Grey invasion
T
ravel back in time just 100 years and take a leisurely morning stroll through one of Ireland’s forests. Keep an eye out for a flash of movement amongst the branches – you could be lucky enough to spot a red squirrel peering at you, mostly hidden by the trunk of a tree. Today, in many areas of the country however, the bushy tail you might see will belong instead to a grey squirrel, a relative newcomer to our shores. A recent survey has found that our native red squirrels are being steadily replaced by greys and are now very rare in several counties. What can be done to protect our indigenous squirrels from further incursion by the grey and their possible disappearance? Most readers will be familiar with both the red and grey squirrel, but some may be unaware that the grey was actually introduced to Ireland as recently as 1911. Several animals, intended as ornamental additions to a wedding reception in Co Longford, escaped into the surrounding woodland and multiplied to such
an extent that the entire modernday population of grey squirrels is descended from these few original animals. Where red and grey squirrels overlap, particularly in broadleaf and mixed woodlands, the greys use up the majority of the autumn seed crop before reds find them palatable. When this happens, numbers of red squirrels fall away and they are quickly replaced by the invading greys. The Irish Squirrel Survey 2007 set out to assess the distributions of the two animals by collecting data from organisations involved in wildlife and forestry, together with information from the general public. Distribution maps based on the survey show that the red squirrel can still be found in the majority of counties and remains common in the western half of Ireland. Though it is also still found in many areas of the east and north, in many cases its habitat is now shared with the grey squirrel. Unfortunately, it is now probably extinct in Meath and Westmeath, and has become
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 25 Page 10
particularly rare in Kilkenny, Carlow and Louth. Grey squirrels meanwhile are now frequent across the east, and are now present in 26 counties (the exceptions being Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Kerry and Cork). Most significant is its recent spread into the counties of Antrim, Wicklow and Wexford, which were predominantly devoid of greys only 10 years ago. For the first time, grey squirrels have also been confirmed west of the River Shannon. So what does this mean for the future? Red squirrels that already share their habitat are under immediate threat, while other populations just beyond the current grey squirrel distribution (such as Cork, Limerick, Kerry and northeast Antrim) may also be considered at risk. It is likely that the grey squirrel will continue to spread in many areas of the country in the coming years. It is possible that they could extend their range west of the Shannon, though the type of habitat in this region is not ideally suited to grey SPIN
Distribution of red squirrels in 2007
squirrel dispersal. Active conservation of red squirrels may be pursued in a number of ways including; selective management of coniferous forests which support good populations of red squirrels, targeted grey squirrel control at the frontiers of their distribution to minimise further spread, supplementary feeding of red squirrel populations and translocations of reds into normally inaccessible woodlands. All of these options are currently being assessed as part of a range of projects, and hopefully an integrated plan for the protection of the Irish red squirrel will be put into place in the near future. so that in another 100 years, our great-great-grandchildren will still be able to go red squirrelspotting in the many forests of Ireland!
Distribution of grey squirrels in 2007
NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR FOREST RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT AN CHOMHAIRLE NÁISIÚNTA UM THAIGHDE AGUS FORBAIRT FORAOISE
The Irish Squirrel Survey 2007 has been published as a report by COFORD.Copies are available for €8.00 - email info@coford.ie, phone 01-2130725 or visit www.coford.ie to order it on-line
The 25 Greatest Science Books The editors of Discover magazine compiled a list of the 25 greatest science books of all time. A large selection of these books are on display, accompanied by a hand-out explaining the relevance of each of the books. Monday 12 Nov. – Friday 16 Nov., Foyer of Hume Building, 9 am - 8 pm. Superstrings A celebration of Einstein and physics, with music by J. S. Bach, W. A. Mozart, and F. Kreisler, presented by physicist Brian Foster and violinist Jack Liebeck. Tuesday 13 November, Hume Building, Theatre 1, 7 pm - 8 pm. Astronomical Observations Look through telescopes at the moon, planets, stars, and galaxies. Tuesday 13 November, roof of Science Building, 8.30 pm - 10 pm. (Also Friday) Celluloid Sums: The Mathematical Magic behind Harry and Frodo From The Lord of the Rings to Bridget Jones’s Diary, modern films have special effects that have been driven by computer graphics, which in turn is driven by mathematics. In this talk Emmy Award winner Dr. Andrew Fitzgibbon (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK) shows the real science behind these effects. Wednesday 14 November, Hume Building, Theatre 2, 7 pm - 8 pm. Poteen, Potions and Poisons An animated, exciting lecture depicting the fascinating chemistry behind poteen making. Lecture by Dr. Malachy McCann (Department of Chemistry, NUI Maynooth). Thursday 15 November, Hume Building, Theatre 2, 7 pm - 8 pm.
Move It! A fast-moving interactive show that explores the forces and energy that are so important to our everyday lives. Shows for primary schools performed by Paul McCrory (Think Differently, Antrim). Website: http://www.think-differently.co.uk/page72g.html By invitation only. Friday 16 November, Hume Building, Theatre 1, 10 am - 11 am, Friday 16 November, Hume Building, Theatre 1, 11.30 am - 12.30 pm. Surrounded by Science Try out simple hands-on experiments, watch demonstrations, and participate in competitions, in Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology. Suitable for all ages, all welcome. Friday 16 November, foyer of Science Building, foyer of Callan Building, and various laboratories in the Callan Building and the Science Building, 7 pm - 9 pm. Astronomical Observations Look through telescopes at the moon, planets, stars, and galaxies. Only for limited numbers of people and only if the sky is clear. Friday 16 November, roof of Science Building, 8 pm - 10 pm. (Also Tuesday) National Science Museum Come and view the finest collection of historic scientific instruments in Ireland and much more. In collaboration with St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Saturday 17 November, National Science Museum, 2 pm - 5 pm.
More details will be available at
http://science4all.nuim.ie/
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Massive Fin Whales off Ireland Fin Whales, the second largest animals to have lived on Earth, are living in Irish waters off the southwest and west coasts, turning these waters into one of the most renowned whale-watching areas in the world. Marine biologists have, however, only recently acknowledged their presence, and begun to try to unravel the mysteries of why they are here, and why it took so long for us to realise they were here, writes Lenny Antonelli.
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ight at the southern edge of Ireland, in the open expanses of the Celtic Sea, lives the second largest animal that ever existed on our planet. Here, the fin whale (Balaeonoptera physalus) thrives, feeding on herring and sprat, among other species. A true giant of the seas, it grows to about 20m in length, weighs between 50 and 70 tons, and its blow can extend over six metres into the air. Only the blue whale is larger. It is only very recently, however, that we have become fully aware of the presence of these giants off our south coast. Indeed, many people are probably still unaware they are there at all, associating large whales instead with locations far more exotic than Ireland. The reason we’ve only heard about them recently, however, is quite simple — the experts have only really become aware of their presence recently too.
Background
It was in 1999 that Pádraig Whooley, a cetacean (cetaceans include whales, dolphins and porpoises) enthusiast and currently sightings co-ordinator for the Irish Whale & Dolphin Group, moved to west Cork and began to look for whales from the Old Head of Kinsale. He soon realised that west Cork is, as he describes it, a “mecca for whale-watching.”
Zoologist Dr Simon Berrow, Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) founder and current co-ordinator, explained: “After Pádraig started doing the whale-watches we realised that a pattern was emerging and that the fin whales were coming back year after year. We realised that this was a regular thing and not just a once-off.” West Cork quickly gained prominence among cetacean enthusiasts, with common and bottlenose dolphins, minke, humpback, and of course the fin whales all to be seen regularly. It wasn’t long, though, before it became apparent that fin whales weren’t just confined to the waters of west Cork. “Our original thinking was that they were just off Cork, then it became the whole south coast, and then it became the south west too,” said Dr Berrow. Indeed, a quick glance at ISCOPE, a powerful digital tool on the IWDG’s website that allows users to generate maps of species sightings off the Irish coast over any time frame, brings up a huge cluster for fin whales over west Cork, with smaller clusters over east Cork and Waterford, and some scattered dots around Kerry. Pádraig Whooley laughs at his own explanation for the distribution of sightings: “I think it’s very much the case that the distribution of sightings reflects the distribution of whalewatchers.”
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Pádraig Whooley has spent many days at sea off west Cork recently, camera in hand, as he attempted to photographically catalogue the fin whale population there. To date, 29 individuals have been identified, using natural physical markings such as patches of discolouration, nicks on their fins, or scars. “We’ve only touched the surface. There are lots more out there that we haven’t photographed,” he said.
Distribution
Fin whales — close relatives of other giants such as blue and sei whales are distributed worldwide, but tend to be less common in polar and tropical waters. They can be spotted off our south coast for almost ten months of the year, generally occurring in small feeding groups of three to eight. They are usually first seen in the waters of the south west in late May or June, persisting right through until February, with their distribution seeming to move eastwards towards Waterford and Wexford when they leave west Cork in December. “When we stop seeing them in west Cork, they start picking them off Ardmore head in Waterford,” said Pádraig Whooley. According to Dr Berrow, the explanation for this is simple — they are following their food. “We’re pretty SPIN
confident that the individuals we see in west Cork are the same individuals that are seen further east in Waterford and Wexford. This pretty much mirrors what we know about herring, which spawn in the west earlier and in the east later. And as the herring spawning progresses east, the whales seem to move east too.”
Migration
Fin whales usually disappear from our coastal waters early in spring, prompting what remains the most enduring question surrounding their behaviour in Irish waters: Where exactly do they go? The truth is that nobody really knows. The migration of fin whales is generally quite poorly understood. Some textbooks will tell you that they make annual migrations from warm, low latitude breeding and calving grounds to colder, higher latitude feeding waters, as is conventional for many large cetaceans. If this is the rule, however, the Celtic Sea population could be the exception. Dr Berrow elaborated: “There are only two to three months of the year that they’re not in Irish coastal waters. In fact, I’d be surprised if they went all the way out of Irish waters at all, given the time frame. Historically, a lot were caught off Spain, so they could be going there to calve, but we haven’t seen many fins with calves in Irish waters. One suggestion is that these could be immature individuals just hanging around for a few years before they go off to mate, but some of them are very, very big, and don’t look immature. We’re really not sure.” To answer the questions that surround the movement and migration of fin whales in the Celtic Sea, the IWDG hopes to tag individuals for satellite tracking. “We want to tag five or six because some tags might fail to transmit. The tags work for about 100 days. I think they’ll show the whales following the fish eastwards along the south coast, and then we’ll get to see where they go when they move offshore,” Dr Berrow explained. The big question is; why are they here? There is another major question mark surrounding these animals – just why did it take us so long to realise they are here? Even though concerted whale-watching efforts only began in 1999, surely fishermen, yachtsmen, and seaside locals would have noticed
“To date, 29 individuals have been identified, using natural physical markings such as patches of discolouration, nicks on their fins, or scars.”
Fin whales off the Cork coast. Photograph Pádraic Whooley, IWDG. these 20m titans and their giant blows sooner? Dr Berrow thinks that they might actually be relatively new arrivals to our south coast. “We’ve spoken to fishermen and farmers in the area, and I get the impression that maybe they (fin whales) weren’t around so much in the past. Maybe it’s because they were hunted so intensely, and what we’re seeing now is an increase in population after protection was introduced,” he said. Past locations of whaling stations and old sighting records don’t point to a long established Celtic Sea population. “The old whaling stations in Ireland were along the west coast. The one in Mayo was located there, for example, because it’s the closest point to the shelf edge, which we know oceanic Atlantic fin whales migrate along. The odd fin whale was caught in the 1700s, but mainly around Donegal, but there are no historical records of them off the south coast. So this habitat could be relatively recent,” Dr Berrow explained.
Populations
In the past, fins were a major target for whalers. Initially, they were simply too fast for fishermen, as despite their massive size, they are amongst the ocean’s fastest swimmers, and can travel at speeds of up to 22 knots (40km/hr). In the nineteenth century, however, the invention of the steamship and the explosive harpoon made them easier
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prey. Catches of fin whales increased through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and by the 1950s and 1960s around 30,000 were being caught annually, most in the southern hemisphere. Around 600 were landed at the Norwegian whaling station at Inishkea, Co Mayo. Pádraig Whooley thinks fins were “probably the mainstay” of the whaling industry off the west coast. But if their appearance in the Celtic Sea is part of a global ‘bounce’ in their numbers, just how many were in the north Atlantic before whaling began? There is considerable debate over the figures. Estimates based on ships’ logbooks have put the number at between 30,000 and 50,000, about the size of the current population. A recent estimate based on new genetic methods, however, suggests the ‘before whaling’ figure could be far higher. Researchers in the US examined samples of mitochondrial DNA from north Atlantic fin whales and humpback whales, and compared the genetic “distance” between these two species of the same family. Then, they measured the genetic diversity within the fin whale population. By doing so, they were able to calculate how many breeding females would have been required to account for the genetic variation they found, and thus they could estimate population size. They concluded that there were once a staggering 350,000 fin whales in the north Atlantic. Critics of this study have pointed out that this could have been the maximum size of the population
at any point in history, and that the reduction to their current numbers might have been caused by natural factors over hundreds of thousands of years, long before whaling began. Nonetheless, fin whale populations do appear to be recovering towards pre-whaling numbers, and Dr Berrow believes the Celtic Sea would present an ideal habitat for recovering populations to colonise. “They could be colonising a new habitat here along the south coast. The waters there are very different to what they used to be. There is massive productivity down there now that’s associated with the changing climate, with massive blooms of phytoplankton. It could be these oceanographic factors that have brought them here now,” he said.
Whale-watching
As news of the Celtic Sea’s Fin Whale population has spread, a fledgling whale-watching industry has sprung up in recent years. Currently, there are two operators running whale-watching tours from west Cork, with more expected to join them soon. Whale-watching has the potential to be of massive benefit to local communities, and can provide a viable and sustainable alternative to fishing, but Pádraig Whooley stresses the need for it to be done in the right way. “Here in West Cork the whalewatching industry is gaining momentum, but we need to try and avoid a situation which has too many operators working in the same waters, as concentrations of tourist boats may well have a detrimental impact.” “Apart from the demise of salmon stocks, the second biggest threat to Killer Whales near Victoria (British
Colombia, Canada) is commercial whale-watching. Research has shown that Killer Whales spend less time in the areas where commercial whale-watching boats operate, and that they also dive more and dive deeper and longer here. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that stage yet, but it does seem that whales have a preference for water where is no pressure. Of course if a Fin Whale doesn’t want you around it will lose you remarkably quickly. It can dive for fifteen to twenty minutes and resurface a mile away. But that said, Fin Whales shouldn’t have to go out of their way to avoid whale-watching boats.” A policy document produced by the IWDG providing guidelines to marine wildlife tour operators has since been given legal status by the National Parks & Wildlife Service and the Marine Safety Directorate. The document sets out a variety of regulations; such as the speed whalewatching boats can travel at, how close they can approach whales, and how long they can spend with them. Dr Berrow believes there is “huge potential” for marine wildlife tourism in Ireland, citing Scotland The website of the Irish Whale & Dolphin Group provides up-to-date news and records of whale and dolphin sightings and strandings, as well as information on whalewatching, IWDG events and courses, and species profiles. It can be found at www.iwdg.ie.
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as an example of a country that has successfully developed such an industry. He would like to see a whole ecosystem approach taken in the management of the whales in Irish waters: “I spent a few years working in the Antarctic, and there, when they’re setting quotas for the krill catch, they don t just take into account the sustainability of the krill population, but also the amount of krill needed by predators. This isn’t really in the mindset in the North Atlantic. The whole push should be on ecosystem management.” West Cork and the south coast is now quickly gaining a reputation as one of the premier whale-watching spots not just in Europe, but in the world. Pádraig Whooley recalls a recent day spent at sea where harbour porpoises, common dolphins, minke and fin whales were all encountered. “You could have whalewatched anywhere in the world on the same day and you wouldn’t have seen the same diversity,” he says. And if this is a haven for cetaceans, fin whales are certainly the jewel in its crown. But with pressure on these behemoths likely to grow as the area becomes more popular with tourists and enthusiasts alike, Pádraig Whooley stresses the importance of ensuring adequate protection is in place, especially when, as he says “so little is known about the ecology or behaviour of these fin whales in Irish waters.” Lenny Antonelli a graduate in Marine Science at NUIG is a freelance journalist specialising in science and environmental issues.
Science Foundation Ireland reaches out
science foundation ireland fondúireacht eolaíochta éireann
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esearch,no matter how groundbreaking Speaking at the recent presentation of the or exciting, cannot exist in a vacuum. 2007 awards, Professor Frank Gannon said, The general public needs to know about “This gender imbalance among students it, schools need to know about it, the taking university engineering courses means media needs to know about it, but most that we are failing to tap into a source importantly, the next generation of of potential talent. We need to produce researchers need to know about it – the sufficient numbers of graduates to continue young people of today who will be taking to attract global companies in science and this research to the next level. engineering, upon which our economy It all comes down to outreach — linking depends. To do this, we need to attract more up with schools, university laboratories, David O’Connell from Douglas Community women which these awards are helping to research groups, and young people about School and Jessica Perrot from Christ the King address.” to embark on a scientific career. Science school with Dr. Dan O’Sullivan a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has developed Foundation Ireland’s Secondary Teacher Centres for Science, a range of programmes such as STARs, Assistant Researcher from Colaiste Chriost Ri. Engineering and Technology SFI/Dell Young Women in Engineering Scholarship, Speakers for Schools, and the (CSET) Programme outreach activities of CSETs, which focus on bringing the scientific If you thought GI Jake was a soldier in the US army, think again. His research it funds out into the wider community. full name is actually Gastrointestinal Jake, and he’s a cartoon character
Reach for the STARS Let’s start with STAR (Secondary Teacher Assistant Researcher), the programme that filters new skills and knowledge through secondary school teachers down to their pupils to encourage an active interest in science. Here’s how it works. SFI funded researchers submit their proposed STAR research project to SFI for publication on the SFI website. Teachers look at the projects, select one of interest and make contact directly with the SFI funded researcher. Both researchers and teachers then submit their joint STAR proposal. “The programme provides teachers with exciting opportunities to work at the cutting edge of research under the direction of world-class researchers, acquiring vital skills and knowledge which can be passed on to the scientists and engineers of the future”, said Professor Frank Gannon, SFI Director General. A good example of a recent STARs initiative is the Cancer Biology programme for transition year students, which will examine how cancer grows inside the body, how it develops and how this fits into everyday genetics and biology. The module aims to improve the understanding of the genetics and molecular biology of cancer and was created by Cork based teachers Cian O’Mahony and Dan O’ Sullivan in conjunction with Professor Gerald O’Sullivan and Dr. Mark Tangey at the Cork Cancer Research Centre. The module will provide teachers with a practical and relevant tool to use in biology lessons and the pilot programme will initially be run in four schools in Cork -Douglas Community School, Coláiste Chriost Rí, Christ the King and Mount Mercy.
Young Women in Engineering Scholarship The SFI/Dell Young Women in Engineering Scholarship encourages more female students into engineering as an undergraduate degree and future career, and is especially interested in those who want to do the type of four-year engineering degree course that is not usually chosen by girls. The ten successful scholars receive €2,000 a year, a DELL notebook computer, the assistance and support of a research active mentor throughout their undergraduate career, and the opportunity to spend summers in a research internship in university or industry.
who’s part of the education and outreach programme at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC), University College Cork (UCC); one of Science Foundation Ireland’s seven Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETS). Along with Luke O’Cyte (leukocyte – a white blood cell), GI Jake battles against Pat O’ Gen (pathogen) to keep us healthy. The cartoon characters appear on the APC’s dedicated website for schools, http://microbemagic.ucc.ie and feature in interactive presentations its scientists make each year in schools. All seven of SFI’s CSETs undertake extensive education and outreach activities aimed at keeping the public aware of exciting new research findings and to encourage young people to study and take up careers in research. These activities include computer games, visitor programmes, videos, teaching packs and TV programmes. The Biomedical Diagnostics Institute (BDI) is a multidisciplinary research institute focused on the development of next generation biomedical diagnostic devices. BDI is committed to working extensively with schools. The Me and My Body Programme (MAMBO) is an initiative aimed at the 8-12 year old primary school audience.The core focus of the programme is a website which enables the audience to explore the human body and link elements to research taking place at the BDI. The website is character led and fully animated. The initiative is complemented with “hands on activities” for school children. See: http://www.bdi.ie/mambo
Speaking out in schools Hoping to have an impact on the next generation of scientists and engineers, SFI funded researchers in third level institutions are happy to visit primary and secondary schools to give talks on their own research, on more general science and engineering topics, or on careers in science and engineering. The SFI website now has contact details for 67 researchers who are willing to give talks in schools. Interesting titles include: Why Blood is Red – Drugs, Vampires, and Medicine; What Happens to the Brain as We Age; The Eye, Vision and Super-vision; Exploring the Maths in your iPod and DVD Player, and The Body’s Army Against Invaders. Full details of all of these initiatives are available on the SFI website – www.sfi.ie
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SPIN
Auto software for safer cars Lero’s software engineering research for use in cars and other vehicles promises to benefit Irish industry in general, as well as car drivers, reports Anna Nolan. he human race has been conducting a love affair with the motorcar since its invention, and the number of different makes and models is growing at an ever-increasing rate. Every year sees a host of new versions introduced to the car-buying public. Of course, styling is what first attracts the eye, but under the bonnet and deep in the car interior a software engineering revolution has been quietly taking place. Today’s car carries a huge array of electronic devices and needs increasingly sophisticated software to make everything work smoothly together. The importance of the motorcar was taken into account in determining the research programmes of Lero — the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre. Led by the University of Limerick (UL), this two-year old body has research groups in Dublin City University, Trinity College and University College Dublin, as well as in UL, each with its own specialties. Software engineering is a broad, ever changing discipline with many facets. Research runs all the way from highly theoretical, abstract models, right through the development of numerous branches of technology into
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studies of industrial practice. So it is important to have a research focus that still allows general application of results. The sheer rate of change in automotive software makes it attractive for research in software engineering. Firstly, there is the huge world market in which to apply it. Secondly, it is challenging, since it requires high quality software because of legal, safety, quality and interoperability issues. It represents a big opportunity for Irish researchers and companies too. Although we don’t make cars, we have a very strong automotive components industry, and software is a significant part of this activity. And importantly, over and above all these considerations, much of what is learnt and discovered in R&D in the automotive area can be transferred to other industry areas. So when Lero was set up in 2005 with 11.7 million euro in Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) funding, it was with the aim of initially putting a great deal of emphasis on automotive software along with that for medical devices.
Using a laptop to check performance. Cars rely increasingly on electronics for control and safety
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Lero is by no means confined to this area, though, and the centre has undertaken a wide range of projects in other areas. The plan is to continue to broaden out. This initial 11.7 million euro Lero funding came from the SFI’s CSET (Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology) programme, so industry links are especially important. Among the companies Lero has connections with are Intel, Analog Devices, IBM Ireland and Robert Bosch. The Centre Director is Professor Kevin Ryan and the Scientific Director is Professor Klaus Pohl. Lero has five researchers at DCU, four at UCD, three at TCD, and about 15 at UL. Additionally, the postgraduate numbers at time of writing are DCU 1; UCD 4; TCD 3; and UL 17. Around 20 projects are currently under way in Lero’s various locations. Within automotive systems, Lero has five research areas. Projects within these areas are linked to one another and to industry.
Automotive research areas
Within automotive systems, Lero focuses on five research areas: Autonomic Software Systems (AUS); Globally Distributed Software Development (GSD); Mathematics Applied to Software Engineering (MSE); Service and Aspect-based Component Architectures (SAA); and Software Product Lines (SPL). The choice of these areas was based on the strategic importance of the area to the chosen domains; the significance of the area and domain for Ireland’s future development; the potential value of research results within other relevant domains; and current and planned clustering of research expertise in Lero. AUS, which is being researched at UCD, is concerned with nextgeneration software systems, ranging from communications networks to automotive control systems. These will be required to act both intelligently and autonomously. Lero is seeking to ensure that these systems are able to adapt to changing environments SPIN
The software engineering PhD course is the first of its kind in Ireland Prof Kevin Ryan, Director of the Lero Centre.
while at the same time maintaining consistent behaviour. When one thinks of how splitsecond decisions by a driver can determine whether an accident is avoided or not, the importance of incar systems being able to react swiftly but stably is clear. GSD research, based at UL, arises from the fact that globalisation has resulted in software development being distributed worldwide, with many organisations setting up software development in locations such as Eastern Europe, India and China. Lero is studying the software processes and methods, the socioorganisational influences on software development, and how SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) will be positioned in global value chains. The MSE research team at DCU aim to increase understanding of the abstract mathematical principles underlying software. They plan to improve and adapt mathematical approaches and integrate them into the
full software development cycle. In a nutshell, they want to make maths more useable and useful for software engineers. SAA research, based at TCD, arises from the increased demands to combine, recombine and adapt the basic building blocks of software, which demands in turn have arisen from the telecommunications revolution, both wired and wireless. Here Lero is investigating software architectures that provide a predictable composition of services and components without negative side effects. The SPL team, based at UL, are focusing on the area of the product line approach to developing new software. Companies successfully using this approach are able to build a variety of systems with a minimum of technical diversity. The Lero SPL researchers are aiming to make such product derivation more effective, efficient and reliable, so that this approach can be widely adopted in the automotive
ReachiNg out
A Lero priority is to raise awareness of software engineering and to ensure effective knowledge transfer from is own research projects to the second and third-level sectors. Clare McInerney, who joined Lero this summer as Knowledge Transfer Specialist, is responsible for the Lero Outreach and Education programme. “Software engineering is present everywhere in our daily lives,” said Ms McInerney. “It manifests itself in mobile phone, car engines, ATMs, air traffic control systems, motor way tollgates and so on.” She pointed out that for the novice user, software engineering is difficult to see. “The goal of the Lero education and outreach programme is to make software engineering, and in particular, Lero research visible and accessible at second- and third-level in Ireland. “At fourth level the programme is concerned with organising events and providing services to postgraduate students and researchers.”
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and other industries.
New building and innovative new PhD programme
At present, Lero is operating in premises in the International Science Centre in the National Technology Park, which surrounds the University of Limerick (UL). Now it has been awarded 7.3 million euro to fund a new headquarters building for the centre and to develop a new PhD programme. The funding has been granted under the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions (PRTLI) Cycle 4 by the Higher Education Authority. The Lero headquarters at UL will house office space, computer laboratories and a display area, where the public can find out more about how software works. The building project is at an early stage, with the process of appointing an architect in train. The new software engineering PhD research education programme is the first of its kind in Ireland, according to Centre Director Kevin Ryan. “The funding will allow us to establish a Lero Graduate School of Software Engineering,” said Professor Ryan. “So Lero will contribute to research, industry and education in the years ahead.” The course, which is designed by the four member universities, aims to help students to develop the necessary skills to carry out high quality research. It is expected to begin next year. In the first year of their PhD work, students will be able to choose several classroom-based courses, such as research methods. Professor Ryan said this ‘groundwork year’ would help them to develop their research skills in a systematic manner and to develop a support network. He said this was vital, considering the project-based nature of software development. It is expected that 20 students will join this new graduate programme in the first year. Twelve of these will be fully funded under the PRTLI grant, while the remainder will be supported through a variety of other funding schemes. Professor Ryan said that Lero hoped to attract international PhD students to the programme within the next two to three years. Anna Nolan is a science and technology journalist based in the Mid West.
Seven spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata
NATURAL reactions q B
The number and variety of plant and animal species in the Irish countryside have been declining for decades now. This is a crucial issue here and elsewhere as if too many species are lost, nature could get nasty and humans could suffer, writes Seán Duke.
iodiversity. Yawn. What is it? Who cares? Another environmental fad? Something that we don’t have to pay much attention to? A bit like global warming, the ozone layer, and the rain forests? Too vague, and far too boring. Nothing to see here, time to switch off. Does this thought process feel familiar? If so, perhaps you should know that the loss of biodiversity, meaning the loss of species of plants and animals, could ultimately impact on human health and well-being. Paying attention now? Good. Alarmingly, many experts believe that we are losing species fast, and that there is a danger that we could be fast approaching some “tipping point” where, even if we introduce last ditch measures, it won’t bring our ecology back to equilibrium. That could mean, for example, that we end up with sterile soils, where no crops will grow, out of control weather systems, pollution of our seas, global warming, and serious
floods. There are even worse scenarios where the planet could become almost unfit for human life. “There is certainly a risk if you push biological systems to extremes like that you actually get extremely nasty, unpleasant things happening, and risking human health and everything else,” said Dr Gordon Purvis, Department of Environmental
Mayfly nymph
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Resource Management, UCD, who is at the forefront of biodiversity research in Ireland.
Background
Biodiversity is a relatively new issue in science, with its profile increasing markedly only after the 1992 Rio Convention. Then all European states, and many other nations (with the notable exception of the USA) signed up to the principle that they should do what they can to protect the environment from human activities that negatively affected it. “There was this big concern that we had reached this ‘tipping point’ and biodiversity was being so damaged that we were damaging the natural world to a point where it might not be recoverable, recalled Dr Purvis. “That convention in 1992 put an official seal or stamp on this international concern, but much more importantly a commitment to try and do something about it SPIN
by essentially a decision to integrate concern about biodiversity into every sector so that meant every area of human activity had to consider its likely impact on biodiversity – it became a kind of formalised process. So, with in Europe produced a whole series of biodiversity action plans, one of which is a BAP (Biodiversity Action Plan) one of which was for agriculture and the knock on from that was that each individual country produced their own variant.” “The interesting thing about ’92 was that it introduced the idea of a target date to halt the international loss of biodiversity. This has been a kind of albatross hanging around everyone’s neck since because there is a commitment to halt this perceived loss of biodiversity by 2010, which is very close now. It seemed from the politicians’ point of view, a safe enough target to push it off into the future. The reality though is that it has crept up very quickly, but it is still an issue, it hasn’t gone away, and now, I guess there will be some revision and extension of that target, it is a prominent concern now”.
high quality habitats that are seminatural, such as the Oak remnants in Wicklow and Kerry, Dr Purvis and his colleagues decided to focus their research efforts on the farmed landscape, as whatever was going on here, given its extent, was going to have the most impact on biodiversity.
Baseline
One of the problems facing anyone that wishes to study changes in biodiversity over time in Ireland is that the records, going back, are poor.
Ireland
In Ireland the issue of biodiversity much necessarily revolve around agriculture, and what agriculture is doing, as Ireland remains a predominantly agricultural landscape. At European level postRio, the policy makers began to try and push agriculture into a more environmentally friendly direction. This was done through the introduction of the agri-environmental schemes, which became a central plank in rural development policy. The recent reform of the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) meant a shift in emphasis in agriculture towards environmental concerns and protection – to the idea of multifunction agriculture. Over 60 per cent of the Irish landscape is a farming landscape, so farmers, and farming practice had to be at the centre of whatever was done regarding biodiversity. Dr Purvis said that when considering Irish biodiversity, it is important to remember that there is no such thing as totally ‘natural’ vegetation in Ireland – it is all influenced by humans in one way or another. Though there are important
Tortoishell butterfly, Aglais urticae
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There just isn’t the history of record keeping of flora and fauna species, and the changes to them over time, as there would be in other countries, such as the UK, where records exist going back quite a long time. Researchers have, however, belatedly started to gather information on biodiversity here, and, for example, there is a countryside bird survey in Ireland that in recent years has started to gather information on biodiversity, and that has shown a decline in a lot of different bird populations. The problem for birds is that large
open, arable fields, which cover a lot of Ireland, will benefit some arable specialist birds, but not most birds. It has been recognised that what biodiversity researchers in Ireland really need is “baseline” information - that is something against which change can be compared. Ireland is only starting to generate baseline data, and typically this takes the form of identifying species that are important in terms of the general health of biodiversity in an area, and watching whether there is any change in this species over time. It is not good enough to simply follow what has been done in the UK, or elsewhere, said Dr Purvis, as Ireland’s geography, topography and the nature of its farming is different. “I mean the Irish landscape is quite, quite different from quite a lot of the UK, it would be similar to western parts of Britain like Wales, for instance, small fields. Across the east of England would be totally different, much more arable farming base,” said Dr Purvis.
Ag-Biota
Dr Purvis and his colleagues wanted to develop a national expertise in biodiversity research within the context of modern agriculture. That was the concept behind a proposal that was submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called AgBiota, which received funding. The project, was based in UCD and funded by the EPA for five years, rather than the usual three, which indicated the amount of work involved. The work was to focus on the farmed landscape, rather than the special areas, such as the Oak remnants. The project represented a massive task, to build a base from which biodiversity research could be done in Ireland. Its work, which began in 2001, will be completed in November this year, after an extension was granted by the funding body. “The extension was done because we ended up doing an awful lot more work, having learnt what
was important to monitor (at a small number of sites). We looked at four groups, birds, bees, aquatic invertebrates and parasitoid wasps, pretty obscure insects, but biologically they are very interesting. AG-BIOTA succeeded in identifying these four groups as key bio-indicator groups,” said Dr Purvis. Bio-indicators are species that reflect the health of biodiversity generally in an area. These are important, because it is far easier to monitor key bioindicator species, than every single species in an ecosystem, which would be hugely costly and time consuming. Birds and bees are a good bio-indicator to sue as the public like them, and bees are important for pollination. Aquatic invertebrates are important because they can reflect water quality, or the lack of it, while parasitoid wasps are important biologically. The next step for Dr Purvis and colleagues was to understand the relationships between the biological indicator groups, and farming practice.
Hoverfly, Helophilus sp
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Capsid, Stenotus sp
The kinds of questions that Dr Purvis wanted now to answer included: What kind of impact does changing land usage have on biodiversity? What is the likely effect on, for example, water quality, from a change in farm practice? By finding the answers to these questions, those farm practices that are very damaging to water quality, for example, could be curtailed, while those with the opposite effect encouraged. This approach promises to provide, for the first time in Ireland, a means for policy makers to make informed decisions on how best to protect biodiversity, and balance that against the need to protect farming livelihoods.
Agri-Baseline
Much of the push for developing a means to measure impacts of farming
practice on biodiversity is coming from the EU, said Dr Purvis. There has been an enormous amount of public money spent on agri-environmental schemes across Europe, and the EU is keen to see whether that has had a positive impact. Are taxpayers getting their money worth? The focus is on creating of scientific “baselines” that can enable scientists to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of these agri-environmental schemes. This need formed the basis for the second major biodiversity research project in UCD, the Agri-Baseline. This project was funded by the Department of Agriculture. Agri-Baseline was highly practical; it applied the knowledge gained from Ag-Biota on how to measure biodiversity to the real world. To do this, three regions — Cork, Sligo and Offaly were chosen and 180 individual
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farms. These areas were chosen for the diversity of land usages, and as a reflection of the diversity of land usage in Ireland in general. Agri-Baseline was to provide the means to check biodiversity on a continual rolling basis, and to do it in a way that is time-efficient, so it doesn’t involve counting actual species. Dr Purvis and co. divided up areas in 10km2 boxes, and applied standard methodologies. The key element sought was simplicity, to find a simpler way to measure biodiversity. “There will always be a need to go back and check and validate that your relationships still exist, but it means you can sample much larger numbers of farms or regions of the country much more frequently if you can more simply measure things,” said Dr Purvis. “Things relating to farming practice. How farming is changing.”
Hoverfly
AE-FOOTPRINT
The next step for Dr Purvis, after Ag-Biota, which developed ways to measure diversity, and AgriBaseline, which sought to apply that knowledge on specific farms, was AE-FOOTPRINT. This EC supported scheme seeks to develop common methods, right across Europe to assess the environmental performance of agri-environmental schemes. The EU wants to develop a standardised system to assess the effectiveness of agri-environmental schemes whether they were on the Great Hungarian Plain, the Finnish forests, or in the Irish ‘Golden Vale’.
Dr Purvis and his group are among the researchers across Europe trying to work out – as the Irish representatives in the AE-FOOTPRINT project - how common standards can be draw up for very different countries, regions and localities. “So you have this massive diversity of farming types, geography and biological conditions and policy differences and the challenge now is to develop a common method that can assess for any scheme, in any geographical region, in any agricultural context, the impact of agrienvironmental policies, which are all very different.”
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“That’s a real challenge and what this project has actually done is develop this idea of an agrienvironmental (AE) footprint index, which is simply a way of describing the agri-environment in any context.” But, all the hard work is worth it, if only to prevent nature getting nasty. This is a more extended version of an article that originally appeared in UCD Today.
Laura Breslin, winner of this year’s RDS Young Science Writers’ Competition, examines the role of music in our lives.
H
ave you ever wondered, as you hum along to your favourite song, what it is that you like so much about it? As a student of two musical instruments myself — the viola and the piano, I was interested to learn more about the route music takes as it winds its way into our ears and through our heads, sometimes remaining there for longer than we’d like! Music to the ears — haven’t we all been envious of someone’s musical talent once in our lives, how we’d all like to be gifted in that way? Or is there a Moby, a Mozart or a Madonna hidden in us all? Well, read on to find out… It’s fair to say that music plays a huge role in our everyday lives. Just think of all the times you’ve had a song stuck in your head — whether it was an advertising jingle, a theme tune from a programme or something you heard on the radio that morning. Let’s also consider the different forms of music. Singing and instrumental pieces are the main ones but there are numerous styles and uses of music within these. Take singing for example. We have backing singers, singing in harmony, folk and traditional singing and that’s before we even go into the countless various genres! So, where to begin when we think of music in scientific terms? The first thing that springs to mind when we consider music scientifically is whether music is a basic aspect of human nature. Is music merely take-it-or-leave-it entertainment, or something deeper? Are some people born with musical talent, or can we acquire it during our lifetimes? The resounding answer from researchers is that yes, the capacity to appreciate and play music is part of human nature1. Some people may have a natural disposition to enjoy music just as other activities, for example languages, are enjoyed by some more than others. With regards to acquiring musical talent, it has been pointed out that many musical geniuses come from families of skilled musicians. Examples include the Bach and Mozart families. This suggests that the talent is hereditary. The general opinion, however, is that the obtaining and developing of musical ability is the same as that of other intellectual and academic activities. With enough interest, encouragement, motivation and practising, the sky is the limit.
There has been a focus on human evolution to reach this answer. It is pointed out that our primate ancestors, and indeed many animals today, made use of their voices to ‘sing’ to potential mates with the purpose of attracting them. The source of research that has been used most widely in this field is studies among infants. It has been shown that infants have as good an ability as adults have to distinguish between notes and are sensitive to rhythm. A particularly impressive finding showed the effects of Mozart on young children2. Seven month old infants were tested on Mozart pieces of music after having heard them daily over the previous two weeks. The results suggested that the familiar music was retained in the long-term memory and that the children’s listening preferences were influenced by how similar a piece of music was to the Mozart pieces. Much of this research has taken place only in the past ten to fifteen years, so this new view of human nature has been created only in the last decade or so. A further argument on this point is that all cultures in the world have music4. All music is structured around the octave — the eight notes that make up a scale, and all involve singing songs connected to certain emotions. Thus, music is known as ‘the universal language’. This strongly suggests that humans have an inborn capacity to process and appreciate music. I was curious to know how we listen to and process music. When sound waves of music enter the ear they are broken down according to the spectrum of sound frequencies. The waves pluck a spiral sheet in the inner ear, much like guitar strings. The firing of brain cells are triggered by this plucking. These brain cells make up the hearing parts of the brain. Varying patterns of firing excite certain groups of cells and this is how the connection between music and emotions, thoughts and past experiences is created. One particular hearing part of the brain called the auditory cortex, situated just above the ears, is where the conscious experience of music is generated. The auditory cortex is connected to the brain’s frontal lobe. This is just behind the forehead and controls our capabilities for anticipation and abstraction. There are also channels from these two areas to the parts of the brain
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SPIN
emotions are produced. The culture in which we live influences the development of these passageways4. Just think of the differences between traditional Irish music and Latino music. Information on how the brain processes music previously relied on research from sufferers of brain damage. Although it is now possible to image the brain during various musical activities such as listening and learning, the information obtained from older studies is very interesting. An example is a study carried out on a man who had lost most of his auditory cortex to strokes. He still had the ability to hear, but found speech and music hard to understand. Having escaped injury in part of an area named the auditory association cortex, this meant that he could still recognise his favourite songs4. Scientists say cases like this give important information about how parts of the brain integrate what we hear with what we know about meaningful sounds like music. Other fascinating findings include the fact that it is thought that the amount of brain involved in active music making greater than in any other activity, with the exception of the storms of electrical activity in the brain during an epileptic seizure1. Scientists have also discovered that there is an increased flow of blood and oxygen to the brain while listening to or playing music. Furthermore, there is evidence that people who learn to play a musical instrument before the age of ten have larger brains than those who don’t!1 The size of some parts of the cortex concerned with mentally rehearsing and attending to music are increased. Another noteworthy investigation found that people with musical expertise process music differently from people who play no music. Musicians process music in the part of the brain related to language responses and even react more to music than to language. Non-musicians activate a completely separate network. An extension of this experiment compared the processing of music by jazz musicians to that of other musicians. Jazz music is based more on improvisation than classical music is and it was found that different parts of the brain were activated in each genre3. There is an interesting coincidence to note as regards the processing of music as a language — Howard Gardner in his radical multiple intelligence theory, proposed that musical talent is a form of intelligence and runs in an almost structural parallel to linguistic intelligence6. Does our education system nurture or value musical excellence as much as academic excellence? Now that we have investigated music itself, let’s turn away from this focus and towards the effects of music elsewhere. There is a great deal of interest in the effects and possible benefits of music on non-musical activities. At this stage, we need to narrow down exactly what is implied by ‘music’ in order to discuss its effects. The definition of music is ‘an art form using a melodious and harmonious combination of notes’7. There are two types of involvement in music- passive and active. Passive involvement is listening to music. The extent of engagement and interaction is not huge so there aren’t many effects or benefits of this. However, some behaviours can be affected by passive involvement, for example the use of background music during consumer purchasing can be effective1. Shops hope to change their customers’ moods positively, make them spend longer in the shop and spend more money. It is with active involvement that we see most positive effects. Active involvement includes listening to music in an educated way, learning to play a musical instrument and composing music. The strongest benefits are that of active involvement1.
Getting back to the effects and benefits of music, ‘nonmusical’ activities can be divided into two areas of major significance. These are the effects of music when used therapeutically and the effects on other cognitive processes; particularly in problem-solving, attention, learning, memory and reasoning. An interesting study giving definite results in the latter area was one involving three year olds. Out of a group of children, some took piano lessons, some learned to use the computer and some did nothing. After a few weeks, those who had played piano were better than the other groups at solving IQ test-like problems. On a similar thread, there is evidence that secondary school students who have musical backgrounds perform better in exams4. Think about it in your own life; are the intelligent people you know involved some way in music? Scientists think that the reason for this lies in a concept called generalisation. This is the idea that a learner is helped in a number of subjects due to the studying of one subject. If we examine music as a cognitive process, we can see that music-listening and playing involves many cognitive skills. Take for example reading a score and playing a musical instrument. This involves understanding and interpreting the notes, intense concentration and memory. Perceptual and motor skills are also employed. Researchers argue that these skills can be transferred to and used in other, different intellectual activities. These activities are thought to include language development, emotional development — a lot of emotion can put into playing, reasoning, personality and social development — goals are being set and achieved, creativity and group interaction and cooperation — when playing as part of a group. However, there could be other explanations. Children who are intelligent and confident could naturally shine in academic subjects and music. Perhaps parents who can afford to pay for music lessons can also afford to get their children a better education. On balance, it is agreed that involvement in music nurtures the development of intelligence. Have you ever contemplated if there really are any benefits of music, as you grit your teeth and block your ears from the racket of music you don’t like? A major area in which music has been shown to have incredible benefits is in music therapy. This is the use of music to promote wellbeing and includes a field of using music in the remedy of physical and behavioural problems. The belief that music is a form of healing is as old as the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Progress took place following the two World Wars, when it was noticed that injured soldiers responded positively to musicians playing to them in hospitals5. The clinical form of music therapy is a very broad field. A wide spectrum of people can benefit from music therapy. People with mental health needs, learning or physical disabilities, substance abuse problems or Alzheimer’s can all gain. No musical ability is necessary in order to respond to it. Forms of music therapy include song writing, lyric discussion and music performance. Music can also be applied therapeutically by healthy individuals. There is indication that music can have powerful effects on mood. Music involvement has also been shown to reduce the release of stress hormones. An astonishing use of music therapy is in comatose patients who have uncontrollable epilepsy; brain seizures even when unconscious. The frequency of seizures is reduced by the playing of classical music1.
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When we think of music as a scientific concept, we may wonder if this is a paradox. Music and science seem like such opposites. One is creative and full of emotion; the other is based on facts. Music is a universal language, another intelligence yet to be developed further and a form of therapy. There is a lot of science behind the progression of music through our ears and to our brains. Following on from this, the effect of music on the brain is a whole other field of research — emotionally, cognitively, therapeutically... I might not yet have figured out how to rid that annoying tune from my head, but I have learnt a lot from this research; a further insight into the ‘sound of the music’.
References (1) www.musica.uci.edu/mrn (30 March 2007) (2) www.sciencedirect.com/science (31 March) (3) www.indiana.edu (3 April) (4) www.harvard.edu/gazette (1 April) (5) www.musictherapy.org (4 April) (6) www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner/htm (5 April) (7) Collins English Dictionary (7 April)
Thank you for the music!
Laura Breslin, winner of this year’s RDS Young Science Writers’ Competition receiving the Perpetual Award from Mary Hanifin, Minister for Education and Science. Laura, who attends St Joseph’s Secondary School, Castlebar, Co Mayo, entered the 14 to 16 year old Science Report category. Laura was among the winners in two previous competition, and this year she was declared overall winner.
RDS Young Science Writers results Short Story (12-13 year olds)
First Place, Aaron Elbel, Spectacular Digestion, St. Brendan’s College, Killarney, Co. Kerry Second Place, Zoe Watchorn, The Principle of Archimedes, Loreto College, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2 Highly Commended, Ciara Magee, The End of the Rainbow, Our Lady’s Templeogue, Dublin 6W Science Report (12-13 year olds) First Place, no award Second Place , Breda Larkin, Local illegal dump unearthed, Hazelwood College, Dromollogher, Co. Limerick Short Story (14-16 year olds) First Place, no award Second Place, James Bennett, Chain Reactions, CBS Secondary School, Thomas Street, Wexford Second Place, Daron Anderson, Foolish Ways — A plunge into the Infinite, Belvedere College, Dublin 1 Highly Commended, Liam O’Brien, A force to be reckoned with, Mean Scoil Nua an Leith-Triuigh, Castlegregory, Co. Kerry Science Report (14-16 year olds) First Place, Laura Breslin, The Sound of Music, St. Josephs Secondary School, Castlebar, Co. Mayo
Second Place, Eamonn Bell, 1, 2, skip a few…99, 100, Sligo Grammar School, The Mall, Sligo Highly Commended, Lorraine Spotten, Can a virus Kill Cancer? Should a Virus Kill Cancer? Royal School, College St. Cavan Short Story (17-19 year olds) First Place, Thomas McDonnell, A Dangerous Habit, Carrickon-Shannon Community School, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim Second Place, no award Highly Commended, Brian O’Rourke, New Horizons, Belvedere College, Dublin 1 Science Report (17-19 year olds) First Place. Carol O’Brien, Stem cells: Hope for the Future, Brigidine Secondary School, Mountrath, Co. Laois Second Prize, no award Highly Commended, Paul Kelliher, Out of the Boundless Blue, Intermediate School, Killorglin, Co. Kerry Highly Commended, Michael Macken, The Black Death, St. Louis Community School, Kiltimagh, Co. Mayo Overall Winner, Laura Breslin, The Sound of Music
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Ones to watch
A sensitive type
drug delivery, decreased requirements for the total amount of drug and protection of drugs, which are rapidly destroyed by the body,” said Bernadette.
Dopamine
In this new series, Science Spin will highlight young researchers that are making their mark. For the next six issues we will focus on some of the talent emerging at NUIM. r Bernadette Alcock, an electroanalytical chemist, could be called a sensitive type. That’s because in her work as a scientist she is interested in developing sensors that can detect the presence of important things. As part of her PhD, for instance, she worked on sensors that could detect pollutants in drinking water. Now, in her post-doctoral work, she is working on sensors that can detect the key neuro-transmitter, dopamine, in the living brain. This work could — in future — help with the diagnosis and treatment of a range of serious brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
D
Water
One of the primary jobs of a good chemist, as Dr Alcock, understands is to create new materials, and to develop ideas of how best to apply them usefully. As part of her doctoral studies, Bernadette, worked on developing new materials that can sense the presence of nitrates and heavy ions in water — something crucial to assessing whether a water supply is fit for human consumption, or not. The specific materials that Bernadette worked on were polymer matrices, and they worked quite well. The quality of the water supply is crucial to many people and the pollution-detecting polymers could potentially be used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agricultural sector, local
authorities, water analysis laboratories and water analysis companies. Ireland is bound by obligations under the EU Water Framework Directive, which came into law in December 2000. The Directive relates to maintaining water quality in rivers, lakes, canals, groundwater and nearshore coastal waters. The requirement to ensure water quality is at a high level means that polymers that can detect pollutants are going to be of very practical use to many public and private bodies.
Drugs
Following on from her doctoral studies, Bernadette became interested in the field of drug delivery, and this is the subject of her current post-doctoral work, funded by the Health Research Board (HRB). The over-arching aim of this work is to find ways to better control the level of a drug administered to a person, thereby reducing side effects, while optimising the effectiveness of the drug. This is all about making drugs work better for individuals. Bernadette is working on developing methods to control the release of important drugs, such as dopamine, from polymers. The polymer must be capable of changing such that a particular drug can be incorporated or released in a controlled manner. If this can be achieved, said Bernadette, if offers many potential benefits for users. “The controlled release of drugs from polymers offers many advantages over conventional methods (of administering drugs), including better control of the drug level administered, resulting in fewer side effects, local
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Bernadette has received funding as a principal investigator from Enterprise Ireland to develop a dopamine sensor. Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter. The ability to monitor dopamine levels in the living brain could have important applications in the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. One of the scientific difficulties in developing a dopamine sensor is that high concentrations of ascorbic acid co-exist with dopamine in biological systems, and there is no sensing material – currently at least – that can discriminate between dopamine and ascorbic acid. Therefore, selectivity and sensitivity are crucial aspects to the development of a dopamine sensor. Bernadette’s approach is, thus, to aim to develop simple materials that are both highly selective and sensitive to dopamine. This work has significant commercial potential, down the line. Bernadette explained: “As the project matures and we gain a better understanding of the product, the options for a spin-out company or a licensing deal will be investigated in consultation with the technology transfer office at NUI Maynooth and Enterprise Ireland. Licensing would be the preferred step.”
Outreach Bernadette is also a talented communicator, and as part of her role as a post-doctoral researcher she supervised summer interns on the NUI Maynooth SPUR (Summer Programme for Undergraduate Researchers) programme. She also has been involved in reaching out to school students and trying to get them interested in science. “I give talks to primary and secondary schools, a recent example of which was to 3rd to 6th year students at Scoil Chonglais, Baltinglass, and to 6th class students at Scoil Naomh Iosaf (both in Baltinglass). I have also been involved in University Open Days promoting Chemistry to Leaving Certificate students.” SPIN
our everyday life. Most products that make our society “tick” are derived, in one way or another, from minerals. Shaped by technology, they are the building blocks of virtually everything our modern comfort is made of. In other words, without minerals and the science that tells us how to find, exploit and use them, there would be no civilisation as we know it.
Prestigious conference
A view of mining in the 16th century based on Agricola’s De Re Metallica.
Digging Deeper Marie-Catherine Mousseau reports that prospectors are going further and deeper in their search for minerals.
W
hat springs to mind when you think of minerals? Maybe beautiful stones like quartz or amethyst, or precious metals like gold, silver or platinum? Or less beautiful and more common but very useful metals such as iron, copper, zinc or aluminium, which are key elements of cars, buildings and many home
appliances? In any case you would be right, minerals include all of these and much more. They actually include everything with a defined chemical composition and a crystal structure that comes naturally from the Earth (see box). So minerals comprise silicate from sand used to make glass or cement in construction. They also include sodium in salt, and less known compounds such as kaolin, still useful as part of glossy paper. You’ve got it, minerals are central to
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Ireland does contribute to the world mineral supply. The country is known worldwide for its high quality zinc ore (commercially viable deposit of zinc) making Ireland the biggest zinc producer in Europe. “Few people realise it but the geoscience-based industry already contributes more than €2 billion each year to the Irish economy,” said Tony Killeen TD, Minister of State at the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. Minister Killeen’s tribute to the ongoing work of geologists in our society was given at the inaugural reception of a prestigious conference recently held at Trinity College Dublin. The 9th Biennial SGA (Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits) conference gathered over 600 delegates representing 46 countries around the world with the aim of disseminating information and research results on mineral deposits to the research community. “This, I believe, is the largest number of delegates ever to attend a geological meeting in Ireland,” Minister Killeen commented. The title of the conference was Mineral Exploration and Research: Digging Deeper. It responded to a current concern of the geological community: the massive increase in demand for minerals.
Running Out
Prof Hartwig Frimmel, president of the SGA and chair of geodynamics and geomaterials research at the University of Würzburg, Germany, summarised the challenging situation of the mineral market worldwide: “There is a current boost in mineral demand,” he said. “Mineral demand has always fluctuated,” he continued, “but for some this trend of increased demand is set to become permanent.” A major reason for the current mineral boom is the rising profile of China and India as economic superpowers. No wonder! In many respects China is currently SPIN
Common as the glistening flakes in granite, mica, as muscovite, is a potassium, aluminium silicate, and it was used to make windows in stoves and ovens. (University of Illinois)
at the same stage of its development as we were at the beginning of the last century, but with 10 times more people. This gives us some idea about the amount of minerals they are about to consume. You might think the main concern would be for uncommon or rare minerals needed for industrial purposes. Let’s take gold for instance.
Gold may be seen as a luxury merely aimed at satisfying our aesthetic sensibility, but, in fact it is much more than that. According to Prof Frimmel, only two thirds of gold is used in jewellery. Another 20 per cent is there as a warrant for our currencies — kept in national and international treasuries it helps ensure our money is not just an immaterial concept but can actually
WHAT ARE MINERALS? Minerals are naturally occurring substances in the earth’s crust which consist of chemical elements or compounds (a compound consists of two or more elements). There are approximately 4,000 known minerals, often referred to as mineral species, and approximately 60 new minerals are discovered each year. Traditionally, to be classified as a “true” mineral: a) a substance must be naturally occurring, b) it must be a homogeneous substance with a defined chemical composition, c) it must be a solid with a crystalline structure – orderly geometric spatial arrangement of atoms where the chemical elements or compounds are repeated as patterns. Traditional definitions excluded organically derived material. However, the International Mineralogical Association in 1995 adopted a new definition: A mineral is an element or chemical compound that is normally crystalline and that has been formed as a result of geological processes. The modern definition allows geologists to include an organic class – i.e. substances that have a carbon and a hydrogen (the building blocks of life on our planet). For instance, graphite which could have resulted from dehydration of biogenic hydrocarbons is a mineral.
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be converted into something — while the remainder is used in industry. Computers for instance contain gold — albeit in small amounts, but look at the quantity of computers produced worldwide and, believe it or not, “the memory sticks that you use to store your data are actually packed with gold,” said Prof Frimmel. Thus, finding new commercially valuable gold deposits is an ongoing quest for geologists. Bear in mind that gold is currently sold at close to $750 an ounce (an ounce of gold weighing 31.1g — approximately the size of a dice). “Due to the high gold price, gold exploration is booming,” commented Dr Kalevi Rasilainen, a Finnish geologist specialising in ore geology and a delegate at the conference. In fact, Dr Rasilainen noted that this is true for metals in general; exploration has intensified because the price of metals is high, and has been so for a good while. However, despite its widespread use, the prospect of running out of gold doesn’t seem to be a major concern yet. As Dr Rasilainen pointed out, there should be ample resources remaining globally. “In 2004, total world resources of gold were estimated at 100,000 metric tons by the United States Geological Survey,” he said. So, if gold supply isn’t likely to become a problem in the near future, which minerals should we be worrying about? Uranium may be one of them. As Prof Frimmel pointed out, there’s a big interest at the moment in nuclear energy due to the common belief that it is environmentally friendly. But once all the projected nuclear plants are finished, it has been calculated there won’t be enough uranium from ores to supply them all. And while gold is recyclable, uranium obviously is not; it is destroyed in the process of producing energy.
Digging Deeper
So what can be done now? An obvious way to respond to increasing mineral demand is to find new sources. According to Prof Frimmel, most ore deposits that appear on the Earth’s surface have already been found, so we need to look elsewhere. That’s where the “digging deeper” topic of the conference starts to make sense. Digging deeper raises a number of challenging issues that urgently need to be addressed: Digging where,
Some clay minerals, talc, opal, and called gamma-ray spectrometry. chlorite, and as viewed by an electron how and at what cost? Deeper also Gamma-ray measurements give microscope. Mineralogical Society, UK. means dearer, so digging costs and the natural radioactivity of the mineral value need to be balanced bedrock. Measurements can be made very carefully. Obviously, the more measures provide some information either on the ground surface or from expensive the mineral is, the deeper on the type and concentrations of the an airplane, with the scale varying you can afford to dig to extract it while minerals underneath the surface (see accordingly. But gamma-rays are not remaining economically viable; that’s panel). just used for uranium exploration. As why, as Prof Frimmel pointed out, the For gold prospecting, many pointed out by Ed Sides, a Principal deepest mines worldwide are gold different methods have been used Resource Geologist originally from mines in South Africa, which reach the (depending on the target deposit Ireland and now at the AMEC Mining dizzying depths of 4km. and the environment), but according Group, UK, “isotopes of potassium And of course you want to establish to Dr Rasilainen, geochemical and thorium are also radioactive and where to dig first, which may not be as methods would probably be the most often the natural radioactivity is used straight forward as for surface minerals successful. For uranium prospecting, to map out differences in the rock and involve different exploration the accepted leading technique types that are present. For instance techniques. Technology is a key worldwide is a geophysical method granites will have a totally different element in the exploration process. radioactive signature to limestones”. “Because mineral exploration has Below: granite, an aggregate of minerals. intensified, it is getting more and more Different Approaches sophisticated as new methods However, technology is still and better instruments are not perfect and different developed,” Dr Rasilainen said. technologies might come He explained the kinds up with different results. Ed of techniques that geologists Sides gives an example: “In are looking at: “Roughly, one session, I was interested exploration methods/ in a difference of opinion on techniques can be divided the use of different methods into two main categories: (palaeomagnetism and isotope geochemical and geophysical. measurements) to date the As a generalisation, age at which mineralisation geochemistry can give occurred in the Irish deposits,” indication of deposits that he said. “The two approaches occur at, or relatively near, the gave totally different results surface, whereas geophysical neither of which agreed with methods can reveal information what the geologists on the also from deposits occurring What are rocks? ground found.” deeper down in bedrock”. Rocks are usually simply an aggregate of one or more So technique is not all. Historically, geochemical minerals. Graphite is a mineral, because it’s all made of one Finding new ores may methods have been among the single component: carbon. Diamond is also a mineral made also involve thinking most productive. They simply of carbons; but because the arrangement of the carbons is differently. Moving away involve collecting and analysing different, it’s a different mineral altogether with obviously from technological and various types of geological or very different properties and different value. Granite by methodological issues, Dr. even biological material samples contrast is not one single mineral but is composed of several Rasilainen took a broader view: such as soils, stream sediments, minerals with different silicate-based chemical structures “The meeting, despite its name, rocks, plants etc. Geophysical (quartz, feldspar, mica). concentrated on understanding methods can go deeper because the mineralisation processes they incorporate measurements An ore is a volume of rock containing minerals in conditions and their connection with other of certain properties of the and concentrations that can be profitably mined. geological processes — not Earth, either occurring naturally on exploration methods or (e.g. gravity, magnetic field, Gamma rays are forms of electromagnetic radiation or light techniques”. He explained that radioactivity), or occurring in emissions of a specific frequency produced from sub-atomic while the term ‘digging deeper’ response to a signal (electric particle interaction, such as radioactive decay. has been around for a while current, seismic signal). These
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Galena, lead sulphide, from which the by Prof Frimmel, is that we may now and the meaning can be taken metal is smelted, and, right, pyrite, with be running out of tungsten. But literally, it also refers to the need for crystals of FeS2, from which sulphur be reassured; we’re not facing an a deeper understanding of the whole was extracted to make sulphuric acid. imminent future of darkness. As he process of mineral formation, “if new Specimens from the Illinois State Museum. pointed out, we have already come up discoveries are to be made,” he added. with a solution. We now know how to Indeed, the process by which development we have, in many cases, use fluorescent gas as a replacement the minerals are formed can give to find alternatives to minerals — as and countries such as Australia are important clues as to their geological we have already done for tungsten. about to make this more sustainable location. “To be efficient, exploration Tungsten is a very hard metal type of light bulb mandatory. techniques need to be combined with which has been extensively used to As a general rule, while China an understanding of the geological make light bulbs. There may not be is dramatically increasing its use of structures controlling the making of much tungsten in one light bulb, but minerals, we’re trying to decrease ours minerals,” Dr Rasilainen explained. worldwide we’ve being producing and for our industrial needs we are This means that “mapping and making billions and billions of light bulbs, turning to new man-made composite observations in the field remains a therefore tons of tungsten. And materials. The possibilities are endless very important part of any exploration tungsten can’t be reused because and new materials targeting various program,” he concluded. He added it is progressively vaporised while needs are invented on an ongoing that there are new opportunities to producing light. The result, as stated basis, allowing us to rely less and do that: exploration is moving to new less on metals – at least in areas in Africa, China, Russia, theory; practically the costs of etc, which were previously not METALS producing such materials still open for various reasons. Metals are called elemental mineral because a metal is a remain very high. However, recycling single element (with specific electronic properties). Iron, where possible appears to for instance, is used everywhere – from cars to home appliCleaner Mines be the most obvious option ances to infrastructure in roads or buildings. But iron Thus, until new advances free to address any imminent seldom goes on its own in industrial processes. Because it us from our heavy dependency shortage. And this may can easily be oxidised (causing rust) it is usually associated on minerals extracted from eventually apply to uranium. with another metal such as zinc to avoid this happening (in the Earth, let’s face it, digging “The shortfall will probably a process called galvanisation). What’s more, unlike what mines is critical to our survival be made up for with uranium is commonly believed, iron is not a very hard metal, so to in the modern world. That’s from dismantled nuclear war increase its hardness it may be combined with carbon, creatwhy, along technological heads,” Prof Frimmel said. ing an alloy called steel. Then there is copper which has a issues, we need to address key importance as well; because of its high conductivity it is the sociological ones. Mines Alternatives widely used to make wires (with current demand growing are not all that bad. Ed Sides In spite of all the geologists’ following its increased use in integrated circuits for cars). deplores the persistent dirty efforts, there is one Aluminium, both light and malleable, is also widespread image of mines and mining. inescapable fact; the Earth’s and along with silicium represents a key component of “As a result, it has become resources are limited. If computers. extremely difficult to set up we’re aiming for sustainable
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EXPLORATION TECHNIQUES Geochemical methods are sampling methods involving collecting and analysing geological materials such as soils, stream sediments, and rocks or certain biological materials such as plants. Historically, these methods have been some of the most productive of any methods used in mineral exploration and without their use many known ore deposits would probably not have been discovered. Geophysical methods measure certain fields or properties of the Earth and can be classified into one of two types; Active and Passive.
a new mine in Western Europe,” he bemoans. “Mines might have been damaging to our environment twenty years ago, but things have improved dramatically in the past few decades,” he stresses. Prof Frimmel acknowledges that mines have sometimes to deal with specific pollutants such as cyanide or arsenic that may be mixed with the mineral you want to extract. But new advances in technology allow for cleaner extractions and new
Passive geophysical exploration techniques measure a naturally occurring field or property of the Earth – e.g. the earth’s gravitational or magnetic fields. Radiometric decay products, certain electrical or electromagnetic fields are other examples of Earth properties that could be passively measured. Measurements of spatial variations in these fields infer something about the subsurface geology. In conducting active geophysical surveys, a signal is sent into the Earth and geologists measure how the earth responds to it. These signals could take a variety of forms such as dis-
Left, uraninite from Brazil, a source of uranium, in crystals of calcite. Above, uraninite impregnated quartzite, New Mexico. Right, native copper from Lake Superior, US. (Portland University and University of Illinois). regulations have also appeared to protect the environment. As he points out, a licence to establish a new mine now includes an obligation and cash provision to rehabilitate the site after exploitation. Still, nobody fancies having a mine set up right on his doorstep or worse, under his feet. But bear in mind that
placement, an electrical current, an active radiometric source or a seismic signal. Geophysical instruments that check for variations in gravity, magnetism etc, include airborne sensors, hand-held and downhole instruments, which have been widely used in mineral exploration since the 1950s onwards. Airborne geophysical surveys are the most effective and widespread method of gathering geophysical data quickly for a larger area.
ore can be anywhere and has no frontiers; at the end of the day we have no choice but to get it where we can find it. Marie-Catherine Mousseau has a PhD in neuroscience from Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris, and has an MSc in Science Communications from DCU/ Queen’s.
Involved in science? Are you a researcher, a really dedicated science teacher, or a scientist who just wants to keep in touch? The Irish Science Open Forum, ISOF, is working on a programme for a big event next year, and this could involve you. Register your interest, email your name to us at tom@sciencespin.com and we will put you on the list for occasional alerts about ISOF activities. For more details visit the Science Spin web site: www.sciencespin.com SCIENCE SPIN Issue 25 Page 31
A complete
glAciAl
map for ireland Glacil features are not confined to land, and to get a more complete picture, reports Séan Duke, we need to go out to sea.
reland is perhaps the best place in the world to study glacial features. The landscape here is littered with drumlins, eskers and moraines. Now, with new technology, geologists are finding similar features on the seabed, sometimes out into the deep sea. The ultimate goal is to integrate seabed features with landforms to form a complete glacial map for Ireland. Ireland is heaven for glaciologists. Our landscape is dominated by glacial landforms. It is impossible for anyone to study or understand the landscape without thinking about the action of ancient ice sheets. There are ice sheet deposits left lying all around us, for those that care to look. Many of our soils have been created by glacial material, drainage patterns too have been created by glacial action, while our rivers follow ancient ‘melt channels’ that formed beneath ice sheets during the last Ice Age as the ice started to melt. “Put it like this,” said Dr Paul Dunlop, a University of Ulster glaciologist, “if you want to go and study glacial landforms as good as (exist) in Ireland you have to go to Arctic Canada, or up to Norway, very remote places in the summer time,
I
Drumlin field on the northwest shelf. The ice flow is towards the viewer. Inset image is a vertical view of the same areas. you can’t go to Arctic Canada in the winter it is too cold, so you go in the summer time — it is absolutely covered in mosquitoes and is inaccessible, and you have to fly, charter small airplanes in, here you can drive down the road and jump out. It is on your doorstep.” Dr Dunlop is part of the Quaternary Environmental Change Group, at UU Coleraine, working along with Professor Marshall McCabe and Dr Peter Wilson. The Quaternary period of geological time spans from 1.8 million years ago up to the present — very recent in geological terms. It was during the Quaternary that the last Ice Age occurred, from 120,0000 to about 10,000 years ago, while little remains of Ice Ages previous to that. The over-riding theme of their research at the UU Group is to study the ‘recent’ geological past — the Quaternary — in order to get clues about the past environment, and, to better understand that environment and to make some predictions about the future.
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Ireland
Ireland was covered in the most recent Ice Age by the British Irish Ice Sheet. It was fed by ice coming in from Scotland, and, when the ice finally melted the entire landscape was etched with its markings. The features here rival anything to be seen in more remote, less pleasant locations, such as Arctic Canada, or the northern parts of Norway or Sweden. For example, there are glacial features around Dundalk Bay that are hugely impressive — if you have a glaciologist’s eye for them of course. The landscape there is quite bumpy and there are lots of drumlins, as well as massive features called ribbed moraine ridges. These latter ridges are, indeed, so massive in this area that they are called ‘mega’ scale ribbed moraine ridges. Dr Dunlop studied these mega moraines for his doctorate. The Dundalk moraines are in geological terms, spectacular, and compare to any found in any location around the world. To put into context how huge they are, a comparison can be made with North America. At the time of the last Ice Age North America was SPIN
covered by the Laurentian Ice Sheet, which was huge and covered most of the continent there. The North American moraines are about one km to three km long, a few hundred metres wide and 10 km high. The moraines are of the same kind of scale around Norway and Sweden. However, around Dundalk, there is a huge jump up in scale. Here they are sometimes up to 12 to 13km long, one km wide and 80 metres high. A huge jump up. “One of the ideas we think as to why they are so big is that the Irish Ice Sheet, the centre of the Ice Sheet oscillated around quite a lot and not all of the sediment was evacuated, or put into the ocean,” said Dr Dunlop. “Because the centre of the Ice Sheet might have moved around there is a lot more sediment offshore and a lot more sediment to build stuff (like the Dundalk moraines).” Dr Dunlop, and his colleagues, also developed a theory about how mega moraines form. They based it on an ‘instability mechanism’ operating beneath ice sheets. The idea is that the ice sheet is so heavy that it causes the ice at the bottom of the ice sheet to melt at below zero degrees Celsius, and that it then begins to behave like a plastic-like fluid. Meanwhile, there is a layer of sediment behind this fluid, which is also behaving like a fluid, due to the pressure of the ice. These processes come together and the ice sheet produces a ‘wave’ effect, similar to what happens when ripples on the beach form.
Sensing
One of the most important techniques that Dr Dunlop uses to study glacial formations is remote sensing. In the more traditional ‘bottom up’ approach, a geologist will go out with a bucket and spade, dig through sediments, and try to extrapolate upwards to interpret the landscape. Remote sensing provides the means to look down from a satellite in space at a whole glacial system, such as that at Dundalk Bay, and to see the scale that it operates at. “That’s what I do — remote sensing — so rather than look at an individual drumlin I look at thousands and thousands of them and from that you can work out the direction that the ice was sliding in, you can work out where the probable centres of ice mass were, where they migrated to and where their ends are, you can look at the whole system and you can work out different
Lobe shaped glacial deposits cross-cut landforms where things were happening,” said Dr Dunlop. The Landsat satellite programme, which provides images at 30 metres by 30 metres on the ground, is a useful remote sensing resource. The one problem is that glacial landforms can be larger than 30m by 30m, but that can be corrected for. As well as Landsat, Dr Dunlop uses images from ASTER, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, an imaging instrument flying on the satellite Terra launched in 1999 as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System. The use of remote sensing is helping Dr Dunlop to re-interpret Irish glacial landforms on land, and also to follow glacial features into the Irish offshore, using marine remote sensing. Marine sensing makes use of acoustic signals and the amount of time a signal takes to return can determine the elevations of features at the bottom of the ocean.
Offshore
Until recently, the submerged record of glacial activity in the Irish offshore was completely unknown as the technology was not available to reveal such activity. That changed when the Irish National Seabed Survey (INSS) through its INFOMAR (Integrated Mapping for the Sustainable Development of Ireland’s Marine Resource) programme began to produce 3-D images of the seafloor at very high resolution. “Other people, such as at the Antarctic Continental Shelf, people were finding glacial signatures way, way out under the ocean so I thought given that it is happening elsewhere, people are finding stuff in Canada offshore, Norway offshore and offshore Britain there has got to be stuff offshore in Ireland,” said Dr Dunlop. “The landform record showed that, you were getting drumlins extending right up to the coastline and then stopping – why would it stop? There had to be more stuff, but we just didn’t have the ability to find out, so the INFOMAR programme when those images became available that’s when I became interested in offshore.”
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“It is not that I am just interested in offshore that’s a part of the story that is unknown, so what we are trying to do is find out what that is, unravel that and tie that back to onshore, so you can look at the full system from the interior right to the margin – totally uncharted territory.” In particular, Dr Dunlop was keen to find out where the western limits of the British Irish Ice Sheet that once covered both islands, lay. He set up collaborations with others that were similarly interested in the glacial Irish offshore, Sara Benetti, a doctoral student at the Marine Institute and Dr Colm O’Chofaigh, a Dubliner based at Durham University. The three of them agreed to come to together to start to interpret the offshore images that were emerging from INFOMAR and from the work of the GSI (Geological Survey of Ireland) through the Celtic Voyager vessel. Dr Dunlop used a data set obtained from the GSI to look at the Malin Sea area and interpret the glacial features there. This is forming the basis of a paper submitted along with research student Rachel Shannon. Another paper is in press, with inputs from Dr Dunlop, Sara Benetti, and Dr O’Chofaigh, where they determine the limits of the western margins of the British Irish Ice Sheet for the first time. “We found very big, large ridges right out to the shelf edge into very deep water, we thought that the only way you are going to get very big, large ridges out there is by an ice sheet so we thought they were end moraines,” said Dr Dunlop.
Future
The next step is to get funding for ocean cores to be put down through the area. The hope is, said Dr Dunlop, that the work being published on the glacial formations left on the seabed in the Irish offshore will encourage funding agencies to provide further support. The ocean cores can provide dates to match the features that have been discovered. The ultimate goal would be to develop a complete glacial map of Ireland and its offshore, with all areas integrated and dated. “We have got the features, we know they are there; it is just about working out the timing,” said Dr Dunlop. There is just a whole story there that needs to be unravelled and that is what we are trying to do the three of us.”
Inner conflict in outer space
When small groups of people live for long periods isolated from outside society and in cramped quarters it can lead to individual problems such as depression, schizophrenia, as well as serious, even murderous, conflict between people. That is why longdistance space travellers must have the personal qualities to be able to cope, writes John Moore.
“All one needs to effect a murder is to lock two men in a cabin and keep them there for two months.” “Interpersonal distrust, dislike, misunderstanding and poor communication have led to potentially dangerous situations.” “I miss my family, news from home, and hearing English been spoken.” These quotes, taken from personal journals by people who have lived together in confined environments in space, give just an idea of the behavioural problems long-duration space-travellers face in the very near future.
b
As exploratory missions to go to the Moon, Mars and beyond will likely require several people to stay in isolated environments for long periods at a time, is there the possibility that these ventures could fail — all because of interpersonal behaviour among crewmembers? If past and recent studies are anything to go by, the answer could most definitely be yes.
Strange behaviour
Ever since groups of individuals have gathered together for long-duration stints — whether on remote oil rigs, submarines, Antarctic expeditions, on shuttle missions or the International Space Station — there have been instances of negative behaviour. For instance, data, taken from studies of human behaviour at US and Australian research stations in the Antarctic over the last 40 years, show significant rise in personal problems. Studies on individuals during wintering periods that lasted up to 13 months showed increased levels of
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withdrawal symptoms, depression, schizophrenia and impulsive behaviour; while cases involving groups illustrated intra-group conflict, perceived favouritism in allocation of resources, and incompetence by dysfunctional leaders. Other instances include the Biosphere experiment in which a group of scientists and doctors got together to live in an enclosed football field-sized glasshouse in Arizona. By the end of the first year, the group had split into two factions, and people who had once been intimate friends now were desperate enemies that barely spoke to each other. Space, too, has had its fair share of ill-behaviour. From records taken of shuttle missions that totalled over 4,000 hours in space, 34 behavioural signs and symptoms of anxiety and annoyance were reported by 508 crew members to medical staff. And what about the first mutiny in space? When three astronauts living onboard the Skylab 4 space station were asked why SPIN
here .... e r e w u o y Wish
Setting off across Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, simulating a trek into the barren landscape of Mars. (NASA)
and their ‘like-mindedness’ would further allow for considerable latitude in differences of opinion in areas unrelated to other purposes and tasks. If one crewmember, for example, is skilled in an area in which the other person is unskilled, or has knowledge that the other must learn from or rely upon, then this is a crew whose consequences can only promote solidarity and high morale.
b Age
they weren’t continuing with their work, they said mission control was asking too much of them — so they refused to do a tot for a full 24 hours. It seems then that human behavioural issues have no boundaries when it comes to location, and rather it has more to do with individuals’ level of expertise and education. Trustworthy characteristics in a person, however, have now been identified to reduce such behaviours, and these are the ones that will most certainly be required for success of the long-duration missions envisioned.
The ‘right stuff’
Leadership, crew compatibility, gender, age and heterogeneity are just some of the issues that will determine the success or failure of a longduration mission.
b Leadership
Case histories suggest that under conditions of isolation and confinement, a leader must be able to perform both task and socioemotional leadership roles. He has to be capable of focussing on the interaction of structural and personality variables, rather than upon either variable alone. He also must have a full understanding of his crew — emotionally, socially and physically — for a more stable and cohesive environment to be maintained.
b Crew compatibility
Crewmembers who can engage in a wide variety of social behaviours should prove valuable, for they should help reinstate lost social opportunities. Their shared attitudes and values will enforce group compatibility,
The Devon camp, and one of the team, in a space suit, exploring the Haughton Crater.
Evidence from various remote analog environments (oil rigs, submarines, polar stations) suggests that tomorrow’s long-duration astronauts will not have to be selected from a narrow range of ages. Candidates who are relatively young and relatively old both have something to offer. For example, while a younger aged person would have peak energy and physical fitness to their advantage, an older person would have experience and perspective, and his maturity could also act as a parent-surrogate who satisfies important needs of the younger crewmember.
b Gender
There are many complex issues regarding the gender composition – all male, all female and mixed gender — for crews going on longduration missions. Most of the studies done today involve males only and extremely little is known about the values of having a mixed crew on such long journeys. Some instances where a crew consisted of a single woman with several men onboard reported gender stereotyping (men taking unnecessary risks to impress women or women faking helplessness in the presence of men). Other instances showed greater difficulties with females trying to exert a leadership role, and in one case a female crewmember had to act as peacemaker in a leadership conflict between two male co-members. While both sexes would obviously increase the social diversity of a long-duration mission, difficulties with either sex having strong prejudices about the capacities and/or appropriate roles of the other could jeopardise its success.
b Heterogeneity
Spacecrews in the future will likely be composed of heterogeneous groups — in other words, people from different countries, with different cultural
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Long-duration environments NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) Situated underneath the sea nearly six kilometres off the Key Largo coast in Florida, NEEMO consists of an underwater laboratory, called Aquarius. Crewmembers of six can stay up to three weeks at a time, and during their period will perform simulated moonwalks, sample collection and construction of equipment on the ocean floor (similar activities to what they would in space). The small complex of 14 metres-long by four metres in diameter is also monitoring crew interaction, fatigue and stress levels, and how sleep and wake cycles are affecting individuals. Degree of isolation and social monotony is low.
Devon Island
Situated in a remote region in the Canadian high Arctic, Devon Island, or, ‘Mars on Earth’ as it is called, represents the best terrestrial comparison to living on the Martian landscape. Groups of scientists and engineers work for up to several weeks during the summer; conducting field activities which look at the possible constraining factors astronauts may face on Mars. Currently in its 11th field season, the project’s focus is on human behaviour in time and place – observing how people interact with each other, when, with whom, and why. Degree of isolation and social monotony is low to medium.
with which an issue is mentioned in a journal reflects the importance of that issue to the writer. Degree of isolation and social monotony is low to high.
Antarctica
International Space Station (ISS)
Orbiting some 350 kilometres above the Earth, astronauts can stay for up to six months at a time onboard the ISS. Besides doing experiments onboard, crew members make entries at least three times a week in a personal journal about how they are feeling and relating to their colleagues and environment. The method is based on the assumption that the frequency and tone (positive, negative, or neutral)
Approximately 30 nations in nearly 50 research stations are based at Antarctica and its surrounding oceans. Most of the human behavioural data available to date has come from these stations. The most significant behavioural problems reported over the last 40 years show increased levels of: insomnia, withdrawal, impulsive behaviour, frustration over situations at home, depression and schizophrenia, while the most significant group problems reported involve: friction in factionalized subgroups, individual(s) not working, dysfunctional leadership, perceived favouritism in allocation of resources, and changing sexual partnerships. Degree of isolation and social monotony is medium to high. Top: Astronauts have remained for months on the International Space Station. Left: Looking out into the ocean depths from NEEMO in Florida. Below: An inflatable Moon module, and an image of how a Mars base would look like. (NASA)
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traditions and values, with different career backgrounds. In principle, a heterogeneous crew offers potential advantages over a homogenous one for long-duration flights, as their combined diversity presents more alternative perspectives and greater richness in skills and experience. They also offer a greater effectiveness of problem-solving and decision-making amongst the group — an essential bonus if one happens to be several million kilometres from any help. It is difficult to find all these characteristics present in the one individual. However, assuming that such individuals exist, what are the next challenges ahead, given that the mission has now already started?
Stages
The two main goals that several space agencies are currently aiming for are the establishment of a permanent base on the Moon and a temporary one on Mars. Five planned missions to the Moon are already envisioned to launch by 2012, and by 2020 a lunar base should be built. Between four and eight astronauts will be able to stay for up to 180 days living in aluminium and inflatable modules, as they explore the lunar surface and learn skills needed for an eventual journey to Mars. Research, largely based on crews that have stayed on the space stations Mir (Russian) and the ISS (International Space Station) lasting up to 6 months at a time, show that astronauts living and working together in such a confined and isolated environment on the Moon are likely to go through four different stages. The first stage, lasting four to six weeks, revolves around the astronaut’s adaptation to his new microgravity environment. Here, primary effects of fatigue, work-rest cycles and other secondary microgravityrelated disturbances (headaches and sleep disturbance) may affect his performance and impairments to mood and well-being. The second stage, lasting for several more weeks, is where the astronaut becomes fully adjusted to living and working in his environment, with no apparent psychological effects showing. The third stage, however, is where the relationship between the astronaut and his environment may start to go
Are you suitable for space? Answer the questions below, add up your results, and see how you score Q 1 Do you consider ourself a likeable person? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Not libeable Moderately likeable Extremely likeable Q2 Are you in control of your emotions? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No control Moderate control Extreme control 1 No patience
Q 3 How patient are you? 2 3 4 5 6 7 Moderate patience Extremely patient
Q 4 How tolerant are you of others? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No tolerance at all Moderate tolerance Extremely tolerant Q 5 How confident are you of ability to perform well? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No confidence Moderately confident Extremely confident Q 6 Are you a team player, or a loner? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Not a team player Moderately team orientated Extremely team orientated Q 7 Do you have a sense of humour? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No sense of humour Moderate sense of humour Great sense of humour Q 8 Are you easily entertained? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Not easily entertained Moderately so Easily entertained
Your score
53 to 56 — Sign up now for the next mission to the edge of the Galaxy, you are made of the right stuff! 46 to 52 — You are an excellent candidate for working on a lunar base for up to a year, and a possible candidate for a three year long expedition to Mars. 40 to 45 — You should restrict your ambitions to a shorter mission, for example, a three month stay on a lunar base or the International Space Station. 33 to 39 — stick to week-long missions to the Moon, or consider working as a shuttle pilot. 27 to 32 — stay on the ground!
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wrong. If an astronaut experiences this ‘third quarter phenomenon” as it is called, issues like crowding and absence of privacy suddenly become foremost. As a result, interaction with colleagues becomes strained, emotional and disruptive behaviour creeps in, and stress and depression become major factors. “Attitudes can spread among group members like a ‘social contagion”, commented Chester Spell, an associate professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “While relatively scant attention has been paid to this issue, the studies to date suggest that the link between isolation and worker mental health may be a critical one for a lunar base.” The fourth stage is where the end of the astronaut’s stay is in sight and feelings of euphoria prevail. With thoughts of returning to family and friends, the astronaut becomes overly busy until his stint is finally over. These stages, however, equally apply to each part of a long-duration mission to Mars — the trip out, the trip back, and staying on the surface. On the outward trip, lasting anywhere from 250 days, a crew of six will have
to endure extreme confinement in a habitat approximately 500 cubic metres in size (equivalent to eight truck containers). On arriving at Mars (assuming that they can successfully land), the crew may then have to wait 400 days without any possibilities of rescue or re-supply, until an appropriate window opens for another 250-day journey flight back.
Mars
A test to see if such a mission is survivable will commence in late 2008 — on Earth. The experiment, called MARS500, will be carried out in a terrestrial experimental complex in Russia, which resembles the same amount of space astronauts will work in. Consisting of five interconnected modules totalling nearly 550 cubic metres in volume; the facility will have six people locked inside for at least 520 days as they simulate a round trip to Mars. All food and water will be taken onboard before the simulated journey begins, and communications with the outside will be delayed by 20 minutes each way (as it would be at Mars). The experiment’s main objective is to test human performance and well-
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being in an environment similar to what astronauts may experience in reality. The results should prove very interesting, as it’s expected that some individuals just won’t be able to hack it (several replacements will be on standby).
Future
The behavioural issues that longduration space-travellers will experience in the near future are only now beginning to be taken seriously. Gone, soon, will be the days of simple, one-off, psychological checks on potential individuals (like NASA and others currently do today), and more thorough checks take their place instead. Given the perspective that man is destined to explore space and live in other environments other than Earth’s alone, the vision ahead for long-term spaceflight has suddenly become an even greater probability, and soon perhaps even a reality.
b
John Moore is a science graduate from University College Cork, and you can visit his Moon website at www.moonposter.ie
EVOLUTION
Fit for survival
There’s more to it than simply ‘survival of the fittest’ Clownfish, safe from the stinging anemone while it keeps predators away. The survival of the fittest has long been held to be the crucial factor that drives evolution. Charles Darwin noted that on the Galapagos Islands those species, such as the long necked turtles, that were best suited to their environment had the best chance to survive and produce offspring. Now, however, evolutionary biologists are coming to understand that cohabitation is just as important as competition. Clodagh O’Brien reports.
C
harles Darwin who began publishing his theories of evolution in the mid 19th century did not talk very much about the importance of interactions between species. However, it is now well known that those species that interact most effectively with others will survive. Those that interact better, survive better. The way that many species survive is by having relationships with each other that are mutually beneficial. This phenomenon is known as symbiosis, and is defined as a close association between two different organisms in a community. The biologist, Lynn Margulis, who is famous for her work on ‘endosymbiosis’ contends that symbiosis is a major driving force behind evolution. She believes that evolution is strongly based on co-operation, interaction, and mutual dependence among organisms, and is not just a matter of survival of the fittest.
Symbiosis
There are two distinct categories of symbiosis: ectosymbiosis and endosymbiosis. In ectosymbiosis, one party lives on the body surface of the host, such as
the inner surface of the digestive tract or the ducts of the exocrine glands (glands like the salivary glands that secrete their products into ducts). With endosymbiosis, however, one party lives within the tissues of the host; either inside or outside the individual. There have been a number of documented cases of symbiotic relationships in nature. One of the most well known is the relationship between the colourful clownfish and the tropical sea stinging anemone. The clownfish lives in the anemones stinging tentacles and has a special mucus that acts as a protective barrier from the tentacles. The fish benefits from having a secure home, while the anemone is protected — by the presence of the clownfish — from predatorial fish that would otherwise attack it. Not all anemones that house clownfish are in need of protection, as some instead act as food suppliers and share food with their hosts.
SYMBIOSIS
There are several general classes of symbiosis including: • Mutualism — a relationship in which members of two different species benefit and neither suffers. • Commensalism — a relationship in which one party gains some benefit, whilst the other suffers no serious disadvantage. • Parasitism — in which one member of the association benefits while the other is harmed. • Amensalism — in which the association is disadvantageous to one member while the other is not affected.
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Research
New research has come to light from a number of scientific papers that reveal a new side to the symbiotic equation. The most common types of symbiosis between species of fish is a cleaning relationship where one species grooms another in return for food. This type of relationship is common amongst many species that live in both temperate and tropical waters. The fish being cleaned are called the ‘client’ fish, and the places that they go to, in order to be cleaned are called ‘cleaning stations’. The fish doing the grooming at the cleaning stations benefit by obtaining food in the form of parasites, dead skin, tissue and mucous. Therefore, as well as getting food for themselves, they are carrying out a valuable service that helps to maintain the health of marine populations. Often the fish that is to be cleaned changes colour. This is believed to act as a signal that they require cleaning, or to make the harmful parasites stand out against their skin. Gobies, wrasse, and shrimps are the most common species that are involved in this behaviour. A well-known example of a cleaning relationship is between the grouper and the shrimp. In this instance the shrimp will enter the mouth of the large fish and eat any parasites that are residing in the grouper’s mouth. This relationship ensures that the shrimp has a source of food while the grouper rids itself of parasites and reduces the risk of its health deteriorating. Researchers believe they have found the first example of a cleaner symbiotic relationship where the SPIN
cleaner is not the benefactor. In a recent article in the journal Coral Reefs, Dr Yannis Papastamatiou and his team at the University of Hawaii observed a new behaviour amongst sharks and reef fish. It has been well documented that many fish man cleaning sites for sharks where they come to be groomed. In a strange twist, researchers observed a bluefin literally taking its life into its own hands by using a Galapagos shark as a cleaning device. The researchers observed the fish approaching the caudal fin of the shark and rubbing its side against the shark’s body from tail to fin, circle and repeat this behaviour three times. In the same article the researchers observed four rainbow runners swimming in formation towards the back of a grey reef shark. The leading runner then accelerated towards the shark and rolled over exposing its ventral surface. The fish then rubbed its back and flank along the shark. The reason for this behaviour is simple Dr Papastamatiou told Science Spin: “Shark skin is covered with placoid scales which give it an abrasive quality when rubbed in a tail to head direction. We think that the shark provides an abrasive surface against which fishes remove dermal parasites, necrotic tissue and other irritations.” As regards the prevalence of this behaviour Dr Papastamatiou said: “This behaviour is common amongst tropical communities. I have also seen this behaviour since writing the paper, at Palmyra atoll (with a grey reef shark) and have also seen it with sandbar sharks and whitetip reef sharks at Oahu (in Hawaii). I have also read some old papers describing similar behaviour in other coral reef ecosystems. I have no idea if it occurs in temperate ecosystems.” Meanwhile, Allan de Souza and his team at Universidade Federal da Paraíba in Brazil found previously unidentified associations with the hairy blenny fish. In one location a majid crab was found feeding on the necrotic tissue of a blenny for five minutes while a number of days later a blenny was spotted eating a similarly sized crab from the same species. From this the researchers concluded that the cleaning event was a one off occasion that benefited both species. “While there are a number of reports on cleaning symbiosis among reef
Close to the jaws of death, but safe as long as the benefits are mutual. A Grouper fish getting a clean up. fishes there are only a limited number of studies reporting invertebrates cleaning fishes. The unique thing about this association is that unlike other specialised cleaner species, majid crabs are often eaten by the hairy blenny,” said Allan De Souza. In all three examples above it seems that these species are risking their lives in order to be cleaned by a larger creature that under normal circumstances would eat them. The reason for this is unclear, but De Souza believes that these instances occur due to behavioural differences.
In relation to the majid crabs, he said: “Perhaps the first crab signalled its intentions correctly, whereas the last could have committed a mistake that cost the crab its life. However, behaviour is easy to speculate on, therefore, it is difficult to establish what the main factors for this behaviour pattern are without more detailed studies.” The reasons for these behaviours are unclear, and a debate is underway between evolutionary biologists to better explain the interactions between species.
Taking advantage In another twist to the evolutionary tale, it has been shown recently that some species can step in to take advantage of a symbiotic relationship between two other species. In a recent paper entitled “Wasps robbing food from ants: a frequent behaviour?” in Naturwissenschaften it was reported that social wasps rob food from ants resulting from a symbiotic relationship. A species of plant ant lives in myrmechophytes, which are plants that provide shelter in hollow structures. In return, the ants protect the plants against most enemies. Dr Louis LaPierre and his team at the Biology and Environmental Science Faculty at Lower Columbia College
discovered that wasps are using a number of techniques to rob food from the ants. If the ants are not active, the wasps simply take the food, but if the ants are alert, the wasps either fly off to avoid attack, or in a coordinated effort, some prevent the ants leaving the nest while others rob the food. “To our knowledge nothing has been published on the phenomenon of social wasps robbing food from ants. The existence of this phenomenon is unusual as robbing food from plant ants is a risky behaviour as they are well known for their aggressiveness towards any intruder landing on their host plant,” said Dr LaPierre.
Clodagh O’Brien writes for various publications and was a winner of the Daily Telegraph BASF Science Writer Award.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 25 Page 40
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