ISSUE 39 March 2010 €3 including VAT £2 NI and UK
SCIENCE
SPIN
IRELAND’S SCIENCE NATURE AND DISCOVERY MAGAZINE
The Earth on view l Haiti quake Introducing THE BRAIN — collect the series Castlecomer coal l Young Scientists NEW — Spin ACTIVE on innovation
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SCIENCE
Looking into lava tube on the flank of Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii, photographed by Eoin McCraith. One of the photographs from the Du Noyer competition.
Publisher DKS Ltd 5 Serpentine Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. www.sciencespin.com Email: tom@sciencespin.com Editors Tom Kennedy tom@sciencespin.com Seán Duke sean@sciencespin.com Business Development Manager Alan Doherty alan@sciencespin.com Design and Production Albertine Kennedy Publishing Cloonlara, Swinford, Co Mayo Proofing and web diary Marie-Claire Cleary marieclaire@sciencespin.com Picture research Source Photographic Archive www.iol.ie/~source.foxford/ Printing Turner Group, Longford
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.
SPIN UPFRONT
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Who owns your DNA?
In an award winning essay Lisa Duffy considers the question of who owns your DNA.
Young scientists
Seán Duke talked to some of the participants in this year’s BT Young Science exhibition.
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Introducing the brain
The Haiti quake
The first part in a series of articles in which Veronica Miller explains all about the brain, and how it works. Collect the book length series.
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Spin ACTIVE
A new supplement in Science Spin covering applied science and transfer of results into business and industry. l Bio-inspired networking could take the strain out of expansion. l Pharmaceuticals can be more effective by finer control of their final form
Seán Duke reports that plate movements made the pressure build up.
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Castlecomer coal
Tom Kennedy writes on how hundreds of miners dug into a Carboniferous swamp.
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The Earth on view
A selection of winning photographs from the Du Noyer competition.
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UPFRONT Geo award
The Geological Society (UK) has made a number of awards for exceptional work in 2009. Among the awards winners was Tony Bazley, a founder member of ES2k, Earth Science 2000. The ES2k group has been actively promoting interest in geology, and under Tony’s guidance a number of earth science magazines have been produced, and a number of articles from the group have been published in Science Spin.
Space resources A SPACE resource centre has been opened in Dublin for schools. Based in Belvedere College, the centre, funded by ESA in partnership with Discover Science and Engineering, is to provide educational materials and support for primary and secondary school teachers. Ireland is the fifth country to open a European Space Education Resource Office.
Liquid lenses
DROPS of water are likely to focus light, and according to Dr Gabor Horvath from Eotvos University in Hungary, gardeners who claim that we should never use the hose under the midday Sun have a point. In the New Phytologist journal, Dr Horvath reports that computer studies and experiments confirm the view that water drops can indeed burn plants by acting as a lens. Experiments revealed that leaves with smooth surfaces, such as maple or ginkgo, are not at risk, but in plants with tiny surface hairs, drops of water are held in suspension, so they can act as magnifying glasses. “Water drops held by plant hairs can indeed cause sunburn,” said the researcher, ”and the same phenomenon can occur when water droplets are held above human skin by body hair.” While admitting that evaporation makes this unlikely, Dr Horvath said we should not rule out the possibility, however remote, that drops of water could start a forest fire.
Saving sight
REMOVAL of cataracts has become one of the most common surgical procedures, restoring clear vision to millions of people every year around the world. However, solving one problem may actually cause another by accelerating degeneration of the macula, a light sensitive area essential for vision. The light sensitive retina at the back of the eye can be damaged by exposure to intense blue and ultra-violet, so cells there contain special pigments to filter out the harmful rays. Loss of the protective pigment is thought to be strongly linked to age related deterioration of the macula, a problem affecting thousands of people in Ireland. According to Dr John Nolan from Waterford Institute of Technology, about 80,000 adults in Ireland are affected, and a further
Compared to a normal eye, left, the deterioration of the macula can be seen by an examination of the retina, right. 30,000 are unaware that their sight is deteriorating. Following cataract surgery sight is improved, but at the same time, more light is allowed through. If macular degeneration was already underway, the increased exposure to light would accelerate the process. However, in a study conducted by Dr Nolan and his group at WIT, it was found that incorporation of a blue-light filter in the replacement lens could solve that problem. Follow up studies on patients who had received blue-light filtering lenses revealed a significant rise in protective macular pigments shortly after surgery.
Geo resource
WHERE can you make up your own rock, squeeze it out of shape, crack the clues, dig up a dinosaur, eat rocks, make the sun disappear, become fossilised, or enter a great soil race? To find out, go to www.earthlearningidea.com The site, put together by Chris King, Peter Kennet and Elizabeth Devon from the Earthlearning Team at Keele University, has lots to offer students and teachers including activities that require the minimum of equipment. New activities are being added, all aimed at stimulating thought and deepening an understanding of scientific principles.
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Colour
AS light levels go down we lose the ability to distinguish colours. In bright moonlight the world is monochrome, but with birds colour is lost at dusk. Loss of colour vision varies among animals, and as researchers at the Lund University Vision Group discovered, birds need between 5 and 20 times more light than humans to
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page 2
see in colour. Research student, Olle Lind, said that the finding comes as a surprise because in bright light birds have better colour vision than humans. When different animals were compared it was found that geckos can still distinguish colours at night, and horses, like humans cease to see colour after dusk. SPIN
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Boosting yield
Artemisia annua, a common plant, more often known as wormwood, is often used in flavouring, giving a bitter taste to drinks, and traditionally it was used as a medicinal herb. Extracts from this
plant are regarded as most effective in treating malaria. However, yields from the plant are not sufficiently high to keep up with demand. Low yields also make the extracts expensive, but selective breeding is likely to improve productivity. Plant scientists at the University of York have genetically mapped the species, enabling them to identify markers associated with higher performance. The scientists, led by Prof Dianna Bowles and Prof Ian Graham, have been able to use this information in conducted growing trials aimed at selecting high yielding plants. Prof Bowles said that “with our new understanding of Artemisia genetics, we can produce improved, non-GM, varieties much faster than would otherwise be possible.� The researchers expect to be in a position to produce high-yield seeds within the next two to three years. The higher yield varieties will help thousands of small-scale growers to improve their income, treatment costs will be lowered, and more people will have access to malaria treatments. At present, almost a million people a year are killed by malaria.
Invisible hazard
OVER time radioactive elements decay, and in the case of uranium, radon gas is produced. Normally this radioactive gas filters up from the depths to vent into the atmosphere, but if its passage is blocked, radon can accumulate. Well insulated homes can act as a radon trap, and according to the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, the extra exposure to radioactivity is causing up to 200 deaths from lung cancer every year. In the latest figures from the Institute, homes in the west, southeast, and south are most at risk, and in Sligo almost a quarter of the houses checked by inspectors had radon levels above an acceptable level. Radioactivity is measured in becquerels per square metre, and over a period of 70 years a person exposed to 200 Bq/m3 is believed to have a one in fifty risk of contracting lung cancer. With smokers, this risk is thought to be 25 times greater, so statistically, these people are far more likely to die from lung cancer than from a traffic accident. Dr Ann McGarry, chief executive of the Institute, remarked that because radon is odourless, colourless and without taste few people perceive it as a threat to their health. A programme to measure radon in homes was started in the 1990s, and although 38,000 have been inspected, it is thought that 91,000 dwellings with levels about 200 Bq/m3 have yet to be identified. The RPII website is www.rpii.ie IVE
Earth gas
IT is often assumed that volcanic action gave rise to the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, but Dr Greg Holland, from the University of Manchester, maintains that meteorites also had a big impact. In the journal, Science, Dr Holland and researchers from the University of Houston report that
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isotopes of the trace gases, krypton and xenon, show that they can only have come from meteorites. According to the researchers, bombardment of Earth with gases and water-rich materials, must have made a significant contribution to our atmosphere.
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UPFRONT Blue energy
WHEN two aqueous solutions are separated by a semi-permeable barrier, the more concentrated one pulls in more water until equilibrium is achieved. This osmotic pressure is quite strong, and for many years engineers have wondered if it would be possible to harvest this energy by separating fresh and sea water by a membrane. In Norway and The Netherlands attempts are being made to turn the century old theory into practice, and researchers report that small scale trials show that where rivers enter the sea, the potential exists to harvest power on a large scale. In Norway drawing water into brine has been used to produce enough pressure to drive a turbine, while in The Netherlands the approach is to harvest the energy by reverse electrodialysis. This is the reverse of an energy consuming process used to produce pure water from brine. Jan Post, a doctorate student at Wageningen University has been investigating this process, and he argues that reverse electrodialysis has a lot of attractions. In the lab, he said, it is possible to recover 80 per cent of the energy from salinity gradients, and both the Maas and the Rhine, discharging an enormous volume of fresh water into the North Sea represents an enormous untapped potential. In his doctorate thesis, Jan suggests that up to 4 million households in The Netherlands could be supplied from a blue energy power plant located at the Afsluitdijk, the point at which fresh water from the enormous inland sea discharges through the dike into the sea. However, success in harnessing the energy from reverse osmosis depends on developing suitable membranes, and some experts maintain that the cost of getting these into mass production could be high. Jan Post believes this investment could pay off, and he points out that the situation in The Netherlands is not unique. There are 5472 large rivers worldwide, he said, and blue energy requires no fuel and produces no pollution.
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UPFRONT Impact
THE Yucatan impact, which is often blamed for the demise of the dinosaurs, is thought to have been between 8 and 20 kilometres wide. Massive as this was, that impact would have been relatively minor compared to an event that created the largest crater we know of on Earth. The object that created the Shiva basin is thought to have been about 40 kilometres across. At the 2009 AGM of the American Geological Society the origin of this great basin northwest of India was described by Sankar Chatterjee from Texas University. Sankar and his colleagues have been taking a close look at the submerged depression, which is well known as a rich source of oil and gas. Complex craters, explained Sankar, are among the productive sites on Earth for hydrocarbons. Shiva’s outer rim forms a great faulted ring, about 500 kilometres in diameter. This ring forms a circle around a central peak, known as the Bombay High. On land this feature would stand out as a five kilometre high mountain. The crater rim extends onto land, where it is distinguished by tall cliffs, active faults, and hot springs.
As Shiva remarked, “it would be hard to imagine such a cataclysm,” which in all probability smashed through thick layers of granite, vaporising everything in its path, causing ultra-hot magma to well up filling the void. The extreme violence is thought to have caused the Seychelle Islands to break away from the Indian plate, sending them adrift towards Africa to their present position. For Sankar and his colleagues the investigations into Shiva have just begun. Samples are to be taken from the impact area for detailed examination, including isotope analysis which could indicate where the giant body came from.
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UPFRONT Migration
Galactic crash
IN what must be the biggest crash of all time, two Milky Way sized galaxies have been observed smashing into each other. This dramatic event, known as NGC 2623, was captured by the Hubble Telescope in 2007, but it has taken a team of more than 30 astronomers led by Aaron Evans to generate this compositive picture from the image combined with data from x-ray studies. The crash, which is seen in its late stage, is about 250 million light years away, in the constellation Cancer. As galaxies collide, there is a massive tug-of-war in which gases are drawn from the centre of one to the other. Eventually the two galaxies merge into one super body, and in this case, the merger is nearing completion. Tails of material remaining on both sides become active sites for star formation. About a hundred bright star clusters have been observed in one of these tails. In NGC 2623 there is now one centre which is pulling material into a black hole.
Back pain
MArkErs, known as glycans, can show the difference between healthy and diseased tissues in the spine. This ability to detect problems is likely to help in treatment of back pain, one of the most common forms of disability in 30 to 50 year olds, and prevalent in older people. At NUI Galway Prof Abhay Pandit has been investigating how these glycan markers can be related to the condition of intervertebral discs, and his research is being backed by the Swiss AO Foundation. As he explains, “You could think of the discs in the spine as being made up of an outer doughnut shaped ring of hard tissue. In the centre of each disc is a soft jelly-like material called the nucleus pulpous, or at least in healthy discs it is soft. With age and disease, the centre can harden.” It is almost impossible to differentiate between the nucleus pulposus tissue from the outer shell tissue of the disc and the centre, making it difficult to know when to give treatment. The glycan indicator is being investigated by his colleague, Prof Lokesh Joshi, who leads the glycotechnology research group at NUIG. Glycons are complex sugars with an important range of functions within cells, and many different types occur on cell surfaces. The AO Foundation, which has existed for many years and is based in Switzerland is a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving surgical care.
What do you expect?
EvEr wonder why spelling errors keep cropping up in published text, and even Science Spin makes more than the occasional slip? It has a lot to do with how we read, or, to be more exact, what we think we read. The fact is, we read what we expect to read, so we turn a blind eye to flaws that do not actually block our understanding. If you don’t believed this, try reading this: hard to blveiee, but more than likely, you can raed this, and actually uesdanatnard it. So, when you read, is it the odrer of the wrords, or is it the asusumptions you make based on the first and last letters. Without those assumptions our reading speed mgight be a lot solower.
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What guides migrating birds as they fly over enormous distances? It has often been suggested that they can sense the Earth’s magnetic fields, but as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology have found, detecting scent may play a more important role. Richard Holland, Martin Wikelski and other researchers from the Institute at Radolfzel and University of Konstanz went to New Jersey where they captured 24 adult and 24 juvenile Catbirds, Dumetella carolinensis. In eight birds from each group a saline solution was applied to their nasal mucosa, making them temporarily insensitive to smell. In another eight birds from each group, strong magnetic fields were applied, and the remaining birds were left as they were to act as a control. A further group of 19 catbirds were captured in Illinois and brought overnight to join the birds in New Jersey. There, all birds were fitted with tiny 0.9gm transmitters before release. When these birds migrate, they fly south west, avoiding a wide crossing of Delaware Bay. However, non-smelling birds lost their bearings, flying too far south to miss the narrower part of the bay. The birds from Illinois, because they had been moved, were also thrown off course, but unlike the nonsmelling migrants the adults, who had made the journey before, tried to compensate by veering off to the west. From this difference in ability to find their way, the researchers concluded that a sense of smell must be involved in migration. The most likely explanation is that different senses are involved, but how the birds originally find their way is another mystery. Young birds, who have never made the journey before, inherit a compass bearing, but if they are moved, like the group taken from Illinois to New Jersey, they set off in the wrong direction.
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UPFRONT
The world FI champions, the Koni Kats, on their return to Ireland in December, from left, Eoin O’Connell, Connor Daly, Sean Cleary and Adam Gammell from St David’s Secondary School. At an Irish Computer Society reception, leading figures from industry praised the team for their exceptional skill in designing and building the winning compressed gas powered model racer. www.fiinschools.ie
Bad maintenance
IN a study of 24 cases of breast cancer researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute found that the genome had been disrupted in a variety of ways. Between reshuffling, deletions, duplications and novel juxtapositions, more than 200 different rearrangments were made. As Prof Mike Stratton from the team remarked, “we were, frankly, astounded at the number and complexity of rearrangements in some cancers.� The variety, he added, supports the view that breast cancer is not just one, but several diseases. The type of rearrangment has a bearing on how the cancer can be treated. Some respond to herceptin, while others don’t, yet in appearance they are similar. Another of the researchers, Dr Andy Futreal, said that it seems that in some breast cancers there is an underlying defect in processes that normally maintain and repair DNA. Identifying the defect, he said, could help to explain how so many varieties arise, and it raises the possibility of improving treatment by targeting the basic mechanism. Dr Jorge ReisFilho, team leader from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research added that this approach is likely to work well. There is evidence, he said, to show that cells with a malfunctioning repair mechanism are more susceptible to drugs that knock out their DNA without causing any harm to normal cells.
Milk
STARVING children are being given blended flour while European farmers are at a loss to know what to do with a surplus of milk. The charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres, which brings practical aid into some of the most war torn and impoverished areas of the world, comments that it would make more sense to substitute some of this grain with milk. As Stephane Doyon, MSF’s expert in nutrition, observed, food aid is based on agricultural surpluses, and while Europe is drowning in milk, children are being given grain, which does not provide sufficient nutrients. Because of this, MSF has to deal with the medical consequences of sub-standard food, said Stephane. Without animal protein, such as milk, she explained, growth, mentally and physically, is stunted to such an extent that many children fed on grain do not even live long enough to celebrate their fifth birthday.
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Mood regulator
KNoCKING out a particular gene appears to reduce anxiety, at least in mice. Elizabeth Barbier and Jia Bei Wang from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland made this observation by systematically removing genes in mice. In the journal, BMC Neuroscience, they report that the removal of the gene, PKCI/HINT 1, changed how the mice behaved. Increased perserverence in carrying out tasks and reduced anxiety when let into open spaces, made the researchers conclude that the mice had become less anxious. Although the observations were made from mice, the researchers point out that the same gene may be involved in depressive and bipolar conditions in humans. “The protein encoded by this gene could be a potential drug target for development of diagnostic or therapeutic agents that one day might be used for depression, bipolar or schizophrenia disorders� said Jia Bei Wang, adding that “the knockout mice might be useful as a model to study mania, as there is no other animal model available yet.�
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UPFRONT
Evolutionary jumps Flying dinosaurs, the Pterodactyls, dominated the skies during the Mesozoic, and scientists have these divided into two different groups, essentially distinguished by the length of their tail. The long tailed Ptererodactys were succeeded by the short tailed ptedrosaurs. The problem for scientists was that, while the two could be connected, the evolutionary gap between them was big. The discovery of a new fossil, described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, fits well into this gap. In honour of Darwin, this new discovery from China, has been named Darwinopterus. More than twenty fossil remains of Darwinoptererus were found in the north-east of China in rocks dated to 160 million years ago. Some of the fossils were complete, and they are
More to come
THE build up of pressure from colliding Earth plates was such that a major quake in Haiti was expected. Although geologists knew that the earthquake was a disaster waiting to happen, nothing was done in advance to reduce the impact. Undoubtedly, a lack of resources made it difficult to take any kind of preventative action, but even so, a failure to plan ahead meant that buildings tumbled and people in their thousands either died or suffered appalling injuries. Unfortunately, this is not going to be the last time that disaster strikes densely populated areas, and in many cases countries most at risk are as illprepared to deal with the consequences as Haiti was.
An impression of Darwinopterus hunting a small feathered dinosaur (Anchiornis). Picture credit: Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth Fossil skeleton of Darwinopterus (skull 185 mm long). Picture credit: Lü Junchang of a crow sized pterosaur, thought to have been hawk-like, hunting for other flying animals, which like them, had recently taken to the air. The recently discovered flying reptiles were described by scientists from the University of leicester and colleagues from the geological institute of Bejing. “Darwinopterus came as quite a shock to us” explained David Unwin part of the research team and based at the University of leicester’s School of Museum Studies. “We had always expected a gap-filler with typically intermediate features such as a moderately elongate tail – neither long nor short – but the strange thing about Darwinopterus is that it has a head and neck just like that of advanced pterosaurs, while the rest of the skeleton, including a very long tail, is
identical to that of primitive forms.” One of the significant points to emerge from this discovery is that big changes can occur in one step, rather than in a succession of small modifications. As David Unwin observed, a lot of big changes were concentrated into short periods of time, and entire groups of important structures, such as the skull, neck, and tail, seem to have evolved together. in this way, evolution is likely to have been ‘modular’. The modular jump has always been one of the problems in describing evolution, and one of course that has been seized upon by those who like to believe that every species emerged intact from the Ark. The point that they fail to understand is that evolution is not necessarily a gradual process, but is more likely to have proceeded in a series of jumps.
Prof John McCloskey, an internationally recognised expert on earthquakes, has warned that the recent event that rocked Padang in western Sumatra, killing more then 1,000 people, was not big enough to relieve the enormous stress that has been building up in the region. Two massive plates, Asian and indian, are colliding, and in doing so, an enormous amount of stress is being generated. Prof McCloskey said “it’s like slowly drawing a bow,” and in just a few seconds all that stored energy can be released. As happened before, the shock, flexing the ocean floor, can create a tsunami, and as Prof McCloskey commented, “the thought that other big earthquakes are just around the corner is a truly bleak picture.”
Prof McCloskey said the situation in western Sumatra is extremely serious. “Another massive earthquake is due there, and it could happen literally any day.” All the indicators, he said, are that when this happens, the earthquake will be more destructive than the one that hit Haiti, and it will be accompanied by a tsunami. in a paper, published in Nature Geoscience, Prof McCloskey said that we have to be prepared for this quake, otherwise we will have a repeat of the Haiti disaster, but on a much bigger scale. Haiti, he said, has shown up how ill-prepared the international community is to deal with large scale disasters, and as usual, those least able to cope suffer the most.
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UPFRONT
The flow of life
BECAUSE genes change we can have evolution, but we are not too sure of how often mutations occur. The reason for this uncertainty, explained Detlef Weigel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Development Biology, is that we usually only look at the differences between plants or animal species. This can give a false impression for the rate of change because during the course of evolutionary divergence many of the mutations that occur will be lost. To get a better measure, Detlef and his colleagues worked with Michael Lynch and his team at Indiana University on a study of cress, Arabidopsis thaliana. In a painstaking
Germ killers
Going easy on the antibiotics does not mean that we should dose everything with disinfectants instead. As Dr Gerald Fleming at NUI Galway found, bacteria that can adapt to one form of attack, such as a disinfectant, can acquire defence against another, such as an antibiotic. His findings, published in the journal Microbiology, report that adding disinfectant to a culture of Pseudomonas aeruginosa resulted in the bacterium acquiring immunity to both the disinfectant and a commonly prescribed antibiotic, ciprofloxacin in spite of the fact that it had never been exposed to this treatment. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen, attacking people with a weakened immune
comparison of genomes the differences arising over thirty generations were noted. The number of differences found was quite small, and to put it in context, Detlef explained that the probability of change in just one base pair is about one in 140 million replications. For an entire genome, this would amount to one or two mutations a generation. “To find these tiny alterations in the 120 million base pair of Arabidopsis was akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.” In order to eliminate errors, each letter of the genome had to be checked thirty times. Although the rate of mutation seems small, Arabidopsis produces thousands of seeds, and given a huge
system, and it is one of the more important hospital-acquired infections. Disinfectants are often used to prevent its spread, but as Dr Fleming has found, this form of cleaning up may actually add to the risk of infection. Non-lethal doses of disinfectants, even in small amounts, have been shown in the lab to boost the ability of Pseudomonas to survive attack. The researchers believe that acquired resistance has a common cause, in the form of a pump. Cells have such pumps to eject harmful substances, and in acquiring immunity, bacterial cells have boosted the efficiency of this pumping system. Antimicrobial agents, whether in the form of disinfectants or an antibiotic are not allowed stay in cells.
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Scientists from all over the world are working at the Weigel lab. Image: Gertrud Scheer / Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology population, such as 60 million plants, this rate would be enough to bring about an average of one change for every gene. These are, in fact, the conditions that occur in nature, and as Detlef pointed out, the same rate of change would apply to humans. “If you apply our findings to humans, than each of us will have on the order of 60 new mutations that were not present in our parents.” The conclusion is that evolution can proceed much faster than we previously thought, and as Michael Lynch remarked, everything that is genetically possible is being tested out over a very short period of time.
Net safe
ACCORDING to Microsoft, 79 per cent of Irish teenagers are active on social networking sites. Nothing much wrong with that, but unfortunately, there are creeps who take advantage of open networking to present themselves as ‘friends’. For this reason, students are being encouraged to ‘think before you post.’ A study conducted by Microsoft reveals that the majority of students with personal details up on a social networking site have been approached by strangers. Jerome Morrissey, from the National Centre for Technology in Education said the ‘web generation’ has become highly sophisticated, but even so, it’s not always smart to use real names, and never ever respond to weird or nasty messages.
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YOUNG SCIENTISTS
Prompting the authorities to do more on teenage mental health Seán Duke reports from the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition
health had something to do with their state of mind, or their feelings. After he did a simple presentation on mental health to the same group, he surveyed them again, and found after his talk that 95 per cent of the students understood what mental health was about. “This showed how easy it was for a 15-year-old guy with a small presentation to get the message across,” said Alex. One surprising finding, he said, was that 10 per cent of students said that they would talk to a religious leader if they had problems, something he said “was shocking to me personally.” He also found that girls, while more honest, tended to be over dramatic at times, while boys tended to sometimes be under dramatic.
TALK Alex received a Highly Recommended individual award in the Social & Behavioural category. e all agree that it is very important that teenagers – who face a range of pressures these days – are aware of mental health, and what it’s all about. But, what are the authorities doing about it?
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It appears very little, and that is something that Alex Jordan, 4th Year, Clonkeen College, is trying to change. He is hoping his own attempts to raise awareness, will prompt the HSE to do more. What he would like to see is a mental health professional from the HSE visiting all schools at least once per year in order to talk to students about mental health and answer their questions on it.
Teenagers, like adults, can face severe mental health problems, such as depression, and in rare cases schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, but often they have little understanding of these conditions. Raising awareness among teenagers about mental health in general was Alex’s project goal.
SURVEY
He conducted an anonymous survey of 50 boys and 50 girls in nearby schools, not his own school, which is an all boys school, as he felt that his friends there would not take the survey seriously. He found that just 40 per cent of students understood that mental
In his presentation to fellow students, Alex explained that it was important for everyone to look after their mental health in the same way that they look after their physical health. He said that it was vital to keep active, be confident, eat well, relax, and when problems are issues do arise, not to be afraid to talk to people and ask for help if needed. He explained that depression is not something that lasts for a day, and then goes away, that rather it is something that can last for weeks. It can be triggered, he said, by a life trauma, for example. Students, like adults, might respond to depression or other mental health problems by engaging in substance abuse, but, many were unaware that while it might provide shortterm relief, it is going to make the underlying problems a lot worse. “People at the age of 11 today are starting smoking and drinking, which is unbelievable, as its small kids,” said Alex. “That is something that will lead on to later mental health problems, and they may not realise it until it is possibly too late for them.” The students, said Alex, were very interested too in schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, and were a bit hazy as to what both of these conditions were all about. They were also surprised, he said, that each condition affects one in 100 people. In Ireland that means about 40,000 people have each condition (sometimes people have both).
YOUNG SCIENTISTS
Ancient Egypt the inspiration for cow pregnancy test Seán Duke reports from the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition
Celia Cremin (above) & Maura Flanagan, Hazelwood College, Co Limerick, won 1st prize in for “Group Intermediate Technology”. simple test for pregnancy in cows devised by the Ancient Egyptians, called Punyakoti, has been shown to confirm pregnancy earlier in cows than any method used today. It is absolutely crucial for farmers to have the earliest possible diagnosis of pregnancy in their cows, because the herd has to synchronised. The synchrony element is key factor in managing the herd, as farmers want to have all their animals pregnant together. This research was conducted by Celia Cremin and Maura Flanagan, from Hazelwood College, located in west Limerick. The girls proved that the Egyptian test worked, well, and could diagnose pregnancy earlier than either scans or physical exams. The Punyakoti test can determine pregnancy in cows after 19 days, whereas a physical examination by
A
a vet today can only confirm that after 35 to 40 days. The vet performs a ‘rectal palpation’ - the purpose of which is to gain access to placental tissue, if present. “Farmers try to get as many of their cows pregnant as they can,” explained Celia, who is from a farming background, as is Maura. “You need to know if cows are pregnant at the earliest stage, because if not, then you need to give them another chance.” There is clearly a market for a simple-to-use on the spot test for cow pregnancy. Scans are expensive, and rectal palpation is too, as a vet is required and results come too late. The girls had an interest in detecting hormone levels in pregnant cows, and they saw that progesterone increases in cows when they are pregnant, but it is always there as well, when cows are not pregnant too, so it was not a definitive marker.
Then, while doing research on the Internet, the girls came across an early test for pregnancy in cows used by the Ancient Egyptians – called Punyakoti. “This is a germination test,” said Celia, “where you put 1mm of the cow’s urine that you want to test into a Petri dish, and 14mm of distilled water, and wheat or barley seeds – about 15 of them.” “You leave them to germinate for about five days and when you come back, if the seeds have begun to germinate, if there is any germination at all, then the cow is not pregnant. But, if the seeds have gone a blackish colour and have not germinated then the cow is pregnant.” They found the test worked beautifully, and the reason was simple. There is an acid present in the urine of pregnant cows called abscisic acid, and this prevents the germination of wheat and barley seeds when present, causing them to turn dark. This result is achieved 19 days after insemination of the cows, which is early enough for the farmer to take that non-pregnant animal out of the herd, and try and get it pregnant again. There is still time for the animal to get pregnant and get back in sync with the herd. The great result with the confirmation of the effectiveness of the Punyakoti has inspired the girls to think of producing a marketable, simple pregnancy test for cows. The best approach they believe would still be to identify a ‘marker hormone’ for pregnancy in the cow, and to develop a test that would easily detect if it was present. Ideally,the girls want to design a simple test in which the cow’s urine changed colour when the animal is pregnant. This could be used by farmers on the spot, and save them valuable time and money.
SPIN
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YOUNG SCIENTISTS unit was insulated around the cylinder and the ‘motherboard’ (the computer’s main circuit board) to prevent condensation that could ‘kill’ the motherboard. Henrik manufactured the unit with the help of his technology teacher Mr Campbell. As well as increasing the processing power of the standard Intel chip in his computer, Henrik increased the ‘clock frequency’. This is the term applied to how chips are designed so that if one part of the processor completes a task first, it will wait for the rest of the unit to catch up. If this did not happen then the chip would make mistakes.
TEST
Henrik Bruesecke from St Columba’s, Glenties, won second prize for an individual (senior) in the technology category.
Making computer chips run faster
Seán Duke reports from the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition here are those among us, technically gifted people, who are not happy to sit back in vegetative mode, and watch TV, search the Internet, or listen to their iPod. These are the people who want to open things up, spread the pieces, and understand how things work. One such person is Henrik Bruesecke, 5th year student at St Columba’s Comprehensive in Glenties. Surrounded by computer hardware, Henrik casually explained that he had figured out how to get an extra 20 per cent processing power out of standard Intel computer chips. Clearly, this is a young man of great ability with an exciting future ahead of him. “I have been fiddling around with computers since I was about five,” said Henrik at the show, talking happily in front of a desk crammed with his experimental computer hardware. “I became interested in hardware in the last two years or so,” he added.
T
CHIPS
For those that might not know, the computer’s chip, or processing unit, is key to the power of the computer. It determines the speed at which the
machine can perform calculations, for instance. New and more powerful chips are constantly emerging. However, there is more to processing power than the computer chip itself. Heat is a big design issue, and generation of heat is a limiting factor on processing power. Put simply, if chips work faster they generate more heat, and this requires a large cooling unit. That means more bulk and more expense, so manufacturers limit the size of the cooling units. This is something that Henrik knew already, and he set out getting the most out of his chips. He began by purchasing the hardware he required and set about designing experiments, with the help and advice of his teachers, at his home in Glenties. The first thing was to increase the power into the chip, and this meant increasing the voltage. That was easy enough, but the challenge lay in keeping the hard-working chip cool. He did this by designing a cooling unit that kept the chip from overheating. The cooling unit comprised a copper cylinder, into which cold, liquid nitrogen was poured. The
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Amazingly, Henrik, managed to get a significant more amount of ‘ooomph’ out of his computer processing unit. Something akin perhaps to a mechanic buying a standard saloon, then working on the engine, to produce a super-fast, lean, mean, racing machine. He increased the voltage into the chip, while running the cooling unit that he had designed along with his teacher. It was a simple equation: more power in, more heat out, more cooling to compensate for the increase in heat, and faster processing speeds. It worked beautifully. “With the CPU (computer processing unit) I increased its speed from 1.8 gigaherts to 3.5 gigaherts,” said Henrik. He then ran a test to see how long the chip would take to perform a complex task at the lower speed, versus the higher speed. The task was to calculate the 500,000 decimal places after Pi. “At 1.8 gigaherts it took 15 seconds, while at 3 gigaherts it took 9 second,” he said. He ran the calculation at the higher speed at 3, rather than 3.5 gigaherts because the chip is unstable at 3.5 and would have been prone to mistakes. So, instead of buying new computers all the time, which claim to be faster than the previous generation, perhaps we should simply call Henrik. He’ll get our old processors moving. By the way, not surprisingly, Henrik says he would like to be an electronic engineer.
CLOSING DATE Friday, April 23, 2010
Overall Prize: First Prizes:
Laptop iPod Touch
Second Prizes: Highly Commended
€150 €100
:
Direct all enquiries to: Karen Sheeran, RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. Tel: 01 240 7289 Email: science@rds.ie Web: www.rds.ie/youngsciencewriters LIVE K LIN
PART ONE Starting in this issue of Science Spin, a series of special features in which Dr Veronica Miller explains what we know about the brain and how it works.
INtroduCINg thE braIN Y
our heart beats, fingers feel, muscles move, eyes see, ears hear, toes tingle and tongue tastes. A four year old wouldn’t need a degree in anatomy to tell you that. From day one we can feel our body in action. A quick blink tells us eyes create sight. A nibble on a chilli pepper tells us our tongues taste. And a shock to the system sets our hearts thumping showing us what makes blood shoot about our bodies. But, if you ask a four year old what their brain does, they’ll probably just scratch their heads in wonder. And perhaps you would too. Billions of electrical impulses are born every millisecond in our brains. These actively motivate our minds, move our limbs and mark us above other mammals on the planet. Yet apart from the odd headache, you may wonder how we know the brain is working and what exactly it does? Many thousand’s of years ago, according to Buddhist and Hindu legends, an Indian sage told a parable about “The blind men and an Elephant”. According to the story, a Raja was asked to settle a dispute in his court between the men of Savatti who believed life was eternal and those who did not. The Raja gathered six men of Savatti who were blind and sent them to the jungle to encounter an elephant. They were told to return to the court and describe the elephant to him. The first blind man laid his hands on the elephant’s legs and described the elephant to the Raja as being like a wall. The second man felt the elephant’s sharp tusks and told the Raja that the elephant was more like a spear. The third felt the elephant’s trunk and said that the elephant was snakelike. The fourth felt the elephant’s wrinkly knees and said it was like a tree; and the fifth laid his hands on the elephant’s large flat ears and said it was like a fan. The sixth and final man touched only the elephant’s tail and told the Raja he had encountered a rope. For many hours the six men argued with each other, each convinced that they and only they were right as to what an elephant truly was. In the end no resolution was found, as none of the men knew what the elephant was like. Not one
had seen the whole elephant. You might like to think of the brain as being like the elephant from the parable. Aside from the fact that both elephants and brains are large rubbery and grey coloured, the brain is also something that makes blind men of many who study it. If you were the Raja then the six blind people you send to study the brain would be a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, neuropathologist, neurologist, psychiatrist and psychologist. And perhaps somebody with a map to help them find their way back to your palace to tell what they found. One of the simplest ways to find out what is happening in somebody’s head is to cut it open and take a look inside. Once you do that, and see the quivering electrostatic mass of grey tissue inside the skull, the next stage is to find out what the different bits do. By studying people with brain injuries, and by removing parts of people’s brains, primitive neurosurgeons learned the location and function of different brain parts. Nowadays, the blind neurosurgeon, equipped with the latest technology, could tell you from trial, error and immense learning what the brain is made of and what function different parts hold. With an insatiable desire for information and an ability not to believe most of what they read, the neuroscientist will attempt to study how the brain works. He or she, will use information from physiology about the brain’s wiring, biochemistry about the types of nutrients it needs, cytology about the cells that make up the brain, and genetics and anthropology about the brain’s development, to distill information for you to sip on. Equipped with scientific information the neurologist will try to understand what happens when our brains don’t work. Years ago the neurologist might have been the witch doctor or sooth sayer in the village who had a magic herb garden and an ability to make aspirin from forest foliage. Nowadays thanks to improvements in technology allowing for quicker generation of brain images, genetic screening for diseases, and early detection of diseases, the blind neurologist could prove effective in telling you how healthy the brain he/she met was. You might like to think of the blind psychiatrist as a waiter or bar tender who could spot a problematic customer
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simply by their erratic food or drink orders. A good bartender might recommend fewer drinks for customers who were already quite merry, and a good waiter might suggest a little less chilli for westerners unaccustomed to spicy food. Likewise a psychiatrist might spot when your brain is in need of some medical attention - due to lack of nutrients, or erratic electrical currents passing through it, and recommend therapy. The blind psychiatrist could tell you if the brain it encountered was misbehaving and suggest a drug to fix its behaviour. Of all the blind men sent out to study the brain, you might like to think of the psychologist as being the most touchy feely. All of the others would use their own tools and technology to poke, prod, pry, investigate and interrogate the brain. They would then generate their own language, from Latin, Greek, and their mother tongue to describe it to you. The psychologist, however, would more likely use a little tea and
sympathy; he/she would speak directly to the brain and try to understand how it felt. The blind psychologist would attempt to befriend the brain and then tell you what kind of a character it had. Individually each of these six couldn’t tell you the story of the brain. But, together these six from different branches of the brain’s fact-filled family tree could describe the whole brain to you. In this series of features we have used information from these different branches to build a story for you. The story ranges from what the brain looks like, to what functions it holds, what cells it contains, how it processes the sights sounds and smells of our world, why some people are smarter than others, where our fears and dreams are made, why some folk make us smile, to what could happen if we could harness the true power of our brains. And it begins with us opening our own minds.
ThE BraIN IN aCTIoN
D
ancing, dodging, breathing, blowing, shouting, throwing, thinking, growing, everything that takes place in your body is controlled by the brain. It constantly receives information from the body, processes it, and then shuttles out commands to our limbs and organs. The mysterious grey matter encased in our skulls is not just a junction box transmitting a series of electric impulses through a black hole of consciousness. It is in fact a highly structured organ and by the end of this chapter you should be as familiar with its inner workings as with the tips of your fingers.
Brain Box
is a word of Greek origin meaning membrane, and plexus means group of special tissue. The CSF is a clear liquid, renewed four to five times per day. It flows around in the brain and pools in four main caverns known as ventricles, two on the sides of the brain, one in the middle and one at the bottom of the brain at the brainstem. CSF is pretty much entirely water, containing some glucose and nutrients to help feed the brain. It also acts as a drainage system to remove toxic products from the brain. If, for example, a person had an infection in their head, puncturing the spinal chord and draining out some of the fluid to test it for toxic substances would reveal what kind of infection was in that person’s brain.
Firstly we have to get through the skull before we cut to the brain. We often think of the skull as one piece, but in fact the bony cap housing our brain is made Feed the brain of separate parts. Babies are born with a Circle of Willis prevents clogging up of the It’s not just important to keep the brain soft spot on their skull, a gap known as brain’s blood suppiy. well oiled; it also has to be well fed. A the fontanel where the bones have yet to constant flow of blood to the brain is fuse together. As their bones join together vital for our survival. Though the brain is small compared the lines where the bones meet are fused into sutures. In to the rest of the body, it has a huge appetite for energy. the adult skull there are six main bones. At your forehead It accounts for only two per cent of our body weight, yet we have the frontal bone, and on the sides at the front just demands 20 per cent of the body’s blood supply. above your ears we have the temporal bones. At The brain needs to be bathed the back is the flat occipital bone. On the top continuously in blood to obtain sugar, to back sides we have the parietal bones. burn as a fuel. Unlike other body tissues,
Boxing Clever
If you receive a blow to the head, the skull takes the brunt of the blow. Instead of being transmitted into the delicate tissue, the shock is dispersed into the cerebral spinal fluid surrounding the brain. The cerebral spinal fluid, CSF, is so named because it flows in the brain and spine, and it is produced in the brain by special tissue called the choroid plexus. Choroid
which store fats as a fuel reserve, brains are almost exclusively reliant on sugar from a constant stream of blood to function properly. If any of the arteries that supply the brain with blood were to become blocked due to a clot, the supply to that area would be cut off. All functions carried out by that part of the brain would be lost. All of a sudden a person could lose the
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ability to see, speak, walk, talk or breathe. Therefore, it’s vital for the brain to have a back-up system. This back-up is in the form of the circle of Willis, a vessel at the base of the brain. The brain receives blood from four large arteries, two at the front and two at the back. They enter the brain separately, but are linked by a circular vessel, the circle of Willis. From here they branch out to supply the brain with energy. The circle of Willis is the system that prevents the blood supply getting clogged. Essentially it acts like a cerebral roundabout to keep blood traffic flowing through our busy brains.
Uncapping the brain
Internally the brain looks a lot like a walnut shell with a stalk coming out. It’s made of two parts, called the cerebral hemispheres. Both sides look the same, but the right has more creative functions and the left is more logic orientated. Interestingly, people who are righthanded actually depend on their left hemisphere for control of their movement and speech, while people who are left-handed use their right hemisphere. Many famous creative types, artists, inventors and scientists such as Leonardo De Vinci, Henry Ford, and Marie Curie were left-handed. These two sides are connected by a large bundle of nerve fibres known as the corpus callosum, meaning big body of nerves. The cerebrum itself consists of layers of different tissues and cells. Inside you have the cerebral cortex, the outer skin of the brain. The word cortex comes from the Latin word for the bark of a tree. When you peel an orange you immediately release huge amounts of flavour into the air. The skin of the orange contains most of the flavour of the fruit. The brain is similar in that a lot of the good things are on the outside. The cells that control higher functions, such as talking, speaking, dreaming, are located in this outer layer. If you were to look at a slice of cerebral tissue, you would see the cortex is grey coloured and about two to six millimetres thick. Underneath the cortex is the white matter. White matter is basically the nerve fibres
Frontal lobe
Occipital lobe
that connect different areas of the brain together, forming networks. Nerve fibres branch out from cell to cell, and are covered in a fatty layer to insulate their electrical signalling, like the way the copper wires attached to the plug on your TV are covered with plastic to insulate the flow of electricity. This fatty layer gives the tissue a white colour. The high concentration of brain cells in the cortex, which process information, gives it its grey colour. This is where the phrase “use your grey matter” comes from.
Finding your way around the brain
Phrenology was very popular in the beginning of the 19th century. Phrenology means “science of the mind”. It involved a “specialist” or phrenologist running their fingers over a person’s skull feeling the bumps and shape of their head. The lumps on people’s heads were then used to predict both the person’s personality and their future station in life. A bump just above your ear could indicate an honest disposition, and make you more employable. But, for some a bump at the back of the head, could mean a predisposition to criminal activity, and jail. Science has moved on a little since then, but the idea that we can find specific areas under the skull with specific functions is not without truth. The lumps and bumps on the cerebral cortex can be divided into four different anatomical areas, and these, in turn are associated with different functions. The frontal lobe is under the frontal bones of the skull. This area controls speech production, elaboration of thought, control of emotions and of skilled movements. The temporal lobes are either side of your head under the temporal bones of the skull. These lobes control recognition of sounds, tones, generation of short-term memories and speaking. The parietal lobes are under the two paritial bones, at the rear sides of the skull. They control sensations such as touch, temperature, pressure and pain. The occipital lobe is under the occipital bone in the skull at the very back of your head. The function of this lobe is to detect and interpret visual images.
Parietal lobe
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Temporal lobe
Down from the cerebrum, we encounter the cerebellum, which literally means little brain. It has a ridge-like structure on the outside and a branch like structure on the inside. The cerebellum is also known as the “tree of life” or Arbor Vitae, thanks to the tree like structure of its insides. You can see the branch-like structure of a slice taken from the cerebellum and stained purple. This area controls regulation and co-ordination of movement, posture and balance. Under the cerebrum we find the bits of the brain that are concerned with controlling the driving power of our bodies, the basic animal urges, to create, to attack to breathe and then to sleep. These animalist bits are controlled in the midbrain and brainstem. These bits relay messages coming from the body up to the cortex, and from the cortex down to the body. The brainstem is like a tree trunk receiving information from the roots in the body, and sending commands back from the cortex. Humans, like all other animals, eat, breathe and have hearts that beat. All of our brains have brainstems, to control these basic functions. More developed animals, with more finely tuned skills, have cerebellums, to control finer movements. Those animals that are most developed have similar brains to us, with a noticeably larger cortex than cerebellum or brainstem. But, no animals have brains which are as complicated or developed as the human brain. Why is that?
Comparing Brains
At birth, chimps, our closest relatives, have a brain 80 per cent of its adult size. Their baby brains take up a volume of about 350 cubic centimetres, and develop to 450 cc. The human brain is proportionally a lot smaller at birth, with a volume of about 400 cc, yet it grows to a massive volume of 1450 cc at adulthood. Chimps can walk like us much earlier but in many other areas they do not continue to develop. The human brain, initially slow to develop, becomes larger and more powerful over time, thanks to our extended growth period outside of the womb. After birth, the human brain, no longer constrained by the size of the birth canal, explodes in size, so that by age of four it has tripled in size. At birth the human brain makes up 11 per cent of our body weight, but consumes a massive 74 per cent of the body’s energy intake. The dolphin brain has a brain that is not just larger than the human brain at birth but is certainly more folded. So why is it that adult dolphins seem only capable of doing circus tricks? Dolphin babies can be a metre long and weigh 12 kilograms. At birth dolphin brains are already 50 per cent of its adult size, and within a year 80 per cent of its adult size. Dolphins have larger and more folded brains at birth due to a longer gestation period of 12 months; spending three months longer than us in the womb. So, despite being better developed than us at birth, dolphins do not develop further, because during the extra three months in the womb, they have been learning in the dark. Without external environmental stimuli, dolphin brains don’t develop internal connections between their neurons.
Top: A section through the cerebrum. This is the part of the brain controlling posture and balance. Right: This, the midbrain and brain stem, are concerned with basic urges.
Brain stem
Cerebrum
Though their brains grow larger, they don’t reach the same level of complexity as the slower developing human brain. Increased folding of the brain should mean a greater intellect. Our lungs contain thousands of bud-like alveoli to maximise the surface area exposed to air, to help us with our breathing. The digestive tract contains a muchfolded small intestine to increase the area available for absorption of nutrients from food. So the cerebral cortex is also much-folded to allow for an increased surface area for us to make more connections, and further our thoughts. But, as you can see from the table overleaf, brains with biggest surface area are not necessarily the brightest. We know brain size and brain complexity are not always linked. Males traditionally have heavier heads than females, containing more brain cells, or neurons. Men have about 22.8 billion neocortical neurons, while females have 19.3 billion. Yet, as we know, a bigger brain does not a better brain make.
Less is more
Pruning excess neurons is an essential feature of human development. From the embryo to the early adult at 10 years, the brain is constantly losing neuron cell bodies,
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1 chimpanzee, 2 cat, 3 capybara, 4 dolphin, 5 spiny anteater, 6 squirrel monkey, 7 manatee, 8 weasel, 9 beaver.
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and increasing the connections between the remaining ones. So while adults may be wiser than children, they actually have fewer brain cells. During adulthood we lose an average of 85,000 neocortical neurons a day. This number would be more scary were it not for the fact that we start off with an average number of about 100 billion neurons in the brain. The neurons are the workhorses of the brain, yet losing some can make the brain more efficient. Neurons required for in the early stages of development can be discarded once they have served their purpose, SPECIES and this is a natural process. Neurons are very special cells Lesser shrew because they do not divide and Rat reproduce during the life of a cell; instead they constantly grow forming Cat African elephant and reforming connections between each other, forming new memories Bottle nosed dolphin and thoughts. Killer whale In young adults there are Human approximately a staggering 39 billion kilometres of these fibres, and in older adults about the figure is 36 billion kilometres. This means that the individual brain contains enough myelin fibres to ‘yo-yo’ from the Earth to the Sun many times
over. Neurons can transmit information at up to 250 miles per hour through their nerve fibres. The longest nerve fibre, or axon from a single neuron in the animal kingdom measures 15 feet and stretches from neck to toe of the giraffe. However it’s not just the amount of fibres you have that is important, it’s how often they connect or synapse with each other. Like using the Internet, if you didn’t have the connection to thousands of other computers, search engines, such as Google, simply could not work. So it’s no use having billions of neurons if Surface area, they are not interconnected. In the 2 centimetres brain, every neuron has multiple 0.8 connections. 6 Currently the estimated 83 number of synapses in the cortex 6,300 are somewhere between 60 and 3,745 240 trillion. And in the midst of all 7,400 of these synapses, somewhere we 2,500 have the ability to touch, see, smell taste and hear a relentless supply of information from our natural world. The next issue of Science Spin will explain this sensational side of our brain, and how it makes sense of our senses.
Veronica Miller has a doctorate in neurobiology from Newcastle University, and a masters in communications from DCU. She has worked on ‘Scope’ a popular science television programme for teenagers, and is currently working as a researcher in the US.
Collect the series as Veronica Miller goes deeper into our amazing brain. In our next issue — making sense of the scent of attraction.
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SPIN ACTIVE Applied Science Technology & Innovation
l CAMPUS COMPANIES l GETTING R&D INTO IRISH SMEs l INNOVATION CENTRES l COLLEGE INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS
SPIN ACTIVE APPLIED STI
I
nnovation is an essential part of Science Spin, and to extend our coverage on the applied side of science and technology a new supplement, Spin ACTIVE, has been launched. In Spin ACTIVE the main focus is on how business and industry can benefit by applying the results of research. Like Science Spin, Spin ACTIVE is being distributed in print and as a free-for-all digital pager turner. It also has a controlled circulation to those involved in the business side of innovation, new product development, and professionals working in industrial R&D. For more than five years, Science Spin has been giving Irish research unrivalled coverage, and now Spin ACTIVE is here to present news and information of practical use to people in business and industry. By presenting information in a way that readers can understand, Spin ACTIVE is addressing the gap between generation of knowledge and application of results. That gap is bad for science, bad for industry, and it is undoubtedly bad for the economy. As the recent State commissioned ‘value for money’ studies have shown the vast majority of Irish SMEs either feel excluded from technology transfer opportunities, or they have serious difficulties in matching up their everyday needs to the available third and fourth level expertise. A low level of spin-off to small and medium sized Irish firms raises serious questions on how the economy is supposed to benefit from continued investment in science and technology. This is not, as it might first appear, to be an issue of dividing science into two camps, ‘blue skies’, or ‘applied’. Ultimately pure science, which gave us lasers, induction, and monoclonals, may be far more valuable in every sense of the word than tightly focused applied research, but this is not the point. A failure to profit from results, no matter where they come from, is not the smartest way to to go about developing a ‘knowledge economy.” In spite of the very welcome support and uptake of research by multinationals, the transfer of results to Irish firms remains unacceptably low, and without question this is a problem that has to be solved. In the longer term, solving that problem could well be more important to the Irish economy than using public money to prop up a seriously defective banking system. If you find it hard to accept that, just look at how the global economy works, and see that the SMEs, not the banks, are the real drivers of growth and innovation. Without the SMEs the world’s economy would simply grind to a halt, so is it really too much to think that Ireland should be any different? Alas, for far too many people in the agencies and in adademia home grown firms are just a bunch of losers. Hands-on entrepreneurs, on the other hand, typically regard academics as hopeless dreamers. The truth of it is that both have a point, but these are just two extremes, and in a perfect world, both sides could be of great benefit to each other. Not that the match is easily made, mainly because one side often does not really understand the other, so while busy entrepreneurs skip the lecture but expect to get a quick fix for their latest problem, academics, who have no talent at all for marketing, aspire to become whiz-kids in business. Of course there are the exceptions, people who feel at home in both camps, but even so, a common, if not the dominant view among those who are actually in business, is that publicly funded research has nothing at all to do with them. By making our content relevant to both sides of that divide Spin ACTIVE aims to bridge that gap.
Your news, views and comments are always welcome. If you are involved in applied science and have something to say or wish to profile your research, this is your platform. Send in an email with the words ‘Register Spin Active’ and we will keep you up to date with our live links to the digital page turner edition. Spin ACTIVE is published with Science Spin, Ireland’s science, nature and discovery magazine. Editor: Tom Kennedy. Email: tom@sciencespin.com Business Development Manager: Alan Doherty. Email: alan@sciencespin.com Tel: 01 2842909 www.sciencespin.com
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Spin-offs from space
Techniques developed to speed up car assembly proved useful in the aerospace industry, and now the circle has come around. Technology used for docking in space are now being used for more accurate and faster assembly of components in the auto industry. At the Volkswagen Autoeuropa works in Portugal, object recognition technology developed for the European Space Agency has gone into action fitting dashboards into cars during assembly. The object recognition and positioning system was developed by MDUSpace in The Netherlands for use on ESA’s Automated Trensfer Vehicle which serves the International Space Station.
Cleaning up
Miguel Brito, who is in charge of business development at MDUSpace, explained that the positioning system, which is still being evaluated, could solve a major problem for car makers. Although highly automated, positioning components, such as dashboards, is difficult. Assembly lines do not move along at a steady pace, and robotic manipulators have to be steered carefully into place, otherwise car bodies can be scratched or damaged. Car manufacturers try to get around this problem by placing manipulators on the car itself, or by synchronising the manipulator with the production line belt. Neither approach is ideal. The manipulator puts stress on the car body, and synchronisation is not just difficult, but expensive to achieve.
The new system combines live camera feed with object recognising software. In space, the system on board the transfer vehicle detects reflection of light pulses from target points on the craft. The vehicle is guided into its correct docking position by following the reflected pulses. The European Space Agency has a technology transfer programme to encourage industry to share the benefits of space research. Technology transfer centres have been set up in The Netherlands, Germany and Italy. The centres provide entrepreneurs with technical and business supports. The Technology Transfer Programme also helps aerospace companies to spin-off new developments and it encourages researchers to set up companies.
At present Jennifer is looking at how this combined system could be scaled up to go into production. In a competition run by In 2007 thousands of people in Galway suffered the consequences the Institute, Jennifer took the first prize for her poster describing of drinking water contaminated by Cryptosporidium and hotels her research. Previously, Jennifer, who graduated with first class had to stock up on bottled supplies. The impact of the outbreak honours in Toxicology, represented the Athlone Institute at a panwas serious for health, and harmful to the local economy. Galway European conference in Amsterdam. was not the first place to be hit, and contamination of water One of her supervisors, Dr Neil Rowan, said that thanks supplies with Cryptosporidium is a worldwide problem. The to Jennifer’s research we are likely to see an improvement in micro-organism is quite common in sewage and there is always sterilisation technologies. a danger of seepage into drinking water supplies. In this approach, ultra-short bursts of UV light and plasma-gas The Environmental Protection Agency identified 64 suspect discharges generate an anti-bacterial shock backed by a soup sources of supply, and while promises were made to remedy the of free electrons, ozone, and hydrogen peroxide. Pathogens situation, a research student at Athlone Institute of Technology, cannot survive that treatment, yet the process leaves no chemical Jennifer Hayes, reports that only seven treatment barriers have residue. been installed so far. Compared to existing UV lamp treatment, which requires Jennifer, from Castlerea, Co Roscommon, is studying for her relatively long exposure time, this system has an impact in seconds. MSc in Health Science at the Institute, and she has been looking An extremely fast switching system means that stored power can at how treatment methods could be improved. Her research be delivered in pulses that can be varied both in intensity and suggests that a combined use of pulsed ultra-violet and plasma frequency from 10 to 10,000 pulses a second. gas discharge would be an effective in eliminating the problem. SPIN ACTIVE
SPIN ACTIVE Making it happen
FOR final year students at Ashfield High School in Belfast, just dreaming about going abroad was not the way to gain business experience. For a nine day trip to New York, they raised the money themselves by running discos, fairs and even a fireworks display. Apart from having a good time, the 22 students met with executives from Associated Press, Credit Suisse, Chromavision, and Junior Achievement. School Principal, Mr A McMorran, said the trip, the seventh to be run so far, is all about broadening horizons, and is a great experience for students who plan to go on into business.
Decisions decisions ...
TAKING responsibility usually involved assessing risks and making a lot of decisions. As we can see all too clearly now, bankers, regulators and politicians are not that good in weighing up risks, and Dr Dylan Evans, who lectures in Behavioral Science at University College Cork, maintains that gamblers can be a lot better at making critical decisions. Dr Evans in presenting some of his findings at a public lecture in UCC said that expert gamblers are less prone to bias in their assessments, so they can think about risks more clearly. Gamblers, he added, could teach us how to make better decisions. Dr Evans is author of The Science of Sentiment and The Belief Effect, and as part of his ongoing research he has a website at http://www.projectionpoint.com/
Energetic bodies
ATTACHING solar panels to the roof of a car is one way to capture energy, but scientists at London’s Imperial College plan to go one better. The car body itself has the potential to act as a solar collector, and their plan, in collaboration with Volvo, is to develop a composite material that is robust enough to act as an energy storing shell. With a more efficient system, harvesting energy from the roof, bonnet and boot, hybrid petrol/electric cars could go a lot further before having to stop for a fuel top up. Dr Emile Greenhaigh, co-ordinator of the project said the potential benefits are enormous, and not just confined to cars. “The future applications for this material don’t stop there – you might have a mobile phone that is as thin as a credit card because it no longer needs a bulky battery, or a laptop that can draw energy from its casing so it can run for a longer time without recharging. We’re at the first stage of this project and there is a long way to go, but we think our composite material shows real promise.” One of the benefits for hybrid car makers is a big reduction in weight. At present hybrid cars are loaded down with heavy batteries, which only come into action when the car is cruising along. The researchers claim that the composites they are developing from carbon fibre and polymers, can store and discharge large amounts of electrical power much more efficiently than conventional batteries.
Software support
A matchmaking network has been set up to foster collaboration between software firms and third level research institutes. The Irish Software Innovation Network, ISIN, is being run by the Irish Software Association, and has been allocated €200,000 for the first three years of operations.
Michael Martin, manager of ISIN, said that there is ‘massive porential to boost innovation, enterprise and employment if we can get our software companies to work more closely with research institutes.” The services available through ISIN, he said, will be of particular value to companies that do not have the inhouse resources to conduct research. SPIN ACTIVE
Elected
PROF Gerry Byrne, who heads Mechanical Engineering at UCD, has become the first expert from Ireland or the UK to be elected as an International Fellow to the German Academy of Science and Engineering. Prof Byrne, who served as Dean of Engineering in UCD qualified as a mechanical engineer from the Dublin Institute of Technology in 1975 before going on to receive his doctorate from the Technical University Berlin. In recognition for his work and involvement in fostering engineering in Ireland, Prof Byrne was awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy, honoris causa, by DIT in 2005. Martin extended an invitation to such companies. “We will meet with you to discuss your requirements,” he said, and “we will then identify potential academic partners and match the appropriate expertise to support your company.” Michael Martin can be contacted at IBEC, phone 01 6051550, email: michael.martin@ibec.ie
SPIN ACTIVE Glycobiology
SUGARS in many different forms play a huge role in biological processes, and researchers at NUI Galway have become leading experts in this field. One of these experts is Prof Anthony Moran, and as Editor in Chief he has collaborated with contributors from Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, in producing a 1,000 page academic text book on microbial glycobiology. At the launch in Galway Prof Moran said the book had come at a time when glycobiology is on the rise. Major developments in vaccine design, drug discovery and diagnostics, he said, depends on our growing knowledge of microbial glycobiology. At NUI Galway a research group, the Alimentary Glycoscience Research Cluster, was established in 2009. Publication of this book by Elsevier’s Academic Press, said Prof Moran, will help place the Irish group on the world stage.
PhDs are good for business
FIRMS employing PhDs are more likely to benefit from collaboration with research institutes, and according to a study published by the government’s Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, these companies are more than twice as productive in patenting new inventions. Chairman of ACSTI, Tom McCarthy, commented on the importance of aligning the training of PhDs
Exporting renewable energy
Compared to other countries, Ireland has a much better opportunity to export power from offshore wind and energy resources. Speaking at a renewable energy conference in Dundalk, Matthew Knight from Siemens said that Ireland could easily produce 10 gigawatts from offshore wind by 2050 provided an investment of €30 billion was made. That investment, he said, would also cover grid connections and interconnectors. Although the investment required is substantial, Matthew said it would result in Ireland becoming a major exporter of sustainable power.
to the needs of SMEs, and one of the recommendations made in the report is that higher education institutions adopt a more collaborative approach with enterprise. Placing post-graduates in industry as part of their studies is recommended, and indeed, this approach has proved popular, both with industry and students. On this point, the report states that: “The Council strongly endorses the Enterprise Partnership Scheme, which links private enterprise and eligible public bodies to cofund postgraduate scholarships
Diagnostics
For the past five years industrial, clinical and academic partners have been collaborating on research at the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute. The BDI, based at Dublin City University is primarily concerned with improvements in point-of-care biomedical diagnostic devices.
Forestery research
and postdoctoral fellowships, and recommends that resources are made available to scale up the programme.” The report continues: “Beginning with the PhD education and training period and continuing through to early postdoctoral research stage there should be an integrated programme of support and training specifically targeted at PhD students and early postdoctoral researchers to enable them to commercialise their research.” The report is available at: LIVE www.sciencecouncil.ie LINK The most recent partnership is with Millipore, an international supplier to life science technologies and services. Prof Brian MacCraith, director of BDI welcomed the collaboration as a wonderful opportunity to engage with an industry leader. Millipore has a broad range of interests, and their main focus with BDI is on improving in-process testing and real-time monitoring in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.
Wood and forestry organisations throughout Europe have become partners in supporting a web site: www.innovawood-ssa.net. The aim of this project is to provide a useful link between knowledge producers and industry. About 100 research organisations are involved, and users can search the site to find experts by area and by speciality. www.innovawood-ssa.net
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SPIN ACTIVE Galway growth
ANNOUNCING plans for the next fourteen years, NUI Galway’s President, Dr James Brown, said that the university has now become the biggest employer in Galway city. Five new buildings are to be constructed, and according to the President, a third of the €130 million cost is to come from philanthropic sources. Research, particularly in the medical field, has created a demand for more facilities. These facilities, said Dr Brown, are an important support for the region’s thriving medical device industry, and the aim is to stimulate innovation. A target has been set to produce 200 PhD graduates a year by 2014. Under the plan, an average of five new companies are expected to spin-off every year.
Faster response using space technolology
TeChNOlOGy developed for use by the european Space Agency’s Columbus Module is now being used by the Dublin Fire Brigade to call up information about essential services. The technology, developed by Dublin based software company, Skytek, has been in use on board the International Space Station for the past three years where it is used to store, control and manage mission critical procedures. By adapting the technology, Skytek had been able to provide the fire service with immediate access to disaster procedures and information via a mobile computer. In many cases fire personnel have to deal with situations requiring specialised knowledge of the risks involved. For example, with accidents involving vehicles, there can be explosives in airbags, high voltage batteries, or recently developed hybrid systems that can raise issues on whether or not it is safe to use cutting equipment to release passengers. According to the company, emergency crews can now access data while on their way to the scene of an accident or fire. The system has gone into action in Dublin’s North Strand station and Swords. Dr Sarah Bourke from Skytec said the transfer of technology shows how an Irish company can successfully undertake innovation at a high level and then successfully commercialise the results. www.skytek.com E
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Spin offs on the rise
The number of companies formed to commercialise the results of college research is on the rise. According to the Technology Transfer Office, run by the third level institutes, 35 spin out companies were formed in 2009, three times the number reported for the previous year. The companies were formed across ten third level institutes, made up of the seven universities, Waterford Institute of Technology, Dublin Institute of Technology, and the Royal College of Surgeons. There has also been an increase in the number of licences issued to protect novel technologies, and compared to an average of 33 per annum up to 2007, last year, 102 licences were granted. Commenting on these results, Dr John Scanlan, director of commercialisation at NUI Maynooth, said that “What this process also demonstrates is that Ireland competes very favourably with other countries, in terms of funding invested in university based research and the production of spin out enterprises. In the US, where this activity is very mature and very valued, the equivalent research funding figure of about €50 million is spent per spin out created, while this figure drops to about €30 million per spin out for the UK. In Ireland, the figure for 2009 is about €20 million per spin out, which means that we have created what appears to be a very competitive method of commercialising IP in our universities. A key component is the excellent cross-section of talent in the TTO offices, mainly comprising ex-industry executives with broad knowledge in technology and business development.” SPIN ACTIVE
Digital expert
INrecognition for his contribution to digital camera technologies Dr Peter Corcoran from NUI Galway has been elected as a Fellow of the Institute of electronic engineers. This recognition is a rare honour, shared with just ten Irish based researchers. One of these is Dr Corcoran’s colleague, Prof Ger hurley, who was elected a Fellow of Ieee for his work in power electronics. Dr Corcoran is a co-founder of FotoNation, the market leader in red-eye removal technology. Redeye removal has become universal in digital cameras. Dr Corcoran also pioneered facetracking and face-analysis techniques that have now become standard in many digital cameras. his research continues into encoding of digital content using biometrics, and he commented that this is now the big challenge for electronic engineers. In a few years, he said, we will have consumer devices that ‘know’ their owners, thus solving major copyright and piracy problems.
Meat origins
PROF Frank Monaghan at UCD has found that chemical isotopes in meat can be used to determine the place of origin. For example, beef from Brazil, where cattle are fed maize, have different carbon and nitrogen isotope values compared to meat from grass fed stock. The isotope ratio can be detected by mass spectrometry, and according to Teagasc, the approach could be used to develop a test that could be applied to a range of meats including chicken.
Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units
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limate change and the sustainability ICARUS provides key climate data, crisis are the primary environmental services, advice and solutions, data challenges of contemporary society. to the scientific community, policy makers and community at large, both Mitigation and adaptation to global nationally and internationally, with the climate change has been identified as most up-to-date scientific knowledge, a national and international research for particular sectors and regions. It priority. Significant capacity is therefore produces numerous reports on behalf required in the area of environmental of public bodies and published the research, particularly climate change first regional climate-driven sets of science and impacts, in order to meet impact scenarios for Ireland in 2003. It is Ireland’s international treaty obligations. currently involved in a variety of climate The Irish Climate Analysis and Research change-related projects including: Units (ICARUS) was established in 2001 Climate change has moved centre stage in the water resources management and at NUI Maynooth in order to improve public consciousness and the media in the last modelling, agricultural impact scientific understanding of climate change decade. ICARUS aims to offer scientific insights and its impacts within Ireland and has to help Ireland play its part in tackling the major modelling, tourism, construction, global problem of this century. agriculture and forestry pests and since become a leading centre for such diseases, health, salmon survival rates, research. These objectives have been urban sustainability and planning, soil erosion modelling and achieved primarily through the analysis of climate trends and biodiversity modelling as well as issues of climate governance their causes, regional climate modelling and assessment of likely and economics. In recent months, ICARUS research on flood future impacts. Having won over €5.8million in research awards vulnerability and hydrological impacts of climate change has since 2001, output from the unit provides an important basis been widely disseminated, contributing to regular debates in for local and national government policy formulation and for fulfilling Ireland’s climate change obligations. the national media.
Recent projects Some of the current research projects at emissions have been located at sites ICARUS are: across Dublin as part of a joint research l NUI Maynooth’s High Performance initiative led by NUI Maynooth and Computing facility is working jointly with University College Dublin. The focus is to ICARUS along with the Irish Centre for understand how different types of urban High End Computing (ICHEC) to improve landscapes cope with carbon dioxide the performance of the computationally emissions and how planners might create intensive Weather Research Forecasting ‘carbon neutral’ or more sustainable (WRF) Model. The latest results of city developments in the battle against dynamical climate simulations show that carbon emissions. Globally, cities the WRF model is capable of capturing contribute about 80 per cent of the CO2 key temporal and spatial climate emissions attributed to human activities, variations across Europe at very high ICARUS analyses past climate trends and but the nature of these emissions is resolutions. their causes, regional climate modelling and rarely studied. Through this research the l A multidisciplinary project assessment of likely future impacts in order to scientists hope to better understand addressing adaptation to climate change improve scientific understanding of climate the urban processes involved and to in Ireland in a number of key areas such as change and its impacts within Ireland. determine the ability of particular urban catchment management, tourism, building spaces to capture CO2 after its generation. standards and planning, economics, and biodiversity will be completed in 2010 in collaboration with scientists at NUI, ICARUS scientists are recognised both nationally and Galway. internationally as having made a significant contribution l A multi-disciplinary team from ICARUS at NUI Maynooth, to climate change research and have actively contributed Trinity College Dublin and the Marine Institute have come to such policy initiatives as the National Climate Change together to study the effects of climate and climate change Strategy (2002), the Intergovernmental panel on climate on the aquatic environment, focussing on the Burrishoole change, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Third National Fishery, located just outside Newport, County Mayo. Intensive Report (2006) as well as the Greater Dublin Strategic Drainage monitoring of the catchment was initiated in the late 1950s, Study and various Local Authority planning guidelines and and the availability of long term datasets are critical to city development plans. unravelling and understanding the likely impact of climate change on species such as salmon, trout and eels. For more details: l Instruments capable of measuring the ability of http://research.nuim.ie surrounding trees and vegetation to consume carbon dioxide http://icarus.nuim.ie
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BIO-INSPIRED NETWORKING
Dr Brendan Jennings, Dr Sven van der Meer and Dr Sasitharan Balasubramaniam, Senior Investigators with the TSSG and Dr Willie Donnelly, Head of Research and Innovation.
Tom Kennedy reports that research at the Telecommunications Software Systems Group on self-regulation will give networks the capacity needed for the next generation Internet.
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he Internet is no more than 25 years old, yet it remains based on the technology of the 1970s. “You could say that it is now operating well beyond its initial design,” observes Dr William Donnelly, director of the Telecommunications Software Systems Group at Waterford Institute of Technology. With the rapid expansion of communications this reliance on relatively old technology has become a serious problem. The telecommunications solutions that worked well up to now, are just not flexible enough to handle an explosive growth in traffic. As Dr Donelly explains, convergence is adding to that problem because users now expect a high level of service no matter where they are or how they connect to a network. Most people have a mobile, they are surfing the net, booking or buying on line, and as readers of Science Spin will know, this feature can be viewed on screens around the world. Gigabytes of data are being crammed into networks that were originally designed to carry voice to voice calls. From fax
— remember that — we have moved on to sharing of digital snaps, ebooks, cloud computing, and the number of applications continues to rise. Yet, we all expect instant response, and near total reliability. Telecommunication engineers, said Dr Donnelly, have helped create these high expectations Our telephones can be relied on to work 99.99 per cent of the time, so uninterrupted service from networks is simply taken for granted. However, as Dr Donnelly observed, unless networks can be managed more efficiently, congestion is going to bring everything to a halt. “We now have users communicating with users, users communicating with machines, and machines communicating with machines,” said Dr Donnelly, and its not just one network, but many. “It’s a heterogeneous environment spanning many different network technologies.” In the past, engineers made predictions on what sort of traffic to expect, and planned accordingly, but as Dr Donnelly said, this linear approach no longer works because SPIN ACTIVE
the operating environment has become a lot more complex, and demand is completely unpredictable. To take just one example, following a big match or entertainment event, there can be a sudden surge in traffic as mobiles sent off snaps by the score for sharing. Oversizing the network is not the way to deal with these sudden and unpredictable demands, for that would mean that a huge and expensive capacity would lie idle for most of the time. In effect, instead of getting bigger, networks need to become smarter. “What we need now is a more dynamic communications framework,” said Dr Donnelly, and achieving this is the aim of his group’s research. If the next generation of networks are to work, he explained, they have to be self-governing, self-healing, sefoptimising, and self-protecting. As he admits, this is quite a challenge, but it is one that has already been overcome. Nature, he said, has been dealing with this kind of problem for millions of years, and that is why life has been able to survive so many upheavals that would have rendered linear systems of control extinct. Apart from checks and balances, one of the underlying characteristics of living systems is that resources are not always localised, but are held in reserve for delivery to any part of the body on demand. If we look at how the body works, there are numerous examples of autonomic control for highly complex systems. During exercise we convert glucose into energy, and Dr Donnelly compared this to using bandwith. If the exercise becomes more intense, and the glucose supply becomes inadequate, the body keeps going by burning up fat. In much the same way, a telecommunication network could be made much more efficient by having its equivalent of a fatty reserve. If we look at current management, he added, we usually find that there is just one fall back position, and this has been fixed by predictions. Thus, congestion in Cork might be routed to Portlaoise, but the system has no way
SPIN ACTIVE of knowing whether or not Portlaoise is already congested. As Dr Donnelly explained it would be possible to replace this simplistic predictive approach with a more sophisticated system with the automatic capacity to balance real time needs against real-time capacity. Such a capacity can be fine-tuned to distinguish between different levels of demand. For example, video conferencing demands a lot of bandwidth and if there is not enough capacity available in a network with fixed allocations, images start to judder. Fast response in borrowing that extra capacity from elsewhere would solve such a problem. Achieving this level of response, said Dr Donnelly, is not just a matter of making existing systems bigger, but is more a matter of integrating what we already have. Autonomic management would also keep costs down, and this has become a huge issue as service providers struggle to deliver more and more with the same resources. At present, said Dr Donnelly, service providers are buying enough bandwidth to satisfy expected demand. Having to buy in extra capacity can eat into profits, but
if they have better balancing out of demand, they can squeeze a lot more out of the existing system. Trying to maintain a high level of service by adding to existing networks would only make costs spiral up out of control, and Dr Donnelly remarked that its important for us to realise The Telecommunications Software Systems Group, based at Waterford Institute of Technology is widely regarded as one of the most successful research clusters in Ireland. Over 150 staff and research students are involved in collaboration that spans a number of institutions, including UCD, TCD, UCC and NUIM. There is a high level of support from industry, and partners include Ericsson, Cisco, IBM, Teléfonica ID, Alcatel Lucent, and HP. TSSG was established in 1996 and while it has good support from SFI, the founder and director, Dr Donnelly, said that one of the main strengths of the group is that it has very strong backing from industry. The size and diversity of the group, he said also means that research at TSSG spans a range from blue skies to applications of results.
Don’t be fooled
Anyone buying prescription only medicines over the Internet is taking a big risk. The drugs may appear to be genuine, but quite often they are worthless, or worse because no one can be sure what’s in them. In spite of the risks involved, a lot of people buy medicines over the Internet, and not always from reliable sources. So, when the package arrives, is there any way to check if the contents are safe? A company in Waterford has come up with a solution to that problem in the form of a handheld scanner. This instrument, the TruScan, takes a spectroscopic‘fingerprint’by comparing the chemical composition to an authentic reference sample. While extremely sophisticated, Dermot Harrington from Antech said the TruScan is easy to use, giving a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ indication within seconds. Antech specialises in supplying instrumentation to Ireland’s pharmaceutical and chemical industries, and according to Dermot, the TruScan has become one of best selling products. Under usual circumstances, he said, results like those given by the TruScan, could only be obtained in the lab. www.antech.ie LIVE LINK
that the way we communicate has changed dramatically over the past few years. We still tend to think in terms of traffic as on roads, where highways are built to accommodate congestion. “Imagine if everyone woke up tomorrow and decided to work elsewhere,” said Dr Donnelly, and this is much closer to the situation faced now by telecommunication managers. Demand is no longer localised, and with the rapid rise in mobile communications no one could possibly make predictions on demand. Traffic, said Dr Donnelly, is being driven by user behaviour, and we are getting patterns that we have never had to deal with before, such as virtual communities, geographically separate, but linked by telecommunications. Going back to the analogy with fat, Dr Donnelly remarked that a lot of high performance athletes manage to get the balance right, and we could be doing much the same in how we allocate bandwidth. In calculating the costs, he said, its not the fibre, but the inefficient switching that is so expensive. “Find different ways of getting into the network,” he said, “and a lot of problems would be solved.”
Biotech deal
An instrument developed by Stokes Bio in Limerick can speed up breeding of plants with desirable traits. The instrument produces a genetic profile from a continual flow of nanolitre-sized droplets. Up to 10,000 data points an hour can be evaluated, and samples are just one thousandth the size of those required up to now, making the system highly efficient than any available alternative. The development attracted the interest of the US plant breeding company, Monsanto, and in January a joint licensing and R&D agreement was announced. According to Stokes Bio, a number of these genotyping instruments will be delivered to Monsanto this year. Stokes Bio was established in 2005 by Mark Davies and Tara Dalton, with financing from Kernel Capital, as a spin-off company from the Stokes Institute at University of Limerick. In addition to Kernel Capital, the University of Limerick and Enterprise Ireland also are shareholders in the company. Mark Davies said that the technology can be applied in different ways, and he sees a potential for it in human healthcare. www.stokesbio.ie
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Adding vAlue on drug delivery
Tom Kennedy reports that research will give manufacturers better security while giving us a bigger share in product life cycles.
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iscovering a new drug can mark the end of a long quest by researchers, but for the pharmaceutical industry, this is just one part of the equation. Before anything can be produced, the industry has to work out how to produce the drug in bulk and in a form that can go on the market. As Professor B K Hodnett from the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster based at the University of Limerick explained, there can be no tolerance for variation, yet processes can be extremely difficult to control. Crystallisation, phase transformation, and mixing are just some of the stages likely to be involved, and if these processes vary, even slightly, materials may have to be reprocessed, or even discarded. Compared to other industries, the level of reprocessing, he said, is higher, and the main reason for this is that traditionally the emphasis was on monitoring chemical characteristics rather than taking important physical
characteristics into account. The Cluster although based at UL, involves collaboration between Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, University College Dublin, and the National University of Ireland Galway, and the aim is to match the wealth of chemical, engineering and other academic knowledge with practical production know-how from industry
Brendan O’Callaghan; Professor Kieran Hodnett, Dean Faculty of Science and Engineering, UL; Tom O’Callaghan and Liam Tully at the launch of the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster at the University of Limerick.
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to solve that problem of getting drugs into the right form. Most of the drugs we take, usually as pills, are are in powder or crystalline form. Crystals can vary, and although this might only be apparent under a microscope, the differences can influence how a drug is taken up by the body. Although drugs may be chemically the same, how they are presented usually determines when, where, and how they will be absorbed. It takes more than trial and error to get all of those processes right, and Professor Hodnett explained that knowing what’s involved at the molecular level and understanding the science behind reactions gives industry much more control, and apart from a better end result, there can be a considerable saving of resources. Wth more than 80 pharmaceutical companies manufacturing in Ireland the sector is responsible for a quarter of our manufacturing
SPIN ACTIVE output. One of the main reasons why those companies have done so well in Ireland is because the quality of production is high, and as Prof Hodnett observed, the way to keep this sector healthy is to provide a high level of support from research-based expertise. Manufacturing pharmaceuticals is highly competitive business, and likely to become more so as patents are starting to run out on some of the most popular drugs. Having a competitive advantage in process control, said Prof Hodnett is becoming more important for companies, and there is a related issue in how launch sites for new drugs are chosen. Patent protection only lasts for a limited number of years, so manufacturers cannot afford any delays in the start up of production. Decisions on where to locate initial bulk production are made on the basis of known track record and availability of expertise. Plants with a reputation for getting it right first time are always going to be the first choice for production of new drugs. Irish manufacturing plants already have a good reputation for getting it right, but going beyond this
Speed gene
Some horses are good for the short sprint and others are good longdistant runners. A problem for trainers is that is hard to predict what is the best course of action to take with young foals. Training a long distance runner for short sprints might be a waste of time. For some time, Dr Emmeline Hill at UCD has been arguing that the horse industry has a lot to gain by looking at problems like this from a scientific perspective. Emmeline has a PhD in Molecular Genetics from TCD, and she is certainly no stranger to horses. Her grandmother was Charmian Hill, the owner of Dawn Run, the only racehorse to have completed the Cheltenham Champion Hurdle (1984) and Gold Cup (1986) double. In 2004, as a Principal Investigator at UCD she was awarded an
The pharmaceutical sector in Ireland is represented by the PharmChemical group within IBEC, and one of concerns raised by this body is a high dependency on the manufacturing side of this industry. One of the reasons why this is of concern is that manufacturing and marketing is a relatively short period in the lifecycle of any new drug. In a twenty five year cycle, before patents expire, the first five to ten years goes into research and clinical trials. Two or three years of administration may follow, so it could be fifteen years before a new drug can be released into the market, leaving just five years of patent protection. As the PharmChemical group points out, manufacturers only come into the picture after a lengthy period of product development, so Irish industry has a lot to gain by moving back along the value chain. That means doing a lot more R&D, and this is one of the aims of the Solid State Pharmaceuticals Cluster. to improve products is a good way to secure the future. A number of academic researchers are associated with the Cluster, and there is active industrial participation
with companies such as Janssen, Schering Plough, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck Sharpe and Dohme, Roche, Pfizer, Tyco, and Helsinn Chemicals involved.
SFI President of Ireland Young Researchers award. Her research aim was to add value to Ireland’s enormously important racing and breeding industry by applying scientific methods. In January, this approach led to what is being hailed as a breakthough for the industry. Dr Hill‘s research had identified genes that can be matched to performance, and this discovery in turn led to the development of a ‘speed gene’ test. Last year Dr Hill teamed up with a well known racehorse trainer and breeder, Jim Bolger, to set up a company, Equinome, to commercialise the results. The test, officially launched this January, is expected to have a big impact the way breeders think. “Breeding techniques for thoroughbred horses have remained relatively unchanged
for centuries,” said Dr Hill. “Breeders currently rely on combining successful bloodlines together, hoping that the resulting foal will contain that winning combination of genes. Until now, whether those winning genes have or have not been inherited could only be surmised by observing the racing and breeding success of a horse over an extended period of years after its birth.” Instead of years, the new test can identify genetic characteristics within weeks. Irish breeders are not the only ones to show interest in the test. Internationally, the industry is worth billions of euros a year. In 2009 Equinome was the overall winner of NovaUCD’s 2009 Campus Company Development Programme.
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Renewable energy, nanotechnology, space technology, computer animation and game development: A career for you? MyScienceCareer.ie is a new website which aims to provide resources for students, career guidance counsellors, teachers, parents and people of all ages who are interested in finding out more about a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Check out career profiles written by young professionals from all areas of science, along with useful resources such as video interviews, for some valuable insights into a career in science. Find out the difference between various sciencerelated jobs, what subjects you would need to study, what a typical day involves and what other areas could be open to you in the future by pursuing a career in STEM. Use the Resources section to direct you to some important websites that will help you to get more information on what colleges to consider, what points you may need and what options are open to you. Read about Ireland’s rich scientific history and famous Irish scientists of the past, as well as finding out more about our brightest Science Ambassadors of today.
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Are people’s DNA sequences their business and nobody else’s?
Lisa Duffy, winner of the REMEDI essay competition wonders when, if ever, it is right to use the DNA without the consent of owners.
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he completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 heralded a new era in the study of human biology. While DNA sequencing is an exciting technology, it also raises a lot of ethical issues. DNA is uniquely specific to one person and one small sample provides huge amounts of highly personal information. So how much privacy should we be entitled to regarding our DNA? My immediate answer was that of course every person should be entitled to full privacy. It is their DNA and therefore their inherent right to decide if and to whom they divulge the information. However, this issue is more complex. One very topical issue is that of DNA databases. It is an issue which we should all consider because presently the government is in the process of establishing a DNA database in Ireland. The legislation has yet to be put through and I think it is very important that we have a national debate on this matter due to the significant number of ethical issues. The first question is — whose DNA profiles should be on this database? Perhaps only people who commit serious criminal offences should be profiled? However, this raises the question about what is a serious offence? The England and Wales DNA
database which is proportionately the largest in the world provides a good example of function creep. At first only serious criminals were recorded, now anyone who commits a recordable offence may be profiled. An increasing number of innocent people are present on the database including 24,000 innocent children. Discrimination also plays a role. In the UK 40 per cent of black men are on the database in stark contrast to 6 per cent of white men. To reduce discrimination some suggest that a national database containing everyone’s DNA profile would reduce inequality and abolish any stigma. I admit that the thought of my DNA on a national database makes me uncomfortable. Yes, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, but you also feel like a suspect rather than a democratic citizen. The right to liberty, the right to privacy and the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty are all civil rights which we have fought for and now thankfully enjoy in today’s democratic society. I have to ask, “Are we giving up these basic rights in the attempt to fight crime and is it worth it?” Personally I think it is a waste of resources to profile the entire population. England and Wales spent 300 million on their database in the last 5 years
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alone! The criminal population is small and I agree with the proposed Criminal Justice bill that only those who have committed a crime which earns a one year prison sentence or longer should be profiled. After committing a crime it is only just, then, that the right to your DNA is lost, in the interest of the common good. Interestingly, your actual DNA sample does not necessarily need to be stored in the database. The part of DNA used for identification does not contain genes which indicate predisposition to diseases and other sensitive information. The DNA profile is a unique but meaningless sequence which can only identify the person as being male or female. The issue which raises contention is the storage of DNA samples. The reason given for this is that technology is still progressing and the system used now may become outdated so samples are retained. This varies from country to country. It is illegal everywhere to use samples for anything other than forensic DNA identification but who would know if they were, when many are stored in third-party laboratories? Function creep in the UK has meant that some companies are now allowed to carry out research on samples and the idea of merging ID cards and DNA profiles is being considered. I feel that the retaining of DNA samples is an absolute violation of the privacy of a person’s body. DNA for research should only be attained through informed consent. The value of DNA databases is undeniable and I think we do need one. We can demonstrate this with the case of a woman from the West of Ireland who was sexually assaulted. The Gardaí eliminated all suspects and her attacker was only convicted after the DNA sample matched a sample on
The REMEDI competition The science essay competition organised by the Regenerative Medicine Institute, REMEDI, and cosponsored by NUI Galway College of Science, attracted entries from all parts of Ireland. The competition, open to all senior cycle students in secondary schools has been running for the past five years, and at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, prizes were presented to the latest winners. Lisa Duffy, from Castleblayney College, Co Monaghan. the overall winner, was presented with a high-spec laptop and a €500 science bursary for her school. This is the second consequitive year that a student from Castleblayney College has taken the first prize. The runner up, Emer Jones, from Presentation Secondary School, Tralee, Co Kerry, was presented with a video iPod and a €400 science school bursary.
the UK database. The crime would not have been solved otherwise. It is important also that we do not accept that DNA evidence is infallible. It must be collected, sampled and stored correctly. It is vital that juries convict only when it is supported by motive, eyewitnesses, CCTV evidence etc. The value of a DNA database will depend solely on its integrity. Therefore, the right safeguards are essential to ensure its reliability. Strict legislation to prevent function creep and to prohibit the storage of samples is crucial. So with whom else might we have to share our DNA sequences? Well, the most frightening, is that building societies, employers and insurance providers may insist on you disclosing your DNA sequences. This has not happened yet but it would be reassuring to have legislation put in place to deem this illegal. These organisations would argue that in accordance with the principle of ‘Utmost Good Faith’ we must disclose all facts and our genes are statistics like all others which are analysed. A fair point, but I think genes are uniquely personal and to live in a democracy means to live in a country where the authorities are not allowed to intrude into every aspect of our lives. We need to protect and preserve our freedom and autonomy. Genetic discrimination is a term I hope we will never have to use. I believe our DNA sequences are our business. It is time to draw the line at the intrusion of the authorities into what is confidential. A DNA criminal database is acceptable but we need to establish boundaries because DNA technology is ever advancing and who knows what the future will hold? l Reference: The Irish Council for Bioethics.
The panel of judges, made up of scientists and journalists, commented on the high standards achieved by the students both in writing and in understanding the issues involved in matching DNA to individuals. Specially commended were: Karen O’Neill, Intermediate School, Killorglin, Co. Kerry; Anna Tomalczyk, Virginia College, Co. Cavan; Niamh Dooley, Sacred Heart School, Tullamore, Co. Offaly; Róisín Ní Ghaoithín, Coláiste Ide, An Daingean, Co. Chiarraí; and Gráinne Mulkerrin, Alexandra College, Milltown, Co. Dublin. For more information
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SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page 32
SPEAKING SCIENCE
COMMUNICATIONS TRAINING FOR 4th LEVEL & POST-DOCS AUDIENCE 4TH LEVEL STUDENTS, MSc, PhD CANDIDATES and POST-DOCS
PRESENTER SEÁN DUKE CO-FOUNDER AND JOINT EDITOR OF SCIENCE SPIN MAGAZINE Seán has 15 years experience as a science writer and editor. In addition to his role as an editor with Science Spin, Seán presents Ireland’s only regular TV science slot on Ireland AM, the TV3 breakfast morning show. He also is the creator and presenter of Ireland’s only weekly radio science slot on 103.2 Dublin City FM. Seán founded the Speaking Science initiative in 2008, in response to the need for scientists to develop better communication skills. To find out more about Seán visit: Web: http://sciencespin.com Blog: http://seanduke.wordpress.com Pod: http://sciencespin.podomatic.com
CONTENT This one-day module is divided into five parts, each of which is aimed at helping 4th level students and post-docs develop the practical, ‘real world’ communication skills they require now, and for their future careers. The emphasis at all times is on interaction, discussion and activities. PART ONE: WHY COMMUNICATE? The reasons why scientists in Ireland today need to communicate are discussed, and the communication needs of each student are explored. In this part, we also introduce ourselves, and get to known each other better. PART TWO: AVOIDING SCIENCE JARGON One of the major barriers facing scientists in the bid to become better communicators is the issue of scientific jargon. This is tackled here. The goal is to ‘retrain’ everyone to unlearn jargon and use English. PART THREE: SCIENTIFIC WRITING SKILLS 4th level students and post-docs often state that they don’t like writing, are not good at it, and, thus, put writing jobs on the ‘long finger’. Here some rules and tips for good writing are explained, and then put into practice. PART FOUR: ORAL SKILLS It is absolutely essential for any scientist that wishes to have a successful career to be a good oral communicator. There are a number of elements that make for successful oral communication, and we detail those here, and put the techniques into practice. PART FIVE: OUTREACH More and more these days, scientists are asked to do ‘outreach’ projects, which means, for example, interacting with a lay audience, made up of all ages. It is critical to know how to tailor presentations, or conduct university tours, so that the audience, whether very young or old, can get the most out of it. HOW CAN I FIND OUT MORE? In order to make a booking, or to get further details, please contact, Alan Doherty, Business Development Manager, Speaking Science, at:
alan@sciencespin.com or call: 01 284 2909.
EArTHquAkE WATcH
Seán Duke reports that when two of the Earth’s plates collide, lack of movement indicates a massive build up of strain. he earthquake that hit Haiti on the 12th January happened at 21:53. By 10:10 Tom Blake, the man in charge of earthquake monitoring and the seismology in schools programme at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) had received an automatic SMS message to his phone, from the European seismic network, informing him that it had occurred and its strength. Though the earthquake had occurred some 5,000 miles away, Tom had received details about the event less than 20 minutes later in Dublin to his mobile phone. The earthquake was ‘shallow’ meaning it had occurred close to the surface, its epicentre was close to the capital city Port Au Prince, and there was a tsunami warning. The likelihood was that buildings were not earthquake-proof in this very poor country, and there was potential for very large loss of life in densely populated Port Au Prince.
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Damage on a massive scale. Photo: Marco Dormino, United Nations.
DIAS is part a Europe-wide network of seismic, or earthquake monitoring stations organised by Potsdam University. There is a mobile phone alert system in place so that when an earthquake greater than 6 on the Richter scale occurs anywhere in the world then members of the network are alerted by SMS message. “At that time the advised magnitude was 7.2, so I knew immediately that this was going to be a serious event,” said Tom of the Haitian earthquake. “ I checked our own monitoring station in the Dublin mountains and saw that the ‘P wave’ took just nine minutes to arrive from Haiti, and there was quite a strong surface wave element to it. So, I knew there would be serious casualties.”
along with the overall power of the earthquake, as determined by the Richter scale measurement, these are what will determine the extent of the damage done to buildings and the likely loss of life. The bulk energy created by an earthquake is contained in the P wave, and this travels out from the epicentre of the earthquake – the location where rocks moved and pressure and energy was released – at a speed of about 10km per second. The S waves, or surface waves, are slower. They travel at about 60 per cent of the speed of the P waves, over the surface of the earth, but they are deadly. It is the S waves that can cause the Earth to ripple and buckle and cause buildings to collapse in a heap.
WAVES
The reason that powerful earthquakes occur in Haiti has to do with the fact that two massive tectonic plates, or pieces of the earth’s crust, come
The nature of the seismic waves associated with an earthquake, the so-called P and S waves, is vital, as
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HAITI
together there. These plates are called the Caribbean Plate and the North Atlantic Plate. They are moving, albeit very slowly past each other, but sometimes at the edges the plates can lock, preventing movement and leading to a build up of pressure. When that happens the only possible outcome is the pressure builds until the plates move rapidly in relation to one another, causing huge pressure to be released – this is an earthquake. Earthquakes of the power of the 12th January event are rare in Haiti and the last one of this size to occur there was two centuries ago. The margins of these giant tectonic plates occur in the northern and southern part of Haiti, and there is a big fault running right through the island, which is visible from space, along which the plates can move. It was movement along this fault that caused the recent earthquake. Thankfully, for the beleaguered people of Haiti the fault associated with the earthquake was a strike-slip fault, which means plates glide past each other, rather than a thrust fault, where one plate moves over another. The importance of the difference, in human terms, is huge, because movement on thrust faults, when offshore, as this earthquake was, can result in the displacement of large amounts of water, which in turn can trigger a tsunami. At least the Haitian people avoided a killer tsunami. There were some clues that Haiti was due for a big earthquake, had anyone been looking. Haiti, in seismic terms had been relatively quiet for some time compared to its neighbour on the same island the Dominican Republic. The movement along the Haitian fault had stopped. This led to a big build up of strain, as the two huge plates struggled to continue their movement past each other. The build up inevitably led to a massive rupture as the two big plates rapidly moved to relieve the pressure. Unlike Haiti, San Francisco has a sophisticated earthquake monitoring system, and when there is a lack of movement across the San Andreas fault, scientists take note, and people start to worry. The reason is that if there is movement along the fault, pressure is being dissipated. If there is no movement, there is a build up of stress, and no-one has much idea of how, when or where that stress is going to be released, or whether the
release will trigger a major earthquake event or not. The lack of monitoring was a problem for Haiti, as was their poor building standards, and also, the bad luck that the earthquake occurred at a time of the evening when people were mostly inside relaxing in their homes, or apartments. But, these are small mercies, as earthquake proof buildings, such as are seen in San Francisco or Tokyo are too expensive for Haitian people to construct. Such building are designed to withstand an earthquake of 7 on the Richter Scale – about the size of the Haitian earthquake. So,
in those cities, a similar earthquake would not cause such huge damage. In the aftermath of the earthquake, many survivors of the Haitian earthquake refused to go inside buildings again, even when they were still standing, and preferred to sleep outside. This, in fact, was an entirely sensible thing to do, as the threat from strong aftershocks was significant. Geologists understand that strong aftershocks can occur up to 15 days after major earthquakes and that is what happened in Haiti with one aftershock recording 6.1 on the Richter Scale.
On shaky ground
The 7 magnitude earthquake was the strongest in that area since 1770. SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page 35
For more than 20 years geologists have warned that a major earthquake could occur along a fault line, known as the Enriquillo Plantain Garden Fault, clearly visible from satellite views. Image: NASA.
DONEGAL
Ireland does experience earthquakes, albeit very small ones compared to Haiti, and the two regions that are most prone to the shakes, are Donegal and Wexford. On the 7th January 2010 Donegal had an earthquake of 1.5, and shortly after that, another one, this time measuring 1.7. The reason why Donegal gets more earthquake activity than most of the rest of the country is that it is part of the major structural fault system that extends right down from Scotland. There is movement of rocks along the fault, which can result in release of pressure and energy and cause minor tremors. “A lot of people felt it, and the schools have a recording of it,” said
Delivering care
Tom Blake of DIAS. “St Egneys a primary school had the recordings. People in Donegal are very clued in to earthquakes. They are alerted by the sound of rumbling and the erratic behaviour of animals, dogs or cats, that go berserk almost. The erratic behaviour of animals has been reported around the world as the precursor to earthquakes.” If people are interested they can visit
www.dias.ie/irish_seismicity
To see a record of all the earthquakes that have been recorded in Ireland throughout historical time. The DIAS would also encourage people that felt the Donegal tremors to fill out an earthquake questionnaire on the site.
Photo: Bruno Stevens/MSF
One of the first organisations to go into action following the quake was Médecins Sans Frontiéres, an organisation delivering medical care to areas devastated by war, poverty or natural disasters, such as this one. Some of the MSF staff who were already in Haiti since 1991 are among the dead and missing, and according to doctors working in improvised conditions under canvas, they have never had to deal with so many serious injuries. MSF has managed to send in additional medical staff, and one of their tasks is to set up mobile clinics to replace those that have been destroyed. To find out more:
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1984
The year of ‘Big Brother’ is also the year when the largest earthquake ever reported in Ireland occurred off the coast of Anglesea, measuring 5.4 on the Richter Scale. “That was felt by a lot of people along the east coast and it caused structural damage along the east coast,” recalled Tom. “I remember feeling the earthquake at home, and I said my God there has been an earthquake. My wife thought I was mad. Then when I got into DIAS the phones were hopping. It happened in the morning. There was a blue sky, absolutely no wind, sunny morning in Dublin, deadly calm. So, when I heard the rumbling I felt what else could it be? And our doors fell off.”
Castlecomer coal Tom Kennedy reports on how hundreds of miners from north County Kilkenny once tunnelled deep into an ancient swamp to dig out enough coal to fill three train loads a day. Pit, twenty-two tons of water had to be pumped out, and the miners had to be supplied with 14,500 cubic feet of air a minute. The demand for power made the mines the biggest consumer of electricity in Ireland.
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n Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, many people can still vividly recall what it was like to toil deep underground, mining coal from what had once been a warm and humid tropical swamp. By all accounts it was a hard and dangerous existence, yet, when it all came to and end in 1969 former miners often said that they missed the life. In the final decade before closing down, the mine still employed about 500 men, and three train loads of coal were being sent off to Kilkenny every day. However, despite the exceptional quality of Castlecomer anthracite, a ‘smokeless coal’, the mine became a loss making enterprise. A government study, costing £85,000, concluded that the mine had no future. The miners disagreed, and for a while a subsidy was raised to cover the £18,000 annual loss while hopes were pinned on the success of a new shaft. However, it soon became apparent that this new shaft could never hold
Early days
Show time for Irish anthracite at a trade display to promote Castlecomer coal. off an inevitable decline, and finally the pumps were turned off, and the entrances sealed. Shafts and tunnels, many miles in length and up to 700 feet below were left to fill up with water. Six miles of haulage cables, three miles of rails, coal cutters, lighting, pumps, engines, and other pieces of equipment were abandoned. The cost of keeping the mines open and dry would have been prohibitive. For every ton of coal extracted from the 500 ft deep Skehana
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Mining around Castlecomer has a long history, but it began with iron rather than coal. In the 17th century iron ore, which occurs abundantly in the shale above the coal, was being smelted, and as some overgrown remains show, this was a substantial industry, fuelled not with coal, but with oak charcoal. The fossil stems of giant plants provided iron ore, in the form of Siderite, FeCO3. The iron ore was tipped into the top of a furnace with limestone ‘flux’ and charcoal produced from local oaks. The glassy slag, skimmed off the top of molten iron can still be picked off the ground around the ruins of threehundred and fifty year old smelters.
Many historians claim that charcoal burning caused the oaks to disappear from the surrounding landscape, but the evidence from elsewhere, such as Blackloon in Co Mayo, suggests that charcoal for iron smelting was usually produced from coppiced oak, and forests were carefully maintained. About twenty years after the opening of an iron mine at Ballinakill, Sir Gerald Boate took note of the adjacent coal, remarking on how much heat it gave off. The iron founders were slow to change, but the popularity of coal as a general fuel rapidly began to rise. At Castlecomer, the upper seams are quite close to the surface, so gaining access to the coal was not too difficult. However, locals did not actually own the coal ten or so metres beneath their feet. On acquiring 20,000 acres from the Ormonde family in 1637, Christopher Wandesforde also took over the mineral rights. Like trees and game, his coal had to be protected from poachers. Fortified towers were constructed to store the coal, one of which gave rise to the townland name, Coolbawn. Overseers were employed to catch coal thieves, and while some disguised pit entrances with flags, one canny individual escaped attention by digging down through the floor of his kitchen. Techniques used by all the early miners were not much different, and until the eighteenth century, coal was dug out of pits by ‘middlemen’. The middlemen worked with permission but without any real co-ordination. On reaching the seam, the miners branched out, leaving pillars of coal to prevent the roof of shale from falling in. Where coal is close to the surface in the hills above Castlecomer the ground is still peppered with old pits. A seam of coal, extending from Coolbawn to Crettyard, lies at a depth of 15 to 45 metres, and it became the first to be worked using what are known as ‘bell pits’ In these, there were two vertical shafts and a connecting tunnel from which the coal was extracted. From 1640 to 1815, when that seam was considered exhausted, is thought that fifteen million tons of coal had been extracted. The geologist, Richard Griffith, visiting the site in 1814 commented that the number of pits and holes made the place look like a rabbit warren. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Wandesforde family began to take a
Above, a lease map showing a number of pits north of Castlecomer. Left: a reminder notice drawing attention to the danger of working near moving machinery. Below: the Deerpark mine works.
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closer look at their assets, and in 1740, when a geologist was called in to conduct a survey, a large horseshoe shaped deposit of coal, over three feet thick in the centre, was found lying at a depth of about 200 feet below Cloneen. Experienced miners were brought in from Durham in England to work this coal, which became known from this association as the Jarrow Seam. Early in the 20th century a much deeper seam, three hundred feet below the Jarrow coal was found, and by this time mining at Castlecomer had become a big industry. Its expansion was primarily due to the dynamic intervention of Captain Richard Henry Wandelsforde.
In 1892, the Captain, a young man of just 22, inherited the estate, and he immediately threw himself into a number of projects in and around Castlecomer. The various land acts of the late 1800s had reduced the original estate down to 1,500 acres, but the young captain was already wealthy and the family still retained their mining rights. So, at a time when many of the big land owners were abandoning their damp old mansions and debt ridden estates, Captain Richard was investing in Irish coal. He bought out the remaining coal leases, and by selling his property in Yorkshire, raised capital to develop the mines. In 1917 Captain Henry, reminding the British War Office of
their dependence on coal, persuaded the government to build a 14 mile branch line out from Kilkenny, and under him, the largest and deepest of the mines at Deerpark was opened in 1921. Overhead lines, like those on ski lifts, brought coal in from outlying pits, modern machinery was installed, and just when nothing seemed to stand in the way of further expansion, mining became uneconomic. The scale and success of this venture at the height of production was in stark contrast to the eventual collapse in the late 1960s.
Carboniferous corpses
This fine rendering of the fossil amphibian, Keraterpeton galvanic, from the Clogh mine, Castlecomer, was used to illustrate Huxley and Wright’s 1867 account of the Jarrow fossils. astlecomer is at the centre of the Leinster Coalfield, which extends into Laois and Carlow, and while the coal is of high quality, the seams are narrow. There are three main seams, the deepest being several hundred feet below, and the uppermost close enough to the surface for opencast mining. The coal was formed from vast tropical forests, growing for thousands of miles along the flooded edges of a supercontinent as it slowly sank into a shallow sea. Giant trees, up to 45 metres high, formed dense forests on a scale that the Earth had never had before or since. A high leafy canopy, similar in some ways to the much
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smaller Amazonian jungle of today, could have made the ground below dark and damp. Dragonflies, bigger than birds, flitted through the oxygen rich air, and rat sized millipedes scurried through the fallen debris. As yet, however, there were no rats or birds, for their ancestors were just beginning to crawl their way out of the mud. For millions of years these vast swamps persisted, the continual cycle of growth and decay giving rise to a form of peat. When the land sank, or got blown over by encroaching desert sands, the Carboniferous peat was covered over and compressed into coal. Geologists estimate that it took thirty
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metres of this dense peat to produce one metre of coal. At Castlecomer, the enormous pressure from rocks above, was sufficient to produce anthricite, a coal of exceptional quality. Compared to the mines in Britain, where methane was an ever present danger, miners at Castlecomer could light up their lamps because flammable gases had already been squeezed out of the anthricite coal. Before the swamps there had been a desert, the remnants of which are exposed as the Old Red Sandstone of Munster. Harsh, dry conditions prevailed on land, but at sea there was an abundance of fish life. This was the Devonian era, often known as the age of the fishes, and it ended with a
disaster. It is thought that 80 per cent of all life was wiped out, and about the same time as this mass extinction, the old sandstone desert edge began to sink. Swamps formed, creating a new environment half way between the sea and land. Evolution, as we now know, is not really such a slow process, and there was an explosive growth in diversity led by the plants. The remains of those early plants make up the bulk of our coal, and although long extinct, we know what they were like from their fossils, and like present day plants, they have been given species names. One group, with distinctive diamond patterned stems, are known as the Lycopods, and these could be up to 35 metres high. Another group, known as the Cordaites, had tangled roots, similar to present day mangrove trees, and there were giant ferns, all growing so abundantly that they had a major impact on the atmosphere. It is thought that the air above the forest was so rich in oxygen that insects could grow to enormous sizes. Insects have no lungs, most breathe through body holes, known as spiracles, and having more oxygen in the air would have allowed them to go up in scale. Fossil millipedes from the Castlecomer coal were up to three metres in length, and dragonflies were found with wingspans of 75 centimetres. Most of the fossils in coal are of plants, and when these first came to light it was widely assumed that they had been left over from the Biblical Deluge. The Earth itself, as Archbishop Ussher had calculated, had come into existence 4004 years before Christ, and a few crushed looking plants were unlikely to upset that view. However, the Scottish geologist, Charles Lyell, in looking at sedimentary rocks, had come to a very different conclusion, noting that fossils were like the writing in a much older history of the Earth. Not just thousands, but millions of years, and for the Creationists, surprise at that idea rapidly turned into unholy horror as more animal fossils began to turn up. Just five years after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species the focus of attention moved to Castlecomer where miners had come across some peculiar fossils. Scholars and geologists made their way to the mines, drawings were commissioned by the Geological Survey, and Edward Percival Wright, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, realising that this
was a discovery of major importance contacted Darwin’s friend and defender, Thomas Huxley as he was the acknowledged expert on vertebrate fossils. A year later, Thomas Huxley, in a letter to Charles Lyell wrote of how he had gone to Ireland to look at the “Carboniferous corpses”. “The journey was well worth as any I ever undertook. In a morning’s work I turned out ten genera, vertebrate animals, of which five are certainly new.” In 1867 Huxley and Wright published a joint paper describing these fossils, including a small creature which had been ‘baptised’ Keraterpeton galvani. These vertebrate animals were relatively small, Keraterpeton was just a few centimetres long, but their significance was enormous. These animals had legs and lungs, so, in evolutionary terms, the conquest of land by vertebrates had begun. As we know, from a fossilised trackway discovered only a few years
ago in Kerry, animals with backbones had already begun to take their first tentative steps up onto the shore in the previous, Devonian, era, but with the spread of the tropical swamps, life on land became more attractive. Plants gave shelter and food, and in their new environment vertebrate animals diversified into an every widening variety of forms. Keraterpeton, with its flattened tail and wings each side of its head was similar to modern newts, Ophiderpeton had become legless like a snake, and Megalocephalus pachycephalus had appeared as a large aquatic animal, lurking in the shallows and seizing prey with its sharp backwards pointing teeth. Most of these animals were amphibians, and like modern frogs and newts, they could not survive and reproduce far from water, but later the egg laying animals appeared, liberating the dry skinned vertebrates from their watery environment.
Above and below, old glass plates from the Geological Survey showing fossil plants from the Castlecomer coalfields.
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Paddy Brennan, known as Slippy, at work in one of the narrow seams.
Labyrinth with eleven miles of roadway lthough a British Government enquiry into child labour in 1842 reported that no one under the age of 18 was employed at Castlecomer, many, and perhaps most of the miners began their working life as teenagers. The miners recalled a great sense of community, but conditions underground were far from pleasant. Seams of coal were thin, and before mechanisation in the later years, miners had to lie on their sides hacking into the coal with a pick. Big lumps of coal then had to be loaded into wooden sleds, and hauled out by ‘hurriers’. Passageways could be as low as three feet, and the ‘hurriers’, wearing a girdle, hauled their loads along with a chain until they reached the shaft where the coal was winched up to the top by hand. With the expansion of activities in the early 20th century improvements were made, both in equipment and
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in working conditions, but even so mining remained a hard and dangerous life. Between 1930 and 1960 seven men were killed in accidents. Apart from the dangers of being hit by moving machinery or falling rocks, many of the men developed lung problems, leaving them old before their time with, as one said, ‘no wind to work’. The underground labyrinth was extensive, and at the Deerpark mine there was eleven miles of underground roadway. As miners worked out one area they moved on into another, and the abandoned passageways, known as ‘gobbin roads’ were used as latrines. Walking miles back to the surface was not an option, and the entire working day was spent deep underground. There were rats, but the miners if not exactly regarding them with affection, were glad of their company for they formed the resident cleaning brigade.
The rats, of course, would eat whatever they could find, so lunch boxes were suspended on strings from the roof. Smarter rats discovered that they bite through the string. The miners were also wary of the rats for another good reason, for they knew that the rodents can cause Weil’s disease. Those infected can suffer from prolonged fevers, and the complications from the disease can be fatal. This disease, caused by a bacterium, Leptospira, can be transmitted in rat urine. So, while the rats were useful in cleaning up the latrines, they were likely to contaminate any water in the mines. Machinery and mechanisation made it possible to mine on a grander scale, and to go a lot deeper. Without powerful pumps to draw out 60,000 gallons of water an hour, the mines at Deerpark could not have gone down to 700 feet below, and without the winches to pull carriages along, it would not have been possible to draw a sufficient volume of coal out of the depths to give a return on the enormous investment involved. The owner, Captain R H Wandesforde, was certainly prepared to invest, and under him a whole range of improvements were made. He was highly creative and was ambitious for the mining enterprise to expand. Once the railway link had been made to Kilkenny, he had overhead ‘ropeways’, similar to ski lifts, installed so that coal could be brought in to the central depot from different mine sites. Some of these aerial ropeways were up to two and a half miles long, and the coal was carried in big buckets, each holding about what would now be measured as just under half a metric tonne. There were in all about 200 steel buckets, and they swung along at 140 yards a minute. Naturally, the sight of so much coal passing over their heads, attracted the attention of some locals who became quite adept in using long poles to tip the buckets over. Because the coal was being brought down, the ropeway was quite efficient, and powered mainly by gravity, it only required a modest input of power to keep it going. At one point, the ropeway went over a road, and a wooden bridge was built to stop traffic being hit by falling lumps of coal. These structure have since been swept away, but in places the foundations for the lift remain.
Nixie and the Captain The Captain was an innovator and he was also interested in improving conditions for people in the surrounding area. Houses were built, a weaving industry started, and he was involved in the early co-operative movement. Even so, he lived at some remove from the grimy reality of the daily life of ‘his’ miners, and he was reminded of this by another exceptional character, Nixie Boran. Nixie, who had started work in the mines as a young teenager, was a remarkable man, and he soon realised that the way society worked was fundamentally unjust. The miners who dug out the coal had no say in how the mine was run, and they had little or no influence in improving the conditions under which they worked. Nixie thought there had to be a better way to run things, and in protest he called a strike. He was immediately
sacked, but his fellow miners had him reinstated. Not satisfied with the outcome, and fired up with reforming zeal, Nixie, in spite of being refused a visa, then went off to Russia to see what the recent revolution had achieved. At the time, the establishment, church and state, with good reason, had a great fear of reform, and when Nixie smuggled back to Castlecomer by bus in 1930 he was greeted by police who immediately took him in for questioning. Nixie was already popular with his fellow miners, and they demanded, and got his release. Some of the local clergy, appalled that there was now an ungodly ‘red’ running loose among them, denounced Nixie from the pulpit. Nixie was a born leader, and instead of causing the anticipated grief and disorder, he proved himself to be a
reasonable and fair minded man who went on to inspire a great deal of trust on all sides of the mining community. Having had his eyes opened by seeing what was happening in the world, he realised that the conditions that miners were expected to work under were simply unacceptable. Pay was poor, the work was dangerous, and after working long hours underground, miners did not even have a place to wash off the grime. Instead they had to tramp back home in filthy clothes The Captain did not like the idea of being told how to run his great enterprise, but gradually he accepted that Boran and the miners had a point. Although it took the best part of a decade to arrange, the long awaited showers and lockers were set up in 1939.
Wash outs
Bells Heap
In many places where there were mines, big conical mountains of waste remain. Castlecomer also had its mountain, a 350 high heap, covering three and a half acres. Known as Bells Heap, this was a mountain of spoil rock taken out of the mines. The spoil was drawn along and up to the top on rails before being tipped out. Although regarded as waste, some lumps of coal found its way onto the tip, and some locals made a living by picking these out. When mining ceased, the tip remained, and might still be there if someone had not spotted an opportunity to use the spoil. The rock
had a value, and it was taken away by lorries to a cement factory in Limerick. For fifteen years five lorries a day made the trip, and eventually the heap was no more. Coal picking was a tradition as old as mining, and the dust, known as culm or duff, was gathered and mixed with yellow clay to make ‘bumbs’. The methods used to make bumbs varied from ‘dancing the culm’ to rolling a large grinding stone over the mix. Bumb making was an industry in itself, and some enterprising producers around Castlecomer used horses to draw the crusher around large circles of culm.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page 42
While the Carboniferous swamps persisted for millions of years, the land and sea levels, as now, could rise and fall. The Castlecomer coal beds eventually disappeared under a cover of later rocks. In places, sand and grit laden water flooded over the swamps, flushing out the decaying vegetable matter. These ‘wash-outs’ were a troublesome feature miners encountered 200 feet below in the Skehana Seam, because where this type of incursion of water occurred, the coal was replaced by sandstone. Tunnelling past a wash out was time consuming and expensive, and there was no certainty that coal deposits would resume on the other side. To the miners, the overlying shale was just a barrier that they had to dig through, but when the mines closed, its value for brickmaking was realised. Shale could be exposed by stripping off the thin covering of soil, and diggers often exposed the remains of old pits where miners had once burrowed down into a thin seam of coal. A large brick-making factory was established by Cement Roadstone, and while it kept industry in the area going for some years, the recent end of the building boom left the Castlecomer works with accumulated stacks of unsold stock.
The Discovery Centre The mines are closed, the railway is gone, but the history lives on at the Discovery Park. The park, located just outside Castlecomer, is on part of what was once the extensive Wandelsforde estate. Overlooking a courtyard of craft shops, the Discovery Park centre is a former grass drying building, and that in itself is just one part of the Castlecomer story. Apart from owning the mines, Captain Henry Wandelsforde was what is generally known as “an improving landlord”, and having access to an abundance of coal, his grass-drying project could well have been a smart way to make hay despite the damp Irish weather. Sandra McGrath is the Discovery Park director, and she explained that the idea of starting a mining heritage centre had been under discussion for some time. At first the proposals were
for a relatively modest museum, but support for the project was strong, and finally a number of interested partners, including the town council and Coilte, joined forces to open the Discovery Park in 1997. Different sites and options were considered, said Sandra, but in the end it was decided that it would be best to have a bundle of attractions in the one location. Visitors can stop, shop, walk through the forested grounds, fish in the restored lakes, or learn all about Ireland’s Carboniferous past through the ‘Footprints in Coal Experience’. This is an audio visual tour through the history of coal in Castlecomer, going all the way back millions of years to a time when amphibians, having survived one of the Earth’s greatest mass extinctions, were beginning to crawl up into the swamps.
Find our more A web site, created by pupils at Firoda National School has lots of excellent first hand material, some gathered from friends and relatives who worked in the mines. The school was one of those selected in 1999 to run a demonstration on how computers could be used in education, and the site is a wonderful example of how local history can be gathered, preserved and presented.
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. €15 (112pp)
Footprints in Coal is indeed a fascinating experience, and it is an exceptional production, created for the centre by a team of geologists, local historians, and technical experts under the guidance of Jonathan Mason. Lots of drama, and a cast of larger than life characters such as Nixie Boran, denounced from the pulpit as a ‘red’, the Captain, his employer from the ‘big house’, and of course the miners, who rightly prided themselves as ‘a breed apart.” Una Patterson is in charge of educational activities at the Discovery Park, and she said the Footprints in Coal Experience is popular with schools, and a lot of the material on display relevant to the primary and secondary curriculum. Groups come for the day, she said, so having a mix of indoor and outdoor resources helps to keep everyone busy.
The pupils had great help from Seamus Walsh, an exminer, who has written a book describing what it was like to work underground. The book, ‘In the Shadow of the Mines’ is on sale at the Discovery Centre.
www.discoverypark.ie www.sip.ie/sip019B/index1.htm
In this colourful book Peadar McArdle, Director of the Irish Geological Survey explains how all the rocks we see around us came to be there. Words and photographs help us to explore and understand Ireland’s varied landscape.
Paperback €15 (112pp). Casebound €20
SCIENCE Issue 39 Spin Page 43 OrderSPIN direct from Science
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EARTH on view
A selection of winning photographs from the annual Du Noyer competition The competition organised by the Geological Survey of Ireland commemorates the talented 19th century geologist, George Du Noyer. Now entering its 12th year, the competition attracts entries from a wide range of people with an interest in geology.
Above, karst runnels on dipping Carboniferous limestone, Clooncoose, the Burren, by Mike Simms.
This year the four top awards for Irish entries went to Ist, Mike Simms, for his karst runnels on dipping Carboniferous limestone at Clooncoose, the Burren, Co Clare. 2nd, Catherine Bushe for the basalt pavement at the Giant’s Causeway, Co Antrim. 3rd, Sarah Gatley for the glacial leftovers perched on Dalradian bedrock at Tully, Renvyle Peninsula, Connemara, Co Galway. The winner in the Foreign category Barbara Harsch for sandstone in Libya, sculptured by the wind.
Left: glacial leftovers perched on Dalradian bedrock at Tully, Renvyle Peninsula, Connemara, Co Galway, photographed by Sarah Gatley.
Like sunbathers on the beach, sandstone sculpted by the wind, photographed by Barbara Harsch, winner of the Foreign Category. Below, basalt outcrop by Maria Ryan.
Above, Sadhbh Baxter photographed this rock bowl at Cnoc na Gréine near Forbacha, Co Galway. Right, Catherine Bushe, second in the home awards, captured this scene at the Giant’s Causeway, Co Antrim.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page xx
Twelve Pins from Binn Ghleann Uisce, photographed by David MacDonald. White quartzite bands stand out like snow.
White sands. New Mexico, USA photographed by Nicola Keogh. The world’s largest gypsum field, covering 275 sq miles. The gypsum remains in place because there are no rivers to drain it away. During wet periods dissolved gypsum is redeposited by evaporation as selenite crystals. SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page 46
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Looking into lava tube on the flank of Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii, photographed by Eoin McCraith. Thomas McDonnell photographed these basalt columns at Doon Point, Rathlin Island.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 39 Page 47
Martin Tampier impression of the Badlands, Alberta, Canada.
Brian McConnell’s photograph of a wave cut platform in Co Donegal overlooked by a layer cake of Carboniferous sandstone. Slieve League is in the background.
Guinka Andreeva photographed the ‘Wedding Stone’ by Zimzelen village in Bulgaria. The volvanic tuffs formed 40 million years ago have been weathered into a scene like a wedding party, complete with a bride and groom couple.
At wai-o-tapu in Rotorua, a geothermal pool. Mineral deposits have given this pool at wai-otapu its colours, and the pool itself bubbles, hence the name. Photographeded by Anthony Kelly.
Du Noyer
Geological Photography Competition 2010 Entries are invited for the 12th Du Noyer Geological Photography Competition.
Outcrop of Thor Granite near Burtonport with intrusive band of aplite, a photograph by Daragh McDonough from the 2009 competition.
George Victor Du Noyer, who served as a geologist with the Geological Survey of Ireland from 1847 to 1869, was a skilled field artist whose numerous sketches and pictures, with their combination of artistic skill and technical accuracy, were the “field photographs” of their day. This competition seeks to encourage the same blend of artistic and scientific skills through the medium of photography.
Prizes will be awarded in two categories, Irish and Foreign, and a prize fund of €800 applies. Entrants may submit a maximum of 4 photographs, illustrating any aspect of field geology or scenic landscapes. All photographs entered must be accompanied by a note giving the name and address of the photographer and a short description of the geological content. Up to four photographs may be submitted as prints or good quality scans. Submitted material will not be returned and GSI reserves the right to reproduce entries in its publications and promotional activity with due acknowledgement. Only previously unpublished photos will be accepted as entries. By entering this competition entrants are stating that they have taken the photo and that the photo is unpublished.
The competition will be judged by a panel including representatives of the Irish Geological Association, the Geological Survey of Ireland and external nominees and their decision will be final. Entries will be exhibited and prizes awarded at a GSI Cunningham Awards ceremony on 10th December. The photographs will be evaluated on the basis of creativity, technical skill, and geological content. Entries should be posted in an envelope marked “Du Noyer Competition” to: Cartography Unit, Geological Survey of Ireland, Beggars Bush, Haddington Rd, Dublin 4 or e-mailed to info@planetearth.ie Closing date for entries: Friday 8th October 2010. For full details visit the GSI web site www.gsi.ie LIVE LINK
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