Science Spin 42

42

ISSUE September 2010

SCIENCE

IRELAND’S SCIENCE NATURE AND DISCOVERY MAGAZINE

Will scientists lose control of their data?

SPIN HO

€3 including VAT £2 NI and UK

W

WE O D

LE A R N ?

3 IN 1 in

GOING BELOW FERMANAGH

Sp Science in Sp School tive Spin Ac

MAKING A

SHOW

OF SCIENCE

www.sciencespin.com

Photography Competition Photo Theme:

“The Wonder of Small Science”

Lots of pr izes up for grabs!

‘Science Snaps’ is calling on you to share your vision of ‘The Wonder of Small Science’ with the world!

Get out your camera and take some snaps of the wonder of science, engineering and technology all around you, anything from nanotechnology to scientific discoveries or even the natural environment, whatever triggers your imagination!!

To enter:

So get snapping and submit your photos for your chance to win lots of great prizes!

Shortlisted images will also form a public exhibition during Science Week 2010 and the winning snaps will be displayed by Bus Eireann on commuter routes throughout Ireland!

‘Science Snaps’ is open to Junior and Senior cycle students as well the general public.

M OVE 7 - 14 N

BER 2010

m

www.pix.ie/go/sciencesnaps or email: sciencesnaps@edelman.co LIVE LINK

Closing date for entries is Friday,

October 15th 2010

Tyndall National Institute is Ireland’s largest facility for research and development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) www.tyndall.ie

I n s t i t i ú i d

N á i s i ú n t a

SCIENCE

SPIN 2

UPFRONT Celebrating the success of ESOF 2010, and the hand-over of Europe’s biggest science event to Ireland. In 2012 Dublin will be Europe’s City of Science.

Gold rush in northern Italy

Anthea Lacchia describes how miners from all around Europe headed for the hills.

Making a show of science Publisher DKS Ltd 5 Serpentine Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. www.sciencespin.com Email: tom@sciencespin.com Editor Tom Kennedy tom@sciencespin.com Contributing editor Seán Duke sean@sciencespin.com

LIVE LINK

LIVE LINK

Business Development Manager Alan Doherty LIVE alan@sciencespin.com LINK Design and Production Albertine Kennedy Publishing Cloonlara, Swinford, Co Mayo Picture research Source Photographic Archive www.iol.ie/~source.foxford/ Printing Turner Group, Longford

SCIENCE

ON AIR Go to www.sciencespin.com and listen to what researchers have to say

8

Science from all around Europe went on display at Turin, and in 2012 it will be Dublin’s turn to be the City of Science.

Learning, memory and IQ

10

In the fourth part in a series of articles Veronica Miller explains how learning is part of life from the moment we are born. Collect the book length series.

12 SPIN ACTIVE 20 A supplement in Science Spin covering applied science and transfer of results into business and industry. l Water waste. Time for smarter solutions?

l Fit for work. Tom Kennedy reports that generic skills can be more useful to industry than specialised knowledge. l Wind and wave. Massive wind and wave farms off the west coast will mean that Ireland will become an exporter of power.

Exploring the depths of Fermanagh

The Marble Arch caves have become a big attraction.

SCHOOL SPIN

29 38

A supplement in Science Spin with a focus on education

l Humphrey Jones suggests some destinations.

l What do scientists actually do? Seán Duke reports on a Sun worshipper at work.

l Young scientist projects. Learning from ants, and testing for clean water. l What are the alternatives to oil?

Subscribe for just €18 a year, six issues.

Register to receive free links to our digital issues. www.sciencespin.com

Geological Survey of Ireland

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 1

www.sciencespin.com

UPFRONT Radon

A HoUSE in County Sligo has been found to have radon levels 13 times higher than the accepted level. According to the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, this level would have exposed residents to the equivalent of 3,000 X-rays a year. Any further exposure was prevented by installation of a radon sump.

David Fenton, senior scientist with the RPII, said that high radon levels are common in Sligo and Carlow, and that all people have to do is call 1800 300 600 to order a test, or they can log onto LIVE LINK

www.rpii.ie

Autism

ovER 50 institutions were involved in a search to identify genes relating to autism, and in June, two universities, TCD and UCD published their joint findings from this study. Genetic variations in children with autism and their families were examined and compared to contols. Internationally, over 1,000 of the former, were compared to 1,300 individuals without autism.

It was found that individuals with autism have a number of variations in short stretches of DNA that affect genes associated with autism or intellectual disabilities. Accordng to the researchers, some of these variations appear to be inherited, but others are new and only occur in the affected children.

A number of genes associated with susceptibility are involved in the synapse connection between nerve cells, while others are involved in nerve cell proliferation, and signaling between neurons in the brain. Prof Michael Gill from the Irish Autism Research Group said that the identification of genes could help in the development of interventions and treatments for autism and related disorders.

The studies support the impression that autism is caused, at least in part, by rare genetic variants, and that there is some overlap with factors associated with learning disabilities. Autism ranging in severity from severe to mild has a worldwide prevalence of about one per cent and the impact is such that it is seen as a national health crisis.

Autism affects the ability to form social relationships, and it occurs four times more often in boys than in girls.

Galway medical students have volunteered to work in eight different hospitals in Africa, and earlier this year 20 set off on a bed-push to Limerick to raise funds to develop better care facilities in developing countries. In June 37, medical student volunteers, who personally funded their own travel, set off for hospitals in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Senegal.

The charity, Voluntary Services Abroad, was started in 1977 by Galway doctor, Dom Colbert and is run by fourth year medical students.

Superbug

FollowING antibiotic treatment gut flora becomes upset and a superbug, Clostridium difficile, can take advantage of the situation, and it now regarded as the most rapidly increasing hospital-acquired illness in the western world. The broad spectrum antibiotics used against it, vancomycin and metronidazole often fail, and resistance is becoming a problem.

Scientists from UCC, Teagasc and the University of Alberta have identified an alternative antibiotic, thuricin. The advantage of this, according to the researchers, is that does not affect the gut flora, so Clostridium difficile is held in check. over 30,000 bacteria were screened in the search for the thurici CD, a combination of two peptides act very specifically on killing Clostridum difficile. For an antibiotic that is good because there is no collateral damage.

Professor Colin Hill, from the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at UCC, explained that in vitro tests had shown how effective thuricin is, but the challenge is to develop ways of delivering it as a treatment.

Results from the SFI funded research, involving Prof Colin Hill, Prof Paul Ross and PhD researcher, Mary Rea, were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Fast links

The first high capacity10 gigabits per second (gbps) links for a national educaton and research network have gone live. The upgrading means better connections for scientists involved in data processing on a big scale. The optical network is part of the e-INIS project, under which DIAS, UCC, NUI Galway, TCD, NUI Maynooth, HEAnet, the Irish Centre for High End Computing, and Grid-Ireland co-operate on building a high-capacity resource.

At TCD the Computer Science Department is collaborating with five European partners in a project to enhance the ability of education

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 2

institutes to share computing resources.

Under the Stratuslab project F7 funding, worth â‚Ź2.3 million, the aim is to develop resources that simplify setting up and linking grid systems without having to invest heavily in new infrastructure.

Commenting on the project, Dr David o’Callaghan said that, for example, data from CERN is distributed to institutions around the world and the Stratuslab kit will make it easier for scientists to work with this information.

More information about the Stratuslab project at www.stratuslab.eu LIVNEK LI

www.sciencespin.com

UPFRONT Funding

Dr Alan Davy from the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group at Waterford Institute of Technology has received support to spend 18 months on research at the Universiat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain. Alan’s award from the Irish Research Council for Science was made under INSPIRE, a programme enabling early career researchers to gain experience abroad before returning home.

Dr Davy’s research involves supporting multimedia services with wireless communications.

LIVE K For more on INSPIRE see www.ircset.ie N LI Irish female hare on Bull Island, Dublin.

Photograph: Alan Wolfe, Wikipedia.

Under PRTLI 5, more than €60m has been granted for capital and research programmes at NUI Galway. €50m of this is to go into three new buildings.

One of these buildings is for arts, Humanities and science research, and two are for biomedical science research.

UCC has also been successful in securing PrTLI funding for ten major projects, among them a €7m boost for the National Maritime energy Cluster at ringaskiddy. ICT, energy and lifescience also benefited from the funding.

TCD has secured €81.9m under PrTLI 5, and the plan is to back this up with an additional €20.6m in matching funds. Biomedical science at TCD is to be get the biggest share of this funding. €55.4m is going to TCD’s Biomedical science development, and this is to involve the most ambitious construction project yet undertaken by the university

Cod farming

Hares

Hares in Northern Ireland are in decline, and researchers at Queen’s University Belfast think that harvesting of grass for silage is involved. Hares head for long grass when ready to give birth, and unfortunately, this coincides with harvesting time. Machines trap and kill the young hares, and as Dr Neil reid who led research into the decline, said the animals have fallen foul of an ecological trap. The researchers tagged a population of hares in south armagh with radio-transmitters, allowing them to track their every move. They followed the animals day and night for an entire year to see how they changed their

habitat preferences. The researchers found that during late spring and early summer they tended to enter long grass destined to be cut for silage.

Lack of diversity in the landscape, he said, adds to that problem because the hares have no where else to go. He also said that mowing from the edge to the centre makes it less likely for the young leverets to escape. Moving the other way around, he suggested, might help.

In Northern Ireland the Department of agriculture and rural Development has introduced a ‘delayed cutting and grazing’ option, and farmers who sign up for this receive a special payment.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 3

aT CarNa, Co Galway, a cod breeding project is likely to add value to Ireland’s fish farming industry.

The eIrCOD project, supported by the Marine Institute, BIM and other interested parties, is being led by NUI Galway’s Martin ryan Institute. In an associated project, researchers at UCC are working with DNa tools to identify suitable strains of cod.

Genetics are also being applied by Prof Tom Cross from UCC to increase knowledge of traits in wild stock.

During the first three years of the eIrCOD project cod were reared from eggs collected in the Celtic sea off the south coast of Ireland. These fish are now being selectively bred into a specifically Irish strain. Majbritt Bolton-Warberg, a fish biologist at NUI Galway, said that Celtic sea cod show faster rates of growth in early life than the same species in more northerly european waters.

By 2011 the researchers expect to have more than 50 family groups available for selective breeding.

LIVE LINK

Web: www.gsi.ie Email: gsisales@gsi.ie

Metallic mushrooms

THE concentration of metals in muchrooms has been found to vary with species. A research team from the University of Castilla-La Mancha analysed levels in 12 different species collected from non-contaminated areas, and they found that levels of lead and neodymium are highest in the chanterelles.

Cantharellus cibarius, a chanterelle, is one of the species widely used in European cusine.

Reporting their findings in Biometals, the researchers outlined how hundreds of mushrooms, both edible and non-edible, were collected from woodland areas in the Ciudad Real province before analysis to determine lead, neodymium, thorium and uranium levels In the chanterelles, levels of neodymium were found to be 7.1 microgrammes a gram, and lead was found to be 4.86

Change at sea

THE sea is not a static environment, and a report published in June outlines some of the most significant changes off the Irish coast over the past few years. The report, Irish Ocean Climate and Ecosystem Status, provides figures on sea surface temperature, wave heights and the increase in warm water species. The report notes that there has been a 0.6째C

microgrammes a gram. These mushrooms grow under different oak species, and they have a close ectomycorrhizal relationship with the trees. Both trees and mushrooms benefit from this association by an exchange of nutrients. The mushrooms release minerals that would otherwise remain locked up in soil particles.

Another species, Hypholoma fasciculare, although growing above soil on fallen tree trunks, accumulates thorium and uranium. The better the mushrooms are at extracting minerals from the soil, the more they are rewarded with a supply of sugars from the plants.

The researchers said that they will continue the studies to determine what other chemicals are present in mushrooms and whether or not levels of metals constitute a health risk.

increase in sea surface temperature since 1994. This has led to an increase in microscopic plants and animals, and the number of warm water fish species recorded in Irish waters has also increased.

Glenn Nolan from the Marine Institute, said that one of the obectives in compiling the report was to discover the impact of change on marine life.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 4

www.sciencespin.com

UPFRONT

Carbon dioxide

VegetatIoN on land is thought to capture 123 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. In publishing the results of a study involving 18 institutions, elmar Veenendaal from Wageningen University reports that this is the most accurate figure to date on how effective plants are in capturing carbon dioxide. In Science Express, the scientists state that the highest gross carbon uptake on land occurs in tropical forests. tropical forests are responsible for 34 per cent of the uptake, and savannahs, covering twice as large an area, account for 26 per cent.

The figures relate to land only, and takes no account of uptake of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton at sea.

Biorythms

at the tCD Science gallery the interaction between neuroscience and music is the theme in Biorhythms, an exhibition featuring a sonic bed and instruments that respond to your heartbeat. the exhibition is open tuesday to Friday, 12 to 8pm, and from 12 to 6pm on Saturdays, and it continues until 1st october 2010.

Living high

tIBetaN highlanders live in conditions that would make most people suffer altitude sickness, and an international team including scientists from the Royal College of Surgeons have found that there is a genetic basis for this advantage. Blood samples were collected from just under 200 tibetian highlanders, and it was found that their genetic signature differed from the Chinese. this genetic variation in tibetan highlanders was linked to lower levels of haemoglobin. Normally, when people come up from lowland areas, haemoglobin increases to process more oxygen, but this in turn causes altitude sickness. according to Dr gianpiero Cavalleri from RCSI, tibetans have evolved physiologically to avoid altitude sickness by maintaining low haemoglobin concentrations.

For medicine this is a significant finding as low oxygen, hypoxia, is a common problem for patients.

Identifying the genetic basis for toleration could lead to new approaches in dealing with hypoxia in intensive care patients.

Eels

ClImate is thought to determine where eel larvae go after leaving the spawning sites in the Sargasso Sea. Researchers from Institute of aquatic Resources at the technical University of Denmark, reporting their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, explain that climate has a big influence on ocean currents. there is a front where warm water from the south meets the colder water of the North atlantic. according to the Peter munk, senior scientist in the study, the front retains the largae within a nutrient rich environment, and it channels their drift towards europe. this is different from the general belief that the eels drift initially westwards with the gulf Stream. However, the Danish

Mini-bio factories

BaCteRIa can be used to produce many different products, but the space available within cells can slow down or limit the process. During production, the products are separated out and stored in special compartments.

Researchers from Kent University in collaboration with University College Cork, have found a way to make bigger compartments, occupying up to 70 per cent of the available space in

Stem cells

IN a FoUR-yeaR project, more than 90 european stem cell laboratories are collaborating on engaging with the public on science. the Regenerative medicine Institute at NUI galway, RemeDI, is among the participants. the projects main interface with the public is a website, www.euroStemCell.org the website explores stem cell research and outlines where different

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 5

An 19th century eel trap on the Danish coast. study suggests that the front between warm and cooler water directs the eels westwards to take a shorter and faster route to europe.

In a related study, the feeding habits of young larvae were examined.

Small larvae, measuring just five to 25 mm, were taken from the Saragosso Sea and it was found that they fed on a diversity of marine organisms including smaller jellyfsh.

Discovering what eel larvae feed on could prove useful in breeding experiments. eels have been in decline, and if scientists know what eel larvae feed on, breeding to boost stock might become a possibility. cells. With bigger compartments the cells can store more products. as michael Prentice, Professor of medical micriobiology at UCC explained, compartments enable bacteria to synthesise and store chemicals that would normally be deadly for them. Bacteria can be used to make a wide range of useful products, such as ethanol and novel antibiotics, and making more storage space available could boost production.

SPIN countries stand on the subject. attitudes to stem cell research vary across europe, and at RemeDI, programme manager, Kieran Ryan, said the project ensures that Ireland remains at the heart of the ongoing discourse. the project has been supported with an award of â‚Ź830,000 from the eU F7 programme. www.EuroStemCell.org

LIVE LINK

www.sciencespin.com

UPFRONT

LIVE LINK

www.marine.ie Multicellular

WE ARE made up of billions of cells, all acting together as an enormously complex team. The cells in our body have become so specialised that it is almost impossible, outside the lab, to culture them in isolation. Yet, animals and plants originated from single cells, and this raises questions on how, and why, and when they came together to form multicellular organisms.

Scientists at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg have been looking at the multicellular alga, Volvox. This is widely known as one of the less complex multicellular organisms, consisting of a sphere of cells. Volex carteri, is made up of over 2,000 cells, yet it has a close relation, Chlamydomonas, a single celled organism equipped with two waving flagellae.

The researchers, explained Stefan Rensing from the Faculty of Biology, found that in spite of the difference, both organisms have a similar complement of genes, and from this they conclude that the genes necessary for multicellularity were already present in the ancestors of these algae. It is thought genes required to produce the matrix between cells and other supports and functions, would have been amplified or co-opted for novel functions, such as determination of sex.

P for POWER

ONCE upon a time, when linen was a big trade in the north west of Ireland, urine was used to help separate the fibres from flax plants in a process known as retting. More than a century later, a researcher at Bristol Robotics Lab working in collaboration with the University of the West of England, has come up with another possible application, showing yet again that urine is actually too good to waste. Dr Ieropoulos, who is working on a four-year project, notes that urine is chemically rich in nitrogen and potassium, and has potentially valuable compounds such as urea, and bilirubin.

Dr Ieropousos has found that this chemical mix makes urine suitable for use in micribial fuel cells. So, instead of flushing urine away, we could be generating energy from fuel cell urinals.

The research began as scientists tried to develop microbial fuel cells to power autonomous robots. In these cells, bacteria break down organic matter, and in the process energy is released. Having fed the bacteria with a variety of feedstocks, including rotting fruit, grass clippings, and even dead flies, Dr Ieropoulos and the team, found that urine produced some of the best results.

The plan is to scale up to produce more power by stacking the cells and arranging a continuous flow of urine fuel.

Already a company involved in the portable urinal business, Ecoprod, has taken an interest in developing a prototype, which is likely to make its first appearance at music festivals and other outdoor events.

LIVE http://www.brl.ac.uk/ LINK

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 6

www.sciencespin.com

Surviving stress

WHEN cells are subjected to stress they produce a protein that helps them survive. Researchers at NUI Galway noted that understanding this mechanism could help in the treatment of cancers. In reporting their findings in PLoS Biology, the researchers point out that cancer cells are often under considerable stress because they proliferate in places where they are not supposed to be. Prof Afshin Samali, from the Department of Biochemistry at NUI Galway, said that a protein, known as Hsp70, is activated during stress and this blocks the normal

Gravity

cell death, apoptosis, process. This is the process that kills off and recycles components from damaged or redundant cells.

As Prof Samali points out, inhibiting the release of Hsp70 may be a way to unblock the process that could kill off the cancer cells.

Looking at the process from another angle, producing drugs that encourage the production of Hsp70 could be useful in treating diseases caused by dying off of essential cells, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes.

The Earth’s gravity has been mapped from satellite data collected over two months, November and December, 2009. The GOCE satellite, launched by the European Space Agency in March 2009, was able to detect tiny variations in the Earth’s gravity and from this a model of the entire globe was constructed. According to the ESA, the data adds greatly to out knowledge of large areas that

UPFRONT

Teagasc and UCC collaboration

BY forming a strategic alliance between Teagasc and UCC more than 250 scientists are to collaborate on food research. UCC and Teagasc have a long history of collaboration but the alliance broadens the links and gives industry a single point of access to research. A steering committee, chaired

by Michael Dowling is planning to include industry representatives on a governing board.

has not been properly mapped for gravity before. Data collection continues, so a very detailed picture is being built up of gravity over time. The GOCE satellite has a low orbit, of just 254.9 km, and at this level the gravity signals are strong. The strength of gravity at such a low altitude creates a problem in maintaining the orbit, but to overcome this, the satellite is fitted with xenon gas boosters.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 7

GOLD RUSH Monte Rosa photograph, TobiasBende

IN NORTHERN ITALY

Anthea Lacchia writes about panning and mining in Old Piedmont. pon hearing the words gold rush, one’s mind fills with images of a cowboy, spurs on his boots and beans sizzling on a pan nearby, working the famous creeks of the Klondike or riding a golden stallion in the Australian sunset.

However, in the second half of the 19th century, Northern Italy too was suddenly transformed into a true “Eldorado”, to be exploited by avid panners and miners from all parts of Europe.

U

The Italian gold rush took place in the valleys in the north of the Piedmont region, in the shelter of the Monte Rosa massif and close to the border with Switzerland. The Monte Rosa massif itself is the primary deposit, giving rise to all the secondary and fluvio-glacial deposits of this area.

The drive to extract as much gold as possible, led to the birth of many mining companies, and these came from various countries. The quest was for both native gold, which is found in

Panning in the Anza river.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page xx

rock and is extracted by mining, and alluvial gold, which originally was native, but has been transported and transformed by the work of glaciers and rivers. Alluvial gold is found in particles of varying sizes along the banks of water courses. The further upstream the gold is panned, the larger the particles. Conversely, gold found far down stream tends to be in the form of tiny particles calles “flakes”.

Native gold often nestles in quartz veins and can be of microscopic dimensions or, once extracted, in the form of large nuggets, usually still clinging to a chunk of rock.

Even the amateur geologist can easily spot the white quartz among darker rocks. Of course, the visible part of the quartz vein is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. It is thanks to these small clues in the rock that the wider presence of gold can be detected.

Before the 19th century gold rush took place, local inhabitants and, about 2000 years ago, the invading Romans, had already plundered the gold fields of Northern Italy. “The Bessa”, near Biella, Piedmont, was the oldest opencast gold mine in Europe in Roman times and it is now a nature reserve of important historical, archaeological and geological interest.

Returning to more recent times, gold mining companies sprang up in any site that was potentially profitable.

The technique traditionally employed in separating gold from rock began with crushing, after which mercury was added. The mercury amalgamates with the gold, and the rock together with any unrecovered mercury was simply dumped.

Today’s environmentalists would react with horror, were such a procedure to take place now! Mercury, which was used in Italy up to relatively recent times, represented a danger to mental and physical health and must have played havoc with ecosystems of old.

Of course, the dangers didn’t stop here; miners often used pneumatic drills that led to pulmonary problems and the threat of rock fall was always looming.

Among the many important gold mines active in Northern Italy in the last 300 years were the Alagna Gold Mines and those of Pestarena. Mining at Alagna, situated to the South of the Anzasca valley, which leads off from the Monte Rosa massif, can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

The veins were worked most intensively in the 18th century. At that time the entire region was controlled by the powerful House of Savoy. Later, the mines were almost completely abandoned before passing into the hands of various mining operations.

The real turning point came at the very beginning of the 19th Century, when the property was taken over by an Anglo-French Monte Rosa Gold Mining Company Limited, established by the South African banker, George Robinson.

Tunnels were restored, buildings were repaired and galleries were lengthened. In spite of some financial problems, involving the setting up of two new companies, work resumed in 1906 under the technical direction of the engineer Pierre Catzigera.

Catzigera, a far-sighted engineer of Greek origin, took a great interest in the workers of whom there were about 100, arranging for them to undergo a thorough medical examination once a month. He saw to it that they and their families enjoyed free medical assistance and medicine. Moreover, he promoted a healthy living environment and lifestyle among the men, awarding prizes for order and cleanliness.

The mineral treatment process was changed in such a way as to recuperate 90 per cent of the gold, as opposed to the 60 to 70 per cent recuperated under the previous system. This was achieved by using cyanide to dissolve the gold, a process that had only been developed in the late 1880s. This process rapidly became popular because it was more efficient in extracting gold from relatively poor ores.

1903 was the year in which most gold was extracted, as much as 12 Kg. However, in general, annual yield did not exceed 1 kg and as profits went down work also declined until it was almost completely suspended.

As if this wasn’t enough, in 1915, an avalanche seriously damaged the principal building and shortly afterwards, the investor, George Robinson died.

Entrance to the Guia mine.

As with the Alagna Gold Mines, the six mines of Pestarena, located at the mouth of the Anzasca valley, were already known and intensely worked in the middle of the 1800s. Little is known about the early years of activity but the renowned engineer Francfort, who had studied in both America and Germany, came to Italy in around 1857 and made a study of the local mines.

In particular, he discovered that gold was present on pyrite, in the form of microscopic particles.

He convinced some English entrepreneurs to back him financially and in 1863 the “Victor Emanuel Company” of London bought the mines.

Following detailed studies of the valley’s mineralisation, he introduced a new system for working the mineral, involving large mercury amalgamation mills. These great mills were an improvement, increasing yield, and business expanded. Different companies, such as the Val Toppa, the Cani, and the Crodo gold mines merged to form the “Pestarena United Gold Mining Company”, the largest gold company in Europe, if we do not count two mines in faraway Czarist Russia.

Production often surpassed 200 Kg per year in the following decades, despite the fact that average gold content had decreased from an initial 30 grams per tonne (or perhaps more) to 20 g/t and subsequently to 15 g/t in Pestarena and 10 g/t in Val Toppa.

Unfortunately, the boom did not last, and from 1898 on, production diminished. In the following year, the “Pestarena United Gold Mining Company” was in such trouble that many workers lost their jobs.

In an attempt to resolve the situation, a new company, the “Pestarena Mining Company” was established. This was of no help, however, and in 1901, Pestarena Mining was forced into liquidation.

So ended the most significant and lucrative aspects of the gold rush.

It is said that every golden age has to end, and, indeed, the once thriving mines in Northern Italy are now largely abandoned.

However, gold fever can still affect prospectors in Northern Italy, where all rivers contain alluvial gold, to a greater or lesser degree.

Between the two World Wars, people in Piedmont eked out a living by panning for gold, but this activity today is mostly done for fun, rather than as a means of securing livelihood.

All you need is a spade, a gold pan and a thirst for that glimmering metal.

References La corsa all’oro in Italia, 1848-1915,

by Dr. Aldo Rocchetti, (soon to be published in English).

Anthea Lacchia is a geology student at TCD and Deputy Editor of the science page in Trinity News. lacchiaa@tcd.ie

East side of Monte Rosa.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 9

LIVE LINK

SPIN

KIN

GAS

Tom Kennedy reports that science from all around Europe went on display at the ESOF event in Turin.

his year it was Turin’s turn to become Europe’s City of Science, and in July the impressive Lingotto, a former Fiat factory with its rooftop race track, was the venue for a week long programme of lectures, workshops and other events. This European Open Forum, ESOF, was the third in a series of biennial events designed to provide a European showcase for the best in science. From Stockholm in 2004, ESOF moved on to Munich in 2006, Barcelona in 2008, Turin in 2010, and in 2012 it will be Dublin’s turn to be City of Science.

ESOF, launched by the pan-European Euroscience association, has gone from success to success to become the main event for science in Europe. The event is big, and with something on offer to everyone, the extensive corridors of the Lingotto were often like a busy railway station as people, faced with an bewildering array of parallel presentations, rushed from session to session. With more than forty topics in the agenda every day for three days in a row, visitors were spoiled for choice, with subjects ranging from quantum science, nantotechnology, insect wars, marine technology, stem cell research, careers, and, of particular relevance to Ireland, taming the wind.

This presentation, in which experts described how Ireland could become a major exporter of wind generated power, helped to highlight the Irish

T

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 10

CE

MA

HOW O F

involvement in European science, and another reminder was the double decker Dublin bus parked outside the five story Lingotto block.

In a journey that brings to mind Hannibal’s lumbering elephants crossing of the Alps, the bus had brought six early career scientists from Dublin to Turin via Liverpool, Brussels and Amsterdam. Dara Boland with a degree in technology from DCU, Ellen Byrne with an interest in pharmacology, science teacher Michelle Dunne, Caitríona Geraghty who works on the engineering programme STEPS, Ronan Lyne a neuroscience student at TCD, and Martin McKenna one time editor of Trinity News came as science ambassadors to help highlight the fact that Dublin will be the next destination for ESOF 2012.

N E SCI

During the Turin event, Dr Donald Brennan, who has been working on cancer bio-markers at the UCD Conway Institute, was presented with the European Young Researchers Award. This is the first time such a distinction has gone to Ireland, and in making the presentation, Enric Banda, President of the ESOF founding body, Euroscience, remarked that one of the reasons for Donal being selected, is that he is very involved in what is known as translational research.

The object of this approach is to accelerate the delivery of benefits from lab to patient.

Donal, said

The Irish City of Science team celebrating the hand over at Turin.

Science has always Enric Banda, has been been strong in Europe, working both in the yet the support for academic and the science has been weak. industry world, and In a thought provoking he commented that talk, Mariano Gago, scientists welcome Minister of Science, that sort of association.

Technology and Higher “We in the science Education in Portugal, made community,” he said, “are the observation that science not afraid of innovation, we are, in fact, friends of At Turin, Dublin’s Mayor, had not actually been innovation.”

Gerry Breen, Enric Banda, and officially on the European Dr Brennan said that Ireland’s Science Adviser, Prof agenda before Lisbon 2000. Even if the situation it is a big honour to be Patrick Cunningham. has improved, he said, singled out for this award, science is still not high on the political but the credit has to be shared, both agenda, and few scientists participate in by his colleagues in Sweden, and by decision making at government level. his patients who had been willing The Minister, a distinguished physicist collaborators. Without their help, he who has worked at CERN and is one said, he would not have been able to do of the pioneers who campaigned for this research. the establishment of the European Like many researchers, Dr Brennan is Research Area, was highly critical keen to share and pass on his knowledge, of how some big budget projects are and he remarked on how important it is being run. There is, he said, a mess for experts to communicate effectively with gross overspending on some with both the public and the next of the key projects that were set up generation of scientists. “While there is to put European science in the lead. a lot of emphasis within universities on “Questions are being asked on how research, please do not forget to teach,” the money is being spent,” he said, he said. projects go way over budget, “and The need to connect research to no one gets blamed, no one seems innovation was also emphasised by to be in control.” He gave the fusion Patricia Ryan, who, speaking on behalf project as an example. This is a project of Europe’s Commissioner for Research with enormous potential, promising and Innovation, Márie Geoghegan generation of almost unlimited power Quinn, said that there is a need to within the next 30 or so years. However, encourage creative problem solvers as Mariano Gago said, costs have throughout Europe. As she explained, turned out to be three times higher this involves a change in attitude in than the original budget. Another big schools, where instead of learning by European project, Galileo, involving rote, students learn how to learn. Under the launch of multiple satellites to give the Commisioner, more resources are Europe an independent non-military to be put into enquiry based learning, system of GPS navigation, is also a and there is to be more emphasis on financial mess, he said, remarking that, acquiring what are often regarded as “something like €1.5 to €1.7 billion are the ‘soft’ skills, such as are required in missing.” communication and for working with other people.

This approach is not just for schools, and under the EU Framework 7 programme great importance is being attached to professional career development and mobility. This is all part of the EC aim to create an innovation union. “Young researchers,” said Patricia Ryan, “are the foundation on which the innovation union strategy is being based.” For the European Research Area to work well, researchers have to be able to get around, and they need to have an attractive career structure. As Patricia Ryan remarked, there is a need to “reward excellence with excellence.”

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 11

Not that Mariano Gago takes a totally pessimistic view, but he emphasised the importance of good management, and greater participation by scientists at policy level, particularly when money is tight. In some countries, severe cut backs could have a enormous negative impact on science. The European attitude, he said, is to cut back, while in the US, there is more of a willingness to invest in the future, so Europe could lose out. There have been European success stories, he said, such as CERN, but these need to become the norm, not the exceptions.

Scientists, he said, should not just sit back and grumble while expecting other people solve their problems.

“Science is too important to be left up to the politicians,” he said, “you must do it for yourselves. Scientists have to mobilise,” and in Prof Gago’s opinion, if addressed properly the public will take scientists seriously. Scientists, he said, are seen as professionals acting for the common good. “In general,” he said, “this view is right.”

Euroscience, the organisation behind ESOF, was established in 1997 with just this in mind. The biennial events, attended by thousands of people, and not just by a small number of researchers, are part of the underlying aim to construct scientific Europe from the bottom up.

In less than two years time it will be Ireland’s turn to be the showcase for European science, and at a spectacular hand-over ceremony, a mass of brightly clad students performed a free-form dance around the rooftop racetrack as the mayor of Turin accepted a cut-glass gift from the Mayor of Dublin in exchange for a symbolic Torino bull.

SPIN

PART FOUR Will scientists lose control of their data?

Continuing our series of special features in which Dr Veronica Miller explains what we know about the brain and how it works.

Learning MeMory anD iQ ould you play poker with a cheetah? Would you trust a shark to do your taxes? Probably not. Even very well trained circus animals might struggle with the finer points of cooking microwave dinners. Yet, when animals are born, they have almost exactly the same set of learning skills that we do. The three learning skills we share with animals, habituation, sensitization and conditioning are present in our infant minds, and are vital for our survival. They protect us from danger and help us learn new skills. Somewhere along the evolutionary tree we learned to integrate these behaviors, and add to them, but when we’re born the differences between the brain of a baby and that of a baboon is almost invisible.

W

Habituation and sensitisation

Pavlovian conditioning

Although Pavlovian conditioning may sound like a medical illness whereby people are addicted to a desert with peaches cream and meringue, it is one of the higher learning abilities animals share with us. From an early age children are able to associate the sound of a car engine running outside, with their parents having returned early, and instantly respond by hiding evidence of a misspent night and running to bed. Ivan Pavlov was the Russian scientist who discovered that animals are also capable of this learning behavior.

Prior to embarking on his scientific odyssey Ivan Pavlov had been pursuing a religious career. After reading Darwin’s book The Origin of the Species recently published at the time, Pavlov decided to become a scientist.

It was in 1895 while studying the digestive system of dogs, that Pavlov noticed the dogs would drool at the sight of the attendants dressed in white coats, before being given food, because they knew white coated men meant food was coming. After this initial observation Pavlov then discovered that you could make animals respond to a variety of indirect objects, and termed this type of behavior Palvovian Conditioning.

Ivan Pavlov, and the equipment used

From the instant we are born, our brains are actively soaking in information from every working sense in our bodies. We are learning what the world is made of, how to react to it, and of course what to ignore. Even newborn babies have the ability to be bored with their environment. Researchers proved this by attaching a sensing device to a four hour old baby’s dummy. They then played a tone to the baby, and immediately it paused sucking on the dummy to listen to detect and measure drooling. to the tone. After hearing the tone several Which bit of the brain times, the baby soon ignored it and carried learns first? on sucking its dummy. Then when they changed the tone, the baby, curious as Naturally it wasn’t enough for Pavlov to to what the new noise was, immediately have discovered a method to make dogs paused sucking again to listen to it. drool without feeding them. He wanted This ability to only absorb new to know how this happened and which information is shared between new born parts of the brain controlled this learned babies and many animals and is known response. as habituation, in other words as you get By 1905 Pavlov and his team had used to your environment you learn to discovered that it is the cortex which only notice new things. The opposite of controls Pavlovian conditioning and our nervous system habituation is sensitisation; this is when only a tiny change in in general. By generating different types of tests combining the environment can provoke a huge reaction from you. different stimuli, sounds, tastes smells and reflexes, such as Sensitisation is when experience of an event makes blinking Pavlov was able to discover which parts of the brain you more prepared to act quickly to respond to the event controlled different reflexes. next time. It’s essential to protect you from danger. To be By combining a puff of air, with the sound of a bell to forewarned is to be forearmed. For animals and humans, the eye of a rabbit, Pavlov was able to train the blinking prior exposure to a dangerous event, such as tremors and reflex of the rabbit to work only in response to the bell. He rumbles in the Earth during to an earthquake allows us to be then discovered that this blink in response to the bell was prepared for it next time. processed by a combination of stimulation of the auditory Our ability to notice animals running before our own high nerve from the ear, and the cerebellum, which receives tech gadgets can anticipate an earthquake is another form of fibres projecting from the auditory nerve. learning, known as conditioning, or Pavlovian conditioning; The cerebellum, or little brain, one of the oldest areas of the ability to make connections between indirect events. our brain, we now know is responsible for controlling your

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 12

co-coordinated movements. If your cerebellum malfunctions you lose the ability to do the simple things you would normally do without thinking. You wouldn’t think twice about putting on your trousers in the morning, but if your cerebellum was damaged this could take you ages as you consciously have to plan lifting your leg, bending your knee, pulling up the trousers.

Born to learn

Memories in the animal kingdom — Invertebrates

They say that elephants never forget but what about other types of creatures? If you met an octopus again would it shake your hand and which tentacle would it use if it did?

If you had a particularly scaly hand or one covered in stripes or shapes there is a very good chance that the octopus would remember you. The octopus has the largest brain among spineless animals. Octopi can readily learn tasks which demand the ability to distinguish between horizontal and vertical lines. They can also learn touch discrimination with their tentacles. These touch memories are stored in their inferior frontal and sub frontal lobes, while sight memories are stored in the ventral lobe.

It is these ventral lobes with their tightly packed neurons that are thought to be responsible for the generation of their memories.

But, perhaps your innate intelligence tells you that octopi and humans are very different, and may not be the best model to understand how our brains work.

Not only are we born to learn about the world, we’re also born to learn how to behave towards the people who inhabit it. Our inbuilt desire to learn how to treat other people is vital to our development as adults and our ability to form relationships with others. And it’s a desire we share with many animals.

Konrad Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist who spent his life studying fish and birds to understand what types of behaviour we are born with and what function they serve.

One behaviour he found vital to animal’s survival was “imprinting”. Konrad was often seen followed by some of his favourite subjects, Greylag geese. These birds saw Memories in the Animal him as their mother so they followed him around. The attachment they formed to him Kingdom — was based on their innate drive to form an Vertebrates attachment to something parental like in their environment. Konrad defined imprinting Animals that are closest to us are those with as the behavioral attachment that very spines, the vertebrates. One well studied young animals form with a parent, usually vertebrate is the rat. And although they are dependent on the shape of the parent’s body much smaller than us, weirdly enough, rat or particular colour of their feathers or fur. brains contain more neurons per square inch Konrad thought that some innate than human brains. But because we have behaviour could be passed from parent to about twenty thousand interneuron’s for every child in their genes. For this to be true, a sensory peripheral neuron, rats have lower child would have to behave in exactly the odds of making sense of their environment, same way as the parent, never having seen only having twenty interneuron’s for each the parent behave in that way before. Konrad peripheral one. seems to have been correct about this. Chicks That we have more brain cells than rats of some birds will peck their way out of their Konrad Lorenz, above, found that is indisputable, and this may be why we are egg shell in the same perfect circle, rotating because animals, such as greylag slightly smarter, but you may wonder what is themselves inside the shell till they pop off chicks, instinctively form a strong it about these cells that make them so much the top of the shell. Having seen nothing of attachment to a parent, he could smarter than the other types of cells in our the outside world, all chicks do this in exactly bodies? act as a substitute ‘mother’. the same way, pecking in exactly the same direction.

Neurons and their special relationships It’s essential that animals can form attachments with their Think for a moment. If you were to design cells that were parents so that they’ll be able to survive in the wild and specialized for making memories what kind of characteristics know how to behave as they get older. If they don’t attach would you like them to have? Think of the characteristics of themselves to a parent, it will make it difficult for them your best and oldest friends — some of the most important to survive. If song birds fail to learn their song from their characteristics of lasting friendships are what you’d like to parents, it can mean they never mate and are more likely to find in neurons. be eaten by other animals.

Your best friends would bend over backwards to help The part of the brain which grows and is activated you, and stay in place when you need them: they are flexible during this process of innate learning is thought to be and lasting, characteristics fitting for a good neuron. You the medial part of the ventral hyperstriatum — the stripy need your neurons to be flexible, able to constantly change bit of the midbrain so called because of the fibrous strips and respond to your dynamic environment; so you can soak of nerves running out of it to the cortex. The midbrain is up new information. But you also need the connections they one of the oldest areas of our brains, and while it may be make to be lasting otherwise you’d forget concerned with our simple primitive learning it’s not actually everything in seconds. responsible for our memories or intelligence. You may wonder if the animal kingdom offers us any more clues as to which part of our brain is the smartest.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 13

Flexible friends

The brain is a dynamic organ. Like a hyperactive child with an endless array of phones, it is constantly remodeling, making new connections between neurons and breaking off ones that are no longer needed.

The ability of neurons to reach out and touch each other is necessary not just when we begin to form thoughts as a baby but also to keep memories alive as we grow older.

The ability of neurons to change and grow is known as the “functional self creation plasticity process”. In other words, if you keep the neurons active, once they form a connection, it will keep working. This plasticity, or ability of neurons to change their shape, like a piece of plastic, is one of their most important characteristics.

Experimentally, neuronal plasticity was proved last century. Simply giving tiny electric shocks to brain areas thought to process short term memories, increases the branching of neurons in the areas receiving the input. And removing input to that area can cause degeneration in area these neurons project to. So active neurons are like trees in the forest receiving rain, sunshine and soil nutrients and growing many branches in response. A drought, or lack of sunlight, could cause these branches and leaves to stop growing, and allow the proliferation of other types of tress more suited to that weather. Gaps left by these dying trees would then be filled by other healthy trees surrounding them. The brain also fills gaps left by degenerated neurons with branches from other ones.

Lasting connections and long term potential

It’s not just important that our neurons can send out branches to shuttle information to each other its also important that some of these connections are lasting so that memory pathways can be cemented in our heads. Not only this but these connections need to be accessed more quickly than they were generated, otherwise we’d never learn anything. When you were a child it may have taken a few years for you to learn how to add, subtract or write. Imagine if we never got quicker at these things as we grew older, how long it would take us to write and add up a shopping list. A trip to Tesco could take months.

The ability of neurons to communicate quickly and maintain these connections is mostly based on their electric potential. The electrical potential of the cell is just another way of saying how long it takes the cell to electrocute its neighbours.

Electrical potential or voltage as its also called is basically the way of measuring how much work it takes to bring two separate charges together. Anybody familiar with magnets will tell you that the opposite ends attract and that the similar charges repel each other very strongly. The closer you bring two similarly charged bits of metal together the more vigorously they repel each other, because the force between two charges is inversely proportional to the distance between them.

When a neuron isn’t firing, it has what is known as the resting potential. This resting potential is the combination between the natural flow of positive and negative ions across the neuron’s membrane, known as osmotic pressure, and the electrostatic force when the ions are actively pumped across the membrane.

Inside the neuron is mostly positively charged, containing lots of positive Sodium (Na) ions. Outside the neuron is mostly negatively charged, containing a mixture of negative Chlorine (Cl) and positive Potassium (K) ions.

The negative ions are attracted to more positively charged areas, and positive ions are attracted to more negatively charged areas; the force this tendency produces is called electrostatic force. When neurons send impulses to each other, when we have a sudden thought, or when we prick ourselves and feel pain, the impulses sent around our body are electric. A jump in the resting potential of one cell, above a certain threshold level, wakes it up, and tells it to send neurotransmitters to the next cell. This jump is known as the action potential.

Electrifying thoughts

If you put a tiny electrode into the neuron while the action potential is generated and measured the change of its voltage you’d get a diagram as below. The change in the electrical charge takes only milliseconds to be transmitted. Thanks to the insulation by the fatty myelin around axons, this electrical charge can then be sent really quickly to the next neuron.

An action potential is caused by the exchange of ions, across the membrane of the neuron. The normal resting potential of the neuron is ~65mV, inside the cell the charges are mainly positive and outside they are mainly negative.

When an action potential is initiated, sodium ports open and the sodium ions flow into the neuron from the negative liquid surrounding it. The flood of positive ions makes the inside of the neuron more positively charged and changes its voltage to 30mV higher than the outside. Then the potassium ports open and the sodium ones close. The potassium ports send potassium out of the neuron which brings the cell back to its original resting potential. Because of the timing difference the voltage overshoots to a slightly more negative charge before coming back to its resting potential. You may be wondering how this little electrified membrane translates into us having electrifying memories?

All or nothing

You know that it takes a certain amount of motivation; or nagging to get somebody to do their chores. Brain cells are no different. Unless they receive a certain strength of signal, above a particular threshold- the signal will not be sent from one cell to the next. But once this threshold is reached; it doesn’t really matter how large the initial stimulus is the action potential itself will not shift in size. This phenomenon of consistency of a wave above a particular threshold is known as the all-or-none law of axonal transmission.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 14

The molecular memory trail

Sparking off a memory, or activating a neuron requires an electric potential, but converting this into a memory, requires the release of chemicals which are sent from the branch of one neuron to the next.

The chemical messengers — neurotransmitters released from one excited neuron dock on the next neuron. They tell it to open its ion pumps, which immediately changes the voltage inside the neuron. This electrical change then shoots through the neuron, along its insulated axon and down to the other end where it tells the synapse of the neuron to release neurotransmitters. Then these neurotransmitters act on the next cell, telling it to become electrified, and so the signals are passed from neuron to neuron, by a combination of chemical and electrical activation.

Memories are made because as you use neuronal pathways more frequently they can connect with each other more quickly and for longer periods of time, based on the same small initial impulse.

This ability to connect with each other quicker, for longer periods of time, after having previously been stimulated is known as Long Term Potentiation, LTP. It’s a bit like being able to talk longer to your friend’s brother or sister the more often you meet them. The patterns of neurotransmitters on the surface of the synapses may change slightly depending on the types of memories they code for, light, dark, sounds or smells. But the fact that these patterns are lasting, is thought to be the basis of our memories.

You can prove Long Term Potentiation — or the ability of a cell to remember being stimulated by using electrodes planted into different brain cells.

When you stimulate areas in the brain for several seconds with an electrode, and then test it with a single shock at various intervals, the synaptic response of particular types of neurons in the brain will become greater than normal. Cells in the hippocampus display this curious property which makes them ideal for generating memories. This Long Term Potentiation can last from hours to days to weeks even. And though other areas of the brain also show LTP it’s a compelling piece of evidence which points the finger at the hippocampus being responsible for generating our short term memories.

Calcium good for your bones and brains Calcium from milk and even oranges helps build and maintain healthy bones, and you may be surprised to know calcium is also vital for building and retaining memories.

Long term potentiation is the technical term used to describe the fact that over time less and less stimulation is required to maintain a synaptic connection as long as the connection is stimulated regularly.

When one synapse is activate, calcium ions shuffle across its membrane and activate lots of calcium regulated proteins which are vital for maintaining the physical connection between the two synapses and also encouraging other neurotransmitters to be released and metabolized.

The hippocampus is vital for memory formation. If you inhibit the actions of calcium in hippocampal neurons by injecting the cells with lanthanum — a chemical than inhibits the ion channels, you also inhibit the long term potentiation and memory formation. In your neck, the parathyroid gland is responsible for secreting chemicals which maintain calcium levels in the blood. However, if the parathyroid gland isn’t working; calcium levels will drop, and among many other symptoms, you will experience memory loss. So drinking milk isn’t just important for building healthy bones, but also for healthy brains.

Accidental memory loss

The hippocampus fits our description of what memorable brain cells should look and act like, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that it makes our short term memories.

The strongest piece of evidence to show that it is the hippocampus which is responsible for short term memory comes from two neuroscientists, who observed that if you remove the hippocampus you also lose the ability to make short term memories.

In 1953, Brenda Milner and William Scoville, working in Canada, found that one of their patients, H.M., a 27 year old mechanic who had both hippocampi removed to treat his epilepsy lost the ability to remember any recent events.

He couldn’t remember what he did hours previously but could still tell you how many hours and minutes there were in a week. 28 years after this operation, the patient was re-examined by Suszanne Corkin in Boston, and she found that while he still could not tell her the name of the doctors looking after him, or what he had for dinner that day, he could remember all of his past prior to the operation and was well able to do crosswords and other puzzles.

The domino effect

An interesting observation they made was that the patient H.M. was unable to identify different smells, he had decreased pain perception and little or no appetite or feeling of fullness after eating. You’ll remember that the hippocampus is one of the oldest areas of our brains, which evolved around the same time as the parts that process our basic instincts like fear in the amygdala, hunger and thirst in our hypothalamus. The hippocampus is tightly connected to these primitive limbic areas. Damage to the hippocampus, and loss of projections into and out of it, would therefore decrease the ability of other limbic areas to function properly.

A piece of the brain by any other name…

The hippocampus is so called because it reminded an Italian scientist, Julius Caesar Arantius in the late 16th century, of the shape of a sea horse. The hippocampus was a fabled sea animal from Greek mythology. It resembled a horse with the hind parts of a fish or dolphin. The chariot of Poseidon the Greek Sea God, was drawn by a hippocampus. Literally the name comes from the Greek word hippos, horse; and

Crainologists came up with range of fanciful notions on how the skull shaped character, and the slope of the forhead was considered an indicator of intelligence.

Back in the 19th century it was thought that skull shape determined intelligence until Alfred Binet and others observed that this is not true. kampos, sea monster. Inside the hippocampus is another spiral shape which looks like a ram’s horn. This part was called Ammon’s horn in the 18th century as a descriptive metaphor, referring to the ram shaped horns on the head representing the Egyptian God Amun who protected the Egyptian Pharaoh Taharqa in the temple of Kawa.

Evolution of our braininess

The hippocampus as you know is one of the evolutionarily oldest areas of the brain. It was one of the first areas of the forebrain to become differentiated in primitive vertebrates and is called the archi (old) cortex. One of our earliest relatives, Homo habilis, the handy man, or affluent savage as some anthropologists have called them, lived approximately 2.2 to 1.6 million years ago in east Africa. Homo habilis was so named because he was a tool maker, who was one of the first creatures to develop skills to generate tools for providing better food and shelter before other primates alive at the time.

The skills that Homo habilis learned allowed him to live longer. And living longer meant grandparents were around longer to look after young children, freeing up time for the younger parents to acquire information from their environment.

Increased knowledge and the ability to make some lighter faster spears meant freedom from predators, greater availability of food, and increased time for communication.

It is around this time that people think language prospered.

Our tongues and vocal chords became more sophisticated, our hands more skilled, and our ability to pass hunting farming and simple health skills on to the next generations increased.

Increased farming ability, and the development of civilisations in the deltas of great rivers such as the Ganges and the Nile happened simultaneously with the cross pollination of cultures and the mixing of some of our primitive ancestors.

As we began to divide labour among different members of society, and develop skills for completion of this labour, our brains too became more specialised and began to differentiate into different areas specialised for different tasks.

One of the key steps taken by our simple brains was the development of the hippocampus. As the forebrain expanded during evolution, the hippocampus got pushed out to the

The profile of a donkey and the character of an ass

A bear and the associated ‘great bear”

A lion and a leonine character

A hog and a hog-like character

sides and dragged around to the front in an arc through the dorsal forebrain to the temporal lobe.

Eventually it came to reside in the temporal lobe nestled against the amygdala, although it was not originally part of the temporal cortex. The connection between it and the midbrain is via a tract of fibres known as the fornix. The arc of the fornix is almost like a thread through evolution, its distance signifying both the evolutionary physical displacement of the hippocampus and also showing how far our minds have developed. Our short term memories are processed by the hippocampus, part of what is termed the archi-cortex — or old brain. While our longer term memories mostly find their homes in the neo-cortex, which is the outer covering of our brains. These old brain areas are characterised by the distinctive layering of different types of cells which you can see if you cut a slice through them, like multiple layers of cherries, cream, sauce and chocolate, in a black forest gateau cake.

Memories are made of this

Better food meant better brains for the old apes that evolutionists claim are our ancestral cousins. Not only because their brains had more time to grow but also because they had more nutrients available to use to start making memories with. We know now that communication between neurons is essential for transferring and storing information in our brains. This information transfer process is sparked off by electrical impulses but the actual transaction is parceled off in bundles of chemicals shuttled between cells. Most of the chemicals are made of the amino acid leggo blocks you met in the previous chapters. These amino acids in general come from protein in our diet, and examples of them include dopamine, adrenalin and serotonin. The most important transmitter for memories is acetylcholine, which is not generated from the amino acids.

This molecule actually is made up of acetyl and choline. The choline you get from your cell membrane from a molecule known as phosphatidylcholine. And the snappily titled phosphatidylcholine actually comes from the omega oils you find in lecithin and fish.

So when you’re told to eat your oily fish because its good you’re your brains, it’s actually true!

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 16

My IQ

Fish oils may increase your IQ, but have you ever wondered why IQ tests exist? IQ testing dates back to the early 1900s when a French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) began to become sceptical about the thinking at that time, that more intelligent people simple had bigger and better shaped heads. Craniometry, popular at the end of the 19th century, was considered as the only method suitable for determining a person’s intelligence. By obtaining measurements of “intelligent” folk’s skulls, “scientists” back then supposedly found proof that bigger heads meant better brains.

However, as more and more evidence mounted that people with small, narrow or even mis-shapen lumpy heads were quite capable of becoming professors, Binet began to wonder if there was a better way of measuring a person’s intelligence. His motivation came from wishing to improve teaching standards in schools.

As a person who worked for the French education department, his chief concern was to identify children who were weaker than others in school so that they could receive extra training and so become better students. He generated a series of tasks that children at different ages should be capable of completing, by playing around with the scores that children got, he derived their “Intelligence Quotient” now known as IQ. Binet’s aim was to separate the intelligence that people are born with, from that which is taught to them, so that he could generate ways of teaching children better. He knew intelligence was too complex to be captured with just a single number and was very worried that in the future his simple tests for schoolchildren would be used to label people. At the beginning of the 20th century his IQ tests were jumped upon by people who modified tests to discriminate against people by virtue of their race, sex or culture, but nowadays most people would take their results with a good pinch of salt.

Quick witted

One theory about why people have higher IQ than others is that they simply have the ability to think quicker — because their nerve fibres are better insulated than other people. To test this researchers have tried to correlate IQ with knee jerk reaction times. In theory faster knee jerking, should mean higher IQs. But even if you can think quickly that doesn’t mean you are thinking correctly. In fact slow thinking may not be so bad after all.

Brain scans of older and younger people doing the same task, show more areas of the brain lighting up in younger people. Yet both groups do equally well in the task. In other words older people think more accurately than younger folks. So while older people may think more slowly, they are actually more likely to give you the right answer.

Stage school

If we are born learning you may wonder why it is that we go to school. Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who originally was interested in studying snails, but after the birth of his children became fascinated with developmental psychology. It was his work at the beginning of the 20th century that allowed people to understand the different stages of intellectual development children go through. At an early stage, we can’t see beyond our own little world, and then at about 6 years we start becoming logical, and

capable of understanding problem solving math’s equations.

At about 11 we start to see things from other’s point of view, and can see consequences of our actions way into the future.

In theory schools are segregated into courses to suit these different stages of learning.

Yet we know schools don’t suit everybody, and even Charles Darwin noted, that the brains of animals out in the wild were larger than domesticated animals, partly because they are exposed to greater changes and information in their environment and partly because they have to think for themselves in order to survive. You may wonder therefore if schooling actually causes shrinkage of the brain, and if street smarts are better than bookish brains.

Exams could make you forget things

Whether or not school suited you, you’ll still remember experiencing a mental blank during an exam, when you couldn’t even remember how to spell your name, never mind explain the finer points of the modh coinníollach.

You’ll probably wonder why this is. Don’t worry you’re not alone, and indeed worrying could make the problem worse.

This short term memory loss is usually simply due to an overshoot of your biological stress coping mechanisms.

Stress isn’t just that general feeling of being agitated and irritated waiting for traffic lights to turn green when you’re late, it’s also a biological process active in your blood stream and brain, whose purpose is to prepare you for and protect you from danger. In the short term stress activates your hypothalamus, which sends a message to the pituitary gland, hanging off it, which releases chemical messengers into the bloodstream. These messengers then flow to the adrenal cortex on your kidneys, which then releases cortisol and other stress hormones, which increase your metabolism preparing you for fight or flight. Usually these stress hormones are useful, but for some people they can actually cause loss of your short term memory.

Short term stress can be good because it increases memory and concentration. But, in the short term stress has been shown to decrease people’s verbal memory. You’ll be familiar with this when somebody asks you a question and the answer is just on the tip of your tongue. This short term memory blank can be caused by releasing too much stress hormones into the bloodstream which deactivate the hippocampus temporarily.

People who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, Vietnam War veterans, and women who had suffered sexual abuse, both have been found to have up to eight per cent shrinkage of their hippocampus. This is thought to be caused by prolonged exposure to cortisol, the major stress hormone.

The potentially toxic nature of stress hormones was found by scientists, when they discovered that if you remove the adrenal glands which secrete stress hormones, from animals who have strokes, the damage done by the stroke is lessened- in other words, lack of stress hormones, causes decreased brain damage. If you give the animals stress hormones, after they have a stroke, they have more damage. In the long term too much stress may be bad for you, in the short term some is good to help with your concentration. If you are taking exams a little stress may make you do some work, but prolonged stress could actually make you forget things. There is a lot to be said for taking it easy and not letting yourself becoming stressed out.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 17

Left top, neocortex section from a 45 year old man stained to show tau protein.

Extensive deposition of neurofibrillary tangles show up, and immediately below a high magnification view Top right, section of amygdala stained to show up the tau protein, and below, a photomicrograph showing the tangles. Images: Boston University.

Alcoholic’s amnesia

The photograph is taken of hippocampal tissues from a lady with Azlheimer’s disease. The plaques are extracellular and comprised of all kinds of proteinacious material, especially amyloid. The tangles are inside neurons and contain misfolded cytoskeletal elements particularly the tau protein.

the midbrain. Just why these areas are most vulnerable to thiamine deficiency isn’t clear now.

People with Korsakoff’s syndrome have difficulty remembering new information. They can remember what happened 20 years ago, but may not remember what happened twenty minutes ago. This defect is known as anterograde amnesia, in memory loss from now to the past.

Usually people with Korsakoff’s fill in the gaps in their recent memory by generating elaborate fictional stories, a symptom called “confabulation.”. In fact they may even be unaware that they are making up these memories, and unawareness of the memory defect is one of the hallmarks of Korsakoff’s syndrome.

Some people drink to forget, and some people can’t remember what they’re drinking. Alcoholic’s Amnesia is a form of memory loss, whereby a person may be able to remember the year the pub they’re in was built, but forget what drinks everybody is having. This type of amnesia is also known as Korsakoff’s syndrome.

Korsakoff’s syndrome is a memory disorder which is caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, also called thiamine.

The most common cause of thiamine deficiency is alcoholism. People who are chronic alcoholics tend to replace food with drinks, and develop vitamin deficiencies because of their poor diet, combined with the toxic effects of the alcohol on their intestine which makes it difficult to absorb nutrients from food.

Alzheimer’s disease Thiamine is essential for cellular reactions which generate Short term memory loss, and confusion found in Korsakoff’s energy for neurons in the brain. If you have no carbohydrate syndrome may sound eerily like Alzheimer’s disease to in your diet, like people on the Atkins diet, your cells start you, but the two disorders are quite different. Alzheimer’s burning up another fuel reserve disease is thought to be linked - fats. Brain cells don’t have fatty Neuron in the amygdala. Image: Friedrich Miescher Institute with defects in specific proteins for Biomedical Research. reserves, so they start burning in brain cells and effects older up proteins. The active form of people over 65 yrs, Korsakoff’s thiamine is needed to use up syndrome is due to alcoholism brain proteins, and generate and poor diet, and effects mostly useful end products of these men over 45 yrs. reactions. It also plays a part in Alzheimer’s disease glucose metabolism. So without usually begins with short thiamine in your diet, neurons memory lapses, losing keys, don’t have the ability to generate getting confused with paying enough energy and become bills, getting progressively more loaded with toxic products of severe. The term Alzheimer’s metabolic pathways. disease comes from a German When you look at the brain man named Alois Alzheimer of a person with Korsakoff’s at the beginning of the 20th syndrome you find damage century, who looked down the consistently in the mamillary microscope and saw what looked bodies and the thalamus in like little clumps of misfolded

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 18

proteins in the brain of one of his patients who had memory problems. He coined the term Alzheimer’s disease to describe the problem.

Nowadays we know that Alzheimer’s disease covers a wide range of symptoms, and can affect some people more severely than others. But in general the hallmarks of the disease include memory loss and disruption in normal protein processes in the brain.

In order for our memories to work properly it is essential that neurons can grow new branches and maintain existing.

There are two proteins are involved in this growth and maintenance, and these are the two proteins which become dysfunctional and are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

One acts like a tiny scaffold inside the branch to transport chemicals to different ends of it and help maintain it’s shape — the tau protein.

One is needed both for transporting chemicals in the neuron and to help it grow is the Amyloid protein.

If you look down the microscope at the brain of somebody who had Alzheimer’s disease you see the tau protein is misshapen and the tiny microtubules its attached to, become twisted into unmovable rope like structures blocking the transport in the cell. While the amyloid protein, gets wrongly chopped up, and the bits that are chopped up clump together, both inside the cells and outside of them, acting like a magnet for attracting all manner of cellular rubbish.

Some people can be born with genetic defects in the tau protein, or the chemicals that chop up the amyloid protein, and unfortunately this means that as they get older they are very likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease. These people have Familial Alzheimer’s and may be affected in their 40s.

Other people, because of a variety of different reasons, may acquire damage to these proteins as they age, and develop Alzheimer’s in their 70s.

Why it is that you find clumps of the amyloid and bundles of the twisted tau protein in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s is unclear. Currently to treat the disease, many drug companies are focused on either cleaning them out of the brain when they are formed, stopping them forming, or helping the remaining cells work better. But what we do know is that smoking, having a fat filled diet, not taking exercise and not being socially active and severe stress are all the biggest risk factors for the disease.

Use it or lose it

So if you want to avoid Alzheimer’s disease you better “Use it or lose it” as the MacArthur study of the behavioral characteristics of 1,200 cognitively fine old people advises people. The study found that the most mentally alert people were the most physically and mentally active, who regularly went to the library, played bridge or had hobbies.

Keeping active isn’t just important for keeping our brains healthy. Even mice kept in cages with more toys and activities have five times the number of brain cells than those kept in empty cages. And mice that have more exercise have increased growth factors in the brain compared to those who slouch around their cages.

In fact, assuming you keep yourself healthy, old age psychiatrists see no reason why older people can’t be as creative artistic and active if not more so than younger people. One such advocate is an American G D Cohen, who has said that, “Although we have more brain cells at 2 years of age than we do at 22, you would not want your 2-year old to do your taxes.”

Short term memory and déjà vu

If, after reaching the end of this chapter you decide to flick back a few pages, you may remember bits of some paragraphs. Sometimes, this vague familiarity strikes us even though we find ourselves presented in a completely new environment. A moment of déjà vu.

This false memory, déjà vu, is thought to result from a sudden collision between our objective and subjective evaluations of familiarity. We think that the present is new but also we feel that we have lived it before. This experience is thought to be just due to a simple neuronal misfire, like a muscle twitch, an intellectual hiccup.

Epileptics often suffer random neuronal firing, and some experience déjà vu during their preseizure period. These patients usually have a seizure focus in the hippocampus or amygdala of the temporal lobes. This part of the brain, as you know, is responsible for handling our assessment of familiar objects faces and places. If a random electrical discharge occurred in this area, it is possible that we would experience an overwhelming sensation of familiarity at that exact second, with our surroundings, without it necessarily being true.

So why do we remember things?

Trying to explain how our memories work is like attempting to throw a net around the stars at night time, and then explain how the Universe was formed from what you have caught.

We know now that healthy neurons, neurotransmitters and an electrical spark are needed to activate our minds.

We are tangibly close to understanding on a microscopic level, the tiny changes that happen in our brain when memories are made and recalled. But what our memories are made of, why it is that some experiences are vivid and stay with us for our entire lives is entirely subjective, down to what you have experienced in life, and what you choose to remember. This subjectivity; a combination of experience and taste, is governed by our personality. And what it is that makes us have different personalities, from our dendrites to desires, our atoms to our attractions, our impulses to our individuality will be the focus of the next chapter.

Veronica Miller has a doctorate in neurobiology from Newcastle University, a Masters in Science Communication from DCU and a degree in Biochemistry from TCD. Previously she worked on “Scope” a popular science TV series for teenagers. Currently Veronica is working in the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health laboratories, researching how environmental toxins contribute to risk of disease from womb to tomb, with a focus on autism, Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

Collect the series as Veronica Miller continues to go deeper into our amazing brain.

In our next issue — what’s makes our personality?

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 19

SPIN ACTIVE WASTING WATER Tom Kennedy reports that continuing to pump water around to big treatment plants is simply perpetuating an expensive cycle of waste.

P

aul O’Callaghan, founding CEO of the O2 Environmental Technology Group, maintains that the management of water in Ireland leaves a lot to be desired. Speaking at an ocean technology meeting held earlier this year at the Marine Institute, he said that the water industry is both innefficient and wasteful. “We have a use once approach to water,” he said, and this is because there is actually no plan. Our water systems, he said, were never designed with efficiency in mind, and in fact they were never really designed at all.

Paul, who has become an expert in assessing emerging technologies, pointed out that it is really remarkable that we dump all kinds of detergents, nutrients and personal care products into out water before conveying it at great expense to a centralised treatment plant. At these facilities, he said, we then go to further trouble and expense to take all these products out again.

If this is not bad enough, about 30 per cent of the water is lost before it reaches its intended destination and keeping the waste on the move uses a lot of energy.

“At present,” he said, “in a city such as Dublin, half of the local authority energy bill is related to water services, just moving it from point A to B, and then getting rid of it.”

Paul’s contention is that we have simply expanded on systems inherited from the Victorian era. Conditions then, he said, bear little resemblance to the conditions we see now, and instead of tinkering around with bits here and bits there, we need to look at water management in its entirety, and by doing so we can come up with a smarter alternative.

For example. he said, instead of using energy to pump the waste water around, we should be looking at using at how micribial digestion could be used to generate power.

NUI Galway, he said, has conducted a lot of research in this area, and that knowledge could become part of an integrated approach to water management.

A similar approach, he said, could be applied to nutrient recovery. Valuable resources are being being flushed away and end up adding to to strain at centralised treatment plants. Revovery of phosphorous, said Paul, is one such possibility. Phosphorous is needed in agriculture, and at present, Europe is an importer of this essential resource.

In Victorian times, the options would have been more limited, but as Paul pointed out, technology has moved on, so intelligent integration of water systems is a lot easier to achieve. A number of companies in Ireland are now involved in the development of sensors and automated systems, and Paul commented that is is surprising to see just how much research is going on in the institutes and universities. To benefit from this research, he said, it is necessary to set up more demonstration pilots, such as the treatment plant currently installed in Tuam. The expertise is there as is the demand, and “funding for demonstration projects,” he said, “would help pull technology out of the universities.”

Water is being wasted, and so is money. Paul said that of the €4.5 million a year being spent on water in Ireland, most is going into compliance with EC directives. This is, in effect, just a knee-jerk response, and it’s a bad investment because it is not really solving our problems.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 20 SPIN ACTIVE

SPIN ACTIVE Medical devices Merit Medical, a US company with a plant in Galway, is to expand. Since 1997 the Galway plant has been making guidewires and inflation devices for medical use, and the plan is to enter the european ‘surgical prepack’ business. the company already employs 250 in Galway, and the latest development is expected to result in about 100 new positions.

Apart from plants in the US, the company also has facilities at Maastricht and Venlo in the Netherlands.

High potential StArt-Up companies with the potential for rapid growth qualify for special support from enterprise ireland. these are the high-potential start-ups, HpSUs, and currently enterprise ireland is spending €22m in backing 73 winners. in August it was announced that €55m extra is being made available bringing the total funding, over a five year period, from 2011 to 2016, up to €187m. the plan is to increase the number of HpSUs up to 100 by 2016.

HpSUs can come from any sector, but to qualify for this status companies have to show that they have the capacity to generate over €1m in annual sales within three years.

Young Innovators rebeccA Kummert and Sile Stafford, students at Sutton park school in Dublin, came up with a real winner in developing a low cost physiotherapy vest. Apart from winning a string of awards, starting off with a first in Senior biology from the bt Young Scientist and technologist exhibition, the vest, which looks like an ordinary life-jacket, could make treatment of cystic fibrosis more effective and a lot cheaper. As the students explained, they collaborated with doctors to design a vest that delivers lung clearing vibrations. Such a vest already exists, they said, but, at $1500

Pictured at the launch of the Lucerna Report on Capability and Competiveness at NUI Galway from left: Professor Michael Best, University of Cambridge and University of Massachusetts; Frank Ryan, CEO of Enterprise Ireland; and Dr Paul Ryan, Principal Investigator, NUI Galway. Photo: Aengus McMahon.

Industry study AN industry database has been produced by NUi Galway. the database is the result of three years work at the centre for innovation and Structural change at NUi Galway, provides product-related information on irish industry. According to the authors, the database represents a systematic approach on identifying key industrial clusters, and it helps to highlight emerging technologies and technology management capabilities.

With support from the Marie curie transfer of Knowledge programme, NUi Galway has been collaborating with with the University of Massachusetts and the database is one of the outcomes. the Lucerna database apart from giving details of firms and the products they make, shows how many companies straddle sectors.

it is very expensive and much too bulky. rebecca and Sile decided to see if they could develop a better alternative, and in doing so they not only cut the cost down to about €100, but they brought down the bulk. For people unfortunate to have cystic fibrosis, keeping the lungs clear is of critical importance, and, although the incidence in ireland is higher than elsewhere, hospital facilities to deal with this condition have been criticised as completely inadeqate. the vest, which could come as a great relief to people with cF, said rebecca and Sile, is unobtrusive and

could easily be put on during breaks at school or work. Hopefully, that vest will soon go into production, but at the YS exhibition, the students said that this cannot happen until someone conducts clinical trials.

Other students at Sutton park, Adam Keilthy and conor Scully have also been active in developing technology that can help people overcome problems. colour blindness is quite common, and to make it easier for computer users, the students won last year’s Golden Spider Award for developing a browser that selectively increases the contrast between reds and greens.

http://www.btyoungscientist.ie/media/video.php?file_id=8 http://www.suttonparkschool.com/suttonparkschool/Main/PR_SS_AC_SC_BigBangScience_2010.htm SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 21 SPIN ACTIVE

LIVE LINK

SPIN ACTIVE Solar power

Monika Pyzalska at the Institute of Physical Chemistry with the microflow device.

Micro-lab PERFORMING single reactions using normal lab equipment and chemicals might not pose much of a problem, but on a larger scale the cost and time spent on testing thousands of samples could be prohibitive. For years, scientists have thought of solving that problem by bringing everything down in scale, and at the Polish Academy of Science Institute of Physical Chemistry, researchers have succeeded in creating a lab the size of a credit card.

With many tests, reaction is important, not the volume, so in the micro-system, tiny drops of soutions are allowed react under strict control. According to Dr Piotr Garstecki, who headed the project, the drops move along tiny channels, and to avoid the expense and bulk of including microvalves on the card, drop volumes are determined by computer controlled valves placed outside the device.

Dr Garstecki said the card device, which has been used already in testing the effectiveness of antibiotics, cuts costs and is much faster than current microtitre plate procedures. Tens of thousands of experiments, he said, can be conducted in a day.

The savings, he added, can be considerable. Maintaining the apparatus accounts for most of the cost in running robotically controlled microtitre tests, and as thousands of compounds may have to be tested in a typical drug development project, these costs can mount up into the €millions.

In one example, the researchers at the Polish Academy ran tests involving the merging of two antibiotics, ahloramphenicol, and tetracyline. The relative volumes were changed, and the impact of different ratios on bacteria observed. All of this was automated, and the results allowed the researchers to determine what mix would be more, or less effective.

With the development of microflow techniques, the volume of drops is likely to be reduced down to nanolitre or even pictolitre levels, and according to the Polish researchers, microflow systems are likely to change the nature of modern chemistry just as dramatically as integrated circuits changed electronics in the 1970s.

Constraint AS Prof Gene Freuder, director of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre at UCC recently remarked, anyone who solves in the popular sudoku puzzles knows what constraints are all about. Constraint computing is widely used to solve complex problems, and Prof Freuder said readers of Science Spin with an interest in the subject should have a look at Helmut Simonis’s blog where a number of practical real-life examples are given, ranging from design of a fighter jet to provision of services to passsengers on high speed trains in France. http://hsimonis.wordpress.com/ LIVE LINK

CARS will be able to top up with power from the Sun using technology developed by a group of researchers involved in the SMARTOP project.

With EC support, researchers from TCD, UCD and Imperial College in the UK have been working in collaboration with industry partners to develop solar panels that can be incorporated into automobile roofs. The Irish energy technology company, SolarPrint has been playing a leading role in commercialising the development, and in June a partnership deal signed with the Italian car maker, Fiat.

Chief Executive of SolarPrint, Dr Mazhar Bari, said that the smart roof technology will have a huge impact on the auto industry. Vito Lambertini from the Centro Richerche Fiat, said that incorporation of the solar panels is expected to result in a significant reduction in fuel consumption.

The technology involves using flexible dye-sensitised solar cells, and according to SolarPrint, these are produced from low cost raw materials. This makes the flexible cells cheap to produce, and incorporation into cars is just one of the possible applications. The Sandyford based company expects the solar cells to go into a whole range of consumer electronics devices. www.solarprint.ie LIVE LINK

Hip implants MORE than 3,000 hip implants are caried out every year in Ireland, and one of the problems has been limited life. Many people are now living long enough to need a replacement.

As a result of research at the National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science at NUI Galway, implants can last longer, and materials allow for better in-growth of bone. Having completed a proof of concept project, Drs Pat McDonnell and Noel Harrison, working with orthopaedic consultant surgeon, Bill Curtain, have received support worth €400,000 from Enterprise Ireland to commercialise the results.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 22 SPIN ACTIVE

Callan Institute lose – NUIcontrol Maynooth Will scientists of their data?

C

omputer and communications technologies have become pervasive and ubiquitous elements of our modern lives, whether it be the mobile phones we use to talk or download music, social networks such as Facebook, or the more hidden technologies that manage our roads, electricity and water networks. In the future, the world will be increasingly intelligent and connected, with smart meters in our homes, internetconnected machines ranging from Coca-Cola machines to our cars and even to our clothes. The purpose of the Callan Institute is to focus on exploring the new technologies and services that are possible for the person in this future always-on society.

The Institute is named after Nicholas Callan (1799-1864), a pre-eminent scientist in Maynooth who developed many of the electrical devices that have laid the foundations for today’s high technology. Rev. Callan has been recently recognized by the IEEE as a pioneering contributor to the development of electrical science and technology. Rev. Callan was famed for the generation of electromagnets, spark generation (up to 600kV), the induction coil and affordable batteries.

This led to one of the earliest examples of commercialisation of research from an Irish university in the widely admired “Maynooth Battery”. He remains an example of the value of curiosity-inspired research and innovation.

NUI Maynooth has recently announced The Callan Institute builds on the success the formation of the Callan Institute of the Institute for Microelectronics and for applied research in the application Wireless Systems which has over the of computer and communications past 5 years developed a reputation technology. Comprising of over for high-quality, and novel, research, 40 researchers, the Callan Institute along with a highly successful model for brings together expertise in wireless engagement with industry in Ireland and communications, data mining and abroad. Through the support of Science knowledge extraction, image and Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, video signal processing, cognition and the Institute for Microelectronics and intelligent systems. The Institute continues Wireless Systems has developed world to enhance its expertise in these individual class facilities to support research in all Rev Nicholas Callan (1799 — 1864) areas but has an initial focii on exploring areas of wireless communications and the convergence of these technologies for personalised services, sensing. Institute members are already playing leading roles in particularly within the urban environment. many major national research projects, including the SFI Centre for Telecommunications Research (CTVR), the SFI Strategic Cluster There is growing interest in the idea of “smart cities” as a way of on Advanced Geotechnologies, the EI/IDA Microelectronics maintaining a more sustainable lifestyle without impinging on Competence Centre, the Innovation Value Institute, the quality or the services available. This has been highlighted with Competence Centre for Advanced Manufacturing (ICMR), recent initiatives by Dublin City, the EU announcement of calls SmartBay, the Innovation Value Institute, e-inclusion in society, the for the “Future Internet”, and with the announcement of the new lead on an EU FP7 project on 3D and 4D Holography Systems, and IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre. However, in this vision of many other initiatives. a world where there is a cloud of pertinent knowledge available upon demand, there is a requirement for all the different aspects Innovation, and the realisation of research results, is a fundamental of your environment to be sensed, for that information to be principle for the Institute. This is exercised through engagement communicated back, processed, assessed and integrated into with companies, local and international, to identify pertinent some form of intelligent system to provide pertinent knowledge research questions and to provide access to the knowledge and to the mobile user. The concept is hugely appealing as it provides expertise of our researchers and facilities. We are currently working benefits to both the citizen and the regional resource managers with multinationals such as Intel, NXP, and Alcatel Lucent, as well as (traffic, energy, water). many ongoing projects with large and small Irish companies. Our experience has shown that blending basic research and use-driven However there are fundamental problems with this vision that projects provides novel research outputs with direct relevance require significant research: how do we communicate with to real-world problems - particularly when realised in hardware millions if not billions of sensors? No suitable wireless technology or software prototypes . Institute researchers already have a track exists today, nor do we plan to dig up all the roads; how do you record in developing new spin-out companies and licensing process the huge streams of video, audio and other sensed data; technologies. Two notable examples include Socowave (wireless how do you manage the privacy and security issues; how to communications) and ExamSupport (online e-learning). The Callan report to the user timely information upon demand? All these Institute has engaged with over 30 companies in the past two questions require researchers from many different areas and years. We understand the needs of companies and welcome all within Callan, this is just one of several areas in which we will be new engagements. encourage cross-domain research.

For more details: LIVE http://research.nuim.ie/ LINK

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 23

SPIN ACTIVE

Photographs from the IRCSET event at Dublin Castle: Neil Warner

FIT TO WORK

Employers in business and industry are keen to take on post-graduate researchers and as Tom Kennedy reports whether they come from the humanities or the sciences is not the big issue.

At an event organised earlier this year by the research support organisations, IRCSET and IRCHSS, early career researchers heard how many employers are more concerned with transferable generic skills, such as ability to manage, than on specialised knowledge.

Action man

IN Longford there is a pharmaceutical plant producing 27 products and carrying out 270 million tests every year.

The company, Abbott, has recently been given the green light to expand R&D activities, and as Mark Ryan, Technical Support Manager, said, the company expects to ramp up collaboration with the universities.

Some change from 2004, when Mark began working for Abbott. He arrived in Longford to find a caravan on a greenfield site. His job involved the creation of a high specification high technology manufacturing plant from scratch. It was the sort of challenge that appealed to Mark who had begun his career with a degree in pharmacology from UCD in 1993.

For his PhD he choose immunology, and while working on the development of a safer whooping cough vaccine, he saw how important it was for research to end up with a real product. At that stage, he said,“I had no master plan,” but one of the choices he made had a significant impact on his career. He was thinking of heading to the University of Edinburgh, where he knew there was a great team and a very good mentor, but then he decided to try for Harvard. As he admitted, he knew very little about Harvard, but he sensed that even if things did not work out, the name woud still look good on his CV.

As he found, things did work out, better than he had expected. The quality of research was extremely high as was the desire to profit from results. From Harvard he went over to Bringham and Women’s Hospital where researchers were harvesting a glycolipid from a marine sponge. “Although it was academic,” said Mark, “everybody was looking for something they could commercialise.”

Mark found that he had much more interest in applying the results than spending months on research in the lab, so he decided to move on into industry, and this is when he discovered how right his choice of name had been. The company he came back to, was a spin off from UCD, and they were trying to attract venture capital. “I only had to mention Harvard, and I had the job”, said Mark.

Even if he had only been sweeping the floors, or serving coffee in the canteen, the fact that he could be wheeled out as the company’s scientist from Harvard was enough to grab the attention of potential investors. It was a busy time, and Mark recalled one weekend with visits to three cities in Canada, followed by meetings in San Diego, and then on to Paris.

That whirlwind tour of investors paid off, and the company then diversified, one part going into batteries and

SPIN ACTIVE smart printing, and the other becoming Sigmoid, the pharmaceutical company that won The Irish Times business award.

Working in a start up, said Mark, gave him a lot of valuable experience. “The company began small, so you got to do a lot of different things,” he said.

From Sigmoid he went on to another spin out involved in manufacturing biopharmaceuticals, and two years later he was with Abbott looking at the caravan in Longford.

Once more he was in at the start of something big, and as he remarked, this was a once off opportunity to apply all his talents. If he were to join Abbott today, he said, this might not be the case. His concern would be that he would be boxed in to a well defined job.

Abbott in Longford, with about 400 employees, has 70 scientists, 70 per cent of which are PhDs. One of Mark’s responsibilities at Longford was to recruit the scientists, and he insisted on taking on PhDs. As he explained, only those who had been through that process would have the ability to think logically, be able to solve problems, and work

independently without the need for constant supervision.

Those PhDs, he said, came from a wide variety of disciplines, but subject was not an issue. When interviewing PhDs Mark does not ask about the research. Instead he asks how they have solved problems in the lab.

Not that Mark would like to have a staff totally made up of scientists. It is important, he said, to have a mix.“It’s a disaster to have too many scientists in the same room,” he remarked.

“Nothing gets done because they start going into the detail.”

Mark takes his responsibilities seriously. The products made in Longford, he said, are of vital importance to people around the world. For many of these life saving drugs the Longford plant is the only manufacturing plant, and as he remarked, “If a product does not work we have blood on our hands.”

Would Mark ever want to go back to academic research?

The answer is a firm ‘no’, the satisfaction of getting things done is far more attractive than the long wait for results.

“Am I being challenged intellectually?” Again, no hesitation, “Yes, every day.”

Human interface

Working with people has convinced Simon that most industries are so obsessed with technology that they fail to understand that business is all about applications. If industry only takes on scientists, he argues, they will lose all the creativity that the humanities bring. To bring home his point, Simon pointed out that all the big decisions in business and government rely on the humanities, and for industry he posed the question: ‘What is more important, new technology, or a new application?’

Simon said this kind of issue is of great importance if we are serious about developing a ‘knowledge economy’. Ireland is a small country, he said, so how can we ever hope to compete with China in the number of science and technology PhDs we produce? Clearly we can’t, but where we can succeed, he concluded, is on what we do with that technology.

Simon said that that communication between the humanities and the sciences has to be improved, and one way for people in the humanities to engage with industry would be to take up interships. However, this should not involve some menial job that anybody can do, but it should be an opportunity to apply humanity skills. In the humanity science divide, internships could be used more extensively to gain and give experience, he said. On that point, Simon remarked that in preparing material for an interdisciplinary web site, no one seemed to be thinking in terms of communications, and this involves humanity skills that many scientists lack. What he got from the experts, he said “was utterly unintelligable — who did they think they were talking to?”

WHEN Simon Roberts began studying anthropology he had no game plan, and the only thing he was reasonably sure of was that he did not want to become an academic.

He followed his interest in how people behave to India, and because he wanted to continue in this field he applied for a grant. His application was successful, but then he was reminded that taking up the grant meant doing a PhD. As he remarked, that was fair enough, it was progress, and it meant that he could stay away to study the impact of the satellite television revolution on Indian viewers.

While having a PhD in anthropology was good, Simon did not want to follow the footsteps of his colleagues in, as he put it, “perpetuating their profession’, and his real interest lay in making practical use of his knowledge. For a while he wondered if he should just forget about everything he had learned and do something else, but he knew from some examples, such as the high profile Xerox Park, where people from the humanities worked with scientists on the human-machine interface, that there could be a practical role for anthropology in business and industry.

That sort of approach appealed to him, so after first joining a dot.com company, he decided to strike out on his own as a consultant. His clients included a number of companies, including Price Waterhouse Coopers, and as he explained, he had found his niche providing a service that industry needs and is prepared to pay for.

The machine-human interface is of enormous interest to the computer industry, and with a growing reputation as an expert in this field, Simon was offered a job with Intel in Kildare.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 25 SPIN ACTIVE

Will scientists lose control of their data?

WIND and

WAVE Tom Kennedy reports that Ireland’s wind and waves may turn out to be more valuable than gas and oil. ow much oil and gas can be displaced by wind power? At present four per cent of Europe’s electricity comes from wind, and according to experts in this field, we can expect that percentage to rise. In Denmark, where wind generates 20 per cent of electrical power, the plan is to ramp this up to 50 per cent by 2025.

Wind energy was a hot topic at the recent ESOF event in Turin, where much of the debate focused on Ireland as a potentially big player in meeting European demands. In a session chaired by Ireland’s Science Adviser, Prof Patrick Cunningham, Paul Dowling, chief executive of the energy company, SSE Renewables, observed that while overall energy consumption has gone down, electricity as a proportion of what we use has actually increased. In Europe, “electricity is roughly 125 per cent of what it was 25 years ago,” he said, and that creates a better opportunity to displace oil with wind. Gas, he remarked is still the big winner, but wind is not far behind.

“If you are working in energy,” he emphasised, “you have to look at wind.” His prediction is that over the coming ten years, 60 per cent of all new power plants will be based on wind. One third of the installed

H

capacity in the UK, he said, could be replaced by areas currently designated for wind generation.

For wind to take off, he said, there has to be more trading in power. At present, he explained, there are too many stand alone systems, and what Europe needs is a single market for electricity.

Aidan Corcoran, from Eirgrid, said that Ireland’s grid is being upgraded to meet these new demands, and the aim is to become part of an enormous European network. There is an interconnector between Ireland and Scotland, an interconnector to Wales is on the way, and Eirgrid is considering an interconnector to France. “We are also studying the possibility of offshore grids,” said Aidan. There is some debate on whether to use DC or AC, and how the public will react to higher voltage lines. “In Ireland,” said Aidan, we have about 450 km of 400 kV lines, but in Europe, where this is the standard voltage, there are over 100,000 km. To catch up with Europe, more 400 kV lines will have to be installed.

The need to accommodate renewables, such as wind, is a driving force behind this upgrading. The target of 15 per cent from renewables by 2010 will be met, and Aidan said Ireland is on course to achieve 40 per cent by 2020. A study published just weeks ago by Eirgrid, confirms that wind generation from existing sites in Ireland is efficient, so technically there is nothing to stop expansion other than access to a suitable grid.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 26

One of the plans to take advantage of better grid access to the grid comes from the Spirit of Ireland group. A number of engineers and others with a professional interest in energy volunteered to collaborate on launching this ambitious plan to combine wind power with pumped storage for generation of electricity.

In pumped storage, off-peak power is used to fill a reservoir above a hydro generating station which can then supply electricity to meet peak demands. Although there is only one example of pumped storage in Ireland, at Turlough in Co Wicklow, the technology is well established, and as Prof Igor Shvets from the School of Physics at TCD explained, this approach is ideal for wind. One of the big problems with wind is that generation of power varies, and for this reason wind farms cannot operate without the backing of large power plants to provide the base load. If power is used to drive pumps, these fluctuations cease to be an issue, and the reservoir can produce a steady flow of electricity on demand.

Normally a pumped power plant has a lake above and a lake below, as at Turlough. However, while this approach works well, in Ireland there is an opportunity to go one step further by using the sea instead of a second lake. As Igor points out, the western coast of Ireland, with its strong winds and deep inlets is ideal for this approach. Apart from eliminating the need to construct a second lake, the hydro power station would be above ground, and this alone would be a big saving.

Although this claim has been disputed on environmental grounds, the use of seawater, said Igor, does not

represent any technical problems, and even on a big enough scale to generate a massive 90 GW, the group maintain that the area of land required for the lakes would not exceed two square km.

By happy coincidence, many glacial valleys in the west run down to the sea, making it relatively easy to build a rock filled dam to hold back a seawater filled lake.

Although the efficiency would be high and the costs relatively low compared to a more conventional pumped storage system, the investment required to make this a

ind and waves are attracting some of big power generation giants, such as Vattenfall from Sweden to our exposed western coasts.

Vattenfall is already the fifth largest producer of electricity in Europe, and by harvesting energy from waves and wind, the state controlled company aims to double its capacity by 2030.

The company has been taking an active interest in Ireland and Scotland, both of which offer huge returns from wind and wave energy. Speaking at a ocean technology conference at the Marine Institute in Galway earlier this year, Ulf Tisell from Vattenfall, explained that the company is now directly involved with wave energy pioneers, Wavebob in Ireland, and Pelamis in Scotland, and is preparing to go into business on a grand scale.

Instead of a slow build up, Vattenfall’s strategy with wave energy is to go from small to big within a short time. An investment of up to €20 billion will be required to realise ambitious plans to generate and export 30 TWh of electricity to power hungry England and France. According to Ulf, the company which currently earns a profit of €3m on a turnover of €18m, is not going to depend on state subsidies to achieve this aim, but will raise the necessary finance on the commercial market. As far as the company is concerned, this is a good business proposition, so it will produce a healthy return.

The company also accepts that the technology involved in wave energy is almost ready to go into action on a much bigger scale. Although wave energy field trials are to continue over the next three years, said Ulf, this is just a learning exercise. Having ironed out any engineering or design

reality is high. “The aim is to build big,” said Igor, “90 GW, and that’s what’s required to make it viable.”

This is ten times larger than Europe’s biggest existing hydro storage system at Snowdonia in northwest Wales. The first stage of the project is expected to cost about €3.5 billion, but do it right, said Igor, and it becomes a money making machine.

Undoubtedly, many people, disenchanted by being forced to pay out ten times this amount to prop up a toxic bank, could prefer to support an idealistic project such as this, and

it is remarkable that so many experts offered to give Spirit of Ireland their services for free. Since the project started just over a year and a half ago, said Igor, 150,000 have registered their interest and 5,000 have offered to help. “We didn’t get any government subsidies to develop the project,” he added.

The Spirit of Ireland site is at LIVE LINK www.spiritofireland.org Debates on the merits of the project at

www.sliabh.net

W

A Pelamis wave energy device off the Portugese coast. problems, the generating devices are to go into full production. These mass produced devices, said Ulf, will be a lot cheaper and more efficient than the experimental pilots, so costs per unit of power produced will drop sharply.

By 2019 the plan is to be fully commercial, and one of the immediate benefits will be a massive boost to industries that were left stranded by the decline in shipbuilding. Those engineering skills are likely to get a new lease of life. Thousands of units will be required, and as Ulf explained, in a full scale wave farm, up to 1,000 generators will be anchored around central power collection points.

Four or five kilometres offshore, the farms are unlikely to be obtrusive, but as Ulf pointed out, there will be lots of swinging cables, and there will be a need to assess the environmental impact before full scale developments begin. The company, said Ulf, takes pride in being green, and indeed this is behind the move towards wind and wave energy. Even so, he added, the company does not want to assume

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 27

the right to give the all clear because this would not be accepted as an independent assessment by the public.

At the same time, it is important to know what the impact on the environment is likely to be in advance of development, so the company is commissioning independent studies by university researchers. In one of these studies the influence of electrical fields on eels is being investigated, and in another study, environmentally neutral alternatives to lubricating oils are being looked at. “A problem of not knowing what the impacts are likely to be,” said Ulf, “leaves developers open to questioning. Anybody can start raising objections, and dealing with these at the planning stage could be quite difficult.” The ultimate aim, said Ulf, is to be a good neighbour within the community.

Part of being a good neighbour involves a entering a web of agreements, and Ulf remarked that long term security is likely to be a deciding factor in siting of large offshore wind and wave farms.

Have you heard that Science Spin has gone digital?

WOW! So now I can read it on my computer?

Yep...

YTIME, N A , E IM T Y AN ANYWHERE to do is All you need nce Spin go on the Scie website pin.com IN REAL PRINT AT YOUR LOCAL www.sciences and register.

NEWSAGENT FOR JUST €3 A COPY. On subscription for just €18 for six a year

and ....

A DIGITAL PAGE TURNER FOR FREE! SCIENCE SPIN is the only magazine giving extensive coverage to all aspects of science from an Irish perspective. SCIENCE SPIN is a magazine for everyone, not just scientists, and now that all our content is available 24/7 on the web, readers from Balbriggan to Beijing can see what’s going on right now in Irish science.

Visit www.sciencespin.com and register for your digital alerts now.

LIVE LINK

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 28

Exploring the depths of Fermanagh By tradition, the little folk lived within hillsides, and even if there are no leprechauns, Ireland’s extensive underground is no myth. Tom Kennedy reports from the depths of Fermanagh.

ow high can a building be before the stone it is made of begins to crumble under its own weight?

In their book, Caves and limestone scenery of the North of Ireland, Pamela and Tim Fogg provide the answer.

Blocks of limestone would have to be piled up to 4,000 metres before the bottom would start to crumble, so, as long as the walls remain vertical, all our railway stations, churches and town halls are safe. Safe that is for the present, and certainly not for all time. An acidic city atmosphere will

H

rapidly erode the hardest surface, and even in Fermanagh’s clean and open countryside, the limestone surface is being lowered on average about 50 mm every 1,000 years.

In spite of being a hard rock, limestone, over half of which consists of calcium carbonate, is readily dissolved by acid, and even rainwater

The Marble Arch centre is tucked unobtrusively into the landscape.

is acidic enough to start etching away at the surface. As it falls through the atmosphere, rainwater picks up carbon dioxide, and on the ground, vegetation, instead of protecting the rocks below, adds to the acidity.

Every crack and crevice becomes a line of attack, and over time an apparently solid landscape becomes as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese.

Streams disappear down sink holes, lakes go dry, and rivers meander through dark caverns only to emerge far from their origins. Most people think of the Shannon as rising in County Cavan, but in fact it begins in Fermanagh. Studies have shown Above, old and new, models of how cave explorers looked like then and now.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page xx

The pathway down to the cave entrance.

Common features of the cave system, diagram from Fogg’s Beneath our feet, caves and limestone scenery of the North of Ireland. that the Shannon Pot is fed by water originating on the slopes of Cuilcagh Mountain, and as some of this water has been shown to be thousands of years old, it is thought that it must have been flushed out from a deep drowned cave system.

No one knows how extensive these cave systems are, but the Fermanagh landscape provides a number of clues as to what goes on below. The absence of rivers on the surface and

dry grassy hollows, show how the land is collapsing in on itself as it is being undermined. Those hollows, known as dolines, are common enough in Fermanagh for the Gaelic ‘lag’, for hollow, to be part of many placenames, such as Lag an Chapaill, the hollow of the horse.

Sometimes there are openings where cavers can clamber in to explore these subterranean passageways, but until the late 19th century very few,

A mound of carbonate known as the Porridge Pot.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page xx

if any, dared to enter the dark and dangerous underworld. The Marble Arch, where the Claddagh River gushes out from below, has always been a natural curiosity, but the first known recording of interest in the caves was in 1796, when Jacques Louis De Latocnaye, described how he had been led underground by local guides, suggesting that he was not the first visitor. Having fled from the revolution in France, De Latocnaye spent some

SPIN

In his original account, Martel wrote that the cave would be good for education, and today, school tours are popular. RIGHT TOP: Scallop marks made by swirling water.

LIMEsTONE is composed of at least fifty per cent calcium carbonate, CaCO3.

Rainwater picks up carbon dioxide, CO2, to form dilute carbonic acid, H2CO3.

The acid acts on the rock to form calcium bicarbonate, Ca(HCO3)2 which is soluble.

In the caves, carbon dioxide is released, reversing the reaction, and calcium carbonate comes out of solution. This reaction is familiar to anyone who has to boil hard water, but instead of stalactites, the kettle becomes coated with lime scale. time rambling through Ireland, and in 1796 his account, Promenade dans l’Irlande, was published in Dublin.

Just two years before the rebellion in 1798 was not the best time to encourage visitors to go exploring Ireland’s countryside, and so we hear nothing more about the caves until, almost a century later, another Frenchman, Eduoard Martel, arrived with his collapsible canvas boat and measuring instruments. At the time the land was owned by the Earl of Enniskillen, and he invited Martel, who had gained an international fame as a pioneer of caving, to explore the underground passages leading into Marble Arch.

Martel arrived in 1895 with Lyster Jameson, a naturalist from Dublin. After entering the caves, Martel, with just candles to light his way, paddled upstream until a deep water filled sump blocked the passage.

The caves were obviously extensive, and as word spread, other cavers came, notably the Yorkshire Ramblers who made

several visits up to 1935. By this time, candles attached to felt hats, had been replaced by much more powerful carbide lamps, and with Students come to explore the Fermanagh landscape both below and above.

better illumination the Ramblers found a passageway above the sump, now known as “The Flyover.”

As exploration continued, cavers were able to progress into what was revealed to be an enormous underground system in which three streams converged to form the Claddagh River.

Interest among cavers was high, and in the 1970s it occurred to people, such as John Crichton in the Fermanagh District Council that the caves could, as Martel suggested, become a tourist attraction. At the time, explained Richard Watson, who now manages the highly successful Marble Arch geopark, most people would have dismissed the idea that the caves had anything other than scientific value. Cross-border troubles meant that few tourists ventured into the area, but John Crichton, who was responsible for tourism in the county took a more positive view. Backed by the council’s chief executive, Gerry Byrnes, who subsequently become Northern Ireland’s Ombusman, John Crichton embarked on an ambitious project to open the caves to the public.

As Richard Watson explained, such was the eventual success of this project that in 2001 Fermanagh’s Marble Arch became Ireland’s first European Geopark, and more than 70,000 visitors are attracted to the cave centre every year.

A keyhole shaped passage upstream of the show cave, showing how water found its way down to a lower level.

Richard, who grew up in Enniskillen, said that he is one of the many people who benefited greatly from this development, and it gave him an opportunity to return to his interest in geology. Although he had gone caving at school and had done an A level project on Marble Arch, Richard had embarked on a marketing career in Britain. When driving up and down the motorways began to lose its appeal, Richard decided to return with his growing family to Fermanagh, and as luck would have it, the Marble Arch project had reached such an advanced stage that there was a need to have a manager in place before the caves could be opened to the public.

Opening a cave to the public in 1985 was not just a matter of putting up a few guide rails or even building a reception centre. A lot of work had to be done in advance, said Richard, and even deciding on which stretch of cave to open up was difficult. The caves are known to have 20 or more kilometres of passageways. “Any one of five or six sections would have been suitable,” said Richard, and while Marble Arch was not the only or obvious choice, it had some practical advantages, such as big passageways and close proximity to a well established nature park, and, of course, Marble Arch was already a well known brand name.

Following a feasiblity study the civil engineers, Ferguson McIlveen from Belfast, got to work on making the cave more accessible and safe for visitors. Pathways were made, low level lighting installed, and some passageways raised or widened but only where absolutely necessary. At one stage, tour guide, Jane Dundas, after pointing out the stalactites and calcite flow formations, directs her torch up to the cave roof high above.

“At this place”, she said, “we are 55 metres below ground,” and moving the beam a little, we see two perfectly round holes. “One of the very few man made features of the caves,” and as she explained, the holes were made so that concrete could be pumped down to build the steps and pathways.

The pathways skirt the underground Claddagh, swirling and gurgling along just like a river above, and in places it widens into pools, so deep that the water is still and silent. One of these large pools, because the water level is high and the roof low, presented an apparently insurmountable barrier, but as Jane

explained, some creative engineering made it possible for visitors to continue along the ‘Moses Walk’. Two shoulder high walls, with a narrow passage between, allow visitors to have the strange experience of walking single file right through the water.

For those equipped to go on, such as the dedicated cavers who are prepared to scramble through tiny passageways, the journey into the depths can continue for much further, but as

Richard explained, the tour, taking one and a half hours is already quite long, and it has everything that a cave should have. Even so, the show cave, he said, is just a ten per cent section of the entire system, and no one really knows just how much space remains to be discovered below the undulating landscape of Fermanagh.

SPIN

Dyke barriers In their excellent book, Caves and limestone scenery of the North of Ireland, Pamela and Tim Fogg, explain that the Marble Arch caves lie within an extensive arc of Carboniferous limestone that extends from Sligo up into Fermanagh and Antrim.

The earlier limestone, laid down about 350 million years ago, has deposits of mud between layers of calcareous marine skeletons. This is the thinly bedded Glencar Limestone, and it lies below the much purer Dartry Limestone. The Dartry Limestone was laid down millions of years later, at a time when the tropical sea was deeper and there were lagoons within coral reefs. In turn, the Dartry Limestone was covered and sandstone and shales, and these rocks now remain as a protective cap on the summits of Cuilcagh and Bellintempo uplands.

Water from these uplands runs down into the Dartry Limestone, where it soon begins to disappear into ever widening cracks and sink holes. The slightly acidic water has been dissolving its way down ever since the rocks became dry land. As the water finds its way down, higher passageways can be left dry, and these are the caves that are easiest to explore.

In Fermanagh that process has continued until the water meets the lower Glencar limestone, which acts as a barrier. So, instead of going down, the water flows along the top of the less soluble stone until it finds a way out as a spring.

Marble Arch, where the Claddagh emerges, is such a spring. The flow of a cubic metre every two seconds, can become 10 times higher in times of flood, making this the largest spring in Ireland.

The Glencar limestone is not the only barrier, and higher up along the northern slopes of Cuilcagh there is a much harder obstacle. A long fault extends east west, and during the period of intense volcanic activity 60 million years ago that covered Antrim in basalt, molten rock forced its way up through this fault to form the extensive Cuilcagh Dyke. Because of this dyke, some of the underground water has been diverted, making it difficult to trace the source of distant springs such as the Shannon Pot.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 32

Geopark expansion

Conditions above have an impact on conditions below. The total volume of water running off into caves depends on rainfall, but removal of peat or changes due to farming, can have a big influence on how fast this happens.

Instead of flowing in at a steady rate, the caves can be flooded out by a sudden flush of water. In the mid 90s, said Richard, it was noticed that changes in a relatively small upland area, 50 to 60 ha in size, seemed to be having an adverse affect on the caves.

A flush of water, for example, could wash away glacial deposits that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years, so steps were taken to protect the catchment area. What began as a conservation exercise, said Richard, then became an extension of the geopark.

In 2007 large tracks of land in west Fermanagh, mostly owned by the Forestry Service, were included, and by extending its reach into the limestone Burren of County Cavan, Marble Arch became the world’s first cross-border geopark. As Richard explained, the unifying element is geology, and just like caves below, geology shapes the landscape above.

The area recognised by UNESCO as having great geological importance has been extended well beyond the Marble Arch caves, by definition the size of a geopark is limited. Not only has the area within a geopark got to have international geological significance, but it has to be managed according to quite strict rules. As it happens, said Richard, officially recognised geoparks have only existed since 2000, and Marble Arch had already been operating to these standards since the 1980s. “It was as if the rules had been made for us,” he remarked, and recognising the benefits that the recognition would bring, a bid for geopark status was made. “We were one of the first to be accepted,” he said.

At one stage the idea of expanding the geopark further was considered, but this proposal was abandoned in favour of promoting earth sciences and geo-tourism in a more general way.

Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh county councils are now collaborating on this approach, using Marble Arch as the major attraction.

While appealing to visitors in general, the Marble Arch geopark has an important role in education.

A geologist, Dr Kirstin Lemon,

One of the first sights to greet visitors is the two metre long stalactite.

Cracks and channels During the ice ages, caves were in a state of suspense, and when the caps retreated, glacial deposits would have sealed off entrances. It is possible that extensive cave systems remain to be discovered under other areas of Ireland’s drift covered limestone, but entrances are more obvious in places such as Fermanagh and Co Clare, where the rock is exposed.

As sea levels drop, caves go lower, and once water filled channels are left high and dry. In these passageways time almost seems to stand still, and immensely slow processes can continue undisturbed for thousands of years. Small depressions, known as scallop markings, are a common feature of these caves, and these have been made by the continuous swirling of water as it flowed by rock surfaces.

Quite often, the water in a completely filled passage, known as phreatic, wears its way down through a crack to drain into a channel lower down, resulting in a keyhole shape, round at the top and splayed out at the bottom.

In partly filled passageways, known as vadose, the water can pool over a sump or siphon, just like the U tube in a kitchen sink, and for cavers, this is one of the most difficult features to overcome, and frustrating because enormous caverns can lie beyond.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 33

working from cavan, is part of the team, and courses in geology are run in association with the Open University.

The UK field studies centre has facilities at Derrygonnelly, university students from as far apart as canada, Taiwan and england are among those coming for field studies in the area, and as Richard explained, they are not just coming for the caves. The geology in the northern part of Ireland, he said, is

Cave decorations

If caves are completely sealed off they can have fewer features.

The distinctive stalactites and stalagmites which everyone expects to see in a cave, are formed, not by streams, but by bicarbonate charged water, slowly percolating down from above. The slightly acidic water acts on the calcium, forming a soluble bicarbonate. as this water drips down from the roof, it gives off some of the carbon dioxide, and so an equivalent amount of bicarbonate returns to its original state as the insoluble carbonate.

Little by little, these deposits build up into a hanging stalactite.

The water that drips down from the stalactite is still quite highly saturated with bicarbonate, and where it falls, more carbon dioxide is released, and a stalagmite starts to form and grow up until eventually, given enough time, the top and bottom tips may merge into a column.

exceptionally varied. “It is one of the most geologically diverse regions in the world, and there are a lot of features within easy reach.”

The interest in these courses coupled to the fact that Northern Ireland has a world class geopark, makes many professional geologists wonder why geology was dropped as a subject at Queen’s University Belfast. at the same time, in the Irish Republic, some

prominent geologists have argued that students are not getting broad enough experience because university departments are small. More sharing of resources and course content has been suggested as a solution, and if this could happen, said Richard, geoparks, such as Marble arch, could play a significant role. However, a third level centre, he said, would have to be fronted by a major university.

one known as ‘the Thatched Roof’ in the Marble arch cave. The cushion, with its frilly edge, has been held in suspense ever since the fast flowing stream changed its course and washed away the sandbank that formed the base. all of these formations are extremely delicate, and as the guide, Jane Dundas, likes to remind visitors, it takes less than a second to snap off the end of a stalactite that took thousands of years to form. Preserving the Cave guide, Jane Dundas with a group of visitors. cave, while opening it up to the public, is a balancing act. Just how important These cave ‘decorations’, known it is to maintain this balance is shown collectively as speleothems, are not just by the potentially destructive impact confined to these more familiar shapes. of light. Guide lamps are dim, and some stalactites are hollow, like not just to maintain a dramatic cave straws, and there are strange looking atmosphere, for if lights were left on, horizontal forms, known as helictites, algae would start growing on the which are thought to have been shaped walls, and that kind of invasion would by constant, but almost imperceptible, completely alter the cave ecosystem. cave breezes. seeping water can cause curtains with lots of folds, to form, and a slow flow can create cushions, like

References

Beneath our feet, caves and limestone scenery of the North of Ireland Pamela and Tim fogg Published by the environment and Heritage Service, 2001.

www.marblearchcaves.net LIVE LINK

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page xx

MARBLE ARCH CAVES Will scientists lose control of their data?

Global Geopark Created over 300 million years this is one of Europe’s finest showcaves. Explore this unique network of caves with a fascinating natural underworld of rivers, waterfalls, winding passages and lofty chambers by boat and on foot

Open late March to September Last tour 4.30pm (July/August 5.00pm) Pre-booking is recommended

LIVE LINK

Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark Marlbank Scenic Loop, Florencecourt, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland Tel: +44(0) 28 6634 8855 Fax: +44(0) 28 6634 8928 Email: mac@fermanagh.gov.uk www.marblearchcavesgeopark.com

Calling all scientists!

Speaking Science One Day Workshop Communications training Just for you!

What is it? Speaking Science is an intensive one day communications training workshop for scientists and it aims to help you to tell your stories. If you need to explain what you are doing or if you need talk to the press, this is the course for you.

Who should attend? This course is aimed at staff scientists based in academia, public bodies or industry and 4th level students, MSc and PhD candidates who need to develop a wide range of career development skills. The ability to communicate clearly is one of the most important of these skills.

Who presents it? Seán Duke, Joint Editor, Science Spin magazine. Seán has fifteen years experience as a science writer and editor. He is also the creator and presenter of Ireland’s only weekly radio science slot on 103.2 Dublin City FM. Seán began the Speaking Science initiative in 2008 in response to the need for scientists to acquire better communication skills. Until now Speaking Science has only been available as an in-house course.

When is it on? Tuesday 21st September 2010. Book early as there is limited availability on each date.

Time: 9.00 am to 5.30 pm.

Venue: Terenure Enterprise Centre, Terenure, Dublin 6.

Cost: €195 per course.

ow Book n e for th r be Septem e cours

More information: To book a place simply email Alan Doherty at alan@sciencespin.com choosing either the June or September date.

LIVE LINK

l Speaking Science can also be held on your own premises for groups up to ten

Putting the SEA into the SESE Curriculum at the Irish National eal Map of Ireland” Launching the “R : Andrew Downes. oto Ph 0.

201 e enc Organisation confer

Teachers

Ireland has an enormous A marine territory and as John Joyce clansserxopoeriment in th Photo m at Galw e “Explor : Neil e a notes, this is a good reason for Warn y Atlanta rs” quaria er. . primary schools to focus more on the sea. can be used to illustrate the SESE curriculum and how a ith the Taoiseach’s announcement that Ireland is to be “seashore safari” can be safely carried out. developed as a technology hub on the one hand and the A great step forward was achieved this year with the vast natural resource of our 220 million acre marine resource inclusion of the “Real Map of Ireland” in the most recent on the other, it seems logical to suppose that one way to edition of the Phillips New Irish Primary Atlas for schools create a sustainable employment for future generations is to published by Folens. This map, showing the detailed seek ways of introducing marine science into our Primary underwater contours of the seabed within Ireland’s Exclusive Schools.

Economic Zone offers a treasure chest of examples for As yet there is no specific marine element to the Social the classroom in the teaching of Geography, Science and Environmental and Scientific Education (SESE) curriculum.

Mathematics.

But, by providing marine examples to illustrate the For example, when teaching the SESE Science Curriculum subjects that are already on the curriculum, such as history, module on ‘Forces’, why not explore the forces that allow geography, science and mathematics, by empowering a toy boat made of clay to float in a bowl of water, while a teachers to use those examples and by making the whole solid ball of clay sinks? And while we’re on the subject of process a great deal of fun, we can raise awareness of the sea floating and sinking, why not throw in a bit of Irish history in schools and reach the citizens who will study, manage, and talk about John Phillip Holland, the man from Clare develop and enjoy it long after we are gone. who developed the modern submarine or Thomas Andrews, Following the example set by such pioneers as the the Belfast ship builder who designed the Titanic? And what Sherkin Island Marine Station in Cork, Leo Hallissey in better place to teach the SESE Environment curriculum than Connemara and Brendan Smith in Galway and Clare, the the seashore where you can demonstrate how animals and Marine Institute joined forces with the Galway Atlantaquaria plants adapt from the cold darkness of being submerged in and other educational interests in the West in 2006 to place the sea to full exposure to the sun, wind and waves twice a saltwater fish tanks in a number of schools. This was so day at the turn of the tide? successful that it developed into the “Explorers” programme Visits to the seashore, to the Marine Institute’s research – complete with downloadable lesson plans, teacher training vessels and the Galway Atlantaquaria also give our citizens courses and seashore safaris - co-funded by the Institute, of the future a “hands-on” experience of what marine studies the Atlantaquaria and the Forfás Discover Primary Science are all about, something that a text book or a white board Programme. can never replace. It is a vital investment in the future since, “Explorers” now extends to 40 schools across counties while most of us may not be around in fifty years’ time, Galway, Clare and Mayo and discussions are underway to these young people will be the shapers of our world. At the extend it to a number of schools served by the Blackrock very least, such teachings and experiences will give them an Education Centre in Dublin and the Bray SeaLife Centre. understanding of the importance Since teachers are the most of the sea to an island nation like important facilitators of this A “seaweed maze” created during the teacher-training course. Photo: Cushla Dromgool-Regan.

Ireland. At best, they might create programme, a great deal of effort a lifelong passion that drives a has been taken to make sure new career. that they are comfortable with the material and its application Here’s to the future! to the SESE Curriculum as a whole. Five-day teacher training You can log on to the Explorers programmes are undertaken at web site at the Marine Institute and at the Galway Atlantaquaria, aimed at www.explorers.ie LIVEK showing how marine examples LIN

W

School Spin

SCHOOL SCIENCE SLUMP NOT SURPRISING T

he news that science standards have apparently slipped even further, following the publication of failure rates for science subjects at Leaving Certificate is not a surprise.

The fact that biology, chemistry and physics, the three flagship science subjects at secondary school also occupy positions one, two and three in terms of the failure rates of students that took the higher level papers, is shocking, but certainly, but not surprising.

During the Celtic Tiger years students began to turn their backs on science subjects in their thousands in favour of ‘easier’ subjects, such as business, where rewards were perceived to be greater, the career path clearer, and the academic demands lighter.

In 2010, the applications from science to do science courses are up from recent years. On the surface that appears to be a good thing, but it hides an unpleasant truth.

The truth is that many of the applicants are not capable of doing a college science course.

This is seen clearly in the rates of failure of those taking higher level science subjects.

Biology was top of the list of failure rates for all of the commonly chosen subjects at Leaving Certificate level at 9 per cent (so much for biology being the easy science); Chemistry was next at 8 per cent and Physics at 7 per cent. That’s a lot of failure.

The fact that this is happening against the background of ‘grade inflation’ at Leaving Certificate, where many feel it is becoming easier to get higher grades, is even worse.

Certainly, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of a huge decline in the quality of student entering science, and mathematics courses, over the past 20 years or so.

For example, it is very hard, one university source told me, to get Irish maths students that are capable of doing on to do postgraduate research work.

Almost all maths post-grads here are foreign. This is a major change from the 1980s when there was plenty of local maths talent here.

Engineering has the same problem. Not enough quality people that have achieved at higher level maths are applying. So, the entry standards have dropped. Now, some colleges no longer insist on their engineering students have higher level maths.

So, this is just a further bit of news that reflects a long-term decline in science.

What’s going on?

Well, perhaps the overall situation can be compared to what has happened to soccer in England since the arrival of the Premier League in the early 1990s. The English now have a bloated top league, full of the top talents – apparently. And this must be good.

But, the top teams have few Englishmen in their ranks. There is occasional angst when the English national team falls flat on his face yet again, but the fuss soon dies away.

There is talk about why more English players are not making it, and why more English players are not emerging from soccer ‘academies’ dotted around the country. The reason is that the entire focus now is on immediate gain, and there’s no long term thinking.

Likewise in Irish science, the focus is almost entirely on supporting the top talent, and helping them to provide us with immediate benefits – new ideas, new high technology start-up companies, and ultimately new jobs.

That’s all very well, but if the Government strategy works – and the evidence isn’t great to say that it is working – where will the next generation of scientific talent come from to fill the thousands of jobs the Government says will be available in new high-tech firms?

The only place they can come from: our schools. The level of funding for schools here is going in the wrong direction, and this makes a mockery of talking about a future knowledge economy.

There will be no knowledge economy without large numbers of capable, home grown science graduates. If the Government doesn’t understand that, they are in trouble.

The slump in science needs to treated with urgency if we are not to risk losing what we have gained in Irish science over the past 10 to 15 years, let alone moving to the next level as a ‘knowledge economy’. Action, and not more talking, is what is required.

www.sciencespin.com SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 38 School Spin

Seán Duke Editor, School Spin sean@sciencespin.com

SCHOOL NEWS

A round-up of news impacting on science in our schools To submit a news item for consideration please email: sean@sciencespin.com

Capturing science interest among primary students

IN AN effort to capture students’ interest in science at the earliest possible opportunity, a new pilot programme for teachers was launched in June by Discover Science and Engineering, and St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra.

The project, called the Fibonacci Project, is an ‘inquiry-based’ programme that aims to develop teachers’ expertise in ‘hands on’ learning. The Project is part of a Europe wide effort that involves schools scattered across 24 countries.

The project will be co-ordinated by Dr Clíona Murphy and Dr Jane Varley from the Centre for the Advancement of Science and Mathematics Teaching and Learning (CASTel) at St Patrick’s College.

“By developing primary teachers’ expertise in investigative approaches to science, we will be investing in school science for the long-term,” said Dr Murphy. “It is vital to capture children’s enthusiasm for science early on as research has shown that many young people have made their decisions about careers in science before the age of 13,” she added.

Links: http://www.castel.ie ; http:// education.inflpr.ro/en/Fiboacci.htm ; http://www.discover-science.ie

Go-ahead for €30 million facility at St Pat’s

The go-ahead was given by the Government in July for construction of a 12,000 m3 facility at St Patrick’s College that will house lecture theatres, libraries and offices.

This represents massive change at the teacher training college, as the existing building space available – which is to be refurbished as part of the plan – is just 6,000 m3. The project is expected to be completed by 2012.

“St Patrick’s College has experienced strong demand for its programmes,” said the Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, “which has resulted in student numbers more than doubling over the past decade”.

“Enrolments have risen from 1,024 in 1999-2000 academic year to 2,500 in 20092010,” the Tánaiste added. “This contract will bring Government capital investment in St Patrick’s College to over €40 million in the past decade.”

Links: http://www.spd.dcu.ie/

‘Young scientists’ get top marks in Leaving

Two Cork students and former winners of the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition have achieved A1s in Applied

Maths in the 2010 Leaving Certificate.

Richie O’Shea, a winner earlier this year, and Aisling Judge, a winner in 2006, achieved a total of 575 and 550 points respectively. Richie also received an AI in physics and chemistry, and both students want to study science subjects in college.

Richie, from Soil Muriel Gann Smál School in Blarney won the Exhibition this year for his project entitled “A biomass fired cooking stove for developing countries”. He will also be representing Ireland this September in the EU Young Scientist Show.

Meanwhile, Aisling, who attended Kinsale Community School, became the youngest ever winner of the Exhibition in 2006, when she was just 14. The name of her project was: “The development and evaluation of a biological food spoilage indicator.”

The 2011 Exhibition will open to the public on Wednesday 12th January at the RDS in Dublin. The closing date for entries for that show is the 4th October 2010. Students can find further information at http://www. btyoungscientist.com. They can also phone at 1800 924 362 from the Republic or 0800 917 1297 from Northern Ireland.

Links: http://www.btyoungscientist.com/

LIVE LINK

CLOSING DATE 4th OCTOBER

Limerick girls ‘flying high’

A mini-satellite designed by students from Limerick’s Laurel Hill Secondary School and small enough to fit inside a soft-drink can has come second in the annual CanSat competition organised by the European Space Agency (ESA).

GO DIGITAL AND GET LIVE LINKS

The mid-west’s team of young rocket scientists used their CanSat to make several measurements, such as pollution levels, and CO2 concentrations at high altitudes.

The team did a lot of research in preparation for the competition and enlisted the help of John Nelson, Hugh O’Brien and Sinead O’Keeffe from the University of Limerick.

The team, which called itself Truailliú, and pictured here, was made up of Roisín Aherne, Orla O’Brien, Derval McCauley, Maeve Gilligan, Genevieve McPhilemy, Gillian Gavin, Rachel Ryan and Sarah McNamara.

Links: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.

Read the page turner on line for free Register now for our digital alerts

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 39 School Spin

www.sciencespin.com

LIVE LINK

FIELD TRIPS

Belfast and The Ards Peninsula Humphrey Jones selects some places of scientific interest within reach of schools.

S

cience field trips are a great way to enthuse your pupils about the world of science and nature. We are exceptionally lucky in Ireland to have so many attractions of scientific interest within easy reach and a few short days away can provide a huge range of teaching and learning opportunities.

Over the next few issues, we will focus on a particular area of the country, highlighting the scientific attractions assessable within the area. The first suggested area for your next science field trip is the Ards Peninsula LIVE and Belfast, just a few hours’ drive from LINK Dublin.Within the Co. Down area, there is an enormous range of activities which provide an opportunity for pupils to learn more about science and nature. Here are a number of suggested activities to do during a two or three day trip to the area.

W5

LIVE LINK

W5 (which stands for Who, What, When, Where and Why) is a science and technology exploration centre. The amazing exhibition centre stands on four floors and contains over 200 permanent exhibitions, each focusing on an aspect of science and technology. Each floor has a theme (Start, Go, See & Do) which focuses on a particular area of science.

The whole exhibition centre is self guided, so very little is required of the teacher when you get there. W5 is suitable for primary school children and junior science pupils. A must when visiting Belfast. Visit www.w5online. co.uk for more information.

Exploris and Seal Sanctuary

Within the grounds of Exploris is Northern Ireland’s only seal sanctuary. The sanctuary is open to the public and pupils will get an opportunity to see some of the seals which are being rehabilitated in the centre.

Visit www.exploris.org.uk for more information.

SeaGen

Just a short walk from the Exploris aquarium, and situated in the mouth of Strangford Lough, is the SeaGen – the only tidal energy turbine in Ireland or Britain. SeaGen uses the strong tides of the lough to turn its turbines and produce energy for hundreds of homes, which is added to the national grid. It is a great way to discuss renewable energies with your pupils.

Visit http://www. seageneration.co.uk/ for more information about SeaGen.

Castle Espie Wildfowl and Wetlands Centre

Strangford Lough is the home of a huge Exploris is Northern Ireland’s largest variety of wildlife, particularly wildfowl. aquarium and a brilliant way to introduce Castle Espie Wildfowl and Wetlands Centre pupils to Ireland’s marine life. Found in the is an excellent place to explore this wonderful coastal town of Portaferry, there are three variety. The centre is just a few miles from main areas exhibited within the aquarium Comber and it has the largest collection of - Strangford Lough, Ireland’s coast and ducks, geese and swans in Ireland. Pupils will the open sea. The aquarium is very well have the opportunity to see the wildfowl up designed and easy to navigate a large group close and personal while walking around the through. The Exploris team also arrange LIVE extensive park. Definitely worth a visit. for a range of learning activities, including LINK Visit http://www.wwt.org.uk/visit-us/ discovery pools, shore walks and workshops. castle-espie for further information.

Ulster Folk and Transport Museum

The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum is one of the best attractions in Northern Ireland. Just a short drive from Belfast, this excellent museum allows pupils discover how transportation evolved in Ireland and the UK. The centre contains a huge collection of planes, trains and automobiles – one of the best collections in Europe. Also within the grounds is the reconstruction of 100 year old village where pupils can discover how life was lived in the early 1900’s. A great place to visit.

Visit http://www.nmni.com/uftm for further information and bookings.

LIVE LINK

Belfast Zoo

Belfast Zoo is one of the most popular attractions in Northern Ireland and a great place to visit with younger pupils. The zoo comprises 55 acres and is home to 1,200 animals and some 140 different species, many of which are endangered. Visit www.belfastzoo. co.uk.

LIVE LINK

Armagh Planetarium

While not within the area of the Ards Peninsula, it may be worth a little detour. The Armagh Planetarium is a great place to learn about the wonders of the cosmos using their amazing digital theatre, with shows designed for all age groups. The staff also run a series of workshops which focus on particular areas of the science and mathematics curriculum.

The planetarium is located beside the historic Armagh Observatory, one of the leading scientific research establishments in the UK and Ireland.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 40 School Spin

CLASSROOM APPS

Mitosis and The Chemical Touch

Humphrey Jones recommends two great applications.

T

here are now an enormous range of apps available for your iPhone, Android Smartphone or iPad which have great potential for the teaching and learning of science, many of which are free. Why not recommend these apps to your pupils and suggest that they use them for reference, for homework or even in class, to help them learn more about science. This week’s two recommended apps are ‘Mitosis’ and ‘The Chemical Touch’.

Mitosis for the iPhone or iPod Touch is a simple program which allows the user learn about the process of cell division by “directly interacting with the cell”. The app contains a glossary of relevant definitions at your fingertips, excellent photos and videos of cells dividing and you can listen to a recording that describes mitosis while

you follow along in the text. There are also interactive quizzes to assess your knowledge of the phases of mitosis. Best of all, Mitosis is a free app for your iPhone or iPod touch. A great download and highly recommended.

The Chemical Touch is a brilliant, easy to use interactive Periodic Table for your iPhone, iPod or iPad. The Periodic Table is truly brought to life with the app’s excellent touch sensitive and colourful home screen.

Flick between each element’s atomic mass,

density, melting point, boiling point or even radii easily, with no fuss. You can also gain access to the Wikipedia site for each element via the app. All of this is available on the free version, The Chemical Touch Lite, and can be downloaded on iTunes.

But wait, why not splurge out 79c for the extended version — it’s worth it. The full version has a full database of amino acids and nucelotides — essential for anyone studying biochemistry or even Leaving Cert Biology.

Science DVDs

Having a comprehensive DVD library for your school is a great way to enthuse pupils about the world of science and nature.

There are a number of brilliant DVD series available to purchase, some for relatively small amounts, which can help pupils understand difficult scientific concepts more easily. Each issue we will recommend a DVD which can be used in the science class.

First up is Brian Cox’s excellent series, Wonders of the Solar System.

Wonders of the Solar System is a spellbinding series where Cox visits come of the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the solar system.

Using top class CGI and buoyed by Cox’s infectious enthusiasm, the series is sure to stimulate your pupils and have them wanting to learn more about science and astronomy.

Wonders of the Solar System is available in all good DVD stores and on Amazon, from around €20.

[HJ]

NUI Galway engineering student, Darren Lyons, from Galway, working with Leaving Cert students, Bishoy Abdou, and Sean Coughlan (right) from St Joseph’s Patrician College in Galway.

Learning by teaching

ELECTriCAL and engineering students at NUi Galway have been going back to school, bringing hand-on experience into the classroom. Leaving cert physics students have been shown how to conduct electrical and electronics experiments that show how theory is converted into practice.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 41 School Spin

CAREERS in SCIENCE

Sun

worshipper How do you describe someone who checks his computer first thing every morning to see what the weather is like – not in Malaga, the Canaries or Tenerife – but, the Sun. Strange? Weird? Odd? No, not really. This is just part of the daily work routine for Ireland’s leading academic ‘Sun Worshipper’, TCD astrophysicist, Peter Gallagher.

T

oday, Peter Gallagher is head of the Solar Physics Group at TCD, working with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the space industry. He is Ireland’s foremost scientific authority on the Sun, and his group is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. By any measure of success, Peter has been very successful in his career.

SPARK

So, how did he first get interested in science? Well, like many leading scientists, he didn’t have a single defining moment that made him realise that he wanted to be a scientist. Rather, he remembers always being interested in how things work, from very early in his childhood. Peter’s Dad, was a service engineer with Ingersoll Rand,

and father and son often working together, taking apart machines in the back garden.

“I was always fascinated by the way things worked,” recalled Peter. “I used to take things apart an awful lot – TVs and radios things like that – and I would work how they worked. I did that when I was in primary school, 10 or so. I was taking things apart around the house and driving my parents mad.”

The young Peter learned quickly, and though he didn’t excel, in an academic sense, while in primary school, he showed glimpses of what he was capable of. “I remember the teacher asked the class how a four-stroke engine worked. I stood up and told the teacher about the four strokes of the engine, intake, compression, fire and exhaust. .

Peter, from Dublin, went to O’Connell’s School on the northside.

While at secondary school he became interested in maths, and though he found it was the hardest subject, he liked it the most, and liked the challenge it presented. Surprisingly, the school didn’t have an option to study physics, so Peter chose to do chemistry and technical drawing with an eye on doing chemistry or chemical engineering later on in college.

Peter applied for science in UCD, and was accepted choosing Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Biology in 1st year, and thinking that chemistry would be his main subject.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 42 School Spin

Peter Gallagher achieved his aim in setting up the Solar Physics Group at TCD,

“I was fascinated by atoms and molecules, but realised in college that physics told you more about atoms and that I could use my maths. In chemistry, I found it too abstract. The chemicals in the bottles didn’t help me understand how atoms worked.”

That first year in college, as for many people, was a momentous one for Peter. He met the two loves of his life - Physics, and his talented scientist wife Dr Emma Teeling. The love-life is a story for elsewhere, but in terms of physics, Peter realised as soon as he did physics in first year that he wanted to be a physicist. The exam results, and reading the ‘Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawkins, lit his fire even further.

He read Hawkins, but that wasn’t enough. He devoured books relating to Physics. “I launched into astronomy and astrophysics,” he said. “I took books out even during the summer, and worked through them. I loved physics, I couldn’t put them down.” That kind of passion and commitment would lead him to do great things in coming years.

NASA

Peter chose to do a post-grad in opto-electronics at Queen’s University in Belfast (QUB) after graduation. This was a hot area at the time, back in 1996, and he learned about fibre optics, lasers, CCD cameras and the like. It was also a stimulating time to be in Belfast, and he was there for the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. He came first in his class, and was offered a PhD at QUB. The clincher was that the PhD would involve travel and interaction with NASA’s Goodard Flight Centre.

The PhD was in Solar Physics, and involved using NASA’s SOHO spacecraft to make measurements of the Sun’s atmosphere.

He worked closely with engineers and scientists based at the SOHO control centre. Then, following the completion of his PhD he was offered a job by NASA at Goddard. A career in NASA beckoned.

However, after three years working as a senior scientist with NASA he decided he wanted to come home. Why would he leave what many would consider a dream job and come back to Ireland?

“How the hell knows,” he answered (laughing). But, the decision was taken for very clear reasons, and he believes it was best for his career. At NASA, he would have gone up the ladder in a big organisation, and could have ended up managing a spacecraft, for example. But there were few opportunities for research.

“It was a dream job at Goddard, but there was a barrier to me scientifically to be honest. I wanted to set up a research group that answer questions like, how the Sun produces explosions and solar flares? How do they affect the Earth when they go off ?” He returned to Ireland in 2006, and first lectured at UCD. Then came the chance to set up a group at TCD, he took it and now he is doing exactly what he wants to do.

“I am constantly changed and have the opportunity to pursue my own interests. If you are driven by a question, then as an academic scientist you have the luxury to pursue that question. The travel is the fluff. I travel to Hawaii for meetings, but the stuff that keeps you awake at night, the science paper beside the bed because you don’t understand something – that’s the joy of the discovery of new things.”

The advice Peter would give to students considering science is that, aside from the academic life, there are many career options, and many of them are rewarding. A recent astrophysics graduate of his, he said, is now working in a financial trading firm. There is the IT sector, or teaching, or jobs in Ireland growing space industry.

He finishes on an optimistic note, from a person that describes himself as ‘an unrelenting optimist”. “I am very optimistic about the future for Ireland. I think we are going to explore new markets, new science and that ultimately that will bring growth and employment back to Ireland. I am very positive about the next five years.”

IDEAL FOR THE SCHOOL LIBRARY Rock around Ireland

Peadar McArdle describes the geology of Ireland. Paperback €15

Colour

Margaret Franklin and Tom Kennedy explain all about colour. Paperback €15

SCIENCE SPIN What’s happening in Irish science? Who is doing the research?

What’s happening in Europe and around the world? What’s it like to be a scientist?

Answers to these and lots more in Science Spin, all Ireland’s magazine about science, nature and discovery.

Great value sub, just €18 for six issues in print, and the on-line digital edition is free.

Order on line www.sciencespin.com SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 43 School Spin

LIVE LINK

The Young Scientists SOCIAL

David Connellan, and right, Killian Creaner at their stand.

Learning from ants

T

hey are incredibly strong, are prepared to lay down their lives for others, make excellent parents, work tirelessly for the common good and are superb engineers.

Clearly, we can learn a lot from ants.

Killian Creaner and David Connellan, students at Belvedere College, in Dublin, thought so too, and decided to investigate more about what we humans can learn from ants and how they live for their 2010 BT Young Scientist & Technology project entitled: “A study on the associations between ant colonies and human societies.”

Killian and David began by purchasing ‘ant farms’ from Argos and Toymaster.

These farms provide the basic housing in which the ants can live. The next step was to buy a queen ant that would be capable of reproduction and a colony. The students bought their queen Carpenter Ant and colony on the http://www.edusci.co.uk/

ARRIVAL

The Queen arrived in a test tube with water in it, for moisture and a sticky substance for food. The students set about digging out tunnels from Styrofoam in the ant house, to try and replicate, as much as possible, the ant’s natural environment. The Queen was assigned to a central or main chamber, and she went there and cornered herself off.

That behaviour from the Queen signalled that she was about to start laying eggs.

The edusci website had provided 10 foods for the colony – the Queen doesn’t feed while she is pregnant. The students found that the ants loved to eat dead insects, honey or any kind of sweet foods. They hated cinnamon, pepper and mint. They began to observe the ants closely and got in touch with a renowned German ant scientist called Bert Hölldobler to find out more about how ants communicate.

The scientist said that ants communicate with each other by spraying hormones, called pheromones. This enables one individual ant to follow a scent towards a food source that has been located by another individual ant, for example.

It is thought that ants follow the scent of other ants from their own colony as they navigate the environment.

The importance of scent to ant communication was shown when Bert Hölldobler investigated what happen if the line of scent was broken, said Killian.

“He found that it really confused them.

They need to have a line of pheromone scent to guide them.” Furthermore, if an unfortunate ant from another colony wandered in to the colony, the ants would pick up the alien scent with their antennae and attack and kill the intruder.

Ants are part of a group of insects, known as the ‘social insects’. This group includes wasps, bees and termites. It is thought that ants evolved from wasps that gave up flying about 40 million years ago, so the links are close. One key unifying feature for the group is that they all have a ‘Queen’ that is solely responsible for reproduction.

The students decided to look at ants under a number of headings, and to see what we can learn from them. Under ‘childcare’ they noted that the ants look after their young when they are injured, even when they are not their own young, as long as they are from the same colony. So there is a shared role in childcare spread among society.

There is a definite hierarchy in ant society, with everyone assigned a task, and prepared to carry out that task for the wider good. There is no-one languishing ‘on the dole’ and everyone has a job to do.

Unlike the Ireland of today, no-one is out of work.

In terms of ‘education’ ants show other ants where they have found food, and they help each other to navigate through the environment. Under the heading ‘security’ it is clear that ants are prepared to put their own lives before the life of the colony, and will attack much larger creatures, such as beetles if they invade colony territory. Once they attack they will fight to the death, and there is no question of ‘taking prisoners’.

Ants are brilliant engineers and architects, and indeed there is a ‘school of thought’ that wishes to use some of their methods in the construction of human buildings. They have vents in the colony which allows air to flow through, cooling when necessary.

The ants also have measures in place in terms of ‘flood control’ and sanitation.

Perhaps most impressive of all, is the awesome strength of individual ants. “Ants are extremely strong for their size,” said Killian. “Most ants can lift 20 times their body weight and can drag something 1,700 times their bodyweight, which is equivalent to a human dragging a ship.” Any creature that can do that is certainly worth of study.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 44 School Spin

The Young Scientists

Lucan students water test for Africa

A

n estimated 1.5 million children globally die each year from preventable diseases caused by drinking dirty water, according to UNICEF, the world’s leading children’s support agency. It is shameful that rich nations do not do more to prevent such deaths.

Great credit is due, therefore, to three young Lucan scientists that are not happy to sit back and do nothing to help address this problem. Rachael O’Neill, Thomas Butler and Sarah Vu, of Lucan Community College investigated a simple-to-use test that would indicate whether water in a tank was safe to drink or not, for their 2010 BT Young Scientist and Technology exhibit.

The project goal was entitled: “To determine the levels of bacteria in rain water collected for drinking in Africa.” For it they won a Highly Commended prize in the Biological and Ecological Category, but the real prize would be to help come up with a real test that could be used in Africa, that would potentially save people’s lives.

The idea was to link up with Self Help Africa, a charity organisation that seeks to assess what people need on the ground, and to work with them on a grass roots level – rather than simply supplying various forms of aid. The Lucan students are all volunteers and linked their BT project with a Self Help project to provide clean water for Gilgil, a town of about 20,000 people located in the Kenyan Rift Valley Province.

Rachael O’Neill explained that Self Help had provided a 10,000 litre water tank for Gilgil, but people there still faced water problems in terms of contamination.

“It is very simple, the water hits off the roof and goes into the gutter and is fed by a pipe into the tank. The problem comes when the water is sitting there for months and months. There are two rainy seasons in Kenya, one around Easter and one in September. The water is collected and has to last six months.”

“The temperature will be an average of 26 or 27ºC. With that heat and the water sitting there for months there is an increase in bacteria – cholera, dysentery and typhoid. They are caused by faecal matter.

It’s kinda cruel, because these diseases – you know when you have them you can cure them almost by just drinking water – by hydrating yourself. But, if you have dirty water, you are just going to get sicker and sicker.”

Rachel O’Neill (left), Sarah Vu, and Thomas Butler came up with a low-cost test to determine if water is safe to drink.

The Lucan students wanted to help 10 kilometres away”. Men travel to get the the people of Gilgil by trying to come up water, she explained, which is odd, as it is with a simple test to see whether the water normally the woman’s job to get water. But, in their tank is safe to drink, or not. They it is considered dangerous for a woman to came up with a test using limestone, which travel that distance, so the men do it. Then was clever, as there is plenty of limestone in even after travelling 10km to get water there and around the town and it can be accessed is no guarantee that the clean water will be very cheaply and easily. Limestone is a test available. “We got a statistic,” said Rachael, for carbon dioxide (CO2 ) as the students “which said that at any one time 40 per cent learned from their science classes. A test for of the water wells in Africa aren’t working.” carbon dioxide is, in turn, a test for bacteria, The students’ next move is to get in as bacteria, like humans, emit CO2 during touch with researchers in Irish universities respiration. The more CO2 given off the that can help them to come up with a more bacteria are present. It’s that simple. test that is capable of providing a precise “There is no money,” Rachael said reading that will indicate when exactly explaining the situation the Gilgil people the water supply has become unsafe for are facing “and the nearest water system is drinking.

A well in Tanzinia before improvements were made. Photo: Peer Water Exchange.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 45 School Spin

DISCUSSION POINT

What are the real alternatives to oil?

Humphrey Jones, Science Teacher, St Columba’s College, Dublin, raises some topics for classroom discussion.

T

he recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused enormous ecological and economic damage to the area. The company responsible, BP, have had a PR nightmare and have suffered enormous financial hardship with the cost of the spill somewhere close to $6 billion. An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled from the damaged well in the 87 days from the beginning of the disaster (which ironically was Earth Day) until the leak was finally capped on July 15. This incident has served to remind us though that oil will not be there forever, with peak production close, and we need to begin the search for real alternatives to powering our technology dependant planet.

FINITE

Everything we do these days seems to depend on the use of electricity, the majority of which is formed by the burning of carbon based fuels, gas and oil. These materials are finite and within 100 years we will have to rely on other forms of power generation.

But which is the best option?

Renewable energies are clean and safe, yet currently expensive. Some people don’t want to have “unsightly” wind turbines or solar panels in their back yard. It is also uncertain whether renewable energy generation techniques provide enough electricity to meet our needs.

Hydrogen has the potential to replace petrol or diesel in road vehicles without any emissions, and is currently being field tested in California and Hong Kong. And then there is the nuclear question? Can safety concerns be addressed in the world’s nuclear power stations? Can cold fusion be achieved to create a large amount of energy from hydrogen, by mimicking the reactions in the Sun? There are so many questions around this area which can lead to an excellent classroom discussion. Now let us take a close look at some of the potential solutions to our energy problems and some of the many unanswered questions surrounding them.

WIND

Wind turbines have been propping up all around the Irish countryside with opinion mixed on whether they are elegant or an eyesore. But these turbines are contributing greatly to Ireland’s energy needs, with all turbines on the island producing over 1200 Megawatts of energy, which accounts for approximately 10 per cent of our yearly demand. But could it be possible to increase the current numbers? Maybe expand the Arklow Bank Wind Farm? There was an

interesting proposal from “The Spirit of Ireland” group which called for wind turbines to be used in conjunction with hydroelectric dams – to pump water up from the sea at night time. The hydro station would then release the water during the day to generate power. Would this work? Visit www.spiritofireland.org to find out more.

SOLAR

The power of the Sun can be used to produce electricity in a number of ways, mainly photovoltaics and concentrated solar power (CSP). Photovoltaics convert the solar energy into electric energy using the photoelectric effect while CSP focuses the heat energy of the sun onto liquid containers using large mirrors, which then turn the liquid into gas, turns turbines and creates electricity. CSP has been the most productive so far but photovoltaics are catching up, with some solar panels now able to produce electric current on even cloudy days.

The Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) is the largest solar energy generating facility in the world. It consists of nine solar power plants in California’s Mojave Desert and can produce over 350 Megawatts of electricity. SEGS is a concentrated solar power plant, using enormous mirrors to focus heat onto hundreds of panels. A massive CSP plant is being planned for the Sahara Desert which could see nearly 100 Gigawatts of electricity being produced annually. It is estimated that if just 0.3 per cent of the Saharan Desert was used for a concentrating solar plant, it would produce enough power to provide all of Europe with clean renewable energy. But could this be successful? How much would it cost to build? Can solar power serve all our energy needs? Is solar polar useful for motor vehicles?

WAVE & TIDAL

Wave power uses the movements of the oceans waves to create electricity, converting kinetic energy into electrical energy. The potential for energy production is enormous but this has not been realised to date. The largest wave power station currently is in Portugal and it produces only 2 Megawatts of electricity per year. SeaGen is the world’s first commercial tidal power plant and is situated at the mouth of Strangford Lough in Co. Down. SeaGen produces 1.2 Megawatts of electricity per year. Can wave and tidal power solve our energy needs?

Are there enough suitable sites for these types of technology? Can the potential of underwater waves be harnessed?

HYDROGEN & BIOMASS

Solar, wind and wave power may provide sufficient energy for our homes in the future, but what about our cars, trains, and airplanes? What are the alternative fuels which will power these vehicles when the oil finally runs out? Many are suggesting that hydrogen powered vehicles could rule supreme – with some cars and buses already in production and in use. Hydrogen is a very clean fuel, producing only water as a waste, which can in turn be used to charge an electric fuel cell. The technology is already available but it is expensive. Hydrogen can be produced easily enough from sea water but does it have the potential to replace all fuels?

Biofuels are produced from living or recently living organisms, such as sugary crops or oily seeds. Bioethanol is the most common biofuel and is produced by fermenting the sugar within crops like wheat, potatoes or sugar beet. Bioethanol is often mixed with petrol, which then can be run in normal cars. In fact, many Irish petrol stations now sell petrol containing five per cent bioethanol. But can biofuels be used to run our cars in the future? Is there sufficient agricultural land available to grow the fuel crops? Should this land not be used to provide food for our ever increasing world population? The debate continues.

NUCLEAR

Many people believe that nuclear power has the potential to solve our energy needs. It is carbon neutral (which means that it doesn’t release CO2 into the atmosphere), cheap and efficient. Many countries rely heavily on nuclear power including the US, which has over 100 nuclear power stations, and France which produces 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear fuel. Nuclear energy is obtained from the splitting of large unstable atoms, a process called nuclear fission, and heating turbines with the resultant reaction heat. The turbines convert kinetic energy into electrical energy. However, there are concerns over safety, after three major incidents involving nuclear power plants over the decades. There is also unease over the safe storage of the waste products of nuclear fission. Can nuclear power be proved reliably? Can nuclear fusion (the merging of two small atoms to produce energy) be harnessed safely? All this remains to be seen.

CONCLUSION

There are considerable options available to replace oil, gas and solid fuels. But maybe the first stage in this process is the conservation of our current energy sources.

A cross-curricular discussion on our energy needs and use can be a great way to get pupils engaged in science and its application to world problems.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 46 School Spin

Ireland’s space industry looks set to take-off like this European Space Agency Arianne 5 rocket.

2006. This progress is expected to increase further in coming years as the number and size of Irish companies active in the space market is expect to expand.

Aside from the direct funds from ESA contracts there are spin-off benefits for Irish companies working with ESA, as space technology can be exploited by them here on Earth. In 2007, Enterprise Ireland, the state body responsible for the space sector reland has a proud astronomical history that dates back here, estimated that the Irish companies that have contracts millennia The first Irish people to develop an intimate interest with ESA generated a turnover of €136 million, and provided and knowledge of the stars were, most probably, the people that employment for 1,000 people. The caveat here is that not all built Newgrange 5,500 years ago. Their economy was based on the economic activity by these companies, or the jobs, is directly domestication of livestock and planting of crops, activities that related to space. The people working in space here are mostly required good knowledge of the seasons, and the natural cycle. engineers or scientists with PhDs. Astronomy could help with this. Newgrange is the world’s oldest Ireland’s space future is bright, according to Tony McDonald, ‘astronomically aligned’ building, predating the pyramids by 500 ESA Programme Manager with Enterprise Ireland, the state agency years, so the Irish can claim to be the world’s first astronomers. responsible for the space sector. “We are seeing significant growth Irish monks were famous for their astronomical knowledge and in the past year in the Irish companies active in ESA programmes, observations, recording super nova explosions in the 12th century. with a number of companies expanding their employment of Later, in the 19th century, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, at Birr Castle, built engineering staff in particular. We expect this what became the world’s largest telescope to continue as Irish companies continue for the next 50 years. Then, in the early 1970s, Some Irish companies in growth to expand their involvement with ESA, and scientists at the Dublin Institute for Advanced space increase sales to commercial space markets in Studies worked with NASA on the manned Ampac ISP Europe – Thrusters, valves Europe, US and Asia”.

Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon. and regulators.

“We are also seeing an expanding range of So, Irish involvement in space did not Eirecomposites – Advanced Irish companies and research groups becoming begin the day in 1975 when Ireland joined the European Space Agency (ESA). But, joining was composites for space launchers and active in ESA programmes, including in the satellites. development of leading-edge technologies for crucial as it demonstrated that Ireland now Eblana Photonics – Advanced laser biomedical applications for human spaceflight.” had a long-term commitment to participate in systems for satellite navigation The range of space research in Ireland has collaborative European space programmes. This payloads. certainly expanded beyond the ‘traditional’ encouraged Irish industry and research groups SensL – Detectors for planetary space areas of astronomy and astrophysics here to get involved in space, and led to the landers into life sciences, microgravity studies, climate development of a home-grown space sector.

Skytec – Advanced software for use studies, and the application of nanotechnology by humans involved in space missions. in space, for example.

GROWTH Studying science or engineering at college, and worried about job prospects in Ireland when you graduate? If so, then you could certainly do worse than consider a career in Ireland’s rapidly growing and exciting space industry sector, writes Seán Duke.

I

The past 10 years has seen a rapid rise in the number of Irish companies securing ESA contracts. From 2005 to 2009, remarkably, 47 Irish companies have secured ESA contracts to the value of €31 million. Furthermore, 19 of those 47 companies were first time space contractors in that four-year period, and spread across many sectors including ICT, materials, software, engineering, electronics and optoelectronics.

Unlike many other parts of the Irish economy, the immediate future for the space industry here looks bright, with over €9 million worth of new contracts placed in 2009 – a dire year in the wider economy, and an increase of €1 million per annum since

SUPPORTS

The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) and ESA is now co-funding post-doctoral research that relates to space with the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, and NUI Galway (Mace Head).

Meanwhile, EI is supporting third-level students that wish to participate in internships at ESA’s research headquarters in Holland, and its astronomy centre outside Madrid.

EI is also offering scholarships to enable students to attend the Summer School Alpbach and the International Space University.

LIVE http://www.summerschoolalpbach.at/ LINK

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 42 Page 47 School Spin

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 VE LI LINK

NOTICE BOARD To book a space contact Alan Doherty at 01 2842909. Email: alan@sciencespin.com Notices include a live link in our digital edition www.projectblogger.ie

'LG \RX PLVV XV"

The National Museum of Ireland - Natural History NOW reopens April 29th 2010 OPEN

Free Admission - Guided Tours - Family programme and events for people of all ages

www.marine.ie

LIVE LINK

SOURCE

Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm. Sunday 2pm to 5pm. Closed: Mondays incl. Bank Holidays

Merrion Street, Dubin 2. Tel (01) 6777 444 - info@museum.ie - www.museum.ie

Great value just €18 for a sub, and you can register FREE for the digital edition.

To register email Register at us at marieclaire@sciencespin.com www.sciencespin.com

PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES

BETTER THAN EVER! Science spin now has three in one l SCIENCE SPIN l SPIN ACTIVE — innovation l SCHOOL SPIN — education

www.iol.ie/~source.foxford

Geological Survey of Ireland

GEOSCIENCE 2010

Science Spin on air

Showcasing excellence in geoscience research and services Conference covering the Griffith Geoscience Awards, INFOMAR, and Ireland’s participation in international projects.

Dublin Castle Conference Centre 3rd and 4th November 2010 www.gsi.ie

Tune in with Seán Duke 103.2 Dublin City FM 15.30 every Thursday LIVE LINK

RESEARCH AT NUIMaynooth http://research.nuim.ie/

Or listen at www.sciencespin.com

Connecting expertise with industry

www.projectblogger.ie

GET NOTICED

Be seen by thousands of readers in print, and let visitors come to your site via the live links in Science Spin’s digital edition.

Contact Alan Doherty at alan@sciencespin.com for details.

LIVE LINK

Need a Science Blog?

Project Blogger is the website for you!

EMBER 2010 V O 7 - 14 N

Over

ts Even wide!

Nation

Science Week Ireland will run from

7 - 14 November 2010 LIVE LINK

Log on to www.ScienceWeek.ie for further details