Science Spin issue 65

ISSUE

65

July August 2014

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SCIENCE

SPIN

IRELAND’S SCIENCE NATURE AND DISCOVERY MAGAZINE

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Mapping the Dingle Peninsula

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Nano foods

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Dr How

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Looking beneath the surface of the Dingle Peninsula

Are consumers ready for foods prepared using nanotechnology?

Exploring volcanoes

Marine landslides

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DNA and RNA

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Rocks and minerals

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Revisiting Fukushima

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Familiar on land but more common under the sea

A competition for school students

Sive Finlay introduces the slow-moving sloth

Paddy Gaffikin explains the differences

Margaret Franklin reports that concerns about radiation persist

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Young scientists

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Neglected nettles and green power

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SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 1

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UPFRONT

Magnetic fingerprint

The magnetic field of our Milky Way Galaxy has been revealed by observing how light from interstellar dust has been polarised.

Waves of light can vibrate in all directions, but when confined to one plane they are said to be polarised. By measuring the degree of polarisation, astronomers can make deductions about the physical processes that gave rise to the effect.

The Galaxy is filled with dust and gas, and although the tiny dust grains are cold, they emit long wavelengths of light. Grains are rarely perfectly symmetrical and, because of this, most of the emitted light vibrates in parallel to the longest axis, and so is polarised. If grains were distributed randomly, no polarisation

Swiss on a science roll

SWITzErlAnd, with a population of just under 8 million, invested CHF 819 million, the equivalent of €671 million, in science during 2013. More than 3400 research proposals were approved for funding under the Swiss national Science Foundation. Funding under SnSF went up 8 per cent in 2013 compared to the previous year, and doctoral students got a salary increase of 7 per cent.

Farm incomes

WHIlE average incomes from most enterprises fell in 2013, Irish farm incomes, according to Teagasc, edged up by one per cent. However, traditional cattle and tillage did not do so well, and the big increase came from dairy farming. The income boost for dairy farming was attributed to better milk prices and more efficient production. Farm income from dairy farms in the south of the country went up by 24 per cent on average compared to a decline of 16 per cent for tillage and drystock farming in the midlands.

In november, Teagasc and the Irish Farmers Association will hold a conference to discuss the future of Ireland’s family farms and the challenges they face. As the shift in incomes shows, there have been big changes, coupled with a the steady decline in family farms.

According to Teagasc, a quarter of all households in Ireland were headed by a farmer in 1971. By 2011 this had declined to just 6 per cent.

would be observed, but when subjected to a magnetic field, the grains reorientate themselves, long axis perpendicular with the field.

By studying data on polarisation, gathered by instruments on board the Plank observatory, astronomers were able to construct a chart showing how the Milky Way is threaded through with magnetic fields.

In October 2013 the ESA Planck space telescope was given its final command to turn off after four and a half years of probing the Universe. Although out of fuel and parked in a stable orbit around the Sun, the data gathered over its lifetime will keep scientists busy for years to come.

Forestry buffer zones

WHEn big blocks of Sitka Spruce were planted in Ireland not a great deal of thought was put into the eventual impact of these trees on the environment. Much of this forestry was planted on peatlands, and while the trees thrived, they did have a negative impact on biodiversity. Close proximity to streams has a negative impact on water quality, making it difficult for aquatic species to survive.

According to environmental scientists in TCd, 300,000 hectares of peatlands have been afforested, and they argue that the impact on aquatic life will become worse with harvesting of timber.

To solve this problem, which should have been foreseen, dr liwen Xiao from TCd recommends the planting of grass ‘buffer zones’ In a paper published in the journal Ecological Engineering, dr Xiao explains that grass retains nutrients that would otherwise wash out into streams.

In a trial in the Burrishoole catchment area, County Mayo, native grasses were sown immediately after harvesting of timber.

This is an environmentally-sensitive area of great importance to eels and salmon. Seeding was found to be effective with grass soaking up the nutrients. Commenting on these results, dr Xiao said this approach was not only more successful than any other attempts to solve the problem but it also made these nutrients available to the next crop of trees.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 2

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UPFRONT

Migration of neural progenitor cells from a sphere of neurons. By observing this migration the researchers can see if progenitor cells are behaving normally or not.

Image: Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Schizophrenia

EvidEncE to show that schizophrenia is likely to have developed before birth has been found by researchers at the Salk institute in california. By talking skin cells from adults with schizophrenia and making them revert to an earlier stem cell stage, neuron growth was established. Reporting on this in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the researchers found that the developing neuron cells displayed characteristics that were similar to those in adults with schizophrenia.

Autism register

An irish register on autism is being established to provide researchers and families with information that will help in providing support and services to those in need.

The irish centre for Autism and neurodevelopment Research at nUi Galway have invited the public to participate by completing a survey. details can be entered through the website www.iarb.ie

Such cells display a lack of adhesion to each other, so they do not connect to each other in the normal way and they are more susceptable to oxidative stress.

The neural progenitor cells were generated from skin cells of four people with schizophrenia and compared to cells taken from six people without the condition.

Kristen Brennand, lead author of the paper, said that the findings support the theory that events occurring early in pregnancy trigger the development of schizophrenia, even though the conditions does not manifest itself until early adulthood. However, while it is not known what sort of conditions, genetic or environmental, lead to this development, the study suggests that it may be possible to test for schizophrenia at an early stage. it was also discovered that antipsychotic drugs, such as clozapine and loxapine, used to treat schizophrenia, had an adverse affect on the migration of developing nerve cells. This was a surprising result, as it suggests that such medication might hinder rather than help prevent the initial development of the disease.

Hydrogen

inSTEAd of carrying around a heavy tank of compressed hydrogen, it might be possible to produce the gas on demand. As scientists from the US University of Buffalo have found, hydrogen can be produced by adding water to ten nanometre sixed particles of silicon. The particles react to form silicic acid and hydrogen.

Although the reaction was already known, the small size of the particles greatly accelerates the process.

Mark T Swihart and Paras Prasad reporting their findings in Nano Letters, said that they had been surprised by the difference in performance between 100 and 10 nanometre sized particles. The reaction was 150 times faster with the smaller particles.

The researchers said that the reaction requires no input of heat or light, and in situations where portability is an issue, generating hydrogen on demand is likely to be a good option.

Lions facing extinction

Lioness hunting in the Serengeti. Schuyler Sheperd.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 3

LESS than 35,000 lions survive in Africa, and in the region between Senegal to nigeria the population is down to just 250 adults. The drop in West African population has come as a shock to scientists who have been conducting a large scale survey. in a paper published in Plos One, Philipp Henschel and co-author Lauren coad, report that protection of lions is completely inadequate.

Lauren coad commented that in many areas there is nothing to stop poachers who target not just lions, but their prey.

Lions, once common and widespread, are under intense pressure across Africa as savannas are taken over for agriculture and cattle ranching.

In West Africa alone, lions are now confined to about one per cent of their original range.

Protecting lions is made all the more difficult by widespread poverty, so countries can spare little for conservation.

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Saturn’s rainbow rings

UPFRONT

First observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610 the rings around saturn have continued to puzzle astronomers as to how they formed. thanks to better instruments, such as Cassini’s UV imaging spectrograph, we can see a lot more detail, but it is still not known how the rings came into existence. they may be as old as the planet, but another suggestion is that they were formed as icy material was pulled in from another body, which would mean the rings are younger than the planet. in this image we see a portion of the ring closest to the planet, spanning about 10,000 km. The colours are due to differences in composition, the turquoise ones are almost pure water, while the reddish bands are made of ice with traces of contaminants.

Oil crop

rape, Brassica rapa,is widely planted for its oil yielding seeds, but researchers at NUi Galway, working with colleagues in Canada, have been examining Camelina as a low-input alternative. Like rape, Camelina belongs to the cabbage, Brassicaceae, family. according to the scientists, Camelina sativa has a long history of cultivation pre-dating Oilseed rape by thousands of years, and they point out that there has been a resurgence of interest in this crop. the aviation industry, for example, has shown interest in Camelina as a source of aviation fuel. a number

of airlines, including Japan airlines and KLM, have run trials with Camelina biojet fuel on passenger flights.

Camelina oil is being produced commercially in ireland as a cooking and skin care product high in Omega 3.

Growing trials have been conducted in collaboration with teagasc and the search is on for higher-yielding varieties.

Work on Camelina is being conducted under prof spillane at NUi Galway where phD student reetu tuteja is identifying genes that could boost production.

Right; the oil yielding seeds.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 4

Atlas of Commercial Fisheries around Ireland published by the Marine Institute On an average day, more than 1000 fishing vessels are active in the waters around Ireland, where fishing hours exceed 8 million per year.

Fishing activities in Irish waters are very diverse and account for one of the most significant overall use of waters around Ireland. These activities encompass a multitude of techniques to target different species or groups of species with very different spatial patterns.

The Atlas of Commercial Fisheries around Ireland is the second of its kind published by the Marine Institute. The Atlas has been developed in parallel with an online Atlas of Fisheries over a wider area within the EU funded GEPETO project.

Dr. Colm Lordan, Marine Institute, co-author of the Atlas explains, “The Atlas provides an opportunity to visualise and analyse complex scientific data and models as never before.

Map of main Fishing Grounds: The map of the main fishing grounds around Ireland provide the names of the fishing grounds that are based on the records from Marine Institute fisheries observers.

Map showing Demersal Otter Trawl Effort: The map shows the species composition of the demersal otter trawl vessels greater than or equal to landing into Ireland. The Neprops grounds can be clearly distinguished, anglerfish dominate along the shelf edge, megrim dominate in the southwestern Celtic Sea and whiting dominate in areas of the eastern Celtic Sea. The percentages in the legend refer to the share of the total landings for each species.

The main challenge is to communicate the information in a way that is useful and understandable, so it can be used to help ensure a sustainable resource base and industry for future generations.”

The Atlas aims to give useful insights by providing maps that show the distribution of fishing activities in Irish waters by gear type and nationality of the vessel. The fishing grounds have been defined and the spatial distribution of landings for all the main commercial species, is also shown.

Simon Coveney, T.D., Minister for Agriculture Food and the Marine welcomed the Atlas saying, “The Atlas of Commercial Fisheries presents complex data in a very visual way using informative maps, making it accessible to a whole range of stakeholders. It brings a new level of transparency in terms of fishing activities and offers new possibilities in terms of spatial management of mixed fisheries.”

The Atlas of Commercial Fisheries around Ireland is available to download free at http://hdl.handle.net/10793/958 Dr. Colm Lordan, Marine Institute and and Minster Simon Coveney, T.D., at the launch of the Atlas of Commercial Fisheries around Ireland.

Photograph: Jason Clarke Photography

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UPFRONT

ThIS 40 km diameter feature in the Sahara Desert of Mauritania was once thought to have been formed by a meteor impact, but geologists now believe that the concentric bands were formed by erosion of a dome, thrust up by volcanic action. harder quartzite ridges were left to stand out against bands of softer rocks to create an enormous bull’s eye.

In this image captured by Japan’s ALOS satellite, wind blown sand can be seen encroaching onto the southern side, and to the north darker sedimentary rocks rise 200 metres above the surrounding sand.

Hearing loss worse at night

LOuD noise can damage hearing, and, as researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have found, the risk is higher at night.

Like many of our body functions, hearing is influenced by the biological clock, and the ability to carry out repairs depends on when the damage occurs.

The researchers made this discovery by studying the effect of noise on mice. Noise that would not cause problems during the day was found to result in hearing loss at night.

A growth hormone, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, is involved in repairing auditory nerve cells and, as the researchers observed, levels fluctuate during the day.

During the day, levels of this hormone increase in response to noise, but at night the protective response does not come into play.

The results of this study were published in the scientific journal Current Biology.

Spruce aphids

APhID insects have been feeding on forestry evergreen needles in Ireland. unlike the garden pest, Green Spruce Aphid, Elatobium abietinum, are active during winter months, and they feed on the sap of Spruce and Sitka needles.

Although the needles become discoloured and there can be a 7 per cent reduction in early timber growth, Teagasc reports that the aphid attacks are not usually a serious threat except when trees are already under stress. The aphids are attracted to the older needles, and this means that new growth is not affected.

Like the trees, the aphids are an import, and were first recorded here in 1914.

Stem cell success

SucceSS in treating an inherited bone disease with stem cells from a donor has been reported in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine. With the disease, Osteogenis imperfecta, bone breaks are frequent, and fractures even occur before birth.

A team of researchers from Sweden, Singapore and Taiwan have succeeded in treating two babies in utero with injections of bone-forming stem cells. The stem cells were extracted from the livers of genetically unmatched donors and there was no rejection, so the cells were accepted. Dr cecilia Götherström from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden said that the first treatment began in 2005 when a female foetus was given stem cells. The procedure was not initially a success and the girl suffered from repeated fractures. Then, at age eight, the girl was given fresh stem grafts from the same donor. According to the Karolinska Institutet, the girl can now dance and participates in Pe at school.

In another procedure, a female foetus from Taiwan was given the same kind of stem cell treatment. The girl had no problems until age one. At that stage, the researchers reported that her development “levelled off” so she was given a top up treatment. The girl, now aged four, has suffered no more fractures and is walking.

The condition is unusual, but the researchers were able to draw a comparison with a baby boy, born in canada, with the same disease-causing mutation as the Swedish girl. The boy received no stem cell treatment and was born with extensive bone damage. The severity of his condition was such that his breathing was impaired, and he died within five months.

The original scientific paper can be accessed at Stem Cells Translational Medicine — http://stemcellstm.alphamedpress.org/

DNA going astray

SOMeTIMeS fragments of a dividing chromosome end up outside he nucleus. Normally this does not happen, but according to researchers at the Salk Institute in california, things can go wrong, and the chromosomes might not divide evenly, so one set ends up short and the other has extra material. These odd chromosomes can then acquire their own nuclear membrane and take up residence outside the nucleus.

In a study of these fragments, termed micronuclei, Prof Martin hetzer from Salk’s Molecular and cell Biology Laboratory, reported that more than 60 per cent of these are highly dysfunctional and their presence is linked to some forms of cancer. The researchers suggest that these micronuclei are likely to play a more active role in the development of cancers than previously thought. Furthermore, detection of these micronuclei could become an important biomarker for many common solid tumours, including those in lung cancer.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 6

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UPFRONT

Inner space for astronauts To survive in space, astronauts have to learn what it is like to live without the everyday comforts and contacts that most of take for granted. To help make these adjustments, astronauts in training are send off to some of the most isolated places on Earth such as the deep limestone caves of Sardinia. The extensive Sa Grutta caves have become a

training location for the European Space Agency, because, as their head of training Hans Bolender explained, this is where astronauts can gain first-hand experience of conditions they will encounter in space. There is no day or night, there is sensory deprivation, minimal hygiene, and tasks require close collaboration with others as a team.

Crystallography congress 19th September 2014

The Institute of Chemistry of Ireland is to mark the International Year of Crystallography with a day-long congresss, hosted jointly by the University of Limerick and Limerick Institute of Technology, on 19th September 2014. A day-long programme with presentations by leading international experts will follow Prof Michael Zaworotko’s keynote talk on “101 years of X-ray diffraction and still going strong.”

During the conference, a travelling exhibition, Le Voyage dans le Cristal, with panels displaying information about crystals will be on display at Limerick Institute of Technology.

For more information

www.chemistryireland.org/html/events.html SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 7

Every year astronauts from all around the world take part in this training. After initial training in the use of climbing and caving equipment, teams of six astronauts are sent off for a week in inner space.

Fresh water

For some islands the saying, ‘surrounded by water but not a drop to drink’ is not always true. As geologists from NUI Galway found, some inhabitants of the Aran Islands have been drawing an abundance of fresh water from an underground river.

The limestone islands are an extension of the Burren karst landscape, and the geologists concluded that underground channels must extend for a long distance out into Galway Bay. Dr Tiernan Henry, from NUI Galway, observed that wells on Inishmaan that tap into these undersea rivers produce more water than rain falls on the island.

9th to 16th Nov 2014

The power of science is all around us. We see, hear, touch, taste and experience the wonder of science every day. From the electricity that lights and heats our homes, to smartphones that connect us to family and friends, to robots that carry out intricate surgery, and space technology that reveals the secrets of the cosmos – science empowers us to shape every aspect of our world. Thanks to the power of science we can improve our health and wellbeing, explore new worlds, and make our world a better place; the only limits are those we imagine!

Coordinated by SFI Discover, the education and public engagement programme of Science Foundation Ireland, Science Week runs this year from 9th – 16th November and is a collaboration of events run by schools, teachers, colleges, students, researchers, companies, libraries and community groups throughout Ireland.

The aim of the week-long festival is to promote the relevance of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) to our everyday lives and to demonstrate their importance to the future development of Irish society and to the economy.

Event organisers are welcome to use the theme ‘The Power of Science’ to inspire some ideas of fun activities and events – however, the theme is not obligatory – all events are welcome!

Check out www.ScienceWeek.ie for more information. Connect with us on Twitter @ScienceWeek and on www.facebook.com/ScienceWeekIreland and use the hashtag #SciWk2014 to join in the conversation (and the fun!)

SFI Funded Research Centres SuPPORTINg STEM EDuCATION IN IRElAND In 2013 SFI launched 7 funded Research Centres across Ireland.

These centres are hubs of innovative research across a broad variety of specialisations including materials science, pharmabiotics and data analytics. One of the key elements of the Centres is to run a comprehensive education and public engagement programme.

Each Centre has developed exciting and innovative education and public engagement activities for all ages to help instil an interest among the Irish public in STEM research.

AMBER (Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research) is one such centre, which has developed exciting and accessible education resources for both primary and second level on nano and materials science. Nanoscience is the study of materials on the nanoscale

or 100,000 times smaller than a single human hair. It is leading to the revolution of materials and manufacturing, with applications across a range of industries including energy; medical devices; pharmaceuticals; technology and bioengineering.

Their primary school programme, NanoWow, is aimed at 5th and 6th class students and is linked to the existing primary science and maths syllabus while also including environment, history and art.

The lessons will enable school children to understand how the properties of materials can change on the nanoscale and provide opportunities for them to work like scientists through discussion, investigations and activities. Find out more at http://ambercentre.ie/ education/#nanowow.

If you are interested in this or any other of the seven research centres and would like more information please visit the Research Centres page on http://www.sfi.ie/investments-achievements

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Bear divergence

UPFRONT

Polar Bears and Brown Bears are closely related, and they only diverged into separate species less than 500,000 years ago.

Scientists from DCU and Maynooth were involved in international collaboration to sequence and compare the genes of both species.

In the journal Cell, the researchers highlight the rapid adaption of Polar Bears to a blubber-rich diet. Although Polar Bears survive on a blubber-rich diet, they do not suffer the sort of illeffects that would affect humans.

Dr Mary O’Donnell from DCU said that her particular interest is in genetic changes that confer advantages, such as resistance to certain diseases. As she remarked, obesity and high cholesterol diets are normal for PolarBbears, yet these would be lethal for us. So, in diverging from Brown Bears, what adaptive changes were made?

The divergence began some time between 343,000 and 479,000 years ago, and this coincided with a 50,000 interglacial period. Milder conditions would have encouraged brown bears to move north, but with the return of a colder climate, the

There are a number of Brown Bear sub-species spanning both sides of the Atlantic, this one is the North American Grissly, U artos horribilis with its characteristic hump.

Polar Bears at play. Photograph Brocken Inaglory northern population would have been forced to adapt or die out.

As northern regions begin to warm up again, the Brown Bears are making a return, and occasionally they interbreed with the Polar Bears, producing hybrids, known as pizzlies.

Crop sharing

GrOwInG enough to eat can be difficult when our crops are being shared by wildlife.

There has alwas been a tussle between our own needs and those of wildlife, but in some countries, crop losses have a much bigger impact on humans. researchers from TCD’s School of Geography report that light-fingered chimps are making life difficult for subsistence farmers in western Rwanda. In a paper published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife, Shane McGuinness notes that it comes as no surprise that other primates like to take their share of crops that humans cultivate to feed themselves.

However, people in this area are already hard pressed to feed themselves, and apart from having to keep watch, they have had to reduce cultivation of valuable crops such as maize, beans and other staples.

According to the study, farmers who have to guard the crops at night are also being exposed to mosquitos and eel-worms, so in addition to loss of nutrition, there has been a rise in diseases such as malaria and elephantiasis.

One of the dilemmas for local inhabitants is that the chimps may be thieves, but they also attract tourists. As the paper points out, the need is to strike a balance between conservation and protection of the local people.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 9

Common cause

THe same underlying mutation appears to be involved in schizophrenia and autism.

According to Prof Aiden Corvin, lead author in a paper in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, these neurodevelopment disorders were seen as different diseases, but they may have a common underlying cause.

The researchers, from TCD and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in the USA, sequenced the genes of 171 Irish individuals from familes where at least one member was affected with schizophrenia.

New mutations were identified in those with schizoprenia. The mutations, which influence the expression of other genes have also been shown to be inplicated in autism and intellectual disability.

As Prof Corvin observed, identifying a common underlying mechanism could point the way to more effective treatments of these conditions.

One atom thick

PrOf Valeria nicolosi, working at TCD’s nanotechnology institute, is developing techniques to produce materials that are just one atom thick. Her project, on ultrasonic spray deposition, has been awarded european research Council funding so that one-dimensional materials can be used to make high performance supercapacitors. As she explained, further advances in energy storage systems depend on developing robust and stable materials with a high surface area. One-dimensional materials meet all the desired requirements.

snakebites

Caught in the act, a rare species of bat goes fishing.

Photograph: Antton Alberdi, UPV/EHU

Fishing bats

BATS detect insects during fligh by the bounce back of sound waves, and it was commonly assumed until now that the reliance on echolocation would exclude fish from the diet. However, as Ostaizka Aizpurua, a researcher at the UPV/EHUUniversity of the Basque Country discovered, the Long-Fingered Bat, Myotis capaccinii, is well equipped to catch fish. Ostaizka became interested in this particular bat because is is an endangered species, so knowing more about its habits would help bring it back from the brink of extinction.

The bat occurs in a small number of niches in the Mediterranean region, but unless it can be protected the bats may disappear. Until scientists began to study this species, no one knew that it fed on fish as well as insects. The first clue to this was the discovery of fish scales in bat droppings. Apart from coming as a complete surprise, Aizpurua said the bat, at up to 10 grams in weight, is so small that no one could have thought it would be able to catch fish.

In another curious twist to the discovery, the researchers found that the bats were consuming an invasive fish species, Gambusia holbrooki. This species was introduced to the Mediterranean in the 1920s to combat plagues of insects, but it has since become invasive. One of the unresolved mysteries now is what did the bats fish for before the arrival of the invasive species?

By fitting four of the bats with tiny radio transmitters the researchers also succeeded in capturing a spectacular record of them fishing.

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Up to 5 million people a year are bitten by venemous snakes, and between 94,000 and 125,000 die as a result. Treatment by injection of an antivenom is expensive, so those who survive can face years of debt.

In 2011, Dr Matthew Lewin from the Californian Academy of Science began to investigate if a less costly alternative could be developed. Instead of injections, it was thought that a drug, neostigmine, used against a relatively rare neuromuscular disease, could be administered as a nasal spray.

A group of scientists from the Californian Academy and Trinity College Dublin conducted a series of tests on mice to see if this approach could help them survive injections of Indian cobra snake venom.

The results, published in the Journal of Tropical Medicine, indicated that this form of treatment was effective in helping the mice overcome otherwise fatal exposure to snake venom.

Treatment of a single snakebite victim in India was also successful. Dr Stephen P Samuel, a visiting research fellow at TCD’s School of Medicine and Dr C Soundara Raj from the Hospital at Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu in India reported that the spray had been used successfully on a women who had been bitten by a snake. After receiving conventional treatment, the patient remained in disresss, but within half an hour of receiving the antiparalytic nasal spray she had recovered.

Responding with a nasal spray would be a lot easier, cheaper and, it appears, more effective than the standard treatment. As Dr Lewin from the Californian Academy observed, the nasal spray approach would make a huge difference to the 98 per cent of those who cannot afford conventional treatment.

Marine sampling

A mOdULE on marine biological sampling and data collection is on offer to graduate and postgraduate students.

The module, which runs from 29th September to 24th October is being run by GMIT and the Strategic Marine Alliance for Research and Training. The module involves four days on board the Celtic Voyager and Celtic mist together with lab work at GMIT. Details from — www.smartseaschool.com/AmBS

The elusive Pine MarTen The Pine Marten, Martes martes, is one of Ireland’s most elusive native mammals, seldom seen and apparently much less common now than in the past. In Irish the Pine Marten was Cat Crainn, ‘cat of the tree’, and a number of Irish place names, such as Carrickacat in Mayo and Carrigacat in Cork suggest that this animal was a familiar sight.

Scientists from NUI Galway and Waterford Institute of Technology have been studying this mammal and they report that protection, introduced in the 1970s, has helped the population to recover, especially in the midlands.

Dr Emma Sheehy and Dr Colin Lawton who led the study said that Pine Martens had come under considerable pressure from hunting, persecution and loss of forest habitat. Pine Martens are slow to breed, so, as they point out it can take a long time for the population to recover.

Pine Martens are quite ferocious hunters and they include other mammals such as squirrels in their diet. The researchers found that woodmice were the most frequently consuned mammal, and it appears that Pine Martens have a slight preference for Grey rather than Red squirrels. One reason for this, said the researchers, is that the Red Squirrel have been co-existing with tree-climbing predators for much longer than the more recent to arrive Greys.

One of the reasons why Pine Martins are not often seen is that they are solitary and both males and female maintain sizable territories. They only come together to breed, and the female is peculiar in that she can, like the Australian kangaroo, put development of the foetus on hold until conditions improve.

Although shy, Pine Martens can take up residence close to humans, and if left in peace they can become quite tame.

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Three parents

UPFRONT

WHilE we inherit characteristics from both parents our energy producing mitochondria come only from our mothers. Thus, if the mother has a genetic defect involving the mitochondria, it will be passed on to the next generation. inherited mitochondrial disorders, occuring in about one in every 10,000 humans cause a number of diseases, all of which are currently impossible to treat.

To prevent this happening, scientists have found that it is possible to clear out the defective mitochondria in the mother’s egg and transfer the nucleus to an egg from a healthy donor.

Thus, a baby, free from the mitochondrial defect, can be the product of three parents.

The success of this experimental technique has led some scientists in the UK to declare that treatment to eliminate inherited mitochondrial defects should be available to the public within the next few years.

However, researchers at the VeterinaryMedicine University in Vienna (Vetmeduni) have observed that elimination

Making memories

MaD-CoW disese has given prions a bad name, as they cause ptotein molecules to fold into detructive shapes.

However, the same sort of shape-changing behaviour can also be of benefit to us. Researchers at the Stowers Institute in California have found that prion-like proteins have a role in creating and maintaining long-term memory.

Dr Kausik Si, who led the study, reports that the ability of prions to continue converting proteins into a different shape appears to play an essential role. in a disease situation, this is why prions are so lethal, but in long-term memory formation, this is just the sort of mechanism that is needed to avoid loss as cell proteins age.

The findings came to light first in a study of memory persistence in fruit flies. In 2012 Dr Si’s group found that a prion-forming protein, orb2, is required for long-term memory forming. In flies that have a mutation that prevents formation of orb2, memories only remain intact for a day, and within three days are gone completely.

Although the study was on fruit flies, Dr Si points out that similar prion-forming proteins exist in humans, and that it has been found that proteins closely related to orb2 are involved in strengthening synaptic connections. Such strengthening between nerves is generally understood to underlie memory formation.

The process of orb2 formation is highly regulated, and in some way, the nervous system can determine when and where it is formed. This is of critical importance as once this happens, the folding process continues.

Succeeding abroad

in ireland commercial forestry is dominated by Sitka Spruce, a non-native that originated in north america. Sitka grows well in irish conditions, and researchers in Sweden have found that another exotic, lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta, also thrives far from its original home.

Scientists from the Swedish University of agricultural Science were curious to know why these non-natives do so well, and after carrying out a series of growing trials they concluded that a difference in soil microorganisms have given the exotics a boost. it is thought that growth is restrained in the original home by certain soil

of defective mitochondria is not that easy to achieve. as Jorg Burgstaller, one of the researchers in Vienna, reports, mitochondria proliferate at different rates, and one group can end up outcompeting the other. in studying proliferation of mitochondria in the eggs of mice, Jorg and his colleagues found that when two types of mitochondria were present, one type eventually took over.

Because of this, researchers may have one more problem to overcome before the three-parent treatment can work as planned. in every nuclear transfer, a small number of defective mitochondria manage to come across, and because they are genetically more closely related to the mother, it is possible that they proliferate to outnumber those from the healthy donor. Until the latest research, it was assumed that the small number of defective passengers could simply be dismissed as contamination.

Getting a close match between the genetic make up of the mother and the donor, suggest the researchers, might help to solve that problem.

Stem cells and spinal cord injuries

Spinal cord injuries are usually serious because transmission of nerve impulses are interrupted. Reconnecting the neurones is a challenge that scientists have been battling to overcome, and the usual view is that the formation of scar tissue adds to the problems. The body’s normal response to injury is to form a protective layer of scar tissue to contain the damage. Scientists, up to now, assumed that in the case of spinal cord injuries, this sealing off process meant that no further intervention would be possible.

However, a team of scientists at the Karolinska institutet in Sweden, have found that this is not an all-or-nothing case. in a paper published in Science, the researchers report that preventing scar tissue from forming can actually be counterproductive. Stem cells within the spinal cord form the scar tissue, and when these were silenced in mice, the injury spread resulting in a further loss of nerve cells. Furthermore, prof Jonas Frisén from the institute’s Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, reported that the stem cells, already present in the spinal cord, help the damaged nerve cells to recover.

Earlier studies had suggested that transplanting stem cells to the injury site would be effective, but according to these researchers a better approach would be to stimulate the spinal cord’s own population of stem cells.

To view a video on this research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2i3FD1ug6w&feature=y outu.be microorganisms, and when lodgepole pine is planted abroad, these inhibitors are absent.

Michael Gundale and his colleagues from the Swedish University of agricultural Science scientists planted lodgepole pines in sterilized and unsterilized soils, and found that the best results were obtained with soils inoculated with naturally occurring Swedish biotica.

The absence of inhibiting microorganisms would explain why some species do so well when moved far from their original environment. improved performance is welcomed by farmers and foresters, but for the same reason, other exotics can become pests.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 64 Page 12

Nanotechnology on the menu

W

hile the term nanotechnology has become familiar to all, few think of it in connection with food. Yet, the food we eat has been formed naturally from molecular components, many of which could, because they can be measured in nanometres, be classed as nanoparticles.

What is new is our increasing ability to manipulate these tiny particles, and while nature builds up from the bottom, we have developed applications based on building from the top down. Homoginisation of milk, in which particles of fat are reduced in size and dispersed evenly throughout the liquid, is a long established example of this approach, as is grinding of sugar and flour.

However, over the past few years, explained Maeve Henchion from Teagasc, our capacity to apply nanotechnology has advanced far beyond traditional processes. Nanotechnology, she said, can be used to change texture, reduce dependence on fats, or show when food is no longer good to eat. In agriculture, nano encapsulation can be used for controlled release of fertilizers, and in much the same way, health-enhancing pro-biotics or anti-microbials could be incorporated into foods.

While these developments hold out much promise, and scientists are busy on research, Maeve said is important not to simply assume that consumers will be equally enthusiastic about the application of nanotechnology, especially in connection with food.

As a social scientist, Maeve knows that rushing ahead with new developments without paying sufficient attention

Website: www.teagasc.ie

to consumer concerns can be counterproductive. Consumers, she said, tend to be cautious, and failure to heed their opinions in advance of launch onto the market is more than likely to lead to blanket rejection of anything new.

On a number of fronts Teagasc researchers have been working on nanotechnology, and as Maeve explained, this is why a study of consumer attitudes to these developments was launched.

The project, funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine, involved collaboration between Teagasc, University College Cork and Dublin Institute of Technology.

The results of this study, she said, will help scientists to focus on those developments that are more likely to be acceptable to consumers.

Nanotechnology can be applied in many different ways, so presenting questions in a way that consumers could understand was quite a challenge. This Maeve Henchion, below, has been assessing consumer reactions using realistic looking nano-inside and nano-outside products, above.

was overcome by creating realistic looking cheese and pre-packed chicken products.

These hypothetical products were shown to 1046 adult shoppers, representing a cross-section of typical Irish consumers.

As Maeve explained, the cheese was an example of “nano inside” and the wrapping around the chicken was “nano outside”. Thus, while nanotechnology was involved in reducing the fat content of the cheese, nanotechnology was only applied in the outside packaging of the chicken.

As might be expected, consumers were more likely to accept “nano outside”, but as Maeve explained, decisions were influenced by a number of factors, such as trust in regulations and price. Also, consumers have different attitudes, some being well-informed, others highly suspicious of anything new, and, as the survey found, a smaller number of people appear to have already made up their minds on where they stand.

In forming an opinion, said Maeve, there was usually a trade-off between negative reservations and perceived benefits, and that could vary between individuals. For some consumers, lower fat would make them accept nanotechnology, while others were more influenced by price.

To ensure that questions could be understood, said Maeve, in-depth discussion were held before the survey with 47 consumers. Participants were briefed beforehand on the basics of nanotechnology and food scientists took part in these discussions to clarify any points.

As Maeve pointed out, only 7 per cent of those surveyed were previously aware of potential nanotechnology applications in food. Thus, there is, what she termed ‘an information deficit’ and because of this there are concerns about consumers forming an attitude about something they don’t yet know much about.

The potential benefits from nanotechnology are substantial, trust in regulatory authorities is high, but unless there is meaningful engagement with the public during development, industry could find it difficult to launch new products.

As Maeve commented, “you don’t want to head into problems,” adding that “it’s also a matter of being responsible.”

Dr. How's

Science Wows!

What is a Volcano?

Junior science by Dr. Naomi Lavelle

A volcano is a hole in the Earth‛s crust.

...exploring Volcanoes!

Let‛s learn more!

The word Volcano comes from Vulcan - the Roman god of fire

Classifying volcanoes Volcanoes can be classed as... active (erupt regularly) dormant (have erupted within recorded hitory but not of late) extinct (have not erupted within recorded history) They can also be defined by their shape: shield volcanoes are dome shaped cinder cone volcanoes have erupted from one single vent strato or compsite volcanoes are tall with layers of magma and rock

Scientists that study Volcanoes are called Vulcanologists Most volcanoes occur at weak spots in the Earth‛s crust

Did you know... pumive is a type of volcanic rock, formed when frothy lava cools quickly?

What comes out of an erupting volcano?

When a volcano erupts it spews out hot liquid rock, dust, ash, rocks and poisonous gases Volcanic bombs Magma is hot are hot lumps of liquid rock contained molten rock shot out under the Earth‛s of a volcano when it surface. erupts. As they shoot When magma escapes into the air they from a volcano cool and fall it is called to Earth as lava. solid rock Did you know... the largest volcanic bombs recorded were from the eruption of Mount Asama in Japan and were up to six metres in diameter?

Some volcanoe history

Did you know... the largest volcano on Earth is thought to be Tamu Massiff off the coast of Japan?

Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii, Italy erupted in 79 AD killing all the inhabitants of the city. Everyhing was covered in a thick layer of ash preserving the scene as a snapshot in time The last super volcano to erupt was Toba on Summatra in Indonesia, 74,000 years ago . It spewed so much volcanic ash into the air that it blotted out the Sun, causing a volcanic winter that lasted nearly six years Krakatoa in Indonesia erupted in 1883 spewing hot ash more than 50km into the air. The force of the explosion was heard as far away as Australia and caused a tsunami

Olympus Mons Image Credit: NASA

The VEI scale ranges from 0 to 8; volcanic eruptions of 8 are called super volcanoes

Experiments you can try

Make your own volcano

Scientists use a scale of stength of volcanic eruption called the Volcanic Explosive Index (VEI)

Pumice is a very light rock, it can float on water!

The largest volcano in our solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars. It is slightly narrower than Tamu Massiff but has a larger overall mass

Make your own volcano

You will need.. You will use the jar as the volcano. If you an empty jar, vinegar, want to make it look more realistic bread soda, water, you can covering it in modelling clay, a volcano and let this washing up liquid, shaping it like dry overnight. food colouring, make the volcano erupt, first add modelling someTowater So what is into the jar (about one third full). happening? clay Add a big squirt of washing up liquid and a few drops of red food colouring.

The vinegar and bread Add one large tablespoon of bread soda and stir well. Place soda react to form carbon the volcano in a clear plastic basin or deep tray. Finally add dioxide gas. This gas gets vinegar, to about nearly the top of the jar. Stand back and trapped in bubbles formed watch the fun! To get the volcano going again just add more by the washing up liquid vinegar and bread soda! making the lava appear thick and foamy.

If you want to know HOW something works why not write to Dr. How and ask? Send your e-mail to naomi@sciencespin.com

SCIENCE, ENGINEERING and TECHNOLOGY CAREERS Job Title: Chemical Engineer Location: Cork A Chemical Engineer is required for a multinational blue chip pharmaceutical company based in Cork. The facility is a leading API producing site and is currently undergoing expansion.

Experience in Chemical Engineering within the Pharmaceutical or Biopharmaceutical industry is required. Candidates should have experience in lean systems, providing technical support to process teams, scale up and installation of new processes.

Proficiency in troubleshooting, strong analytical and problem solving skills are preferred and excellent communication skills are key for the role. For more information please contact Jenny Hill at 01-6146194 or at jenny.hill@cpl.ie.

Job Title: Director Process Science Location: Limerick A biopharmaceutical company in the South West is seeking a Director for the Process Sciences Department of their new Drug Substance facility. The successful candidate will have extensive experience in technical services, technical transfer and process robustness of Biopharmaceutical Drug Substance processes and will have experience leading process sciences teams. The ideal candidate will have experience in mammalian cell culture products and have in excess of 10 years’ experience managing all facets of commercial scale processes. For more information please contact Killian Maher at 01-6146008 or at killian.maher@cpl.ie

Job Title: Process Development Chemist Location: Cork An API production facility in Cork is seeking a Process Development Chemist to develop API production processes in order to reduce costs and increase yields. The ideal candidate will hold a PhD in Organic Chemistry and have experience working in a GMP lab environment. Candidates will need to have experience in lab based skills including synthetic chemistry and have experience in analytical techniques. Candidates who are proficient in troubleshooting, have strong analytical and problem solving skills are preferred. Excellent communication skills are required. For more information please contact Jenny Hill at 01-6146194 or at jenny.hill@cpl.ie

Job Title: Senior QC Team Lead Location: Dublin A Pharmaceutical company the Dublin area are seeking a Senior QC Team Lead to work within the laboratory and lead and coach a team of quality analysts. This role will involve carrying out supervisory duties, alongside completing performance appraisals, training staff and recruitment selection. The ideal candidate will come from an oral solid dosage background and have experience in HPLC, Dissolution, UV-Vis and a range of analytical techniques.

The candidate must have a minimum of five years’ experience and must be self-motivated. For more information please contact Ciara Murphy on 01-6146121 or at Ciara.murphy@cpl.ie

Job Title: Quality Engineer Location: Cork A Quality Engineer is required for a diagnostics facility, based in Cork. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer complaints from a quality perspective. Further to experience in complaints management, the successful candidate will have worked on CAPAs, deviations and investigated root cause. It is a requirement for the individual to have excellent communication skills, a diplomatic nature and excellent attention to detail. The successful candidate will hold a degree in a relevant scientific/ engineering field. For more information please contact Stephanie Gallagher at 01-6146082 or at stephanie.gallagher@cpl.ie

Job Title: Asst. Contract Manufacturing Compliance Manager Location: Dublin A Dublin based pharmaceutical company is seeking an Assistant Contract Manufacturing Compliance Manager for their sterile contract manufacturing partners. The role will involve auditing sterile manufacturing facilities in both the EU and globally. The role will involve significant travel to these sites. Suitable candidates must have experience in Quality Assurance in a sterile manufacturing environment; experience of internal and external auditing is a pre-requisite. For more information please contact Aileen Cahill at 01-6146007 or aileen.cahill@cpl.ie .

Job Title: Inhalation Manager & Group Leader Location: Athlone An expanding Contract Research Facility in the midlands is seeking an Inhalation Manager and Group leader for their inhalation laboratory. The successful candidate will have experience in management; for the manager role this will be of at least 25 analysts. Previous experience in testing inhalation products is an absolute necessity for this this role, candidates without this experience will not be considered. Further to inhalation techniques the successful candidates will have experience in HPLC, GC, IR and a range of analytical techniques.

For more information please contact Ciara Murphy at 01-614121 or at ciara.murphy@cpl.ie

Job Title: QC Biologics Manager Location: Dublin A new Biopharmaceutical Laboratory is seeking a manager for the QC Lab. The ideal candidate will have substantial (8+ years) management experience in QC, additionally they will have extensive bioassay and other biologics related experience. Candidates will have experience in ELISA, SDS Page, Electrophoresis and a range of techniques in both routine testing and analytical services. For more information please contact Killian Maher at 01-6146008 or at killian.maher@cpl.ie

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 64 Page 15

Marine landslides

Landslides are common on land, but more of them occur under the sea and when steep banks slide, the water above can up rise up into a tsunami. Tom Kennedy reports that a team of scientists from Ireland will be on board the Celtic Explorer to see if we should be concerned about the collapse of scarps along the deep Rockall Trough in the north Atlantic

T

hirty-five years ago a major construction project in France ended in disaster as a large segment of the airport and adjoining harbour at Nice slid into the sea. Afterwards it was concluded that the collapse, killing eleven people, began as clay, saturated by heavy rains, began to creep. The undersea slope, averaging 11 degrees, was already top-heavy and unstable, and when it suddenly gave way, the sub-marine avalanche continued cutting back. The collapse generated a two to three metre high tsumani, and almost four hours later the flow of debris cut the first submarine cable over 80 km away, and four hours later, a second cable was overcome.

Compared to some past events, such as the Storegga Slide off Norway 8,000 years ago, the avalanche at Nice was modest. In one massive slide, along 290 km of coastal shelf, about 3,300 cubic kilometres of material collapsed, generating a gigantic tsunami that rose to 20 metres in the Shetlands and in Scotland, reached 80 km inland.

Steep slopes and deep valleys often exist offshore such as these submarine canyons off the Catalan coast. Image: Spanish Institute of Oceanography, University of Barcelona.

Dr Aggeliki Georgiopolou, lecturer in sedimentology at University College Dublin, explained that undersea landslides are actually quite common, but unless they are really big, we are not aware of them. Sometimes a tsunami is assumed to have been caused directly by an earthquake, was, in fact generated by an undersea landslide. This turned out to be the case in Papua New Guinea where a magnitude 7 earthquake in 1988 was followed by a 15 metre high tsunami that leveled villages, destroyed buildings and left 2,200 dead. At first it was thought that a two metre drop in the Pacific plate was responsible, but further investigation, said Dr Georgiopolou revealed that a tsunami of this size would only have been generated by a sub-marine landslide.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 16

Some time later, when the seafloor was being mapped, the landslide large enough to have caused the tsunami indeed was found.

Likewise, the fatalities and disruption of communications at Grand Banks, Canada in 1929 were not due to the 7.2 magnitude earthquake, but to a marine landslide.

As Dr Georgiopolou remarked, marine landslides are likely to occur in many parts of the world, and one of the aims of her research is to help identify such areas and assess the risks they pose. In many parts of the world the likelihood of a marine landslide occurring is not known, she said, simply because no seabed surveys have been carried out. In some areas the chances of being overwhelmed by a tsunami could be quite high, yet the level of risk is not known. Heavily populated and flood prone Bangladesh, for example, is on a great delta, and as sedimentary deposits continue to accumulate, top-heavy off-shore scarps could suddenly collapse.

Lying between two steep slopes, the three-km deep Trough channels a stream of water up one side before turning anti-clockwise to flow against the Rockall Bank.

Dr Georgiopolu’s focus is on the Rockall Trough, bordered on both sides by steep slopes and extending for hundreds of km in the north Atlantic.

This area was charted during the Irish National Seabed Survey, the joint Geological Survey of Ireland/Marine Institute project that mapped out the furthest reaches of Ireland’s extensive marine territory.

This summer, Dr Georgiopolou and her colleagues from UCD will be on board the Irish research vessel, Celtic Explorer, to examine the steep slopes bordering this deep trough.

As Dr Georgiopolou explained in a recent UCD Earth Institute seminar, currents move through this trough in a counter-clockwise direction. After splitting, one branch of the current coming up from the south sweeps around the slopes. This is a dynamic undersea landscape with areas of deposition and areas of depletion. With rapid deposition of sediments, the slopes become unstable, and the steep-sided scarps, discovered during deep water surveying show where these have collapsed.

The collapse, said Dr Georgiopolou, can be big or small, and it is a fairly complex process that changes as the slide progresses downslope. A slide can be plastic or fluid, and if it takes in seawater

Cores taken from deposits show how sediments have been deposited. Changes in succession can show when landslides occurred in the past. it becomes more turbulent. The slope is also a factor, and as Dr Georgiopolou explained, collapse can occur on falls of just one degree, and the slide can continue on as an accumulation zone stretching out for hundreds of km.

Once a slope becomes unstable, said

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 17

Dr Georgiopolou, a landslide can be triggered by a number of things, and in many cases there is a combination of influences. Undercutting, she said, is the most obvious cause, and the collapse is often triggered by an earthquake. For this reason, volcanic islands frequently collapse because they become top-heavy.

A change in sea level can destabilise slopes, and as Dr Georgiopolou explained, a rise in sea level would have the same effect as adding sediment. The sea bed itself may rise or fall, and the melting of ice is thought to have been one of the factors that led to the Storegga Slide.

Scarps show that marine landslides occur frequently and will continue to do so, but what Dr Georgiopolou would like to know is how big these events have been in the past and should we be concerned that a massive event is likely to send a wave of destruction our way soon.

What is difficult to determine, said Dr Georgiopolou, is whether these events happen in stages or if everything comes down in one gigantic landslide.

The bigger slides are the worry because they are the ones that generate the giant tsunamis. However, landslides are more likely to occur in stages, and this has been compared to tossing stones into water

From Varnes D J, “Landslides analysis and conrol, transportation research board special report, 1978�

Secondary scarps and creeping of soft sediment

De

ple

Co n

fin e

tio

nz on

e

Rotational slumps

Ac cu

ds

lid

mu

es

(retrogressive failure)

lat

ion De

bri

De

bri

s fl

ow s

s fl

ow s

Unc onfi ned

slid

es

A generalised diagram of landslide slope movement

rather than creating one big splash with a giant boulder.

By drilling down and pulling up cores, scientists can look along the succession of deposits, and as Dr Georgiopolou explained, this provides information on how landslides have occurred in the past, and in turn this shows how they can be expected to behave in the future. Cores are taken towards the edge of deposits and this saves on having to drill deeper.

The cores have pelagic sediments, made up from the remains of organisms that have died and fallen to the sea floor, these can lie above and below coarser grained deposits, and these show where landslides occurred. By reading these cores, it is possible to work out how big the landslide was and if it took place in stages over an extended period of time.

Some years ago, cores were taken in the Rockall Trough during the Irish National Seabed Survey, and this summer more cores will be extracted. By comparing the old with the new, the team of researchers will be on the look-out for any significant short-term changes. Each specialist on the team will be looking at the cores from their own perspective, and while one of her colleagues, Ken Gavin, will be examining mechanical properties, Dr Georgiopolou will be paying special attention to the layers of weakness showing where landslides begin.

At present, our ability to predict

landscapes is quite limited, and while it is always possible that a big one will take us by surprise, uncertainty has led to some spectacular media-fuelled speculation on what would happen if 20 km3 of La Palma were to suddenly tumble into the Atlantic. One steep

side of this volcanic Canary Island is indeed known to be unstable, but studies of offshore sediments showing that previous slides occurred in stages shows that such a catastrophic collapse is highly unlikely to happen.

The Storegga slides, which occurred over 8000 years ago are among the largest known, and they involved the collapse of about 3,500 km3 of material. A build-up of Ice Age sediment caused an estimated 290 km of continental shelf off Norway to collapse. The tsunami produced by this event is thought to have been up to 20 metres high in places and by the time it hit Scotland it was 3.6 metres high. In Scotland debris from the tsunami has been found 80 km inland.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 18

Undersea landslides often occur near volcanoes because top-heavy loading leads to instability.

Modelling of Mount Etna in Sicily shows steep slopes offshore where landslides are likely to occur. Image, Felix Gross, Geomar.

StorieS about the ‘flood’ are universal and as old, if not older, than the Bible. How many of these inundations were caused by tsunamis is open to question, but one account, from 1014 AD, suggests that this may often have been the case. The Anglo-Norman historian, William of Malmesbury, reported that a flood of that year “grew to an astronishing size such as the memory of man cannot parallel, so as to submerge villages many miles inland and overwhelm and drown their inhabitants.”

While Professor Mike Baillie from Queen’s University Belfast has suggested that this particular flood may have been due to a meteor impact in the North Atlantic, a marine landslide could also have been responsible, and indeed events similar to the Storegga Slide are thought to occur off Norway about every 10,000 years.

Another tsunami that must have made a deep impression was generated 2,800 years ago by a 4 by 13 km Afen Slide, north-west of Scotland. This city sized block is though to have displaced 200 million cubic metres of sediment and no doubt the tsunami wiped out a number of coastal settlements.

A woodcut from a pamphlet published in 1602 following a “wonderful overflowing” in Norfolk.

Dr Aggeliki Georgiopolou, lecturer in sedimentology at University College Dublin, talks about marine landslides on our Science Spin YouTube video.

Visit www.sciencespin.com and click on the YouTube icon to view Dr Georgiopolou and others from our growing selection of videos.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 19

Sive Finlay introduces us to the slow moving sloth

Weird and wonderful animals

The Brown Throated Three-toed Sloth, Bradypus variegatus, from the Panama Republic.

Photograph: Stefan Laube, Wikipedia.

could be quite happy as a sloth.

I There’s a lot to be said for spending your days hanging around in South

American forests. Everything would happen at a very gentle and sedate pace and there would be plenty of time to take in the view. Then again, there are a few things which might take some getting used to; sloths aren’t exactly known for their personal hygiene and restricting answering calls of nature to weekly occasions may get uncomfortable…

There are six living species of sloth, all of which are medium-sized, tree-dwelling animals. These are divided into the twotoed Megalonychidae and the three-toed Bradypodidae (all species actually have three toes but the Megalonychidae have two fingers). They are the remnants of a much more extensive group which included ground sloths, some of which were as large as elephants. Sloths, along with anteaters, are part of the Pilosa order of mammals; from the Latin for “hairy”, a very befitting moniker.

Sloths’ hair caused a lot of confusion when the first stuffed specimens were brought to European

collections. In most mammals hair grows outwards towards the limbs. This growth pattern makes sense because it means that anything that touches the animal (rain, dirt, the petting attentions of an over-enthusiastic toddler) will run off the back and towards the ground. Sloths do things a bit differently: their hair grows inwards away from their limbs. This is a clever adaptation to their inverted way of life. Sloths spend so much time hanging upside down in trees that having hair growing in the “wrong” direction means that rainforest precipitation can roll off their backs.

Sloths have a famously slow pace of life. They have an energy-poor, leafy diet.

They have four-chambered stomachs and can take up to a month to digest one meal but even still they don’t manage to extract much energy from their diet.

As a result, sloths don’t have any energy to waste on unnecessary activities.

One casualty is personal grooming, alluded to by their many tribal names which translate as “dirty”. Sloths have a greenish appearance from the algae and symbiotic bacteria that call their hair home. However, instead

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 20

of being dirty side products of lapses in hygiene, these algae and bacteria are very important because they camouflage the sloths in their rainforest habitat and help them to hide from attacks by harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja). The bacteria are also food sources for the sloth moths (Bradipodicola hahneli) that live in sloths’ fur and also lay their eggs in sloth latrines.

On the subject of bodily functions, sloths do things differently too. They only visit the ground once a week to relieve themselves and it’s estimated that for the rest of the time up to a third of their body weight can be comprised of full stomachs and bowles. Sloths are at their most vulnerable to predators when they’re out of the trees so it makes sense to minimise time spent on the ground. However, it’s not clear why they don’t defecate from the trees. It might be because they don’t want to make noise that would draw attention to their position in the canopy.

Another possibility might be for social reasons. Sloths have a sense of smell which is far more developed than their sight or hearing. The pungent aromas of their latrines are unmistakable and seem to act as aromatic beacons for socialising and mating interactions.

Recent research from collaborators in Swansea University and Costa Rica’s Sloth Sanctuary has revealed yet another clever adaptation for minimising energy output. Sloths have thin, fibrous membranes which effectively tape their internal organs to their ribs and hips.

The researchers estimated that an upside down sloth would need to spend 7 to 13% more energy on breathing if they didn’t have this connective tissue to prevent the liver, stomach and kidneys from pressing down on their lungs. This doesn’t sound like a huge energy saving and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to more active animals that also hang upside down. The difference with sloths is that they have a very limited energy intake in their diet and almost no reserves to waste so even seemingly small savings are important.

When it comes to making energy savings as a sloth, every little helps…

Sive Finlay, a Zoology graduate, is currently working as a postgraduate scholar with the Macroecology and Macroevolution group at Trinity College Dublin.

Unravelling the story of DNA and RNA

At the prizegiving, from left, John Atkins, Research Professor at the Department of Biochemistry, University College Cork, Mary O’Donovan, director of West Cork Education Centre, Cormac Begley, Dr Venki Ramakrishnan, and joint winners, Rhoda Ekendayo and Nicola Reid.

F

or the second year running, students from around the country were invited to write an essay or compose a poem telling the story of DNA and RNA. The competition, initiated by John Atkins, Research Professor at the Department of Biochemistry, University College Cork, together with Dr J D Watson and West Cork Education Centre, was developed to stimulate interest in DNA, RNA and genetics research.

The competition celebrates the 60th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s distinctive molecular structure by J D Watson and F H Crick. Last year’s winners, Niamh Maher, Éabha Wall, Milly Smith and Cormac Farrelly were presented with prizes by J D Watson who was in Ireland to unveil a DNA and RNA sculpture at the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin.

This year another distinguished scientist, Dr Venki Ramakrishnan, who received a Nobel prize for his work on ribosome structure, presented the students with their awards at a ceremony at the National Botanic Gardens.

Rhoda Ekendayo and Nicola Reid shared the first prize and were followed by Cormac Begley, Rachel McPeake, and the Primary School award went to Asa Curran.

Rhoda Ekendayo, student at St Finian’s Community College, Swords, reflects on how we get so distracted by material things that do not really matter that we seldom stop and think of what makes us human.

Deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly known simply as DNA, she writes, is the essential constituent of all life, and it is this code that makes us different from a chimpanzee or dog. “As I began my research,” she wrote, “I began to realise that I had truly underestimated the complexity of DNA. Along with being a complex molecule it is potentially the most important molecule on planet Earth.”

As Rhoda found, all the characteristics that make her a unique person stem from

just 0.1 per cent of a difference in her DNA. “To think that only a miniscule fraction of my DNA has the capability to differentiate me from anyone and everyone else is mind boggling.”

Rhoda expresses amazement that this should be so, and at the same time is grateful that we are genetically so diverse.

“It is close to impossible for me to try and imagine or visualize what the world would be like without that 0.1 per cent difference.

How mundane, uninspiring and bleak life would be.” As Rhoda concluded, we should embrace our differences for they give us our individuality.

Nicola Reid, shared the first prize with Rhoda for her poem “The story of

DNA and RNA.” Nicola, a student at St Andrew’s College, Booterstown, Dublin unfolds a story of the young boy, so awfully small, who looked up to his dad, so awfully tall, as he asks ‘how did you grow, so awfully vast?’

With an engaging rhythm that would make a good rap, Nicola follows the dad’s answer explaining how ‘all living things are made up of cells, inside are strands, they’re kind of like spells.”

At the end of it all, the son goes wow, and dad exclaims that ‘now you know why it’s science I adore!’

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 21

ASPECTS OF IRISH GEOLOGY EXPLAINED — SIMPLY

Paddy Gaffikin on what we need to know about

IrIsh mInerals Go, my sons, buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth. Mark well the various kind of minerals, note their properties and their mode of origin.

Petrus Severinus, a Danish physician (1542-1602)

What are minerals?

A mineral is a naturally-occurring inorganic solid with a definite chemical composition. If a mineral can be mined profitably it is called an ore. An example of a mineral found in Ireland is sphalerite, also known as zinc blende, which has the chemical name zinc sulphide (ZnS). That is, each molecule of the mineral is composed of one atom of zinc combined with one atom of sulphur.

It is also an ore – the largest working zinc mine in Europe is at Navan in Co Meath where millions of tons of sphaleritebearing rock form an ore deposit.

The atoms of minerals are arranged in a regular pattern and this determines many of each mineral’s characteristic properties like crystal shape, cleavage (the way it breaks) and density. For instance the mineral halite (sodium chloride), also known as common salt, has a cubic crystal shape and cuboidal cleavage due to the arrangement of the sodium and chlorine atoms.

Note that ‘minerals’ in food supplements are not minerals in the strict sense; they are actually trace elements like zinc, potassium, calcium and so on.

Left: The mineral sphalerite (zinc sulphide) – dark coloured vein – lying between layers of the mineral quartz.

Below: Sphalerite crystals from Tynagh, Co Galway. (Photo: Dr N Moles, Brighton University.)

Difference between rocks and minerals

Most rocks are composed of a mixture of minerals that have crystallised together or lots of particles cemented or compacted together. For instance Mourne Granite is a rock mainly composed of the crystallised minerals quartz, feldspars and mica whereas Chalk is composed of tiny grains of calcite (calcium carbonate) that have been compacted together. Some rocks consist of one mineral, for example pure sandstone may be comprised of over 99 per cent quartz. However, this is still classed as a rock since the sandstone is made of lots of individual particles of quartz rather than a single crystal. Note that some rocks are not made of minerals as they are organic in origin – coal being an example.

A sample of Mourne Granite:the dark grey mineral is quartz. Right: A quartz mineral specimen (crystal).

Earliest mining for metals in Ireland

The Bronze Age succeeded the Stone Age. It is usually accepted that the Bronze Age in Ireland commenced around 4,500 years ago and ended circa 2,300 years ago (300 BC) to be followed by the Iron Age, which lasted until around 400 AD. As the name implies, the Bronze Age was the time when prehistoric people were able to produce bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin. During this period our ancient ancestors were firstly able to produce copper by heating a copper mineral, such as malachite, and cooling the molten residue. Furthermore, probably by experimentation, they found that they could manufacture a harder and more durable metallic substance, bronze, by mixing molten copper with a small amount of tin. The Bronze Age people in Ireland may have obtained the tin from indigenous sources such as the Mournes and other granite regions. Currently the geologists are investigating this. They are also researching that gold may have been

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 22

may have been recovered from river sediment in the Mournes as a by-product of a tin recovery methods known as streaming during the Bronze Age. This involved channelling water into streams where tin bearing sediments coud be collected. However, the best example of ancient workings in the Mournes is actually the Ballincurry River, which is outside the granite outcrop and has no tin enrichment. It is thought that this area was mined for gold, not as a by-product of tin streaming.

Bronze was used for making tools, weapons and ornaments and evidence of bronze working in Ireland exists in places like Co Antrim and Co Cork.

For example a casting workshop was discovered at White Park Bay, Co Antrim.

At Mount Gabriel, near Schull, Co Cork, over 30 small Bronze Age copper mines have been found in sandstone.

Minerals found in Ireland

Zeolites in Antrim Basalt.

The small cubes are chabazite and the larger crystals are apophyllite. (Photo: Dr N Moles, Brighton University.)

Ireland has a wide range of rocktypes and ore minerals. Some occur in substantial quantities like gypsum at Kingscourt, Co Cavan; zinc and lead ores at Navan, Co Meath and halite forms rock salt deposits at Kilroot, Co Antrim.

But small amounts of other minerals. for instance beryl, calcite, quartz, dolomite and zeolites also are present. Zeolite minerals, for example, highly valued by collectors, have been found in cavities in the Co Antrim Basalt.

Zeolite mineral (white) in the Antrim Basalt.

Two samples of gypsum, which is calcium sulphate dihydrate (CaSO4. 2H2O).

It can be scratched with the finger-nail – a characteristic test for gypsum.

Calcite crystals. Calcite is calcium carbonate (CaCO3). It can be scratched with a steel penknife but not with the finger-nail and this is one way to distinguish it from gypsum.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 23

How do minerals form?

In recent times, the Irish economy has greatly benefited from mining deposits of zinc and lead ores. These were concealed in the carboniferous limestones of Ireland’s central plain – for example at Navan, Co Meath and Tynagh, Co Galway. There is now good consensus among exploration geologists as to how mineral deposits of various types have formed. For instance it is now known that these zinc and lead deposits formed when the Earth’s crust, below central Ireland, was being stretched and faulted during the Carboniferous Period (around 340 million years ago).

At that time, Ireland was covered by a shallow sea. Hot fluids circulated deep within the crust and, when conditions were right, minerals like sphalerite and galena precipitated out of the fluids to be deposited on the sea floor or within the limestones below the sea bed.

The mineral galena, which is lead sulphide (PbS).

University.)

information, and why do our eyes sometimes deceive us?

Getting all emotional

Conservation of minerals

Where do we hide our fears, and why are children, and crocodiles, so emotional?

How to become smarter

If some people can be a bit slow, why are they often better at getting the right

THE SENSATIONAL BRAIN by VERONICA MILLER

What’s inside the box?

Dr Veronica Miller, Billions of neurons and up to 240 trillion connections researcher and writer, Galena from Conlig-Whitespots Mines, Co Memories are made of this Short recall is not much use to us without long term storage lifts Galena the lid on what Down. often occurs with sphalerite, Don’t upset the biological clock inside our Dr N What sets our internal clock and why the graveyard shift may be the death of you the goes ore ofon zinc.

(Photo: Moles, Brighton The sensational brain head We hear, we feel, we smell, we see, but how does the brain make sense of all this

THE SENSATIONAL

BRAIN What is it and how it works Dr Veronica Miller

YS

D

Since the Bronze Age, andanswers? arguably Out of our minds before, minerals have beenMadness extracted is hard to define but imaging makes it easier to spot what’s actually going wrong from the Earth and these have enhanced Getting high Why do people take drugs, and why are they so addictive? the lives of people. The Earth’s resources, Girl brain, boy brain Is there or does the sex of your brain matter? generally, have contributed toa difference, making our speciesAlbertine the dominant one on the V O E R Published in association ISC Kennedy Publishing SCIENCE with Ireland’s science Cloonlara, Swinford, Co Mayo.other Ireland. resources planet. However, as with and discovery magazine SPIN Science Spin ISBN 0 906002 16 8 from the Earth, mineral resources are finite. It is for our individual and collective that profligate Drbenefit Veronica Miller explains all you ever wanted to know about the brain consumption should be avoided and — what it is and how it works. Lots of facts without the jargon in a fully re-cycling becomes commonplace.

Removing minerals from the Earth in illustrated book that will appeal to everyone. vast quantities inevitably damages the environment – and this, ultimately, affects Dr Miller, who studied at TCD and UCD before before Have you ever wondered what’s inside the us all detrimentally.

ERIES

undertaking brain research in the UK is currently Research Assistant Professor at the Wadsworth Centre in New York.

box? Why do we get so upset by working odd hours, or what are memories actually made of?

Paddy Gaffikin is author of Irish Rocks, a Do boys really have different brains from girls, beginners guide to the common types of rock andthat is there anything we can do to become occur around Ireland. smarter? The answers are all here and lots more in this entertaining and highly informative book.

The Sensational Brain by Dr Veronica Miller Hardback, full colour, 160 pages. €25.00 Available now from www.sciencespin.com, GSI store, Amazon and independent bookshops.

A popular guide to the common types of rocks that occur around Ireland, from Cerebellum granular cells and white matter from an older man. the dark basalts of the north, glittering granites, quartzites M and grey limestones to the red sandstones of the south.

Paddy Gaffkin explains how these rocks came to be there and how to identify them.

COLOUR

INK

often be anuscripts can a traced back to stery through particular mona by the scribes. the inks used have been an analysis of of substances wide variety a m of flow, g writin For ements; freedo the basic requir Boiled tree found to meet permanency. rooms, high degree of by ink-cap mush clarity, and a ced produ mush yellow bark, the black ered root of the A owers, powd used. cornfl been from have blue bark even strong coffee flag iris, and winter blackened made from the glue. One black ink was with milk or mixed the twigs from oak galls, of blackthorn of ink was made oak trees. One type on comm d by insects on pounds of iron round balls forme , ration was five formula for prepa s of gum, 12 gallons of water pound galls. sulphate, five gallon of oak by volume, 12 12 gallons must and measuring h oak galls for s how big the Collecting enoug show just lt but it sive have been difficu even more exten an and On gum, was. lampblack and demand for ink dirty was made from although very scale Indian ink became a big, grained soot soot, lampblack, n Europe. The producing fine of south easter rs’ ink. industry in parts to make printe d linsee 63 was mixed with

The quality of medieval inks had to be high for manuscripts such as this to survive.

This is a page from a medical manuscript, the Book of the O’Lees, preserved at the Royal Irish Academy.

of how colours gives a good idea the colour from The colour wheel By subtracting opposite hue. relate to each other. wheel we get the one side of the

saturation, and Colour has hue, three dimensional brightness, and gh harder to modelling, althou ate to more accur visualise, led ication. systems of classif

Full colour with fold-out cover. 48pp.

COLOUR

The science and€9.00 art of colour explained Margaret Franklin and post free from by www.spinstore.eu Tom Kennedy. A colourful and informative paperback. €15 post free from www.sciencespin.com www.spinstore.eu

BOOKS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

cliff above against a granite schist lying up Vegetation covered Wicklow. is Lough Oular, Co ne Granite which

s oniferous plant

Carb

hibernicus, A. Palaeopteris Co Kilkenny. from Kiltorcan, loachitica, B. Alethopteris Tipperary.

Ballynstick, Co lonchilides, C. Alethopteris colliery, Co from Drumnagh Cork. dendron, D. Root of Lepido Laois.

Towerstown, Co Photographs: Tom

Kennedy.

tion is the Mour during initial event. The excep it developed n years old and to the melting only 55 millio , possibly due Atlantic Ocean basalts (see ding Antrim opening of the crust by the ascen ” earlier). of the Earth’s Rocks other Volcanic e in the base of granit “Basalts and n of hot molte of plates: The generation by the movement to driven is crustal plate sinks the Earth’s crust e, the over-ridden granite (see Figure where they collid liquid it melts to form they release extremely a depth where plates pull apart the crust it in turn melts 3). Where those mantle which the from hot basalt The granite with granite rocks. is well-endowed out from the Figure 15. Ireland northeast stands Mountains is the er — only 55 million years old. of the Mourne significantly young others in being

67

ROCK AROUND IRELAND

Peadar McArdle guides us around Ireland’s diversified geology.

Paperback €15 postfree from www.sciencespin.com

The aftermath of Fukushima It is now three years since a major tsunami engulfed the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan but, as Margaret Franklin reports, radiation leaks are still causing concern.

T

he tsunami caused the loss of 18,500 lives and the resulting floods left enormous devastation. It is important to point out that this would have happened even if there had been no nuclear power station in the vicinity. Unlike the disaster that occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, there were no deaths due to radiation in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. However, the long-term effects remain to be ascertained.

Here is a reminder of the sequence of events that occurred in Fukushima in 2011. On March 11th that year, an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale occurred about 100 kilometres north east of Japan. Earthquakes are common in Japan and the Fukushima power plant was designed to automatically shut down in the event of an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.5 on the scale. Three of the six nuclear reactors at the plant were operating at the time of the earthquake and the system functioned properly, the control rods came into play and all three fission reactors were shut down. At the same time, the emergency generators kicked in, providing power for the cooling system.

Cooling was necessary to avoid a meltdown, because even though the fission reaction had stopped, considerable heat was being generated by the radioactivity of the fission products.

The real damage was caused, not by the earthquake, but by the ensuing tsunami. This is a huge wave

that is produced when an earthquake occurs under the sea. In deep ocean water, a tsunami has an extremely long wavelength of about 200 km from crest to crest, but with a relatively small amplitude of only a metre or so. It travels at about 800 kilometres per hour. When the tsunami reaches shallower water near land, the wave slows down. It slows to typically 80 km per hour and the wavelength decreases to about one tenth of what it was in deep water. At the same time, the amplitude increases enormously, so that, seen from the land, the wave looks like a huge wall of water advancing on the coastline.

When it hits the shore, the water can travel inland for miles, sweeping away everything in its path and leaving a trail of destruction.

When the tsunami hit the Fukushima power plant, it flooded the basement of the facility, where the emergency generators were located.

Without electricity, the pumps couldn’t drive the cooling system and so the temperature rose rapidly in the reactor core. Makeshift pumps were used to cool the reactor using seawater. But the reactor was so hot that the seawater boiled, generating a huge amount of steam.

This caused another problem. The uranium fuel rods were encased in a cladding made of zirconium.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 25

Aeriel view of the plant showing the protective barrier that turned out to be too low as the tsunami swept over the site. Right, Fukushuma is just one of Japan’s nuclear power plants.

This metal does not react with water at temperatures below its boiling point. However, the enormously high temperatures caused the zirconium to react with the superheated steam, producing hydrogen gas, which is extremely flammable. This ignited, causing several fires and explosions. The firefighters had to to vent the steam to the outside, causing a release of radiation.

Now, even after all this time, radiation is still leaking from the nuclear plant. Measurements have shown that radioactivity in groundwater near the plant has risen alarmingly. Water samples taken from a well near the storage tanks in September 2013 had readings of 64,000 becquerels per litre, compared to 29,000 Bq/L just three days earlier. (A becquerel (Bq) is the unit of radiation and is defined as one disintegration per second.)

Such an increase in groundwater radiation levels showed that the tanks were leaking. Further radiation leaks were reported

by TEPCO (the company responsible for the Fukushima nuclear power station) in December 2013. The leaks occurred at the joints in the concrete barriers and showed alarming levels of strontium 90. This is a cause for concern, because strontium is chemically similar to calcium and would tend to accumulate in human bone tissue, where it could cause cancer.

Another cause for concern is the contamination of seawater.

On July 22, 2013, it was found that radioactive water was leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Local fishermen had been worried about this. The Japanese Prime Minister ordered the government to intervene and on August 26 emergency measures were put in place. It appears that radioactive water had been leaking into the ocean for several months.

Some of the contamination arises from the cooling system, which uses 400 tons of water per day. This is still needed

because of the heat being generated by the radioactive fission products. The water becomes contaminated from contact with radioactive materials. Wastewater collects in the basement of the reactor and is pumped out for treatment by reverse osmosis. This concentrates the dissolved radioactive materials but reduces the volume of contaminated water, which must be stored in huge tanks. There is also underground water flowing into the plant from the mountains. This becomes contaminated before it reaches the sea.

One of the main concerns is the high level of cesium that has been found in fish over the past three years. Because of this, fisheries near Fukushima have been closed down. Following the tsunami is 2011, TEPCO made barriers to prevent water leaking into the ocean, but they were not very effective. The Japanese government is providing millions of dollars to build an underground ‘ice wall’ around the reactor buildings and to install a sophisticated water treatment system. This could take another year or more. The ice wall will be 1.4 km long and will be constructed by sending freezing fluids through pipes deep underground, to form a permafrost barrier. This method has been used in the United States to contain soil contaminated by mining waste. Eventually, the entire plant will have to be decommissioned, but this could take up to 40 years.

Experts differ about the possible effects of radiation exposure. Some agencies say the risk of cancer death is very low. Others estimate that the probability of developing thyroid cancer has increased 25-fold as a result of the disaster. For people living in the vicinity of Fukushima, this is a worry that will not go away.

Margaret Franklin, is Vice President, Institute of Chemistry in Ireland and author of Colour, what we see and the science behind sight.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 26

Mapping the rocks of Dingle Richard Hooten talked to Tom Kennedy about how he had gone from viewing a landscape to studying how it was formed.

I

f you are interested in studying sedimentary rocks, Dingle, County Kerry, is well worth a visit said Richard Hooten. Last year, as part of his final year geology studies at University College Cork, Richard spend seven weeks tramping around the Dingle Peninsula studying and mapping these rocks, and as he remarked, working out how they formed over the 30 or so million years between the Silurian marine deposits with their fossilized corals and bracyopods, to the terrestrial sands and conglomerates of the Devonian, was quite a challenge. Over that time, he said, there were enormous changes in climate, sea levels, climate, environment and in forms of life. The earlier deposits were laid down under the sea, but by the Devonian, what is now the south of Ireland was at the edge of a desert.

There are long periods of drought interspersed with flash floods washing down sand and rocks that we now see compressed together as red sandstones and ‘pudding stone’ conglomerates.

Before setting out to map the geology, Richard was already quite familiar with the area. His father, John, is a talented landscape photographer, and Richard had often accompanied him in exploring the peninsula. This time, however, Richard was looking at how that landscape had formed.

As he explained, the mapping project had to be completed within a few weeks, and for the first few days be walked around the whole area, getting an overall view. Then, he got going studying the details, advancing over the area, segment by segment until finally he was back to where he started.

In going cross-country, Richard said familiarity with the area was helpful. He knew many of the locals, and besides, Dingle is popular with tourists, so farmers are no longer surprised to see hill-walkers wandering around.

As Richard noted, he is not the only one to take an interest in Dingle’s geology, and he was quite pleased to come across some evidence of this in the form plaques such as the one by Ferriter’s Cove giving information about the abundant Silurian fossils there.

Mapping, said Richard, is a record of what a geologist finds, and it is important to see and interpret features with a fresh eye.

When it comes to interpretation, there can be a lot of debate and one of the benefits of mapping, he said, is that it makes geologists think hard about what they see. Richard said that while some people would probably disagree with his findings, others would agree.

The transition from looking at landscapes to interpreting them came easily to Richard. “I was always interested in general

Richard Hooten with his mapping project at the Geological Survey of Ireland. science,” he said, and on entering University College Cork he took physics, biology, geology and chemistry as subjects. Within his first year, Richard know that geology had the strongest appeal, and as he remarked, the geology department at UCC is “fantastic.” He took a strong interest in sedimentology and a field trip to Dingle during second year made him realise that some of the best examples for his final year mapping project were practically on his doorstep.

Earlier this year, together with another young geologist, Carl McDermott (featured in Science Spin 64), Richard was presented with a Cunningham Award for the excellence of his mapping.

Having capped his degree with this distinction, Richard began to consider his options — “do I do a PhD, a Masters, do I get a job, or will I go travelling.” He also considered a career as an army officer. Whatever direction Richard decided to take, he remains enthusiastic about geology, so his final choice could well be to continue on with it into academic research.

The Cunningham Awards established in memory of Dr Mark Cunningham, ex-Assistant Director of GSI, are presented to the two best field mapping projects of each year. The two winners for 2013 were Carl McDermott from TCD and Richard Hooten from UCC

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BT YOUNG SCIENTIST AND TECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION

Maira Lynch and Laura Walsh with their project at the RDS

A neglected resource

As Maira Lynch and Laura Walsh observed, ”nettles have plenty of nitrogen, and nitrogen is the main component of fertilizers.” They were both discussing this one evening and it struck them that instead of being a nuisance, the

nettles growing wild on farmland might be a neglected resource.

The students, from st Mary’s High school, Cork, decided to investigate.

“We harvested nettles from local ditches and fields and we chopped them up in a

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 28

bucket. We added water and left them for five weeks.”

After straining off the liquid they sent samples off to Teagasc in Johnston Castle for analysis, and when the results came back, they found that the level of calcium was high, there was potassium, sodium and phosphorus, but there was not much iron. Maira and Laura were surprised to find that their samples were so high in calcium and low in iron. “We had not expected that,” they said.

The students conducted their own tests so see how the liquid would act as a fertilizer. They grew parsley and watercress, and compared those given plain water with those given commercial fertilizer and plants receiving the nettle extracts.

Again, the results were not exactly as expected. The parsley plants thrived, growing taller, but growth of the watercress was stunted. They also found that while the nettle fluid was much better than water alone, it was not quite as good as commercial fertilizers.

Even so, nettles come free, and as they found out, some of their neighbouring farmers were already using them as a fertilizer.

The students estimated that one bucket of nettle juice would be enough to fertilize 3,000 plants, and as they argued, this is an environmentally friendly way to boost growth. There is no run-off to kill fish in streams, they said.

The low iron content puzzled the students, so at the Cork Institute of Technology they conducted tests showing that the nettle juice actually lowered this level. This, they said, was another surprising result.

Maira and Laura said that they would be interested in conducting follow-up trials on grass. The high calcium, they noted, could be of benefit to cattle, and using nettles would reduce the dependence on commercial fertilizers.

Coming from a farming background made Maira and Laura more aware of how nettles might be used to advantage by growers of crops. For example, apart from acting as a fertilizer, the nettle juice gave plants a deeper green colour, and as they noted, this is something that consumers like to see.

The students said they had a good idea of what they wanted to do, but having a supportive teacher, Marguerite Alley, made a big difference on what they could achieve. This was their first time to enter the BT Young scientist competition, and having discovered so much, they wanted to get going now on a follow-up project.

BT YOUNG SCIENTIST AND TECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION

Green power Amy O’Donoghue, sixth year student at St Andrew’s in Dublin, is, as she admits, a car enthusiast, so she was well aware of the growing interest in tanking up with hydrogen. Hydrogen is a clean fuel, but one of the big problems is that it costs a lot to produce. One way of solving that probem, she said, is to let algae look after production. As she argued, the common algae, Chlamydomonas, does not need expensive platinum catalysts to break water up into oxygen and hydrogen.

Chlamodomonas, a single celled organisms with two waving flagellae is a common inhabitant of water, and as Amy explained, when deprived of oxygen and sulphur they start producing hydrogen.

This is a survival tactic that occurs in other micro-organisms, but Chlamydomonas is very common and easy to grow.

Like all other organisms, some are better at producing hydrogen, so Amy sent an order off to the University of minnesota for a pure strain. The strain came with some phosphate and other solutions to keep it happy, and as Amy said, it was easy enough to bulk up her supply. “The important thing,” she said, “was not to have oxygen or sulphur — the oxygen stops the hydrogenase enzyme, and without oxygen and sulphur, the algae switches over to its back-up system.”

Getting micro-organisms to produce hydrogen by subjecting them to stress was discovered in 1942, said Amy, and some time later the enzyme involved in this reaction was found.

The back-up reaction can keep Chlamydomonas going, but only for so long, so every so often it needs to recover. It is necessary to strike a balance, said Amy, and also culturing a more productive strain would make a big difference. “The most I could get,” she said, “is 9.8 ml per litre, but these are not efficient strains.”

Amy, who remarked that she had no interest in algae until she learned that they had the potential to provide those big American ‘muscle cars’ with fuel.

“Before that I thought algae were just going to be boring, but now I know they can do many useful things.”

Amy could not find anybody conducting research in this area in Ireland, but her science teacher gave her a lot of help. However, Amy asked so many questions that her teacher eventually told her “this is your project.”

Amy set up her tests, rigged up lighting, and immediately became

engrossed. “Once The big aim you get interested now, she said, you don’t mind is to isolate and getting up early find out more and going down to about the enzyme check everything,” that makes this she said. back-up reaction Production of happen. As hydrogen varied, she admitted, but as Amy making progress commented, this was Amy O’Donoghue with her Chlamydomans on this will be to be expected, and cultures, and inset, electron micrograph of the difficult, and it it took four attempts might even be single-celled algae before she had something that success. She found that temperature, she would like to work on. Amy said lighting and pH influenced the she has always, since primary school results. Bringing the temperature up at Kill O the Grange, been interested in to 30°C led to an increase, as did more science, but “doing this project,” she said, exposure to light. In setting up the “changed my mind on what I wanted to tests, Amy was careful to control any do in college.” variables, and for example, she used As for solving those problems — “give fluorescent lighting as this does not me a decade or so and I must be able to emit heat, and she found that a pH of do it” she remarked. about 7.1 almost doubled production in one flask. Previous research, she Reports: Tom Kennedy noted, had suggested that a pH of 7.7 would be the optimum, but, in her tests, that was not the case.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 29

Break the aebd code and stay on the conveyor belt While the specialised terms used by scientists can make it easier for them to communicate among themselves, the language they use makes it more difficult for everyone else to follow what they are saying. Tom Kennedy reports on how Fame Lab winner, Fergus McAuliff, has lots of good advice on how to overcome that barrier.

M

ost people would like to know what scientists actually do, but scientists are not always able to talk about their work in a way that makes much sense to non-specialists. There are some outstanding exceptions, such as PhD student, Fergus McAuliff. Fergus, who is conducting environmental research at University College Cork, is a natural communicator who not only won the inaugural FameLab competition in 2013 for his entertaining and informative threeminute presentation, but he went on to top the International Grand Final in the Cheltenham Festival.

In March, Fergus was invited to the Irish Science Teachers’ Association conference in Galway, where he gave some tips and advice on how science can be made accessible to all without necessarily dumbing it down.

As he observed from his own experience, the way he had to write up his own thesis was certainly not the way he would ever want to talk about his research in public. When scientists talk among themselves, he said, or write up research papers, they use terms that few other people can even begin to understand. For example, an environmental biologist will immediately understand what macroinvertebrates are, a geologist would be familiar with sedimentalogical deposits, and a medical researcher might happily read a paper on ‘chemotherapeutic studies with ethylhydrocuprein and mercurophen in experimental pneumococcus meningitis’, but the only part of that title that would mean anything to the vast majority of people is the last word, “meningitis.”

Once scientists become immersed in their subject, speaking in code becomes a habit, and in much the same way as people think that white lab coats are the correct uniform to wear, researchers and teachers often assume that they must also

use these terms in order to be properly scientific.

While this form of “in-talk” is an effective way to communicate within a tightly-knit group of specialists, it may as well be a foreign language to everyone else.

As Fergus explained, specialised or obscure terms should never be dropped in without explanation because they create gaps in the flow of understanding. Throw in a strange word and the audience has to pause and digest the meaning, and this, said Fergus can be called the ‘conveyorbelt’ effect. At first, he said everyone is moving along together, but the moment a strange term is introduced, the audience step off the conveyor, and while they are pausing to think about what the term means, the conveyor continues to move on. Missing those few seconds, said Fergus, can mean missing a point that is crucial to understanding everything that follows. “If you are using an unfamiliar term, you must immediately explain what it means.”

Specialists often make extensive use of acronoms, and while most people would be familiar with DNA, but not necessarily deoxyribonucleic acid, fewer would know that HPLC stands for highperformance liquid chromatography, PLC might be a company, post-leaving cert, or a programmable logic controller, and how many could work out that ESAT stands for an esterase activator enzyme?

Acronymns and technical terms are not the only barriers, and everyday words, such as ‘candidate’ can mean one thing to the public and quite another thing to a scientist. When scientists talk about examining different “models” the public might immediately wonder if they have been comparing Naomi Campbell to Cindy Crawford.

‘Succession’, said Fergus, is another word that means something quite specific to

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 30

an environmental biologist, like himself, and this confusion of meaning is not just confined to technical terms. “As scientists,” he said, “we never say we used anything, it’s always ‘utilized’. Nothing is deadly, it’s ‘pathogenic’. Parts don’t exist, they are ‘components’. We don’t work out, we ‘derive’, and as for ‘interdisciplinary cross-collaboration’ that’s just teamwork.

Scientists do not always realise that saying ‘use’ rather than utilize is not dumbing down, said Fergus, it is just making what they say more accessible.

Another convention that scientists often find quite hard to abandon is stating their objectives first and only at the end do they reach a conclusion. This is what they are required to do in writing an academic paper, but in any other context it is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. In newspapers, for instance, the conclusion is usually the hook that catches and draws in the reader’s attention.

People need to know why something is relevant to them, said Fergus, so his advice is to turn the academic convention on its head, get to the point quickly, reinforce it later by repeating it, and make a connection to something that people can relate to. The story of Lonesome George, he said is a good example. Lonesome George was a turtle, the last of the species, and his death which made the headlines, brought home a message about the loss of diversity that all the scientific reports were unable to deliver with anything like the same impact.

Power of PowerPoint

“The first thing to do,” said Fergus, “is select everything and then click on delete.” As he observed, PowerPoint comes with a set of defaults, designed to make it easy to use. However, there is no need to follow the pre-set guidelines,

and as Fergus commented, many of the “rules” suggested in popular manuals, such as six by six to a slide, don’t actually make much sense. “If you follow that rule, there would be six words to a point and six points to a slide, that’s 36 words excluding the title,” and that, he remarked, “would be useless.” If people want something to read, he added, give them sheets of paper.

“The real power of PowerPoint is in the pictures,” he said, and “an image can carry a lot of information, so you end up saying more with less,” he said. “If I wanted to talk about myself, I could say my name is Fergus, I go to University

College Cork and I play frizbee and I am obnoxiously tall.” All of that could go up as bullet points on a slide, but to show how much more effective an image could be, Fergus flashed up a photograph of himself in a UCC jersey playing Frisbee.

As he pointed out, that picture said it all, and, unlike bullet points, the image is memorable. An image can convey information quickly and more than likely it will be remembered long after the text is forgotten.

“There is really no excuse for not using pictures,” said Fergus, but that does not mean dipping into a file of clip-art. “Clipart is false, it is contrived,” said Fergus,

“and it is not at all convincing.” The happy, smiling family we see does not exist, they are actors, probably not even related, and, besides, as Fergus observed, “no one looks that good.”

As Fergus advises, if you want to make an effective presentation, clear the defaults, use the minimum of text, find memorable images, and dump the clipart.

To view Fergus making his winning presentation at Cheltenham —

http://youtu.be/cXJJvvjSB9c

Fergus talks to Science Spin on our YouTube video at www.sciencespin.com

Fame

Pádraic Flood, an Irish PhD student at Wageningen University in The Netherlands came ahead of 22 science communicators in this year’s international FameLab competition.

In his winning presentation, Pádraic talked about photosynthesis, describing it as the point where light becomes life. After taking his general science degree at UCD, Pádraic worked at the Marine Institute on phytoplankton, before going on to begin his PhD in plant genetics at Wageningen.

Science communicators from many countries competed in FameLab, the finals of which were held as part of the Cheltenham Science Festival, and for the second year running the winner was from Ireland.

To view Pádraic’s winning presentation — http://vimeo.com/96735520

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 31

Ask a scientist

More than 25 experts from a wide range of fields including biology, physics, chemistry and astronomy are ready to answer your questions. If there is something that puzzles you, let the panel know. Email questions, with your name and contact to

question@sciencespin.com

Why are hydrogenated fats supposed to be bad for us, and if so why are they not banned?

Hydrogenated fats raise our cholesterol levels, which can lead to heart problems. In the late 1900s it was found that heating oils and blasting them with hydrogen atoms made the oils more solid and stable, resulting in preferred melting temperatures (30-40oC) and a longer shelf life. However, changes in fat structure occur during this process. one of these structural changes causes the unwanted effects in our bodies. to explain we must take a brief look at the composition of fats. Fats are made up of long strings of hydrocarbons (hydrogen and carbon) called fatty acids. the presence of double bonds between the carbons in the fatty acids changes the characteristics of the fat.

Fatty acids without double bonds pack tightly together and are called saturated fatty acids (all carbons are saturated with hydrogen), and generally are solid at room temperature (butter). the most common carbon double bonds (called cis double bonds) cause a kink in the hydrocarbon chains. these

Why are we supposed to add acid to water rather than adding water to acid? tHere is a great deal of heat generated when certain acids, such as sulphuric acid, are mixed with water. the heat produced may be sufficient to cause the mixture to boil.

Sometimes, it may be necessary, for a particular laboratory procedure, to make a more dilute solution of acid by mixing concentrated acid with water.

If we were to add water to the acid, then the acid would still be the major component in the mixture and if it suddenly boiled, someone could be seriously injured by splashes of concentrated acid to the eyes, face, or other exposed skin.

It is much safer to gradually add the acid to the water. this ensures that it is

fatty acids cannot pack together tightly.

So a fat with lots of ‘kinky’ fatty acids is called unsaturated and will generally be liquid at room temperature (olive oil). a second type of double bond exists, called a trans double bond. this is the ‘villain’. For while trans double bonds occur rarely in nature, they are created during artificial hydrogenation of fats. trans double bonds do not result in ‘kinky’ fatty acids so they pack tightly to make the trans fats solid at room temperature.

Scientific investigations and observational studies have shown that ingestion of trans fatty acids significantly increases the risk of coronary heart disease. trans fats increase bad cholesterol levels (LdL cholesterol) and decrease good cholesterol levels (HdL cholesterol). they can also cause problems in the cells that line the blood vessels of the body. Put simply, they are bad for your heart.

So, why are they not banned? It seems we would all be better off without hydrogenated fats in our diets. Since 2006 it is a requirement in the US to include trans fats on food labels and last november the Food and drugs administration (Fda) announced that the water that will be in excess in the mixture, so if splashing should occur, the mixture would be a dilute solution of acid, which would cause less harm.

Water has a great heat capacity and so, if it is in excess in the mixture, it can dissipate the heat generated during the mixing process.

In any case, one should always wear suitable eye protection and laboratory gloves when working in a laboratory, particularly when working with concentrated acids.

Concentrated acids and other corrosive liquids should be handled in a fume cupboard. When diluting acids, the concentrated acid should be added very gradually to the water. l Margaret Franklin, Vice President, Institute of Chemistry in Ireland and author of Colour, what we see and the science behind sight.

SCIENCE SPIN Issue 65 Page 32

they would no longer be ‘generally recognised as safe’ for use in foods. essentially this will eliminate trans fats from the majority of foodstuff. The FDA calculates that eliminating trans fats “could prevent an additional 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year”.

In europe we are lagging behind. only four countries; denmark, austria, Switzerland and Iceland have legislated on this issue, forcing the food industry to limit the amount of trans fats used in foods to 2 per cent of the total fat. Most countries still rely on manufacturers to voluntarily reduce levels. So foods containing high levels of trans fats can still be sold in shops or in restaurants and fast food outlets.

In Ireland, the trans fat labelling is not required, but if ‘partially hydrogenated oil’ is in the ingredient list, there are probably trans fats present. Until a ban is implemented, the best advice is to read the labels and try to limit your own personal intake of hydrogenated fats.

Claire Concannon is a biochemist studying at NUI Galway

Why are we supposed to add acid to water rather than adding water to acid?

WHen water and acid are mixed together an exothermic reaction occurs (ie. heat is given off). Acid is denser than water, so when acid is added to water it sinks and the heat produced dissipates throughout the solution. When water is added to acid, it sits on top of the acid and the heat generated stays near the surface of the solution, causing the solution to spit. l Lisa Shine has a PhD in genetics, developmental biology and ocular biology and teaches chemistry and mathematics in a secondary school.

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