Think — Issue 08

MARCH 2014 • ISSUE 8

ISSN 2306-0735

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M A LTA

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R E S E A RC H

MALTESE HONEY

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U N I V E R S I TY

REVEALED DIGITAL EDITION

CONTENTS

ISSUE

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The Walls of Jericho

MARCH

8 2014

FEATURE

Stalking E.T. Is there life on other worlds?

Dr Alessio Magro searches for signs

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ees are nature’s chemists. They hunt for nectar to make honey, and for plant resin to make propolis — two products that several Maltese researchers are studying. Our cover story reveals their astounding

findings.

We at THINK love insects. Fruit flies are being used at the University of Malta to find out how Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Motor Neuron Disease can be stopped. Another feature has a more human touch, looking into the effect of these diseases on sufferers and their loved ones.

Aircraft research is one of the biggest projects at University.

To clean up our skies and make them safer, Europe is dreaming of a single sky instead of today’s disconnected air traffic control network.

Life from other worlds makes a feature in this issue. Local researchers have joined the hunt to turn science fiction into reality and find alien life on other planets.

Creativity has always been important at THINK. We have two features: one touching on music, the other on language.

Ethnomusicologist Dr Philip Ciantar studies musicians from different cultures talking about how they can bridge divides. On the Maltese language, a team of linguists and computer scientists are developing electronic tools that will be vital to integrate the language within software like word processors and speaking robots.

Research is beautiful. What is happening at the University of Malta still needs more support. Eventually the Walls of Jericho must come down with industry, academia, and government all pulling the same rope.

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EDITOR

edward.duca@um.edu.mt @DwardD

Flying in the face of Neurodegeneration Fruit flies to stop human disease

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COVER STORY

Bees Dream of Gold

Maltese honey and propolis are unique with powerful properties

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Edward Duca

FEATURE

FEATURE

The Sky’s Limits How to make a plane safer and cleaner

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTORS John Gabarretta

Maria Camilleri

ISSUE 8

Dr Alessio Magro

Dr Ruben J. Cauchi

Dr Everaldo Attard

Ray Sciberras

Dr David Mifsud

Prof. Claude Farrugia

Simone Cutajar

Giulia Bugeja

Dr James Corby

Mario Cachia

Dr Albert Gatt

Prof. Gordon Pace

Mike Rosner

Dr Sedeer El-Showk

Ing. Kenneth Chircop

Dr Ing. Andrew Sammut

Prof. Ing. David Zammit-Mangion

Stephanie Mifsud

Dr Philip Ciantar

Noel Tanti

Dr Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone

Prof. Alexiei Dingli

Dr Ġorġ Mallia

Dr Kenneth Scerri

MARCH

8 2014

OPINION

What exactly is it that you do?

John Gabarretta writes about communicating research

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FEATURE

Forgetting what you can’t remember In this technological world, how do we deal with personal and cultural memory loss?

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FEATURE

Decoding Language Saving Maltese from digital extinction

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ALUMNI

Alumni Talk

IT company entrepreneurs, imaging researchers, and simulating turbulant Mediterranean waters

Costantino Oliva

Are you a student, staff, or researcher at the University of Malta? Would you like to contribute to THINK magazine? If interested, please get in touch to discuss your article on think@um.edu.mt or call +356 2340 3451 58

CULTURE GENES

Meme

CONTENTS

COVER

STUDENTS

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Students' thinking

Maltese honey and propolis (bee glue) are amazing. The nutritional benefits are well known.

Researchers are also finding more powerful antimicrobial and health properties . Most important, their unique makeup distinguishes them from the rest of the world.

About: green industries and secure wireless networks

OPINION

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Innovation in Business

Maria Camilleri expresses her ideas on encouraging innovation in Malta

A Good Cause for Research

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THINK I D E A S

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M A LTA

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R E S E A RC H

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P E O P L E

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U N I V E R S I TY

MARCH 2014 - ISSUE 8

EDITORIAL

Raising funds for breast cancer and kidney disease research

Edward Duca EDITOR DESIGN

Jean Claude Vancell THINK is a quarterly research magazine published by the Communications & Alumni Relations Office at the University of Malta

RESEARCH

COPY-EDITING

Daphne Pia Deguara PRINTING

Print It Printing Services, Malta ISSN 2306-0735 Copyright © University of Malta, 2014

FEATURE

Getting the Rhythm

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How does music bridge cultures?

From Libya to Malta

The right of the University of Malta to be identified as Publisher of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Act, 2001.

University of Malta, Msida, Malta Tel: (356) 2340 2340 Fax: (356) 2340 2342 www.um.edu.mt All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of research and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this magazine are correct and active at the time of going to press. However the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

FUN

Film Review

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FIND US ONLINE

The Conjuring: irresponsible, playful, and polished FUN

Book Review Drugs, girls, and a Nobel Prize

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent issues.

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Student

students’ THINKing To protect wireless networks around Malta and help industries go clean

Green Chemistry for the Environment PRODUCING FOOD products, pharmaceuticals, and fine chemicals leads to hazardous waste and poses environmental and health risks. For over 20 years, green chemists have been attempting to transform the chemical industries by designing inherently safer and cleaner processes.

Chemists in academia rigorously test chemical processes which can then be implemented by industrial green chemists. Anthony Debono (supervised by Prof Giovanna Bosica, Department of Chemistry, University of Malta) recently attempted to apply the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry to a chemical reaction called the aza-Michael Addition, which is a carbon-nitrogen bond-forming reaction used for industrial purposes. Normally, the chemical reaction occurs between nitrogen containing compounds called amines and compounds normally associated with a fruity smell such as α,β-unsaturat-

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ed esters (electron-deficient alkenes).

Others have studied this chemical reaction, but the reaction with dimethyl maleate — an additive in plastics, agriculture and pharmaceuticals — as a ‘Michael acceptor’, had not been studied extensively.

Debono tested the process to find out how much and how quickly the product was being produced under many different conditions. The most environmentally-friendly reaction was then identified by maximising yield and minimising waste. Debono showed that under the right conditions no catalyst or solvent was needed. Further tests showed that dimethyl maleate is quite an atypical Michael acceptor since it reacts quite rapidly under mild conditions. This makes it an ideal chemical to produce green reactions and new compounds.

Many of the products obtained were actually novel, so they had to be isolated and analysed to identify them. This

Anthony Debono study may be useful for other researchers working on carbon–nitrogen reactions that are used in industries from plastic manufacturing to food production.

Green chemistry shows how ingenuity and creative design in chemical processes can help sustainable development. As Paul Anastas, the founding father of green chemistry, said, ‘we used to think that we couldn’t maintain our quality of life without toxic, hazardous and depleting substances. Green chemistry belies that myth every day.’

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This research was performed as part of an M.Sc. at the Faculty of Science at the UoM. It was partly funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (Malta), which is part-financed by the European Union — European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II — Cohesion Policy 2007– 2013, ‘Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life’.

THINK Student

Wi-Fi Security Map for Malta The availability of Public Wi-Fi networks in Malta

WI-FI IS UBIQUITOUS. The technology can be an easy back door for hackers to access a computer through online tools that anyone can learn to use. The global cybercrime bill now tops €700bn and will keep rising. To find out the security of Maltese Wi-Fi networks Kurt Mahoney (supervised by Prof. Ing. Victor Buttigieg) mapped out around 70% of the island’s built-up areas.

Mahoney first carried out in-house testing on Wi-Fi security protocols. He then formulated security categories depending on ease and speed of access to a private network. For example, the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) security standard could be cracked in less than one minute (irrelevant of password complexity). On the other hand, the WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access II) security standard with AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) grade encryption and a twelve-character random alphanumeric password was virtually impossible to crack using brute force techniques.

Setting up a car with several Wi-Fi antennas, he then travelled a preplanned route through all the Maltese villages, apart from Mdina. Private security protocols were noted from automatic Wi-Fi transmissions, however he avoid-

Kurt Mahoney ed conducting cracking or penetration testing. Mahoney then created a security map for the Maltese Islands from 64,317 observed private networks. Forty percent of private Wi-Fi networks in Malta were very vulnerable to hacking that increased to 90% if using more sophisticated attacks.

Wi-Fi security was poor all over the Island, with Western and South Eastern districts having marginally lower security. Malta needs a nationwide awareness campaign to increase the security levels of Wi-Fi networks. Top-notch security can be setup in a few minutes. All

modern routers support military grade AES encryption standards, and together with a proper password policy one would render a Wi-Fi network almost invulnerable to direct attack.

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This research was presented at the fourth Workshop in Information and Communication Technology (WICT). It was performed as part of a B.Sc. (Hons) in ICT at the Faculty of ICT and part sponsored by the Malta Communications Authority. It was shortlisted for the Chamber of Engineers’ Best ICT Student’s Project Award.

THINK in collaboration with The Zone | Check out guest writer video interviews on The Zone at timesofmalta.com

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Opinion

What exactly is it that you do?

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esearch — that would be the simplest way to answer the question above. Really and truly this answer would only apply to a small niche of individuals throughout the world.

It is a big challenge to explain to people what you do with a science university degree. The questions “Int għal tabib?” (Are you aiming to become a doctor?) or “Issa x’issir, spiżjar?” (Will you become a pharmacist?) are usually the responses. The thing is, people have trouble understanding non-vocational careers — if you are not becoming a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor or a priest, the concept of your job prospects is quite difficult to grasp for the average Joe. In truth, it is not really 100% Joe Public’s fault — research is a tough concept to come to terms with, ask a good portion of Ph.D. students about that.

There seems to be a lack of clarity in people’s minds about what goes on behind the scenes. If you boil it down, everything we use in our daily lives from mobile phones to hand warmers are the spoils of research — a laborious process with the ultimate goal of increasing our knowledge and, consequently, the utility of our surroundings.

So, then, why exactly is it such an alien concept? I think the reason is that research is very slow and sometimes very abstract. Gone are the days when a simple experiment meant a novel,

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ground-breaking discovery — research nowadays delves into highly advanced topics, building on past knowledge to add a little bit more. I have complained about this to many of my colleagues on several occasions — and it is more complicated when you are studying something like Chemistry and Physics, or worse, Maths and Statistics — people just do not get it!

Research is exciting. The challenge is how to infect others with this enthusiasm without coming off as someone without a hint of a social life (just ask my girlfriend). It is nice to see initiatives like the RIDT and THINK magazine trying hard to get the message out there that research is a continuous process with often few short-term gains. It can be surprising when you realise how much is really going on at our University, despite its size and budget.

To befriend the general public researchers still need to do more. The first step is relaying the message in the simplest terms possible — people need to stop feeling threatened by big words and abstract concepts they cannot grasp. There also needs to be increased opportunities for interaction with research — Science in the City is the perfect example. Finally, I think MCST needs to start playing a larger role — it must work closer to University and take a more coordinated role at a national level. Only then can we begin to explain what us researchers do.

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John Gabarretta

People need to stop feeling threatened by big words and abstract concepts they cannot grasp

THINK Opinion

Innovation in Business Maria Camilleri

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eing in the second year of my banking, finance and management studies, innovation in these sectors is a key part of my curriculum. In banking one can easily see developments with the introduction of banking by telephone, internet and mobile. Similarly with management, recent growth has allowed the sector to grow and develop expertise in management of projects, accounting and supply chains.

Innovation has exponential potential to foster new solutions, initiatives and jobs. Younger graduates need to create new opportunities. For Malta to improve its competitiveness and attract investment we must turn challenges into opportunities. During Ireland’s EU Presidency, in the first half of 2013, the negotiations led by Dublin saw Malta secure €1.128 billion for the 20142020 Multi-Annual Financial Framework. The possibilities for Malta are endless. On top of this framework lies the Horizon 2020 Programme, where countries can compete for over €80 billion set aside for innovation. These funds should be used strategically in Malta to improve existing sectors and to find a way to create new markets and jobs. This growth would build Malta’s competitiveness.

SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) are being greatly encouraged by the EU since they are seen as a route out of the recent economic crisis. The Horizon 2020 programme gives priority to SMEs.

competitive science and to realise innovations leading to societal change. These could be in the areas of biotechnology, clinical research and green technologies.

We need systems that change the way we live and think.

In the global economy, it can be hard to be innovative and entrepreneurial as we have grown accustomed to depending on other countries to do our work.

Instead of waiting for new technologies and developments to emerge so that we can replicate them, we should encourage the young generation to open new doors that could lead them to success.

Thus, inspiring people to think outside the box and to be creative starts from an early age. This train of thought must be cultivated at the heart of the education system where students start to think about jobs and the future.

Last December, I had the opportunity to see this when I visited Facebook’s Headquarters in Dublin as part of the ASCS study trip. There is considerable scope for further research into virtual platforms linking social media with innovation in business.

Albert Einstein once said ‘Most people see what is, and never see what can Malta can win more of these funds by be,’ which is exactly why we need to shift looking at what Horizon 2020 aims to the focus on what can be done, rather achieve, that is leadership in a world of than what has already been done.

For Malta to improve its competitiveness and attract investment we must turn challenges into opportunities

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Stalking

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ET

THINK Feature

There are over 100 billion galaxies in our universe.

Each galaxy has billions of stars. Each star could have a planet. Planets can breathe life. Alessio Magro writes about his experience hunting for E.T. Illustrations by Sonya Hallett

Alessio Magro

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n 1982, 4 years before I was born, the world fell in love with Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Fifteen years later, the movie Contact, an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel, hit the big screen. Although at the time I was too young to appreciate the scientific, political, and religious themes I was captivated and it fired my thoughts. I questioned whether we are alone in this vast space. What would happen if E.T. does call? Are we even listening? If so, how? And, is it all a waste of time and precious money? Instead of deflating me, these questions inspired me to start a journey that led me to my collaboration with SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. I participated in ongoing efforts to try and find intelligent civilisations on other worlds.

The debate on whether we are alone started ages ago. It was first debated in Thales, Ancient Greece.

Only recently has advanced technology allowed us to try and open up communication channels with any existing advanced extraterrestrial civilisations. If we do not try we will never answer this question.

For the past fifty years we have been scanning the skies using large radio telescopes and listening for signals which cannot be generated naturally. The main assumption is that any advanced civilisation will follow a similar technological path as we did.

For example, they will stumble upon radio communication as one of the first wireless technologies.

SETI searches are usually in the radio band. Large telescopes continuously scan and monitor vast patches of the sky. Radio emissions from natural sources are generally broadband, encompassing a vast stretch of the electromagnetic spectrum — waves from visible light to microwaves and X-rays — whilst

virtually all human radio communication has a very narrow bandwidth, making it easy to distinguish between natural and artificial signals.

Most SETI searches therefore focus on searching for narrow band signals of extraterrestrial origin.

Narrow bands are locked down by analysing a telescope’s observing band — the frequency range it can detect. This frequency range is broken down into millions or billions of narrow frequency channels. Every channel is searched at the same time.

SETI searches for sharp peaks in these small channels. This requires a large amount of computational resources, such as supercomputing clusters, specialised hardware systems, or through millions of desktop computers. The infamous SETI@home screen-saver extracted computer power from desktops signed up to the programme, which started as the millennium turned. »

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Feature

E.T. civilisations might also transmit signals in powerful broadband pulses. This means that SETI could search for wider signal frequencies. However, they are more difficult to tease apart from natural emissions, so they require more thorough analysis. The problem is that as broadband signals — natural or otherwise — travel through interstellar space they get dispersed, resulting in higher frequencies arriving at the telescope before lower ones, even though they both were emitted at the same time.

The amount of dispersion, the dispersion gradient, depends on the distance between the transmitter and receiver.

The signal can only be searched after this effect is accounted for by a process called dedispersion. To detect E.T. signs, thousands of gradients have to be processed to try out all possible distances. This process is nearly identical to that used to search for pulsars, which are very dense, rapidly rotating stars emitting a highly energetic beam at its magnetic poles.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum. Higher frequencies mean higher energies but shorter wavelengths.

X-rays and Gamma rays are on the higher end of the spectrum making them so dangerous.

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Pulsars appear like lighthouses on telescopes, with a regular pulse across the entire observation band.

For the past four years I have been developing a specialised system which can perform all this processing in real-time, meaning that any interesting signals will be detected immediately.

Researchers now do not need to wait for vast computers to process the data.

This reduces the amount of disk space needed to store it all. It also allows observations to be made instantaneously, hence reducing the risk of losing any non-periodic, short duration signals.

To tackle the large computational requirements I used Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) — typically unleashed to work on video game graphic simulations — because a single device can perform tasks of at least 10 laptops. This system can be used to study pulsars, search for big explosions across the universe, search for gravitational waves, and for stalking E.T..

THINK Feature

The Wow! signal is a brief, strong radio burst of unknown origin detected by the Big Ear Telescope, SETI search, 1977. If it originated from deep space, it could either be a new astrophysical phenomena or an alien signal.

E.T. we love you

The big question is: where do we look for E.T.?

I would prefer rephrasing to: at which frequency do we listen for E.T.?

Hunting for planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets, has recently become a major scientific endeavour. Over 3,500 planet-candidates were found by the Kepler telescope that circles our planet, about 961 are confirmed. Finding so many planets is now leading scientists to believe that the galaxy is chock-full of them. The current estimate: 100 billion in our galaxy, with at least one planet per star. For us E.T. stalkers, this is music to our ears.

Life could be considered inevitable. However, not all planets can harbour life, or at least life as we know it. Humans need liquid water and a protective atmosphere, amongst other things. Life-supporting planets need to be approximately Earth-sized and orbit within its parent star’s habitable zone. This Goldilocks zone is not too far away from the sun, freezing the planet, or too

close to it, frying it. These exoplanets are targeted by SETI searches, which perform long duration observations of exoplanets similar to Earth.

By focusing on these planets, SETI is gambling. They are missing huge portions of the sky to focus on areas that could yield empty blanks.

SETI could instead perform widefield surveys which search large chunks of the sky for any interesting signals. Recent development in radio telescope technology allows for the instantaneous observation of the entire sky, making 24/7 SETI monitoring systems possible. Wide-field surveys lack the resolution needed to figure out where a signal would come from, so follow-up observations are required. Anyhow, a one-off signal would never be convincing.

For radio SETI searches, the big question is: where do we look for E.T.? I would prefer rephrasing to: at which frequency do we listen for E.T.? Imagine being stuck in traffic Âť

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Feature

and you are searching for a good radio station without having a specific one in mind. Now imagine having trillions of channels to choose from and only one having good reception. One would probably give up, or go insane. Narrowing down the range of frequencies at which to search is one of the biggest challenges for SETI researchers.

The Universe is full of background noise from naturally occurring phenomena, much like the hiss between radio stations. Searching for artificial signals is like looking for a drop of oil in the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, there exists a ‘window’ in the radio spectrum with a sharp noise drop, affectionately called the ‘water hole’. SETI researchers search here, reasoning that E.T. would know about this and deliberately broadcast there. Obviously, this is just guesswork and some searches use a much wider frequency range.

Two years ago we decided to perform a SETI survey. Using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (USA), the world’s largest fully steerable radio dish, we scanned the same area the Kepler telescope was observing whilst searching for exoplanets. This area was partitioned into about 90 chunks, each of which was observed for some time. In these areas, we also targeted 86 star systems with Earth-sized planets. We then processed around 3,000 DVDs worth of data to try and find signs of intelligent life. We developed the system ourselves at the University of Malta, but we came out empty handed.

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THINK Feature

A camera shy E.T. Should we give up? Is it the right investment in energy and resources? These questions have plagued SETI from the start. Till now there is no sign of E.T., but we have made some amazing discoveries while trying to find out.

Radio waves were discovered and entered into mainstream use in the late 19th century. We would be invisible to other civilisations unless they are up to 100 light years away. Light (such as radio) travels just under 9.5 trillion kilometres per year. Signals from Earth have only travelled 100 light years, broadcasts would take 75,000 years to reach the other side of our galaxy. To compound the problem, technology advances might soon make most radio signals obsolete. Taking our own example, aliens would have a very small time window to detect earthlings. The same reasoning works the other way, E.T. might be using technologies which are too advanced for us to detect. As the author Arthur C. Clarke stated, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.

At the end of the day, it is all a probability game, and it is a tough one to play. Frank Drake and Carl Sagan both tried. They came up with a number of factors that influence the chance of two civilisations communicating. One is that we live in a very old universe, over 13 billion years old, and for communication between civilisations their time windows need to overlap. Another factor is, if we try to detect other technological signatures they might also be obsolete for advanced alien life. Add to these parts, the assumed number of

Signals from Earth have only travelled 100 light years, broadcasts would take 75,000 years to reach the other side of our galaxy

planets in the Universe and the probability of an intelligent species evolving.

For each factor, several estimates have been calculated. New astrophysical, planetary, and biological discoveries keep fiddling with the numbers that range from pessimistic to a universe teeming with life.

The problem with a life-bloated galaxy is that we have not found it. Aliens have not contacted us, despite what conspiracy theorists say. There is a fatalistic opinion that intelligent life is destined to destroy itself, while a simpler solution could be that we are just too damned far apart. The Universe is a massive place. Some human tribes have only been discovered in the last century, and by SETI standards they have been living next door the whole time. The Earth is a grain of sand in the cosmic ocean, and we have not even fully explored it yet.

Still, the lack of alien chatter is troubling. Theorists have come up with countless ideas to explain the lack of evidence for intelligent alien existence.

The only way to solve the problem is to keep searching with an open mind. Future radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will allow us to scan the entire sky continuously. They require advanced systems to tackle the data deluge. I am part of a team working on the SKA and I will do my best to make this array possible. We will be stalking E.T. using our most advanced cameras, and hopefully we will catch him on tape.

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Flying in the face of NEURODEGENERATION

Fruit flies are not human. Yet they are close enough to have been used for over 100 years by scientists to find out more about humans. Dr Ruben J. Cauchi writes about his relationship with the fly. He uses it to find out how to stop Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Motor Neuron Disease that affect tens of millions

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THINK Feature

Dr Ruben J. Cauchi

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t was a cold and grey February afternoon. Snowflakes were pelting the dreaming spires of Oxford. This gloomy weather did nothing to impede the warmth and buzz exuding from the laboratories crammed in the iconic Sherrington building. Less than a century earlier, this labyrinthine edifice was the habitat of Sir Charles Sherrington whose experiments shaped our understanding of the ‘synapse’ or the minute gaps between one brain cell (neuron) and another. The Sherrington building (part of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics at Oxford University) has undergone several expansions over the years. In its newest wing, nowadays it houses the research group of Dr Ji-Long Liu, a rising star in the field of genetics and cell biology.

For me, this was no ordinary afternoon. Together with Liu’s lab teammates, I was perched on a stereomicroscope whilst holding a delicate brush in my hands. On one side was a tray jammed with vials populated with fruit flies and the usual good strong cuppa.

Fruit flies are no house flies: each adult fly is only a few millimetres long, their beautiful bodies are pale with black zebra-like stripes and their eyes a bright apple-red colour. I grabbed a vial, fired a puff of carbon dioxide gas through its fluffy plug and then firmly rapped the upended vial to shake its sleepy occupants onto an illuminated pad. I took a deep breath before peering at them through the eyepieces.

At the time, I was more than mid-way through my doctoral studies, and the results of my experiments were far from

extraordinary. I was researching the most common genetic killer of human infants, a neuromuscular degenerative disease known as spinal muscular atrophy or SMA in short. I was exploiting the tiny fruit fly to gain new insight into this catastrophic disease.

I decided to up my efforts by generating a series of mutants or faults in Gemin3, the gene that I was investigating. I was targeting these mutants to different organs such as brain, muscle, or gut. The results of this screen were due today. With a few flicks, I deftly flipped and sorted the minuscule fly bodies into neat piles taking note of differences that are invisible to the untrained eye. The mutants did not produce any

dramatic effect. Damn! Another experiment down the drain! Frustrated by the result, I mistakenly knocked over a vial, dislodging its plug. Usually, released flies would happily escape by flying. Strangely, my flies were jumping as if attempting flight but just couldn’t make it into the air — an unexpected but interesting trait or phenotype. I checked the tag on the vial. In these flies the mutant was targeted to that part of the body that powers movement, the so-called ‘motor unit’. Following that afternoon, which will remain forever etched in my memory, the results just flowed in and a few months down the line I would find myself donning my subfusc (Oxford-speak for academic dress) to defend my doctorate.

Fly Superstar

First Lord of the Flies, Thomas Hunt Morgan in the Fly Room at Columbia, 1917. The basic elements of a typical fly lab haven’t changed much over the years: a stereomicroscope (back) and lots of fly bottles.

The rise to biological stardom for the fruit fly, scientifically known as Drosophila melanogaster, began in 1907 when my great-great-grandfather (by academic lineage) Thomas Hunt Morgan adopted this organism to understand heredity or genetics. Morgan was the first to harness the major advantages of working with this organism: they have an insatiable sexual appetite and a speedy development (only 10 days) from embryo to adult. This means that large-scale experiments are doable in record time. Morgan’s infamous ‘Fly Room’ at Columbia University in New York set the stage for a new ‘religion’ practiced and preached across the globe.

Morgan spent years searching unsuccessfully for flies with clear, heritable »

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Feature

The Fruit Fly Features of Malta’s first Genetically-Modified Organism (GMO) designed and engineered at UoM ‘KRUSTINI’-LIKE APPEARANCE

BEHAVIOUR Targeting the Gem3ΔN mutant to flight muscles results in muscle degeneration and a dramatic loss of flight ability. Flight is measured through a Droso-Drome run.

In this assay, flies are dumped in at the top.

Flightless flies drop straight to the base whereas normal wild-type flies stick to the walls throughout its length.

The fly’s powerful engine lies in the thorax which is crammed with muscle. The GFPtagged mutant protein localises to the multiple nuclei of muscle cells. Muscles appear like our beloved ‘Krustini’ (long Maltese rusks) with green chocolate. YUM!

STATS GENETIC ENGINEERING The Gem3ΔN mutant protein was designed in silico and then engineered in parts through recombinant genetic technology. To generate GMO flies, the final DNA construct was injected in the tiny fly embryos.

GFP

Gene switch

white

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Gem3ΔN

Size: Adults 3mm Diet: Rotten fruit Life cycle: 10 days Chromosomes: 8 Lifespan: 1½ months Heart rate: 230 bpm Brain neurons: 100K Human genes: 75% Nobel prizes: 4

THINK Feature

‘Two years work wasted. I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I’ve got nothing out of it’, Morgan lamented to one visitor to his laboratory. His epiphany had yet to come in the form of a white-eyed fly.

differences so that he could investigate how they are inherited. A breakthrough happened in April 1910 when he discovered his first mutant, a white-eyed male fly amongst many red-eyed flies.

Morgan took great care of this special fly: he kept it in a bottle and after a day’s lab work he used to take it home! At the same time his wife Lilian, who also became a famous geneticist, gave birth to a child. And such was the excitement surrounding Morgan’s discovery that on his first visit to the hospital, Morgan’s wife said: ‘How’s the fly?’ To which, Morgan replied: ‘How’s the baby?’.

When the white-eyed fly was bred or crossed with a virgin red-eyed female, their offspring were all red-eyed.

When sisters and brothers were crossed, half of the male progeny gained back their white-eye colour. This hereditary pattern is typical for a sex-linked (recessive) variation, since the gene for eye colour in Drosophila, named by Morgan as the white gene, is on the X chromosome which determines sex.

Similar to us, male flies are XY whereas females are XX. This key experiment and numerous others that followed expanded on the knowledge gained through the ingenious cross-breeding experiments of pea plants by the Aus-

Flies could be used as models of human disease trian monk Gregor Mendel half a century earlier. Importantly, this fly-based work found that characteristics like eye colour are inherited from parents through chromosomes — large structures which package DNA in our cells.

Furthermore, Morgan and his gifted students uncovered that the thousands of genes in our genome are arranged along chromosomes in a precise order, like beads in a necklace. Each gene can be identified by its specific location on a chromosome.

In 1933, Morgan won the Nobel Prize for these great discoveries. The first of six awards was to recognise seminal insights into our biology through this tiny fly. Hence, in 1946 one of Morgan’s protégés, Hermann Muller, was recognised for his fly research demonstrating that X-rays can damage chromosomes. Then in 1995, Ed Lewis,

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, and Eric Wieschaus shared the Nobel Prize for their herculean efforts in discovering the genes that controlled early development in Drosophila. In the embryo, waves of master genes are triggered that lead to eyes, brains, and the body’s patterning. Similar genes were later found in humans doing the same function. In 2011 Jules Hoffman received the Nobel Prize for finding how the body’s inbuilt immunity works through the use of the fly model organism. I suspect that there is still room for more trophies in the fly triumph cabinet.

At the dawn of this century, the genomics revolution led to the complete DNA sequencing of an organism including fly and human. These monumental projects revealed that an astonishing number (more than twothirds) of human genes involved in disease have counterparts in the fly. This development meant that flies could be used as models of human disease. It sparked off a renaissance of Drosophila research. The fly was good at modelling neuro-degenerative conditions because their nervous system has stunning similarities to ours. Neuro-degenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and »

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Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) makes it difficult for a child to move around, walk, or breathe. This occurs because of death or degeneration of the nerves that control muscle movement. There is no cure for SMA or for any other Motor Neuron Disorder.

Motor Neuron Disease occur when neurons in the brain and spinal cord begin to die slowly. Patients may lose their ability to function independently or think clearly. Symptoms progressively worsen and ultimately, many die.

Most neuro-degenerative diseases strike later in life, so we should expect their frequency to soar as our population ages — Alzheimer’s disease may triple in the US alone by 2050.

Malta: the right time to fly?

Together with my students in my lab at the University of Malta I am working with flies to learn more about neuro-degenerative disease. We continue to focus on SMA, a genetic disorder arising from the deterioration of motor neurons which are nerves that communicate with and control voluntary muscles. As the motor neurons die, the muscles weaken with drastic effect on the walking, crawling, breathing, swallowing, and head and neck control of unfortunate children afflicted by this condition. The child’s intellectual capacity is unaffected but vulnerability to pneumonia and respiratory failure means that many patients die a few years after diagnosis.

The underlying cause of SMA is usually a gene flaw that results in low

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We are feeding these flies the Mediterranean diet derivatives to see whether Alzheimer’s can be stopped in flies, which will bring us one step closer to treating it in humans

levels of a protein called SMN for survival of motor neurons. Inside cells, SMN is bound to other proteins called Gemins. The SMN-Gemins alliance is involved in building the spliceosome, which is the chief editor of messenger RNA molecules. Messenger RNA carry the DNA code that instruct cells how to fabricate proteins. If SMN is absent spliceosomes do not form, correctly-edited messenger RNA are not produced and protein synthesis is heavily disrupted — the cell should shut down. Spliceosomes are required in each of the 120 trillion cells forming our body. Yet, in the disease SMA only motor neurons die. The reason has baffled researchers for decades and remains unsolved.

Is it possible that SMN has another function in motor neurons? And does it act alone? Our flies were crucial in providing some answers to these questions. Our work showed how the SMN-Gemins family is tightly-knit. In this regard, we recently demonstrated that both SMN and Gemins can be detected in prominent spherical specks in different cellular compartments.

Within the cytoplasm, these organelles are known as U bodies because they probably are the factories of spliceosome components, which themselves are rich in the chemical Uridine. In the nucleus, the structures containing the

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SMN-Gemins family hug the mysterious Cajal bodies — discovered over a century ago by Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

And what about the flightless flies?

Think about it. Considering that SMA is a neuromuscular disease, it makes perfect sense that on loss of SMN, muscles become so weak that flies are unable to flap their tiny wings fast enough to fly. Our latest work reveals that flightlessness is seen in flies without enough Gemin proteins. This means that SMN does not function alone but hand in hand with the Gemins. Our next step was to find out the pathway connecting the SMN-Gemins family to the motor defects. We linked the Gemin mutant which did not work properly to a tag called green fluorescent protein or GFP. GFP glows under the right light in cells.

We managed to create genetically-modified flies with this modified gene — a first for Malta and a powerful tool to solve the mysteries of this disease.

Fluorescent proteins let researchers figure out a protein’s location. And by knowing the location of proteins we gain of lot of information about what they do. Consider this analogy with a VIP. If we tagged the Prime Minister of Malta we would find that he is most probably found in Valletta most time of the year. If we were aliens from another planet, this knowledge would allow us to refine our understanding of the Prime Minister’s function. Therefore, we can eliminate a function in the entertainment industry (weak signal from Paceville) but we cannot exclude a function in government (strong signal from Valletta). Likewise, we found that our GFP-Gemin mutant is mostly found in the cell’s nucleus. The nucleus houses life’s instruction manual: DNA. Our work now needs to zero in on the other proteins the SMN-Gemins family works with in the nucleus. Doing so will open new therapies to halt neuro-degeneration in children. Back to our

analogy, we need to zoom in on Valletta until Auberge de Castille, the Prime Minister’s office, is clearly in focus.

Several neuro-degenerative diseases occur because of sticky protein clumps that wreak havoc inside, and outside, neurons. This is typical in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Motor Neuron Disease. With Dr Neville Vassallo’s research group, and local industry (Institute of Cellular Pharmacology), we are testing chemical derivatives of the Mediterranean diet and flora on fruit flies to see whether they can curb the protein clumps’ toxicity. They definitely do in a test tube. Flies mutated to be remarkably similar to human Alzheimer’s lose their ability to climb up the sides of their vial habitats and die prematurely because of neuro-degeneration. We are feeding these flies the Mediterranean diet derivatives to see whether Alzheimer’s can be stopped in flies, which will bring us one step closer to treating it in humans.

Through flies we have understood human biology. Apart from choosing Mr and Mrs Right, a good geneticist must learn to focus and listen to what flies are really saying. This is easier said than done but achievable. Flies have spurred me to pursue unexpected but interesting paths.

In the years to come I, together with my students, will continue to flip, sort,

screen and tag, looking for fly mutants who will continue to teach us about ourselves. And yes, we will be all ears!

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The author is indebted to colleagues at the UoM and worldwide for their constant support and inspiration. The research of Dr Ruben Cauchi (Department of Physiology & Biochemistry, UoM) is funded by the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, the University of Malta Research Fund and the Malta Council for Science & Technology (MCST) through the National R&I Programme 2012 (Project R&I-2012-066). For more about Dr. Cauchi’s research see: http://staff.um.edu.mt/ruben.cauchi

FURTHER READING • Borg, R., Cauchi, R.J. (2013) The Gemin Associates of Survival Motor Neuron Are Required for Motor Function in Drosophila.

PLOS ONE 8: e83878 • Cauchi R.J. (2010) SMN and Gemins: ‘we are family’ … or are we? Bioessays 32: 1077-1089 • Cauchi R.J. (Editor) (2013) Drosophila melanogaster Models of Motor Neuron Disease. New York: Nova Biomedical.

The cell interior can be as stunning as a starry sky. U bodies and Gems twinkle brightly in a fly egg (left) and a gut cell (right), respectively.

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Feature

Malta has around 220 beekeepers over just 316 km2. The country’s name is tied to honey that has been prized for its flavour and health benefits.

Local researchers are finding out just how unique it is and some of its powerful properties.

Words by The Editor 22

Bees Dream of Gold

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ear. One hundred bee stings can kill anyone. I was seeing over 20,000 in front of me.

Beekeeper Ray Sciberras had just removed a hive’s crown board revealing the brood. My heart skipped a beat.

Thankfully I was zipped up in apiarist’s gear. Every surface of my body was covered. These precautions are essential.

If one bee gets in, the rest will follow and sting and sting again. Apart from injecting anti-coagulating toxins, they release alarm chemicals that attract a smart swarm. It’s not their fault; they give up their life to defend the colony.

I was out with Ray to find out about bees in Malta and if there is anything special about their products. Unfortunately, researcher Dr Everaldo Attard (University of Malta), who Sciberras collaborates with, said ‘in the 90’s, a mite infestation destroyed a significant portion of the [local bee] population.

Beforehand, Maltese honey was mainly produced by a typical endemic Maltese

Dr Everaldo Attard

honey bee.’ Few of these bees are left and studies by other scientists are still trying to see whether they are unique.

Sciberras now buys his hives mainly from France and Italy, and though you can even buy bees online, they should come from certified sources otherwise you risk disease.

A Bee’s Problem Bees all over the world are suffering.

Bees in the UK succumb to moulds, those in Europe pesticides, viruses claimed Israel’s hives. Even mobile phone antennae contribute, long exposure affects their health and ‘cause them to lose their orientation and they get lost,’ said Sciberras.

Bees are important for farmers. In 2012, in Northern China the situation was so bad that people were employed to pollinate apple trees by hand. Though nowhere near other countries’ scale, loss of colonies has even affected Malta. ‘Last year we lost around 14 hives’,

stated Sciberras somberly. He only has around 30 hives. ‘The rain stopped very early in March, the bees were stressed and the harvests for spring and summer were a disaster.’

Not all locals look at bees favourably.

Sciberras mentioned how some people destroy them if they suffer an accidental bee attack. Or worse, ‘you suffer from arson, people throw a cigarette in a dry field.’ They try to control fires by cutting nearby grass.

Such hive loss is a big blow. Each hive costs hundreds of euros and has around 50,000 bees. These bees make around up to 90 kilos of honey per year. If it is a good year a beekeeper like Sciberras can make ends meet, but he invests in other projects to make a decent living.

To make a drop of honey A single bee cannot do much; together they form the smart swarm. A hive’s bees all come from the same queen that is protected by a ball of bees at the »

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The three seasons

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altese beekeepers produce three honeys. Spring multiflora honey, harvested in May, is produced from the nectar of several flowers. These include thistles (Galactites tomentosa), silla (Hedysarum coronarium), wild borage (Borago officinalis), almond and citrus flowers and the cape sorrel (Oxalis pes-caprae). Maltese spring honey tends to be golden yellow in colour with a green, iridescent sheen and a delicate flavour.

Wild thyme honey is harvested in late July/August. Unique to Malta, it is mostly exclusively produced from the nectar of wild thyme (Thymbra capitata).

In June in Malta June little else flowers forcing the bees to just feed off it. An attentive beekeeper can monitor thyme’s flowering period and make this highly aromatic honey. Wild thyme honey varies from light to dark amber.

Autumn honey is harvested at the end of November. During this season (August–November) bees take nectar from eucalyptus, carob (Ceratonia siliqua) and mustard plants (Diplotaxis spp.).

Autumn honey varies from dark amber to dark brown. This honey has the most intense flavor and aroma, an acquired taste.

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Dr David Mifsud

Traditional Maltese apiary houses (Miġbħa) Xemxija, Malta

hive’s centre. The single queen lays all the eggs that are fertilised by different males’ sperm. This ensures genetic diversity but retains a common link since a hive is made up mostly of sisters. This connection makes them work efficiently together to create a powerful elixir: honey.

A forager bee can travel up to 3 miles to find the flowers it likes. Once there, it uses its straw-like proboscis to drink the sweet nectar into its honey stomach or crop. Bees have two stomachs. The honey stomach does not change the nectar; it stores the nectar till it flies back to the hive. The stomach can take 100 to 1,500 flowers to fill up. Once at the hive, the bee regurgitates the nectar into the crop of a processor bee.

The processor bee takes the nectar into the hive. It goes to the hive’s outer frames, finds one cell from thousands and fills it up. The bee adds an enzyme called invertase to help mature the nectar into honey. The enzyme breaks down sucrose into two simpler sugars called glucose and fructose.

These two sugars make up around 70% of honey. The nectar needs to be concentrated by drying so the bees fan their wings to help blow air over

the maturing nectar. Water makes up around 18% of honey with another 5% being vitamins, pigments, enzymes, minerals, organic acids and aromatic oils. This 5% is responsible for a lot of the uniqueness of every honey.

Maltese researchers have been studying honey for over a decade. They have found that there are three harvests for Maltese beekeepers: the spring multiflora honey in May, wild thyme honey in July, and autumn honey by the end of November. Each honey is different because very different flowers bloom during each season. The flowers all have a distinctive nectar and pollen makeup.

These give each honey a special character.

Maltese honey is unique. Attard states that its physical properties, chemical composition, and pollen makeup are different to honey elsewhere.

Each harvest makes a distinct honey.

A study recently published in Xjenza, the Journal of the Malta Chamber of Scientists, states that wild thyme honey has some of the highest percentage of thyme pollen of any honey worldwide.

Greek honey comes in at 43% of pollen being thyme; Malta’s honey comes in at a whopping 85–90%.

THINK Feature

Asparagus pollen

Sunflower pollen

Rosemary pollen

DNA Pollen Maltese honey is not a new idea. The country’s name, ‘Malta, is derived from the Greek word Meli, meaning honey.

The Phoenicians introduced the art of beekeeping and honey harvesting.

Ever since the Maltese Islands were renowned for good quality honey, which was valorised for its taste and beneficial effects,’ proudly stated Attard. A traditional Maltese stone apiary (Miġbħa, in Maltese) that used to produce honey can still be seen in the village of Xemxija.

Fraud is a problem for Maltese honey. Importers can remove labels and sell imported honey as local honey. ‘We are looking for establishing a PDO — Product Designation of Origin — like we have for wine’, said Sciberras. Research is the only solution to fight fraud.

Queen

The mix of flowers that bloom in Malta are unique. The bees will gather pollen from this mix, which makes pollen characterisation a powerful way to figure out if a honey is Maltese or not.

Each Maltese honey type’s pollen profile has already been found. Sciberras and Attard are taking this one step further using DNA. ‘So you extract the DNA from the pollen, then see which flowers are in the area. After that you can say with positive certainty which honey is from Mġarr or Żurrieq’, two villages in Malta less than 18 km apart. If these advanced techniques are combined with other physical and chemical properties a profile for the type and place of Maltese honey can be set in stone creating a ‘Malta honey’ trademark.

The importance of a Malta brand are due to the powerful benefits in honey »

How to Make a Queen

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ou have to be careful not to crush the queen’, said beekeeper Ray Sciberras. Otherwise the hive could be lost, though a healthy hive in spring can make a new queen.

Scibberas explains most ‘bees are born female according to what larvae are fed they develop differently. So to make a queen an egg is laid in a [queen cup] and it’s fed more royal jelly to develop faster.

They take 16 days instead of the normal 21. They have a longer abdomen and are sexually capable of reproducing within the next four days.’ When the queen is born she kills any other virgin rivals. She

then needs to mate to create the next hive.

To make a queen you need males.

‘A queen bee lays an egg in a bigger cell, and releases a signal through her body so that she doesn’t fertilise the egg and that egg becomes a male, a drone. The drones eat, they don’t forage. The hive places a balancing act between many workers and a few future queens plus drones. Get it wrong and it collapses. The drones take 23 days to develop.

The fertile female needs to meet a male from another colony to mate.

Under sunny blue skies she emerges, flying to the drone zone where the other men chase her. They fight

to the death to mate with her. After successfully mating, they also die.

She would mate with up to 15 drones to store 6 million sperm to be used for up to four years at her bidding.

Once mated, the fertilised queen flies back to her old hive, steals the old queen’s bees and flies off in a giant ball of bees to found a new hive.

Sometimes she violently replaces the mother.

Beekeepers can also help the hive make queens. Ironically, Mifsud mentioned how today it is harder to make queens because they are being eaten by birds. Probably one consequence of the bird-hunting ban Malta can afford to live with.

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local researchers are uncovering. Silvan Spagnol in 2010 tested whether Maltese honey is better than sugar in busting bugs. The high concentrations of sugar do kill microbes, however honey is not just sugar. The proteins, flavonoids, and terpenoids in honey make it a powerful antimicrobial liquid. Malta’s honey could have powerful health benefits.

Many types of honey caxn cure wounds

Honey, there is someone else When Sciberras opened the hive, pulling up a frame full of hexagonal honeycombs, there was a slight cracking sound. I saw a sticky substance breaking apart. That substance is propolis. Bees use it to keep the hive together. Cleverly, it is both a sealant and anti-microbial substance making a hive highly sterile.

‘Propolis is produced by honeybees after collecting resins from botanical sources such as trees and woody shrubs,’

Honey in the making. Bottom left: a male drone bee.

Top right: wild thyme. Middle Right: female honeybees returning to the hive. Bottom left: Honeybee taking nectar from Cape Soler.

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said postgraduate researcher Simone Cutajar (supervised by entomologist Dr David Mifsud and pharmaceutical chemist Prof. Claude Farrugia). Mifsud continued that plants produce these resins to protect themselves. Plants have tender buds that develop into new flowers or shoots. The buds’ tenderness make them very tasty for animals to eat.

So ‘these buds are covered with chemistry to safeguard them. The only insects that can collect this chemistry are honeybees, and they transform this chemistry into propolis. The propolis saves the

bud from being eaten,’ explains Mifsud.

‘The bees carry these resins in pollen sacs on their hind legs,’ said Cutajar.

She studied propolis at the University of Malta and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Bees mix the resin with beeswax to insulate and fix the hive. ‘If a mouse gets inside, they will kill it with bee venom, but then the bees have no idea how to get it out. They just cover it with propolis and mummify it,’ said Mifsud.

Humans for millennia have exploited the anti-microbial properties of propolis. This inspired the UoM team to find out if propolis in Malta is unique and potent. ‘Yes, there is a Maltese propolis’, stated Farrugia. Its colour ranges from nearly black to a lighter reddish brown and its texture ranges from very pliable and sticky, to hard and brittle.

The researchers first saw its chemical composition. The type of fatty acids,

THINK Feature

The Properties of Honey

polysaccharides, and phenols, was the same as other Mediterranean propolis (Greek and Sicilian). Then they found unique molecules that were found only in Iranian propolis. The distinct mix means that the researchers could use these as markers to place a Maltese flag on the substance.

Maltese propolis can also bust bugs.

In the lab it was just as good as other types and stopped fungi and bacteria growing. It means that it can be used as a natural remedy — powerful implications for industry and medicine.

Honey

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Bees and Our Health

Prof. Claude Farrugia

Honey and propolis are remarkable natural products with the power to heal and cure. In a world where many are seeking alternatives to conventional medicine it is critical for researchers to find out at what dose and for which disease they can be used. Lives are at stake.

Many natural remedies are found with claims ranging curing from cancer to asthma. Such claims can be dangerous when effective conventional medicines exist. Imagine abandoning a chance to recover in favour of a poorly tested remedy.

Many types of honey can cure wounds. There are many products on the market to bandage wounds.

Honey has antimicrobial compounds from hydrogen peroxide to phenol to organic acids that make it a powerful wound dressing. Since it is a complex brew of chemicals, bacteria have not developed a resistance to honey, bypassing the huge problem of antibiotic resistance. Some hospitals even use specially prepared honey to treat cuts and burns.

Propolis has been tested on cancer cells. The cancer cells growing in a petri dish stopped growing. ‘We have shown [Maltese propolis’] antioxidant activity’, said Farrugia. Another group of local researchers lead by Dr

Pierre Schembri-Wismayer also saw that Maltese propolis can be toxic to cancer cells. This phenomenon was due to the level of diterpenoid totarol, a well-known antioxidant and antibacterial chemical. The more diterpenoid, the more effective the propolis.

This research places a spotlight on Maltese honey and propolis. It means it could also be effective against cancer, but this has not been tested in animals or clinical trials. There is a big leap of faith from a lab experiment to the real world. Studies on propolis from other countries in mice indicated that it could help treat cancer when used with other chemotherapies, but the latest clinical studies show it does not work for colon cancer and chemotherapy induced mouth ulcers. On the other hand, a small clinical study in Egypt showed that honey could treat chemotherapy mouth ulcers — confusing results.

Most medicines take around a decade to go from lab to medicinal product because of the experiments required. Though an imperfect system, this rigour tries to prevent products that either do not work or are harmful from reaching the market.

Antioxidants are another cancer-busting buzzword found on »

oney is a mix of sugars (77%), water (18%) and complex compounds like vitamins, enzymes, and pollen (5%). The compounds in this 5% of honey give its flavor, some health benefits, and unique character.

The main sugars in honey are glucose and fructose.

Honey crystallises because glucose is less soluble than fructose. The glucose crystallises out in the honey. So a honey with lots of glucose crystallises more quickly. On the other hand, honey with more fructose rarely crystallises.

Crystallisation occcurs naturally. Heating honey makes it runny again but degrades the beneficial chemicals in honey and kills the aroma. For local honey, autumn honey crystallises the most rapidly with small, regular crystals, followed by spring honey cystallising in winter, with thyme honey hardly ever crystallising.

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Simone Cutajar

Beekeeper Ray Sciberras at work

natural products worldwide. These chemicals basically soak up oxygen radicals that are known to react with DNA and cause mutations that lead down the dark road of cancer. Unfortunately, many cancer-busting berries have ingredients tested on cancer cells in labs and not in the real world. For antioxidants to be effective they need to get into blood, through our liver, and into cells to soak up oxygen radicles before they cause damage. Saying that taking antioxidant tablets can prevent cancer is irresponsible. The best defence is still a healthy diet and regular exercise.

Researchers need to find out which chemical/s in honey and propolis are effective. They need to test the level of this ingredient to make sure what level is effective to treat disease. Afterwards, clinical trials are needed to find if it works in the real world. Till then we are playing Russian roulette.

Bees are tiny insects vital for flowering plants worldwide. Most fruit we eat need bees to develop. They make honey and propolis that have powerful properties. Without bees the world just might stop.

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FURTHER READING • Abdulrhman, M., et al. Honey and a mixture of honey, beeswax, and olive oil-propolis extract in treatment of chemotherapy-induced oral mucositis: a randomized controlled pilot study.

Pediatric hematology and oncology 29, 285–292, doi:10.3109/08880018 .2012.669026 (2012).

• Attard, E. & Mizzi, J. Physicochemical characterization of Gozitan Honey. International Journal of Food Studies 2, 180–187, doi: 10.7455/ijfs/2.2.2013. a5 (2013) • Gambin, C., Farrugia, C. & Lanfranco, E. Pollen Characterisation of Maltese Honey. Xjenza Online, 33–46, doi: http://dx.medra.org/10.7423/XJENZA.2013.2.05 (2013).

• Favre, D. Mobile phone-induced honeybee worker piping. Apidologie 42, 270–279, doi: 10.1007/s13592-0110016-x (2011).

• Zammit, E. J. et al., Totarol Content and Cytotoxicity Varies Significantly in Different Types of Propolis. Research Journal of Pharmaceutical, Biological and Chemical Sciences 4, 1047–1058, (2013).

• Kumar, N. R., et al. Exposure to cell

phone radiations produces biochemical changes in worker honey bees.

Toxicology international 18, 70–72, doi: 10.4103/0971-6580.75869 (2011).

• Natarajan, S., Williamson, D., Grey, J., Harding, K. G. & Cooper, R. A. Healing of an MRSA-colonized, hydroxyurea-induced leg ulcer with honey. The Journal of dermatological treatment 12, 33–36, doi: 10.1080/095466301750163563 (2001).

• Simon, A. et al. Wound care with antibacterial honey (Medihoney) in pediatric hematology-oncology. Supportive care in cancer: official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer 14, 91–97, doi:10.1007/s00520-005-0874-8 (2006).

• Tomazevic, T. & Jazbec, J. A double blind randomised placebo controlled study of propolis (bee glue) effectiveness in the treatment of severe oral mucositis in chemotherapy treated children. Complementary therapies in medicine 21, 306–312, doi:10.1016/j. ctim.2013.04.002 (2013).

THINK Feature

How does the loss of memory change a person? Can media replace memory? Giulia Bugeja asks several researchers to find out the affect on cultural memory and she also touches on dementia

Giulia Bugeja

W

hen Mike* went to the nursing home that evening to visit his grandmother Maria*, she was worried that he wouldn’t be able to find her because the caretakers had changed her room.

Mike tried explaining to her that her room on the 4th floor had been refurbished a year ago, but she couldn’t remember. 

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Dr James Corby

‘Can life without memory be considered a meaningful existence?’ asks Dr Charles Scerri (Malta Dementia Society, and Department of Pathology, University of Malta). Dr Scerri researches dementia. He is currently examining which physical environments and what sort of psychosocial wellbeing can improve life in local dementia hospital wards. In fact, Dr Scerri reports that today there are over 44 million people suffering from some form of dementia.

That is around 100 times the Maltese population. He asks, ‘what type of society can we end up with if we are wholly made up of individuals with no past and an uncertain future?’

With more people relying on new media technology to record information and experiences, Dr Scerri’s question faces a future society where media could replace memory. ‘It would be short-sighted to think that new media will have no long-term influence on the complex nexus of personal and cultural memory’, says Dr James Corby (Department of English, UoM).

Photography already acts as a surrogate for memory. But, it does not stop there; theorist Roland Barthes goes one

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step further saying how photography can capture details missed by the human eye. As developers of new media strive to enhance experiences, more users are adopting them. In the final quarter of 2012 alone, Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones. This smartphone, equipped with HD video, an in-built camera, calendar, and interactive 3D map helps people capture memories and avoid having to remember appointments or directions.

It even comes with Siri, your own ‘personal assistant’, to use Apple’s words.

Despite these abilities, Dr Corby is sceptical. As a researcher working on the interfaces between literature, philosophy and culture, Dr Corby thinks that the rich tradition of the humanities should inform debates about cultural memory. ‘The idea that a facility to record memories leads to the diminishment of personal memory is by no means a new idea. Indeed, it is precisely the accusation that, in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates makes against writing.’ Writing did not steal our ability to remember and neither should new technologies.

So what would happen if old or new media failed us? When the accounts office of the family business burned down,

You can never really know if what she’s saying is true because her memories are not always real

THINK Feature

Mike could relate to his grandmother’s anxiety due to her lack of personal memory. All the accounting records, invoices, transaction records, and overseas payments were destroyed. The accountant was so shocked that he still will not enter his old office after 15 years.

The accountant had to keep paper records. There was too much information to remember and they couldn’t memorise it all. Although they recorded the information they still lost it in the fire.

We all risk losing both valuable information and the recollection of experiences. So what would happen if Malta became a nation of people without a memory of important events? For Dr Corby, a society which relies on new media and less on memory ‘might then lead to a complete eliding of any difference between personal memory and an increasingly undifferentiated surfeit of readily available cultural memory — a sort of technologised and globalised cultural eidetic memory’.

There’s also the possibility that media such as photographs could lead to the creation of cultural memories which never took place. ‘I imagine false memory to be the norm—it would be naïve to think that the visual representation of a culture [...] is free from ideology’ says Dr Corby. Our national identity will instead be formed around uncertain events.

Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of American soldiers raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima signifies a moment of national pride for Americans. Few Americans are aware that the photograph shows the flag being raised for a second time. The first flag was too small but the second larger flag would be seen by incoming ships.

Similarly, on the 4th floor of a nursing home, an old woman recalls how the nurses refused to take down the Christmas decorations. In her room, there was only a lone poppy. ‘She often creates stories in her head’, says Mike. ‘You can never really know if what she’s saying is true because her memories are not always real.’

‘Memories are created by altering a set of connections between brain cells so that one cell stimulates the others,’ says Jonah Lehrer, Wired Magazine.

By creating memories, we are literally rewiring our brains. Every time a memory is recalled, the connection between brain cells is restructured and the memory altered depending on the stimuli of the current situation. This means that whilst media may fail us, so might our memories.

Will a nation inevitably make the same mistakes because its people cannot remember past experiences or because they replace them with false ones? When asked how memory recall can be assisted, Dr Scerri acknowledges that media is a useful tool in improving memory, as ‘memory albums are extremely valuable for individuals with dementia in facilitating memory events and in reducing anxiety and confusion’.

Perhaps these tools can help Mike’s grandmother.

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*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the people mentioned in the article.

Giulia Bugeja is part of the Department of English Master of Arts programme.

Look out for an in-depth feature on dementia in the next issue.

More about Alzheimer’s in Malta Dr Scerri has collaborated with the Department of Pathology to launch the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Group (University of Malta). Their objective is to gather several multidisciplinary professionals to ‘promote and facilitate research and scientific collaboration in Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia’. Together with Trevor Zahra, he recently released the publication X’ħin hu? Fatti dwar id-dimensja (What time is it? Facts about dementia).

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Research

A Good Cause for Research

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Mario Cachia

hy should public, private, and non-profit entities invest in research? Several reasons exist.

Firstly, research is key for our future.

Research helps drive new knowledge that will improve the world. Society depends on research, across a wide range of disciplines, to strengthen our quality of life and sustain economic stability. By raising funds for University research the RIDT is surely not trying to reinvent the wheel. On the contrary, throughout Europe, the US and Asia RIDT CEO Wilfred Kenely (centre) receiving the €70,000 donation from Lifecycle chairman Alan Curry public universities are enhancing their (left), in the presence of Hon. Godfrey Farrugia, Minister for Health.

Government funding through various initiatives to sustain important reSecondly, don’t you want to be part Research affects our day-to-day lives. search. Universities all across the globe of something bigger? You probably can- Though research discoveries take time appeal to public entities, private indi- not find the cure for cancer yourself, but and need constant investment to benviduals and NGOs to fund research everyone can contribute to make that a efit our society, we can come together and invest in our society’s future. possibility. As the University’s Research as a Maltese community by investing in Locally, we have just started scrap- Trust, we do not only want to attract big research for good causes. Ultimately, let ing the surface of fundraising for re- corporate companies or NGOs to do- us imagine a world where we have cured search. Recently, the RIDT received a nate money, but we also want you — the all major diseases, where we can move number of important donations which students, the alumni, the professionals, objects with our thoughts, and unravel shall serve to continue fostering local the workers, the parents, to realise that the mysteries of the universe.Imagine, research. In the first of its kind, we donating for research is a noble cause. A and let’s make it happen! received €55,000 from local NGO recent Christmas campaign at the Uni‘Action for Breast Cancer Foundation’ versity of Malta that was spearheaded RIDT is the University’s Research (ABCF), raised through the ALIVE by KSU, the UoM staff and the Chap- Trust aimed towards fostering awareCycling Challenge. They are being used laincy managed to raise €12,000 from ness and fundraising for high-calibre to launch a Ph.D. studentship in breast students, staff, and academics on cam- local research. We aim to achieve this cancer research. The Lifecycle Founda- pus. A third of these funds were donat- by raising funds for various research tion has also donated €70,000 towards ed to the RIDT, which were devolved projects undertaken at the Universikidney disease research. These NGOs to the Department of Anatomy. They ty of Malta. Please visit www.ridt.eu have followed a stream of public and will be invested in specialised research to donate and our Facebook page on private entities, as well as students, who projects focusing on specific strands of www.facebook.com/RIDTMalta for have been donating money for research cancer, such as leukaemias, sarcomas, more information about our latest events for the last three years. brain tumours, breast and colon cancer. and initiatives.

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THINK Feature

Decoding Language

Maltese needs to be saved from digital extinction. Dr Albert Gatt, Prof. Gordon Pace, and Mike Rosner write about their work making digital tools for Maltese, interpretting legalese, and making a Maltese-speaking robot 33

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Dr Albert Gatt Prof. Gordon Pace Mike Rosner

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the machine’s microphones. If Watson were human, the vibrations would jiggle the hairs inside his ear so that the brain would then chop up the component sounds and analyse them into words extremely rapidly. The problem for a computer is that there is more to language than just sounds and words.

A human listener would need to do much more. For example, to figure out that ‘it’ in the question probably refers to ‘Maltese’ (rather than, say, ‘Italian’, which is possible though unlikely in this context). They would also need to figure out that ‘borrow’ is being used differently than when one says borrowing one’s sister’s car. After all, Maltese did not borrow words from Italian on a short-term basis. Clearly the correct interpretation of ‘borrow’ depends on the listener having identified the intended meaning of ‘Maltese’, namely, that it is a language. Watson was equipped with Automatic Speech Recognition technology to do exactly that.

To understand language any listener needs to go beyond mere sound. There are meanings and structures throughout all language levels. A human listener needs to go through them all before saying that they understood the message.

Watson was not just good at understanding; he was pretty good at speaking too. His answers were formulated in a crisp male voice that sounded quite natural, an excellent example of Textto-Speech synthesis technology. In a fully-fledged human or machine communicating system, going from text to speech requires formulating the text of the message. The process could be thought of as the reverse of understanding, involving much the same levels of linguistic processing.

n 2011 an IBM computer called Watson made the headlines after it won an American primetime television quiz called Jeopardy. Over three episodes the computer trounced two human contestants and won a million dollars.

Jeopardy taps into general world knowledge, with contestants being presented with ‘answers’ to which they have to find the right questions. For instance, one of the answers, in the category “Dialling for Dialects”, was: While Maltese borrows many words from Italian, it developed from a dialect of this Semitic language. To which Watson correctly replied with: What is Arabic?

Watson is a good example of state of the art technology that can perform intelligent data mining, sifting through huge databases of information to identify relevant nuggets. It manages to do so very efficiently by exploiting a grid architecture, which is a design that allows it to harness the power of several computer processors working in tandem.

This ability alone would not have been enough for it to win an American TV show watched by millions. Watson was so appealing because it used English as an American would.

Consider what it takes for a machine Machine: say ‘hello’ to Human to understand the above query about Maltese. The TV presenter’s voice The above processes are all classified as would cause the air to vibrate and hit Human Language Technology, which

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can be found in many devices. Human Language Technology can be found everywhere from Siri or Google Now in smart phones to a word processing program that can spell, check grammar, or translate.

Human-machine interaction relies on language to become seamless. The challenge for companies and universities is that, unlike artificial languages (such as those used to program computers or those developed by mathematicians), human languages are riddled with ambiguity. Many words and sentences have multiple meanings and the intended sense often depends on context and on our knowledge of the world.

A second problem is that we do not all speak the same language.

Human Language Technology, the first step is usually to acquire a corpus, a large repository of text or speech, in the form of books, articles, recordings, or anything else that happens to be available in the correct form. Such repositories are exploited using machine-learning techniques, to help systems grasp how the language is typically used. To return to the Jeopardy example, there are now programs that can resolve pronouns such as ‘it’ to identify their antecedents, the element to which they refer. The program should identify that ‘it’ refers to Maltese.

For the Maltese language, researchers have developed a large text/speech repository, electronic lexicons (language’s inventory of its basic units of meaning), and related tools to analyse the language Breaking through Maltese (available for free here: http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt). Automatic tools Maltese has been described as a lan- exist to annotate this text with basic guage in danger of ‘digital extinction’. grammatical and structural information.

This was the conclusion of a report by These tools require a lot of manual work META-NET, a European consortium however, once in place, they allow for of research centres focusing on lan- the development of sophisticated proguage technology. The main problem grams. The rest of this article will anais a lack of Human Language Technol- lyse some of the on-going research using ogy — resources like word processing these basic building blocks. » programs that can correctly recognise Maltese.

Designing an intelligent computer system with a language ability is far easier in some languages than it is in others.

English was the main language in which most of these technologies were developed. Since researchers can combine these ready-made software components instead of developing them themselves, it allows them to focus on larger challenges, such as winning a million dollars on a TV program. In the case of smaller languages, like Maltese, the basic building blocks are still being assembled.

Perhaps the most fundamental building block for any language system is linguistic data in a form that can be processed automatically by a machine. In

Maltese has been described as a language in danger of ‘digital extinction’

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Illustration by Sonya Hallett

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From Legalese to Pets Many professions benefit from automating tasks using computers. Lawyers and notaries are the next professionals that might benefit from an ongoing project at the University of Malta.

These experts draft contracts on a daily basis. For them, machine support is still largely limited to word processing, spell checking, and email services, with no support for a deeper analysis of the contracts they write and the identification

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of their potential legal consequences, analyse the deeper meaning of these partly through their interaction with contracts. other laws.

Deeper analysis is another big chalContracts suffer from the same chal- lenge in contract analysis. It is not lenges when developing Human Lan- restricted to just identifying the core guage Technology resources. A saving ‘meaning’ or message, but needs to acgrace is that they are written in ‘lega- count the underlying reasoning behind lese’ that lessens some problems. Tech- legal norms. Such reasoning is different nology has advanced enough to allow from traditional logic, since it talks the development of tools that analyse about how things should be as opposed a text to enable extraction of informa- to how they are. Formal logical reasontion about the basic elements of con- ing has a long history, but researchers tracts, leaving the professional free to are still trying to identify how one can

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think precisely about norms which affect definitions. Misunderstood definitions can land a person in jail.

Consider the following problem.

What if a country legislates that: ‘Every year, every person must hand in Form A on 1st January, and Form B on 2nd January, unless stopped by officials.’ Exactly at midnight between the 1st and 2nd of January the police arrest John for not having handed in Form A. He is kept under arrest until the following day, when his case is heard in court. The prosecuting lawyer argues that John should be found guilty because, by not handing in Form A on 1st January he has violated the law. The defendant’s lawyer argues that, since John was under arrest throughout the 2nd of January he was being stopped by officials from handing in Form B, absolving him of part of his legal obligation. Hence, he is innocent. Who is right? If we were to analyse the text of the law logically, which version should be adopted? The logical reasoning behind legal documents can be complicated, which is precisely why tools are needed to support lawyers and notaries who draft such texts.

Figuring out legal documents might seem very different to what Watson was coping with. But there is an important link: both involve understanding natural language (normal every day language) for something, be it computer, robot, or software, to do something specific. Analysing contracts is different because the knowledge required involves reasoning. So we are trying to wed recent advances in Human Language Technology with advances in formal logical reasoning.

Contract drafting can be supported in many ways, from a simple cross-referencing facility, enabling an author to identify links between a contract and existing laws, to identifying conflicts within the legal text. Since contracts are written in a natural language, linguistic analysis is vital to properly analyse a text.

For example in a rent contract when making a clause about keeping dogs there would need to be a cross-reference to legislation about pet ownership.

We (the authors) are developing tools that integrate with word processors to help lawyers or notaries draft contracts.

Results are presented as recommendations rather than automated changes, keeping the lawyer or notary in control.

Robots ’R’ Us

Robby the Robot from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, refused to obey a human’s orders

So far we have only discussed how language is analysed and produced.

Of course, humans are not simply language-producing engines; a large amount of human communication involves body language. We use gestures to enhance communication — for example, to point to things or mime actions as we speak — and facial expressions to show emotions. Watson may be very clever indeed, but is still a »

The Unimate Puma 200

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Lego Mindstorms EV3 brick

disembodied voice. Imagine taking it home to meet the parents.

Robotics is forging strong links with Human Language Technology. Robots can provide bodies for disembodied sounds allowing them to communicate in a more human-like manner.

Robots have captured the public imagination since the beginning of science fiction. For example, Robby the Robot [shown as the cover photo for the article] from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, refused to obey a human’s orders, a key plot element. He disobeyed because they conflicted with ‘the three laws of robotics’, as laid down by Isaac Asimov in 1942. These imaginary robots look somewhat human-shaped and are not only anthropomorphic, but they think and even make value judgements.

Actual robots tend to be more mundane. Industry uses them to cut costs and improve reliability. For example, the Unimate Puma, which was designed in 1963, is a robotic arm used by General Motors to assemble cars.

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The Puma became popular because of its programmable memory, which allowed quick and cheap reconfiguration to handle different tasks. But the basic design was inflexible to unanticipated changes inevitably ending in failure.

Current research is closing the gap between Robby and Puma.

Opinions may be divided on the exact nature of robots, but three main qualities define a robot: one, a physical body; two, capable of complex, autonomous actions; and three, able to communicate. Very roughly, advances in robotics push along these three highly intertwined axes.

At the UoM we are working on research that pushes forward all three, though it might take some time before we construct a Robby 2. We are developing languages for communicating with robots that are natural for humans to use, but are not as complex as natural languages like Maltese. Naturalness is a hard notion to pin down. But we can judge that one thing is more or less

natural than another. For example, the language of logic is highly unnatural, while using a restricted form of Maltese would be more natural. It could be restricted in its vocabulary and grammar to make it easier for a robot to handle.

Take the language of a Lego EV3 Mindstorms robot and imagine a three-instruction program. The first would be to start its motors, the second to wait until light intensity drops to a specific amount, the third to stop. The reference to light intensity is not a natural way to communicate information to a robot. When we talk to people we are not expected to understand how the way we put our spoken words relates to their hardware. The program is telling the robot to: move forward until you reach a black line. Unlike the literal translation, this more natural version employs concepts at a much higher level and hence is accessible to anybody with a grasp of English.

The first step is to develop programs that translate commands spoken by people into underlying machine instructions understood by robots. These commands will typically describe complex physical actions that are carried out in physical space. Robots need to be equipped with the linguistic abilities necessary to understand these commands, so that we can tell a robot something like ‘when you reach the door near the table go through it’.

To develop a robot that can understand this command a team with a diverse skillset is needed. Language, translation, the robot’s design and movement, ability to move and AI (Artificial Intelligence) all need to work together. The robot must turn language into action. It must know that it needs to go through the door, not through the table, and that it should first perceive the door and then move through it. A problem arises if the door is closed so the robot must know what a

THINK Feature

door is used for, how to open and close it, and what the consequences are. For this it needs reasoning ability and the necessary physical coordination.

Opening a door might seem simple, but it involves complex hand movements and just the right grip. Robots need to achieve complex behaviours and movements to operate in the real world.

The point is that a robot that can understand these commands is very different to the Puma. To build it we must first solve the problem of understanding the part of natural language dealing with spatially located tasks. In so doing the robot becomes a little bit more human.

A longer-term aim is to engage the robot in two-way conversation and have it report on its observations — as Princess Leia did with RT-D2 in Star Wars, if RT-D2 could speak.

Language for the World Human Language Technologies are already changing the world. From automated announcements at airports, to smartphones that can speak back to us, to automatic translation on demand. Human Language Technologies help humans interact with machines and with each other. But the revolution has only just begun. We are beginning to see programs that link language with reasoning, and as robots become mentally and physically more adept the need to talk with them as partners will become ever more urgent. There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome.

To make the right advances, language experts will need to work with engineers and ICT experts. Then having won another million bucks on a TV show, a future Watson will get up, shake the host’s hand, and maybe give a cheeky wink to the camera.

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The Sky’s Limits Europe has a dream: a single European sky. By unifying its air traffic it wants to clean up its skies and make them safer. To find out how Sedeer El-Showk interviewed researchers at the University of Malta

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very day around 30,000 aircraft take to Europe’s skies.

Choreographing this airborne dance is daunting. At the moment, it is orchestrated by the disparate air traffic management systems of each European country, with control handed over at border crossings. The aeronautics research team at the University of Malta is part of an ambitious EU project to change that by establishing a single European sky, enabling EU air traffic controllers to manage increasing amounts of traffic with greater safety, lower costs, and a reduced environmental impact.

A passion for flight

Sedeer El-Showk

Ask Prof. Ing. David Zammit-Mangion (Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, UoM) what he loves and he will reply, ‘anything that flies’. He has come a long way since his childhood dreams of flight, when he would build model aeroplanes and scamper over fences to photograph real ones. Now he leads a major re-

search team with an important role in Clean Sky, the EU's €1.6 billion flagship project which aims to reduce the environmental impact of air transport.

The enthusiasm for flying never left Zammit-Mangion. As an adult, he eventually took to the skies himself, learning to fly during his doctoral research at Cranfield University in the UK, where he designed a cockpit instrument to monitor the take-off performance of aircraft. ‘My dream was to twin my passion with my profession,’ he said.

It is a formula that has worked.

Zammit-Mangion's familiarity with commercial operations, safety procedures, and aircraft equipment has given his research an edge by enabling him to quickly estimate the cost and feasibility of different approaches.

‘When it comes to addressing problems, you need to have a very broad understanding of the whole industry,’ he says, and his hands-on industrial experience and hours logged in the cockpit have proven invaluable. »

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Air traffic over Europe. Courtesy of Flightradar24.com

Clean Sky is central to meeting the environmental goals embedded in the vision of a unified European sky.

Launched in 2008, its goal is to reduce the excess noise and greenhouse gas emissions created by aeroplanes. Air

transport is responsible for around 2% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but traffic is expected to more than double by 2030. By improving air traffic management (ATM) and aircraft technology, the 600-member Clean Sky project aims to ensure that emissions increase at a slower rate than demand.

Clearing the air

Ing. Kenneth Chircop

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Aeroplanes currently follow flight paths through set air corridors, which can make routes unnecessarily long. They also may have to climb or descend in stages and wait in a holding pattern at their destination. These inefficient practices increase the amount of fuel used, leading to higher costs and greater greenhouse gas emissions. Each kilogram of jet fuel burned releases roughly three kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with other greenhouse gases like nitrogen oxides. This happens high in the atmosphere, where these gases end up taking part in a variety of physical and chemical processes that

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cause them to have a greater environmental impact than they would closer to the ground. Given that many airliners burn around 50 kg of fuel per minute, even relatively small optimisations can have a significant impact.

Improving air travel routes is not a simple task. It is what engineers call a ‘multi-criterion, multi-parameter problem’. In other words, you have to balance lots of factors, like the type and mass of the aeroplane, weather conditions, route limitations, and air traffic control constraints. At the same time, you need to maximise performance on different objectives such as fuel use, flight time, and environmental impact.

Zammit-Mangion describes it as ‘a very complex mathematical problem’.

That sort of complexity might sound like a nightmare to most people, but it is just the sort of thing Ing. Kenneth Chircop thrives on. ‘My real love is for engineering mathematics,’ said Chircop.

He studied engineering for his degree, but then his passion for mathematical challenges drove him to join the aeronautics research team. ‘At the end of the day, I wanted to do something heavy in mathematics again.’

As their contribution to Clean Sky, the team developed a software package called Green Aircraft Trajectories under ATM Constraints (GATAC) to help optimise flight routes. Instead of just performing a single optimisation, GATAC provides an optimisation framework which aircraft operators can use with their own models. By plugging in models of aircraft and engine performance, emissions levels, noise production, and so on, users can work out optimal air travel trajectories to match their constraints and conditions. The core software developed at UoM incorporates various models from different research partners, but users are also free to plug in their own models.

Dr Ing. Andrew Sammut

Each kilogram of jet fuel burned releases three kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with other greenhouse gases like nitrogen oxides

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus uses GATAC with its own proprietary models. ‘It’s great to see that foreign partners look at us as equals,’ said Chircop. ‘They trust us to develop state-of-the-art technology. We have delivered, and they trust us to keep delivering. We’re really proud of that; it’s what makes us tick and want to do more.’

Bringing it home This work has brought more than just international recognition to Malta; the country will also enjoy practical benefits. Kenneth Chircop is spear-heading Clean Flight — a national research project financed by the Malta Council for Science and Technology’s national research and innovation programme 2011 — to apply the lessons from Clean Sky to Maltese airspace. ‘Our impact on the national scene can be remarkable,’ said Chircop, describing the gains to be made by optimising the arrival and departure routes aeroplanes use at Malta airport. »

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As an island nation, Malta relies heavily on air traffic to connect it to the rest of the world. In 2013, Malta International Airport saw over 30,000 arrivals and departures, up from roughly 26,000 only seven years ago. Despite this, its air traffic systems need an overhaul; while the technology is state-ofthe-art, some of the procedures are out of date. For example, aeroplanes arriving and departing from an airport follow standard, published routes, called STARs (Standard Terminal Arrival Route) and SIDs (Standard Instrument Departures) respectively, which can simplify airspace management.

‘The SIDs in Maltese airspace were designed years ago when fuel was relatively cheap, and the impact combustion

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made on the environment was not given due importance,’ said Chircop, ‘and we don’t even have STARs.’ Updating these procedures presented a clear opportunity to reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions in Maltese airspace.

Together with their partner, Maltese aeronautics consultancy company QuAero Ltd, Chircop, Zammit-Mangion, and the rest of the team analysed the flight paths taken by aircraft in Maltese airspace and discovered that they were scattered and inefficient. They developed a tool to design and analyse the best arrival and departure routes for aeroplanes, which they used to calculate revised routes for Malta’s airport. Based on fuel savings estimates for the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, the two most

common aircraft in Maltese airspace, the new routes could save 465 tonnes of fuel for departing aircraft and 200 tonnes for arrivals every year. The fuel reductions mean less money spent and lower CO2 emissions in Maltese airspace. Not only does that directly benefit Malta’s environment, but it also offers indirect benefits by reducing the pressure on Malta’s carbon emission caps.

In addition to improving the course followed by flights, the team has helped improve climbs and descents. Planes can approach the airport in many different ways: for example, a smooth, continuous descent, a series of steps interrupted by level flight, or a close approach at full altitude followed by a quick descent. Determining which ap-

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Prof. Ing. David Zammit-Mangion

The aeronautics team has put Malta on the map when it comes to aviation research, a major accomplishment for a nation with no significant track record in the field until ten years ago

proach is optimal is a dynamic problem that has to factor in the weight of aeroplane and its cargo, weather conditions, operational constraints, air traffic and so forth. Current optimisation methods try to balance flight time and fuel use, but do not take the other factors into account. The Clean Flight team developed a new approach using computer algorithms which can improve the efficiency of climbs and descents in around 10 minutes on a single computer. ‘So 15 minutes before departure, for example, an air traffic controller can calculate the optimal route for the flight at the current conditions,’ said Chircop.

Altogether, this work could save 1,500 tonnes of fuel every year.

Upwards and onwards The sky is the limit for this aeronautics team. As Clean Sky winds to a close, the EU is preparing to launch Clean Sky 2, and the UoM team will probably continue to play a significant role in the initiative. On the national front, the optimisation system developed in the Clean Flight project will be tested with actual flight trials over the coming months – a major step forward in a field where such tests are incredibly expensive and safety is always a paramount concern. According to Chircop, it is an indication that the potential benefits are large. ‘We’re

pushing to get this technology into the field so we can see it making actual gains, instead of simply on paper,” he said.

Meanwhile, the GATAC software package is already being used by key industrial players, according to Zammit-Mangion. Looking forward, it clearly has a scope beyond Clean Sky, and may even come to be used by other industries like maritime shipping, which faces similar problems.

The team is also working on a project to test unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flying with commercial aircraft in an air traffic control environment. Although the UAV tech was developed in Italy, the Maltese team will test its operational aspects. If successful, the project could open the door to the integration of UAVs into the wider aviation community.

The aeronautics team has put Malta on the map when it comes to aviation research, a major accomplishment for a nation with no significant track record in the field until ten years ago.

‘We’re well-established and recognised in European and global research circles,’ said Zammit-Mangion, describing the team’s success. With the network of partners they have built up and the quality of the team’s research, the future is looking up.

Sedeer El-Showk is a freelance science writer. He blogs at Inspiring Science and for Nature’s Scitable network.

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GETTING THE RHYTHM Music has changed society. Stephanie Mifsud met ethnomusicologist Dr Philip Ciantar to talk about music from all over the world.

Studying diverse musical traditions has taught him about himself and how music can bridge cultural divides to bring us together

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lassical, romantic, baroque, rock, hip hop… music continues to change throughout the years, yet we all look for that beat that gets us moving.

How can we not when music is such an important part of our life?

Music is found everywhere: on television adverts, films, on the radio and at places of worship. Our society immerses us in it for hours every day. A person will listen to music that represents the way they feel. Music has the potential to influence moods, feelings, and thoughts.

Legendary rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, told Life magazine in 1969, ‘I can explain everything better through music. You hypnotise people to where they

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go right back to their natural state, and when you get people at their weakest point, you can preach into their subconscious what we want to say.’

Music, like language, has a common factor: a person’s active role. People create music. No music can exist without the people who make it.

The Ethnomusicologist Dr Philip Ciantar (University of Malta) is interested in both the music itself, as a humanly organised sound, and the musicians.

His research focuses on understanding how people worldwide think about music and how that affects their music. He meets and interviews countless musicians and their audiences. People’s thinking about music is shaped by who they are, their world-view, and how

Stephanie Mifsud

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they use their creative imagination to create music. Take John Lennon’s song Imagine. The song has touched countless around the world. It might have changed the way people see themselves, relate to the people around them, and influenced future songs.

Music to say ‘Hello!’

Ciantar explains that ‘by listening to and exploring music from different countries we can understand other cultural and social realities. Music opens infinite thinking modes unknown to us and uncovers situations we wouldn’t otherwise experience.’ According to him, ‘music can highlight social issues or it can make a connection with

Music opens infinite thinking modes unknown to us and uncovers situations we wouldn’t otherwise experience

different cultures when many other avenues fail’. This is the acceptance of ‘otherness’, the concept of what makes us different from each other culturally and socially. Music can be a very effective medium.

Acceptance of different cultures needs to be taught from a young age.

Music can help in showing people the advantages of multiculturalism. Ciantar suggests that, at school, children can be taught instruments used in different cultures. This would help students understand and appreciate not just the instruments but also the musicians playing them. He continues, ‘you need to be open to other opinions, cultures, and traditions’ and music provides the right scenario. »

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Libyan musicians performing in the ma’lūf tradition

Understanding music globally should lead to appreciation of diverse sounds and how they are made, communicated, and transformed into meaning. The musical process reveals humanity and here otherness surfaces as a challenge for us to deal with. It is up to us to then connect with different cultures we might consider alien.

People come together through music.

The village feast is Malta’s best example of unity through music. During a feast a quiet pjazza transforms into a music concert, a fireworks festival, and a food extravaganza — uniting the whole community. These celebrations bring people together ignoring their differences.

Multiculturalism is a worldwide phenomenon. Malta is becoming multicultural and, as Ciantar comments, ‘music is an indicator of what is going on. Performances of African music at the Marsa Open Centre can be interpreted as a plea for social acceptance and cultural integration. Slavic street players in Republic Street play Bach’s violin partitas

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to make us connect with them culturally. Once we are connected they play a nostalgic lullaby from their homeland to make us feel the pain of distance and sympathise with them. Undoubtedly, music serves as a social text; in itself, an

Undoubtedly, music serves as a social text; in itself, an intriguing sonic document that links the evident with the untold or even ignored

intriguing sonic document that links the evident with the untold or even ignored.’ This is the power of music and the concept of otherness that can shape our thoughts on multiculturalism and readiness to accept others’ views.

He became even more aware of multiculturalism while conducting his Ph.D. research. He went to Libya to experience different cultural backgrounds and traditions. He worked with Libyan musicians, attending their rehearsals, talked to people on Tripoli’s streets about the musical tradition of ma’lūf (a tradition valued for its Andalusian legacy), and sneaked in percussion performances with Libyan musicians. Apart from writing a book, these experiences helped Ciantar understand otherness and the challenges it implies.

Ciantar’s first experience with ethnomusicology and otherness goes back to 1991, when he was inspired by the writings of John Blacking and Bruno Nettl, and started researching Maltese folk music għana. He saw how the għanejja

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performed in two different contexts and their music changed accordingly.

The music they sang was more elaborate in their regular bars when compared to stage music with an unknown audience.

Otherness can also be scrutinised through musical translation. Ciantar researches musical translation: how we digest and eventually accept music that might not be initially appealing to us.

Recently, he composed a Maltese festa band march out of tunes that he had recorded in Libya. The process allowed him to investigate the music and himself. He had to take elements of one musical tradition and apply it to another that was culturally remote, using himself to understand the process of how a person thinks and transforms thought into music.

Ciantar is very hopeful of the musical evolution in Malta as this is being influenced by the different cultures that people encounter everyday. This will create a more varied musical scene. Ciantar can already feel the difference.

Stephanie Mifsud is part of the Department of English Master of Arts programme.

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FURTHER READING • ‘The Process of Musical Translation: Composing a Maltese Festa Band March from Libyan Ma’lūf Music’, Ethnomusicology, 57(1): 1-33 (2013).

• The Ma’lūf in Contemporary Libya: An Arab Andalusian Musical Tradition. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

(2012).

• ‘From the Bar to the Stage: Socio-cultural Processes in the Maltese Spirtu Pront.’

Music and Anthropology in the Mediterranean Online: http://umbc. edu/MA/index/number5/ciantar/ cia_0.htm (2000)

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About research that helps kidney transplants, a love for the sea, and setting up your own IT company

Alumni

ALUMNI talk

Trieste: city of science, karst land and sea ANTHONY GALEA shares his passion for the sea GROWING UP on the small island of Gozo, it was inevitable that the sea would exert a powerful influence on me. As a child I never tired of the sea, swimming, cooling off and floating on it in little boats. As I grew older, I came to see the sea as more than just a pretty playground. ‘Where do waves come from?’ ‘What generates sea currents?’

‘How can I surf a wave?’ Were some questions that aroused my curiosity and motivated me to study the oceans, and eventually to choose to study physical oceanography and fluid dynamics.

Before commencing this journey, I read a B.Sc. (Hons) in Mathematics and Physics (University of Malta), graduating in 2008. Afterwards, I read an M.Sc. in Physical Oceanography, pursuing this qualification while working at the International Ocean Institute — Malta Operational Centre (IOI-MOC, University of Malta). One of the most

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interesting aspects of my research was studying storm surges around the Maltese Islands. The aim was to develop components to forecast variations in sea level around Malta.

In 2011, I was offered a scholarship at the School of Environmental and Industrial Fluid Mechanics (University of Trieste) in Italy. My Ph.D. research focused on the numerical modelling (Large Eddy Simulation) of coastal areas, in particular, the Barcelona harbour in Spain and the Bay of Taranto in Italy.

My objective was to simulate the turbulent water mixing in the ports in order to understand the sea currents and circulation within the bays and thereby to quantify the water renewal within the basins.

Trieste, characterised by the bracing air of the famous Bora wind and by its splendid views of the Adriatic Sea, hosts many world renowned institu-

tions and international organisations.

Living in such a ‘city of science’ has allowed me to meet many celebrated scientists at seminars, workshops, and scientific conferences.

Through video conferencing I deliver a weekly physics study unit in Fluid Mechanics at the University of Malta.

I am pleased that the beautiful blue Mediterranean waters are still motivating other Maltese students.

My interest in the sea has brought me a long way, not only academically but by experiencing new cultures and indulging my love of cycling along the karst (garigue) coastline.

But I remain at heart that same boy with a love of the sea. I look forward to climbing aboard my trusty kayak, revelling in the ebb and thrust of the rolling waves to continue exploring the rugged coastline of my beloved Gozo.

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THINK Alumni

NMR, Kidneys and a Family MARICA CUTAJAR I CHOSE TO STUDY Chemistry and Physics simply because they were the subjects I enjoyed most, so I enrolled on a B.Sc. (Hons) degree at the University of Malta without having a clear idea about what I would be doing once the four years are over. I was not the best brain in the class but in 2004 I graduated with a 2:1 grade and it was quite obvious that I needed a plan. A couple of opportunities to embark on a Ph.D. in Britain came along through local contacts and applications on jobs websites. Despite not knowing much about the subject, I decided to go with the Ph.D. at Exeter University because it was about Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, a subject that sits right on the verge of Chemistry and Physics.

Obviously the idea of moving abroad, living away from my parents and starting this amazing new adventure was incredibly exciting. From the start of my Ph.D. things went incredibly well, it was immediately obvious that I was much better at doing research than studying for exams. I started with looking into dynamics in solid materials on the microsecond timescale, which is the less studied type of motion. It bridges the gap between very fast (spin-lattice relaxation motions, nanosecond) and slow (millisecond to second) timescales. I published my first scientific paper a year into my Ph.D., and five more followed by the time I defended my thesis.

Because of the contacts I built during my Ph.D. as soon as I finished I was offered a post at University College London, Institute of Child Health, working

Marica together with her husband, Dr Nick Dowell, and their son William.

as a research fellow in renal imaging. I carry out research at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital using novel non-invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques. I work mainly with children requiring a kidney transplant. The aim of my work is to eventually be able to furnish doctors with information about their patients, which is currently either unavailable to them or they can only get through invasive clinical techniques such as biopsies.

My work here has produced six peer-reviewed papers and I am currently working on a few more.

The research I carried out during my Ph.D. involved dealing with basic scientific concepts like Quantum Mechanics — that studies sub-atomic

phenomena — and I was at liberty to experiment as I saw fit, which I enjoyed.

However, despite being much more restrictive, I find clinical research extremely rewarding. Coming face to face with the people benefiting from all your hard work is really priceless.

Just after my Ph.D. I married my husband. We are now very proud parents of a two-year-old son. Any working mum would tell you that raising a family while maintaining a career is not easy, but I believe that if you like your job enough, combing the two is very worthwhile. Obviously research does not wait for anyone, and luckily for me, having colleagues that supported me meant that I was able to carry on publishing while I was on maternity leave.

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Alumni

The Bright Side of Life ANGELO DALLI MY PASSION in life is succeeding at building competitive and highly competent teams of people who are driven by a common vision towards success, in other words, setting up successful companies. I am a serial entrepreneur with an almost fanatic obsession for using IT and sound business sense to create disruptive solutions in various industries, including the transportation, entertainment, gaming and big data analysis fields.

My interest in IT started when developing small applications as a teenager in secondary school, selling my first program within a few months for a very tiny amount of money. I spent it the following weekend. Soon after, I took Computer Science seriously and ended up representing Malta in various international events. In 1995, when I was 16 years old, I won Malta’s first-ever bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Five years later, I graduated from the University of Malta with a Bachelor’s degree in IT and a Master’s degree in Computational Linguistics. Then, I moved to the UK, where I read for a Doctorate in Computer Science and Search Engine Tech-

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nology from the University of Sheffield while working for various European Union research projects.

In the UK, I set up one of my first companies. A few years later it became Traffiko, an Intelligent Transport Systems solutions company with offices in the UK, Malta, and Australia. I also wrote proposals that were funded by the UK Joint Research Council and the UK Ministry of Defence Science and Technology Lab (DSTL). Additionally, I published and presented over 23 peer-reviewed papers and journal articles. Around 2005, I built a cluster of servers that copied all text on the Internet to test search engine technology.

In the past decade, I have been focusing on setting up successful IT companies in multiple countries, dealing with the challenges of managing operations in different time-zones and people with different cultures and training.

My current businesses all largely employ Maltese IT professionals. They include gaming platforms, cloud-based data-mining and next generation people-sourcing platforms.

The importance of having a diverse skill set and an open mind is also some-

thing that leads to career excellence and personal satisfaction. I believe that Malta offers a good base of IT professionals who can achieve brilliant results within the right framework.

I am currently a member of the European Business Angel Network (EBAN). The network helps provide access to early stage finance to entrepreneurs with great ideas that need seed funding, mentoring and guidance.

A good foundation in technology, engineering, and science subjects gives the right analytical and logical analysis skills. They are useful in development and solving issues encountered by IT and technology entrepreneurs — from formulating a business plan to turning a start-up company into an IPO (a company that can be launched on the stock market) in a planned manner.

IT skills should always be coupled with a sense of appreciation for business needs. Entrepreneurs need a healthy dose of optimism and inquisitive curiosity tempered by a logical, practical approach. This philosophy has always been my vital skill set for success.

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Fun THINK FUN

FILM REVIEW

by Noel Tanti and Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone

The Conjuring Krista: James Wan’s film is irresponsi-

ble for its appalling suggestion that the Salem witch hunt was somehow a justifiable massacre. The dead earnestness of those who ‘inspired’ it makes me shudder. The ‘true story’ malarkey is common in horror taglines but this movie seems more earnest about those credentials by basing its characters on real people.

Noel: You’ve got a point there. Even

though the story revolves around female characters, most of them are either ghosts or victims. The true menace is motherhood itself. Even Annabelle the doll exploits maternal instinct to haunt its hosts.

The ghost of the witch, despite being after the children, first possesses the mother then tries to make her kill the child.

K: Are you suggesting that the film dis-

torts the maternal instinct?

N: Yes, as far as the witch’s ghost is con-

cerned. That is why it tries to corrupt the other mothers. The males simply orbit.

K: That’s another thing: how seriously

does it take itself ? There’s the playfulness one associates with a Wan film, especially references to other horror movies, such as The Evil Dead (‘groovy’). Wan is a horro fan who indulges in it for its own sake.

N: I found The Conjuring very dark in

tone, compared to Insidious, his previous ghost film. The geeky paranormal researchers play a less central role.

K: How does the motherhood bond in

The Conjuring compare to the fatherhood bond in Insidious?

N: The fatherhood bond is tenuous

there. The mother is most worried about their haunted son.

K: You are right about the mother be-

ing the emotional centre and her level of concern in Insidious. However, the problem originates from the father, who passes on the legacy of astral projection.

And it’s the father who rescues the son.

I thought the mother-son relationship was more peripheral. She tries to influence events but isn’t a moving force.

N: Off on a tangent: James Wan is such

a good filmmaker. He’s confident and knows exactly what he wants to get across without resorting to boo! gimmickry.

The scariest bits in the film happen with a static camera and no cuts. Just mise-enscène — a visually artful way of telling a story. For example, the bedroom scene with the two sisters. One of them points at a ghost that is never seen. Since we’re watching a horror film, we know it’s there. And Wan sustains the scene long enough to get under our skin. Brilliant!

Film: The Conjuring (2013)

««««« Director: James Wan Certification: 14 Spookometer: 66666

K: That’s true. Though in terms of

unexpected shifts, these do occur often. Take that ‘odd’ devil scene in Insidious where it feels like a different horror subgenre. There are these shifts in tone and style in The Conjuring too, but it is more consistent than Insidious overall.

N: Insidious is simply superb up until

the ‘ghostbusters’ appear; then it becomes goofy.

K: Though I’d take any Lin Shaye char-

acter over the Warrens.

N: I am with you on Wan’s playful

approach. Honestly, I’d love to see a ‘mature’ James Wan film through and through. Given the right script, he would make a great film. Krista, could we say that The Conjuring is a second take at Insidious?

K: I agree with what you said when

we came out of the cinema — that it refers back to his earlier film. Though I still prefer Insidious, because of those jarring shifts from subtle to unsubtle, which are tricky to pull off, but somehow work. The Conjuring is certainly more polished, but I cannot quite see it as more ‘mature’ than Insidious, mainly because of its political irresponsibility.

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100 WORD

ideas to change MALTA

High-tech Test Bed

by DR ALEXIEI DINGLI

Size can be both a limitation and an opportunity, depending on how you look at it. My idea is to turn Malta into a high-tech test bed.

Malta has all the complexities of modern countries: high density, traffic, etc. yet it is tiny, manageable and low cost compared to most countries in the western world.

[Don’t] THINK!

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What if we invite companies to come here, test their systems, and then once they’re happy they could implement them in larger countries? We could easily introduce an Intelligent Traffic Management System, Ambient Assisted Living in all the homes; basically the sky is the limit!

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by Ġorġ Mallia

THINK Fun

TECH REVIEW

by Dr Kenneth Scerri

Mirrorless Revolution ABOUT 2 YEARS AGO I was faced with a touch camera choice.

I had been a Canon user for years having used a number of their DSLRs (a professional camera) and amassed more lenses than I needed.

Nevertheless, mirrorless cameras were starting to interest me with their attractive features. I loved the idea of carrying a lighter, compact camera with DSLR capabilities.

Ok, some explanations for the less geeky: film SLRs required a mirror.

The mirror diverts the image to the viewfinder (where your eye can look through) but moves out of the way to expose the film when taking a picture.

Digital SLRs making use of an optical viewfinder still require a mirror. However, there is an alternative. A small display can replace the optical viewfinder.

The main advantage being that eliminating the mirror allows for smaller and lighter cameras. There are disadvantages. Older electronic viewfinders are of

low quality — a problem that is disappearing with the latest cameras such as Sony’s NEX, Olympus OM-D and Fuji X ranges.

Another disadvantage is focusing speed. Mirrorless cameras adopt slower contrast detection methods rather than the phase systems found on DSLRs. Such problems are being addressed through on-chip phase detection in the Nikon 1 cameras.

Finally, the smaller sensor size of mirrorless cameras reduces the camera’s image quality. Again, Sony’s new cameras, the Alpha 7 and 7R, provide full-frame sensors in a small and sturdy body .

With the ever-increasing range of high quality lenses for mirrorless cameras, it is tough to ignore them when choosing a new camera. I now find myself picking up my mirrorless camera, rather than my DSLR, more and more often.

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Gadget rating:

••••• 55

Fun

BOOK REVIEW

by The Editor

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard Feynman Quill rating:

RICHARD FEYNMAN is my new idol. He’s hallucinated, he’s chatted up call girls, and he’s won a Nobel Prize.

Realistically, I’ll probably only manage one of those achievements.

Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character is as amazing a book as was Dick himself. He died of cancer in 1989, three years after the book was published.

The book is a great read and insight into his mind. It is compiled from a series of taped conversation that Feynman had with drumming partner Ralph Leighton. It haphazardly goes through his life from young radio mechanic to Professor at Caltech where he achieved most of his discoveries.

Throughout the book he randomly switches from girls, mathematics, academic life, to his adventures. This nicely sums up his life.

Take Brazil. He travelled there from Caltech during a sabbatical. There he learnt to play Samba music choosing the frigiderisa — a metal stick banged on a toy metal frying pan. ‘I practiced all the time. I’d walk along the beach […] practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior.‘ Insecurity that culminated in him walking down Brazil’s main streets, cars diverted, while his samba band made the streets dance.

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Feynman didn’t hold back his punches; if he didn’t agree with something he said it. He heavily criticised the Brazilian education system. ‘I tried to show them (students) how to solve problems by trial and error. […] I could never get them to ask […] questions.’ When surrounded by Brazil’s big shots, he said: ‘no science is being taught in Brazil. […]

Once Feynman overcame his social awkwardness, he became a famous womaniser It’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil. Why is that?’ Magically, government listened.

Once Feynman overcame his social awkwardness, he became a famous womaniser. Girls crop up throughout most of the book. And he’s good. They would even buy him champagne and sandwiches. As most things in his life, he did it for fun and loved the game.

He writes a lot more about experiences with other women than with his three wives. His first wife’s death touched him deeply, however. ‘I didn’t cry until a couple of months later […] walking past a department store with dresses in the window.’ His other wives aren’t mentioned much.

Feynman also dabbled in drugs. He took ketamine, smoked marijuana, and might have taken LSD — denied in this book but suggested elsewhere.

He also had a short art career and managed to sell his paintings, though he lost his drive to paint by having a solo exhibition too early in his art career.

Another highlight of the book is Feynman’s colourful descriptions of the Manhattan Project that made the first atomic bomb, including how he lock-picked the project’s secrets. He also mentions his great discoveries but is incredibly humble and dismissive about his Nobel Prize — too much hassle. He beautifully describes how he came to his findings and his nervousness when meeting Einstein and Pauli.

Feynman’s genius and eccentricity is clear throughout the book. It will have you in fits. He went on all fours to sniff the world to see how much better dogs can sniff than us — apparently, not much. Life was his game, and boy did he play well.

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Fun THINK FUN

GAME REVIEW

by Costantino Oliva

Pale Machine

OUR IDEA OF digital games certainly doesn’t fit Pale Machine.

The latest work of Ben Esposito — a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles — comprises a physical CD with eight songs and eight wacky game experiments that accompany every track on the album. The title track (or game) is a sequence of absurd vignettes: first you are somehow controlling a bottle rolling on a desk. A few seconds after, you are awkwardly maneuvering a hyper extendable tongue, which soon enough will occupy the whole screen. The game then proceeds to completely change the controls, and now you become a giant hand floating in the sky of a suburb.

Production: Ben Esposito Platform: Web browser It is hard to grasp, but Pale Machine is a tribute to many other works: games like WarioWare and Keita Takahashi’s Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy. One can also hear echos of Japanese electronic musician Nobukazu Takemura, as well of the chiptune band YMCK. But the uniqueness of Pale Machine is in its ability to join together interaction design and music composition. It provides an intense and inspiring experience, perfectly appropriate for an artistic setting.

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http://bo-en.info/ URLpalemachine.html

FACT or FICTION?

Do we live our wishes when dreaming? «»

Made infamous by Sigmund Freud, the idea is that we spend one third of our lives dreaming about what we would like to do. Our rational brain suppresses these feelings.

On the other extreme, our brain is just as active in certain sleep stages.

These neural firings express themselves in dreams. There are no deep hidden emotions behind them.

Somewhere in between lie recent studies that show that dreams are important in memory, learning and emotions. If you sleep without dreaming these qualities will suffer.

For example, rat studies in 2001 showed how while dreaming they replayed solutions to mazes to commit them to their long-term memory.

Send your questions to think@um.edu.mt and we’ll find out if it’s the truth or just a fib!

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MEME Fun

culture genes

MEME THINK

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CareerPlus The University is pleased to announce the creation of a new website through which companies can promote both job and placement opportunities for students and alumni.

These postings will be promoted amongst undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as University of Malta alumni and will give your company direct access to the right people to fill your vacancies.

To place your postings access: www.um.edu.mt/careerplus This initiative is coordinated through: Communications & Alumni Relations Office Knowledge Transfer Office DegreePlus

DegreePlus is an initiative of the University of Malta sponsored by Bank of Valletta www.bov.com

COMPUTIME INTERNSHIP

Coffee.

No matter where you choose to work you will drink up to 5 cups on your average working day. Discover a world of opportunities in between.

Visit us on facebook or apply under the careers section on w w w.computime.com.mt