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Videoconferencing More Confusing For Decision-makers Than Face-to-face MeetingsAlthough videoconferencing has become a billion-dollar substitute for flying business people to meetings, it leaves distant participants less likely to make sound judgments about speakers being viewed over a screen, according to a study in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm 'Superenzymes' Could Streamline Biofuels RefiningStain removers that make even the most stubborn spots on your clothes vanish in the wash may be powered by molecules known as enzymes. Scientists are in search of similarly strong, fast-acting enzymes. But the ones they want would be put to work not in your laundry room, but instead at biofuels refineries, where the enzymes' job would be to break down the cell walls of bioenergy crops such as switchgrass.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm Brain Stimulation Improves DexterityApplying electrical stimulation to the scalp and the underlying motor regions of the brain could make you more skilled at delicate tasks. Research in the journal BMC Neuroscience shows that a non-invasive brain-stimulation technique, transcranial direct current stimulation, is able to improve the use of a person's non-dominant hand.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm Can Your Doctor Correctly Read A Critical Heart Test? Improving Accuracy Of Electrocardiogram InterpretationCorrect interpretation of an electrocardiogram may prompt life-saving, emergency measures; incorrect interpretation may delay care with life-threatening consequences. Currently, there is no uniform way to teach doctors in training how to interpret an ECG or assess their competence in the interpretation. To address the lack of uniformity, a team of physicians from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the American College of Cardiology has developed the first Web-based training and examination program for reading ECGs.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm Study Rules Out Inbreeding As Cause Of Amphibian DeformitiesAlthough research has linked inbreeding with elevated rates of deformity in a wide variety of animals, a new study finds it plays no part in the high incidence of malformation among salamanders.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm Credit Card-swipe Device To Test For Hundreds Of DiseasesScientists successfully created a sensitive prototype device that could test for dozens or even hundreds of diseases simultaneously by acting like a credit card-swipe machine to scan a card loaded with microscopic blood, saliva or urine samples. The prototype works on the same principle -- giant magnetoresistance or GMR -- that is used to read data on computer hard drives or listen to tunes on portable digital music players.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 4:00 pm Off to the Polls: The Irrational Side of Voting (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - As millions of Americans head to the polls Tuesday, new research sheds light on the winding history of voting in America and our motivations for doing it.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 2:34 pm How dangerous is drum making?A second drum maker in two years has died after apparently inhaling anthrax spores from animal skins. What are the risks of this seemingly safe job?Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2008 | 2:23 pm Off to the Polls: The Irrational Side of VotingVoting may not be rational but it's been a mainstay of U.S. democracy.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:53 pm Ancient 'Water Monster' Facing ExtinctionA foot-long salamander that was a key part of Aztec legend is threatened by extinction.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:35 pm Even a little caffeine may harm fetus, study findsLONDON (Reuters) - Pregnant women who consume caffeine -- even about a cup of coffee daily -- are at higher risk of giving birth to an underweight baby, researchers said on Monday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:33 pm Strange Portal Connects Earth to SunHuge magnetic portals allow high-energy particle to jet from the sun to Earth.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:25 pm Prince calls for rainforest billsThe Prince of Wales gives support to the idea of charging developed nations a "utility bill" to maintain rainforests.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:19 pm Grand Canyon's Youth ConfirmedThe Grand Canyon is millions of years younger than previously thought, argue geologists.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:16 pm Diabetes Medication May Be Linked To Lower Risk Of Death From Cardiovascular DiseaseThe diabetes medication metformin may be associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, according to a meta-analysis of previously published studies. No associations were found between other diabetes medications and beneficial or harmful cardiovascular effects, in part because of insufficient data, the authors note.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:00 pm 'Ghost Of Mirach' Materializes In Space Telescope ImageNASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has lifted the veil off a ghost known to haunt the local universe, providing new insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies. The eerie creature, called NGC 404, is a type of galaxy known as "lenticular." Lenticular galaxies are disk-shaped, with little ongoing star formation and no spiral arms. NGC 404 is the nearest example of a lenticular galaxy, and therefore of great interest. But it lies hidden in the glare from a red giant star called Mirach. For this reason, NGC 404 became known to astronomers as the "Ghost of Mirach."Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:00 pm World's Rarest Big Cat Gets A Check-upThe world's rarest big cat is alive and well. At least one of them, that is, according to researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society who captured and released a female Far Eastern leopard in Russia last week.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:00 pm Key To Aggressive Breast Cancer DiscoveredIn trying to find out why HER2-positive breast cancer can be more aggressive than other forms of the disease, researchers have surprisingly discovered that HER2 itself is the culprit. HER2 advances tumor growth by shutting down its own suppressor.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:00 pm Astronauts to Vote From Space Station (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - While most Americans will flock to the polls Tuesday to cast their vote for the next U.S. president, two U.S. citizens will beam their ballots down from the International Space Station as they fly 220 miles (354 km) above Earth.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:48 pm High-Resolution Image of the Sun's Jets
Tens of thousands of spicules are active at any given moment, created through a complex interaction of sound waves and magnetic fields, shooting upwards and outwards before falling back into the sun minutes later. They compose the chronosphere, an atmospheric layer that surrounds the sun and is as thick as the Earth's diameter. Most of our own atmosphere is compressed into a layer about seven miles deep. It's sometimes easy -- for me, anyways -- to forget that the sun is 93 million miles away, and that Earthly life exists through the coincidental good fortune of our planetary rock's location, neither too far nor too close to that ball of gas. This photograph, taken by the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope, a good reminder. Spicules: Jets on the Sun [NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day] WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:31 pm Future of physics 'under threat'Leading physicists have told the BBC that long-term research is under threat because of a shortage of funding.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:11 pm Low oil price should not deter output expansion: UAE minister (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 11:10 am Simulator modelMeet Gertrude - the baby being used to train medicsSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2008 | 10:43 am The Nation's Weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 10:41 am Renzo Piano's California Academy of SciencesRenzo Piano has designed a striking new home for the California Academy of Sciences. Set in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, the museum houses a planetarium, a sample of rainforest and almost 40,000 live animalsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2008 | 9:50 am Scientists find genes that lift lung cancer riskLONDON (Reuters) - An international research team has identified two genetic variations that appear to increase a person's risk of developing lung cancer by up to 60 percent, they reported on Sunday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Nov 2008 | 8:40 am Video: Paralyzed People Control Computers with Their MindsParalyzed researchers are testing hardware that allows them to control computers with nothing but their thoughts. This weekend, on 60 minutes, Scott Pelley gave an absolutely fantastic report about two disabled early adopters who use the nascent technology to communicate. Scott Mackler, a professor of neuroscience, has Lou Gehrig's disease, which makes him nearly immobile. To command a computer, he wears a cap that is covered with an array of electrodes. It can pick up faint electrical signals from his brain and relay them to the computer. By watching a sequence of letters flash on a computer screen, and thinking "That's it!" when the right one pops up, Mackler can construct sentences. The brain-computer interface has allowed him to continue working, author scientific papers, and even send text messages to his kids. At one point during the segment, Pelley donned a similar cap while a technician applied conductive goo to the electrodes. On his first try, the reporter was able to use the soggy electrode array to write words on a computer monitor. Cathy Hutchinson, a stroke survivor, has an array of electrodes implanted directly into the motor area of her brain. She showed Pelley and the 60 minutes crew that the device allows her to send email, play music, and remotely control an electric wheelchair. Both Mackler and Hutchinson make brain-computer interfaces seem slow and awkward, but clearly those experimental gadgets have dramatically improved their lives. As neuroscientists learn how to monitor and decode the signals that make up our thoughts, and users offer feedback, the devices will undoubtedly get much faster and more fluid. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Nov 2008 | 8:38 am Midseason Coaching Changes Don't WorkNFL coaches Lane Kiffin (Oakland Raiders), Scott Linehan (St. Louis Rams) and Mike Nolan (San Francisco 49ers) are gone. Will the teams win?Source: Livescience.com | 3 Nov 2008 | 5:01 am Physics the Next President Needs to Know
Physics may be the furthest thing from the minds of the presidential candidates right now, but a solid grasp of the science behind some of the latest headlines will be critical for the winner. Physics has a history of intersecting with politics in ways both large and small, from the creation of the atomic bomb to nuclear meltdowns to terrorist methods. And now, with more specialized, high-tech issues to tackle than ever before, it is increasingly important that world leaders have an understanding of the underlying scientific concepts. But that’s not necessarily the case, says UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, author of the book Physics for Future Presidents. For example, he argues that some terrorist threats, like dirty bombs, are overrated, while others, the low-tech stuff like natural gas bombs, receive little attention. "I do not have a sense from the campaigns that the candidates really know this stuff," Muller told Wired.com. "And I don’t expect them to. In the past, it’s been the secret knowledge of the scientists who say, 'Pick me as your science adviser, and I’ll tell you what to do." But Muller wants to change that with his non-partisan take on issues like global warming, energy, nuclear weapons, and space. He demurred on who he wants to see elected, or thinks will be. All that matters to him is that whoever wins brings the right approach to their policy decisions. "What you have to do is give the president a knowledge base, so they can make knowledge-based decisions." Muller said. "I say those things that I hope will be heard." In this Q & A, Muller discusses dirty bombs, space robotics and clean coal.
Muller: I know it is within arm’s length for each of them. I’ve gotten it to people who are close to them and see the candidates regularly. The people who have it really like the book, too. They will give it to the winner after the election. Q: How likely is it that either one of the candidates will take the time to understand physics, or any other scientific discipline? A: It depends on how strong the recommendation they get is. This is a subject that is central for what they’ll be doing. They know the world is high tech and that their policy decisions will have a high tech component. I tried to write a book with the voice that would address them at the level of providing knowledge. . . I don’t want to give them my opinions. At the end of every part of the book, I have two pages of advice. But mostly I wanted to inform them to the level where they can make informed decisions. They have to understand the threat of terrorism, what’s going on with global warming. In my book, I did that in a way that’s clear. I’ve never found anybody who has said, “I didn’t understand that.” Never have I said anything that is unintelligible to an educated person whether they are an English major or a lawyer. Q: If you could sit the candidates down and make them understand the physics of three issues, what would they be? A: Let’s begin with terrorism. In terrorism, the fact is that gasoline has enormous energy. It has 15x the energy of TNT. What that means to me is that a likely terrorist attack is going to be like the World Trade Center where the damage was done by the fuel not the planes. Beware of the low tech! In space, the glory of the last 40 years for NASA has been in robotics. Most scientists dread the thought that they have to have their instruments on a manned flight. For the extra cost of putting them on a manned flight, they could build 2 robots, the instrument itself and a backup. Let’s do as much robotics as possible before sending humans. Q: Is it just the cost of manned operations that is the problem? A: No, most instruments work better when there are not humans
walking around and shaking them. But it’s also the cost that it has to
be so utterly safe for humans. Q: And the third physics issue for presidents? A: Global warming. There is a consensus that global warming is real. There has not been much so far, but it’s going to get much, much worse. The thing I would tell the president is that the global warming, according to the global consensus — that’s the IPCC scientists, who won the Nobel Prize — the global warming of the future is going to come from the developing world. It’s the exploding economies of China and India and Asia that are going to be responsible for the CO2. This causes a political problem because they are poor and have a low standard of living and shouldn’t have to pay for emissions cuts. So, the only way this is going to work is that we pay the expense of them cutting back. If all we do is set an example, the example we’ll have set is that once you’re a wealthy nation, you can cut back on CO2. If that’s the example, they will wait until they are wealthy and then they’ll cut back and it’ll be too late. Of course, if either one of the candidates said, we have to send $100 billion to China, they’d lose. But after the election maybe they can talk about that. Doing feel good things in the U.S. is fine. Going to biofuels is good for energy independence. Going to solar and nuclear is also good for energy independence and also good for global warming. But the U.S. is going to contribute less than 1 degree of warming to future warming. The future is primarily going to come from China. Their economy is growing at 10 percent a year. And their carbon footprint is growing even faster, 10 or 12 percent per year. The developing world is taking off. The OECD countries [a group of wealthier nations] are now
contributing much less than one-half of the carbon dioxide. The
non-OECD countries are growing and growing in their energy use. And we
have to be happy about that. It’s a good thing because it means their
standard of living is getting better. It’s even a good thing for
population control to have people who are happy and healthy. Q: Of the technologies to mitigate global warming, which do you think is most important? A: Clean coal is probably the most important. The public
doesn’t understand about clean coal. They think it’s an oxymoron. But
coal is so abundant in China and India and it is so cheap that we have
to capture the CO2 and pump it underground. Q: But some geologists and other scientists have questioned whether carbon dioxide sequestration might be too difficult. A: It’s difficult in the same way that the Apollo mission was difficult. I think there are technological solutions to all the problems that sequestration presents. But also, if you are going to be technologically pessimistic about clean coal, you also have to be technologically pessimistic on solar, on wind, on batteries, and on other solutions. The problems of coal are relatively straightforward. Sure, there
will be problems. But beware of a bias towards some technologies over
others. Q: But not all technologies advance at the same rate, so there could be reasons for supporting one type of technology over another. A: Of course. The IPPC made a major study of sequestration. One issue was, if we do the sequestration, will it work? We’re talking about burying it in deep brines under land. The thing is we’ll know within a few years whether it will work. We need to try it very rapidly, so if it’s not going to work, we’ll know right away. And there are wonderful other things going on. Wind is expanding very rapidly. Batteries are being developed. And batteries are really the hope for reducing emissions from automobiles, but they are not here yet. The Tesla roadster has 1000 pounds of expensive batteries. It’s nice to establish the name of the Tesla but these batteries are notorious for their calendar life. We really have to get cheaper batteries and batteries that can be recharged more often. There is a lot more work that has to be done in batteries. And in the meantime, those of us who are wealthy can drive Teslas. This is I think what people forget. If you’re going to spend a
billion dollars, you can do it far more effectively in China to cut
back their emissions than you can to buy some expensive technology in
the United States. Q: Let’s get back to the fun questions. You present a scenario on your website that you are the President and a terrorist has planted a dirty bomb in midtown Manhattan, but let’s say it’s in Chicago. A: Well, the key issue with a dirty bomb is that it is extremely difficult to make a dirty bomb that will leave any bodies. . . The main effect is cancer not radiation illness. The President needs to educate the public about radioactivity to let them know that when the dirty bomb spreads, in the worst parts of the city, the cancer rate is probably 20 percent and it might go up to 21 percent. You multiply it out over a lot of people, and that’s how you get a large number of deaths. And what people are scared of is a large number of deaths, but they will not be observed. They will be lost in the statistical noise. The president needs to inform the public that radioactivity is not as frightening as it might seem. . . Personally I’d rather see a dirty bomb than another 9/11. Jose Padilla, the street thug, he was going to make a dirty bomb for Al Qaeda. I cover this in my book that it came out during the deposition that they said, “Forget the dirty bomb, rent several apartments in Chicago and explode them with natural gas.” What scares me is that that shows that Al Qaeda understands the
limitations of the dirty bomb much better than we do. We classify them
as a weapon of mass destruction and that’s the wrong scale. Image: mandj98/Flickr Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Nov 2008 | 1:50 am Lithium tested for impact on MNDA new trial will assess the impact of mood stabiliser Lithium as a treatment for motor neurone disease.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:30 am Common drug may slow brain diseaseBritish doctors are to launch a major clinical trial to investigate whether a common anti-depression drug could be a cheap and effective treatment for the devastating condition motor neurone disease. The trial, which is due to start in January, will follow more than 200 patients with motor neurone disease over 18 months to see if those given daily lithium pills live longer. Lithium is already licensed for treating manic depression and other mental disorders, and is extremely cheap, costing just 48p for a packet of 20 pills. The £1m trial follows the publication in February of a small study by Italian researchers which suggested that lithium could slow the progression of the disease dramatically. The study sparked a surge of interest in the drug among online patient groups, and some GPs now offer lithium "off-label", despite widespread uncertainty as to whether it works. Nigel Leigh, director of the motor neurone disease care centre at King's College London, who will lead the trial, said: "It is our responsibility and duty to carry out this trial because we have to consider every lead seriously, and where there is real uncertainty, resolve it swiftly. The results of the Italian trial are too dramatic to ignore." Motor neurone disease destroys nerves in the brain that control movement, leaving patients locked in a failing body. There is currently no cure and half die within 14 months of being diagnosed. In the UK, there are about 5,000 people with the condition. Stephen Hawking, the 66-year-old Cambridge physicist, was diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease 45 years ago. He is now almost completely paralysed, although, as with most other patients, his mind remains active. Doctors are unsure precisely how lithium works, but its effectiveness as an anti-depression treatment is thought to be linked to its ability to slow down electrical activity in brain cells. Doctors are now recruiting patients who experienced their first symptoms of the disease within the past six months to three years. Results from the trial are expected within two years. It will be considered a success if patients who are given the drug live 20% longer than those who receive a placebo. "It would be very nice if we show lithium arrests the disease but we're not expecting that. We're hoping for a three- to six-month increase in lifespan over the 18-month trial," said Leigh. If the drug is effective, it could be given to thousands of patients immediately. But doctors advised patients against taking it until the trial was over. Taken unsupervised, it could put them at risk of side-effects including tremors, stiffness, confusion, kidney failure and damage to the thyroid gland, they warned. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:16 am Aida Edemariam meets Marcus du Sautoy, the world's least likely maths professorA couple of years ago the physical theatre company Complicite were workshopping their new play when they decided they needed some help. Given that A Disappearing Number (currently playing at the Barbican in London) involves the early 20th-century Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy, and an Indian mathematician he tutored, Srinivasa Ramanujan, they thought they would call on the services of a real live mathematician for their games, so they rang Marcus du Sautoy, a professor of mathematics at Oxford, and began their pitch. "'You probably don't know who we are -'" Du Sautoy remembers them saying. "And I said, 'Well, I do, and whenever my maths is going badly, it's you I want to run off and join.'" In fact, he'd done workshops with them during his undergraduate days at Oxford, and has always loved the fact that Comlipicite don't try "to replicate real life, they're not trying to create something that you could perhaps do better on film - they're celebrating the space of the theatre. And in a way that appeals to me because it's a bit like doing mathematics. Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world." As is clear from his most recent book, Finding Moonshine, many brilliant mathematicians are rather like we might imagine them to be - eccentric, unworldly, obsessed with train timetables or freakishly large numbers (he tells of one who courted his wife by reciting the expansion of pi; they took it in turns to do 20 decimal places each). Du Sautoy, who plays football, the trumpet, the piano, is a cook and a curious traveller, surfs ("I count the waves - every seventh one is good") has a stronger claim on the so-called real world. Yet even he, as he puts it in Finding Moonshine, "can't step over a starfish in the sea without spinning the pentacle in my head. I can't ignore the strange pattern that adorns my swimming trunks." He makes deals with his long-suffering son - a morning looking for symmetry in the British Museum for an afternoon in the skateboard park; a day searching for the 17 possible types of plane symmetry in the Alhambra for shopping in Granada. Du Sautoy, 43, was this week made Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, and in many ways the post merely formalises what - in the 2006 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, in his previous book The Music of the Primes, on his current BBC4 show, The Story of Maths - he was doing for his subject already: his particular achievement has been that he is both of mathematics and the world, rather as Complicite are of theatre and the world - interested in making wondrous shapes we can't quite comprehend, but intent on showing them to us anyway, saying, "Look, isn't it wonderful?" Well-practised advocate that he is, he also knows that "of all the sciences, mathematics is the real challenge. People sort of understand the other sciences - what you do, what you're studying, the things, whether it's animals or chemicals, even little particles - but I think for me the challenge is to try and overcome people's antagonism towards mathematics, to show them that mathematics is really part of all the other sciences - you can't do the other sciences without mathematics. It is the language of the sciences, and built the modern world we have today." His wife and twin daughters are away on half term, so he is cooking dinner for his 12-year-old son in their cosy kitchen in north London, evangelising over the potatoes. He waves green-and-yellow oven gloves at me; they match, if that's the right word, his pale pink hoodie, lime-green shirt, orange trousers, and shiny blue trainers. "For me the challenge of the job is to try and communicate that - not to preach to the converted, but to reach the BBC Radio Five Live audience ..." But shouldn't he start with children? Bored, recalcitrant teenagers? "I think my primary audience is in some sense an adult audience, because I think that will then have a knock-on effect for children." Having said which, he remembers "a frightening statistic that over half the teachers who teach maths in school don't have a maths degree. That means that they don't really understand what mathematics is about. I think that's one of the problems across the whole of society. People think it's long division to lots of decimal places - but actually, it's something much more exciting." And times tables. "Yeah. Times tables. You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about. I think it's the same thing as thinking that a good speller will make a great writer. Well, no, actually - great writers can be crap at spelling, but have great vision and ways of bringing stories alive - and I think you've got to put over that mathematics is a similar idea." His attitude to key stage 3 - 11- to 14-year-olds, measurably the group most likely to be lost to maths, because they get bored - is to lure them in with familiarity (he has a favourite presentation about why David Beckham chose the number 23 shirt at Real Madrid and Los Angeles Galaxy) then dump them in at the deep end. Though perhaps he wouldn't put it in quite such sadistic terms: he compares his method, rather, to playing music students Beethoven, or giving English students Shakespeare. "They don't get everything that's going on in Shakespeare, but we're still quite prepared to throw it at them. Well, why aren't we throwing something like the Riemann hypothesis [which would explain how the primes are distributed through the universe of numbers] at them? It's exciting, it's got big ideas, it's got things that you can engage with - although you won't understand the whole thing. That was the mission of my Christmas lectures - to choose a great unsolved problem to lead up to in each lecture, and you know, show them things I don't know how to do. To say, 'I don't understand this, and the goal is for us to try - you're the next generation. You do this.' I think it is possible. It's just we're a bit timid about it." Some of it has nothing to do with numbers at all. "One of the themes in [Finding Moonshine] is about how many of the advances we've made in mathematics are about finding the right language to capture a structure. You know - how do you see in four dimensions? That's something I think you can explain to a kid, and they get quite excited about it - wow! I can see in four dimensions!" Now we're talking about leaps of faith, aren't we? "I wouldn't say faith, no - that's a dangerous word, especially in relation to this professorship." (This issue is relevant because Richard Dawkins, the previous incumbent is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of an atheistic fundamentalist.) "I think very often the exciting moments in mathematical history are moments when suddenly there's a leap of imagination - for example, the idea of negative numbers, or zero - I mean, that's almost as imaginary as a four-dimensional shape. What's a negative number? I can't show you minus three potatoes - but let's come up with the idea of a negative number and the way that it will behave and explore that. That's why it's a creative subject. It's a lot about creative intuition." Du Sautoy once wrote that "in Einstein's view, the ultimate test for an equation was an aesthetic one. The highest praise for a good theory was not that it was correct or that it was exact, simply that it should be beautiful." This doesn't sound particularly scientific to me. "I think what Einstein was getting at was that mathematics and physics has a lot of beauty in it, and often that's a good motivating force to try and find the right answer. Quite often the answer that you want to discover is probably the most beautiful one - something like Occam's razor, which holds that nature seems to like things that have an in-built simplicity and beauty to them. So in my work, if I look for a direction that I think looks exciting and aesthetically pleasing, often that will be the direction where the right answer lies." But isn't that quite a self-fulfilling approach? "No, because sometimes it's wrong! So for example, there was a theorem - a conjecture - I was working on for 10 years. I thought there was a beautiful symmetry happening in my equations. And I worked for 10 years, trying to prove why it would always be there, and then a student comes along and shows me an example where it didn't have this beautiful symmetry, where it all kind of broke down." He claims this discovery had a silver lining, in that he can now explore the new textures it has thrown up; at the time, as he puts it in Finding Moonshine, it was like having "Oedipus sitting here in my office". How about the God question? "Well, I'm an atheist," he says, backing away slightly and gripping the kitchen counter. "When people ask me what my religion is, I say it's the Arsenal. That's my kind of irrational ..." But all this talk of beauty and nature, surely that's just as irrational? Apparently not. "Because we have the power of proof - I can prove with 100% certainty that there are infinitely many primes, and nobody's going to question that. And that is, I think, why I was drawn to mathematics out of all the sciences. What the Greeks proved 2,000 years ago is as true today as it was 2,000 years ago. And actually - when I look through the history of my subject, very often you find that mathematicians have had quite tough childhoods, and have been drawn to mathematics as a place of security, as something that's not going to break down. That's an appealing side to the subject." Du Sautoy was not a maths-as-party trick kind of child; he has said that his parents were told not to bother entering him for selective schools because he couldn't spell or do times tables. Like countless small boys he wanted to be James Bond; unlike countless small boys, he had a mother who had worked at the foreign office (an inventive, artistic woman, she spun this out, pretending she had a little black gun hidden somewhere in the house). So he tried to learn languages, but they infuriated him by refusing to behave logically. It was only when a discerning maths teacher noticed he liked patterns and started recommending books to him that he found his metier. One especially, A Mathematician's Apology by GH Hardy, which was about the business of "being a mathematician - and it brought out the aesthetic side, the creative side. It kept on comparing maths to writing poetry. And it had two little proofs in there. One why there are infinitely many primes, and one why the square root of two is not a fraction, and they were just so beautiful, and turned you on!" His voice goes a little squeaky. "You suddenly could prove things about infinity! You know? That's amazing!" After an undergraduate degree at Oxford he entered All Souls, where, as Matthew d'Ancona, then also a fellow, wrote last week, he stuck out because he "liked the Happy Mondays and New Order ... dressed like a student, had changeable hair colour, was a great cook, loved music and Arsenal, and spent his evenings at theatre workshops." Du Sautoy has compared All Souls to being like "living in a 1920s novel. I was dining in college every night, fine wines, headache in the morning." It was too rarefied; he left for the Hebrew University in Israel, where more people study what he does: primes, and group theory, the study of what symmetries are possible. Essentially, he spends his days envisioning shapes twisting through hyperspace, in up to 196,883 dimensions - in fact, into infinity. (Donate a minimum of $10 to the Guatemalan street-kids' charity Common Hope, and he'll name a symmetry he discovers after you.) In Israel he met his wife, Shani, who thought the fact that he was learning Arabic and spending all his time in East Jerusalem rather funny; she was then a website designer and is now a trained psychologist. He works at home, in his counter-intuitively messy office (he finds searching for things helps him make connections). He doesn't do long hours, because he finds his work exhausting. "I can often be squirming around so much in my chair trying to work out what's going on that I've probably ended up running, you know, 10km by the end of the day." Most of it gets scribbled down on yellow legal pads, rather than entered into a computer, "because actually, when you're trying to explore the infinite, a computer isn't terribly helpful". And in fact he finds the infinite consoling. His eldest son, Tomer, calls, and as we stride out across Stoke Newington to meet the school bus, past dog-walking hoodies, women returning from work, a grey-bearded Hasid carefully cycling along a dark park, he talks about the child they lost, at term; the fact that Shani was then in a coma for two weeks and no longer able to have children. "It was like a bomb going off in our lives. Nobody was able to provide a rational explanation of what the hell had happened. And that I found very difficult to deal with. So I did the classic male thing of just hiding in my subject. And I found the security of what I do very reassuring." Surrogacy didn't work so they adopted, twin girls from Guatemala who are now five. Mathematics (as he almost always calls it, as opposed to maths) may not explain everything in life, but he considers it his mission to show how it is involved in nearly everything: on the way back we talk about how jazz musicians play with time, and infinite divisions of time; how Fibonacci numbers were first discovered not by Fibonacci, but by Indian musicians, "because actually these numbers describe the number of different rhythm patterns you can make with long and short beats". He often works with composer Dorothy Ker; for the last three years they have collaborated on a piece of experimental music in which, as Ker puts it, "we imagine a four-dimensional space through paths of movement, sound structures and projected imagery" and combined it with an interpretation of Borges' The Library of Babel; The 19th Step was performed early this year. We discuss the mathematical models beloved of hedge-fund managers, the maths involved in predicting the weather - the degree to which to understand mathematics is to wield a very real-world kind of power. As well, of course, as in more esoteric realms. He once referred to the "arrogant superior manner that mathematicians can have about truth, as if they alone are its custodians". He laughs. "Gosh, did I say that? Um - well, I think there is something about the power of proof, that you can be so confident in it. I think there are very few other areas, even other sciences, where you can be so certain about something. So yeah - I think it does give you confidence in what you know. That's important to me, as I said. I don't like things where I can't pin down what's happened. I like the power of mathematics to take you from a place that you're happy with to a new place which is unexpected, but you're still totally certain that it's true". • Audio: Marcus du Sautoy on the Simonyi professorship guardian.co.uk/science guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:16 am Jonathan Glancey on Renzo Piano's Academy of SciencesHow invisible should a major public building be? How invisible can a major public building be? These thoughts must have crossed Renzo Piano's mind when he made his first sketch for the newly opened California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. That drawing revealed nothing more than an energetic and undulating, pencil-thin roof, yet this was to be the key to this special design. Beneath this hypothetical roofline, the building that now houses a planetarium, several slices of rainforest, a colony of seabirds, giant reptiles, classrooms, bats, 18 million pickled animal specimens, chameleons, temporary exhibition spaces, geckos, auditorium, frogs, cafeteria, lungfish, and millions of visitors each year was initially left undrawn. The roof would determine the whole. The main body of the academy was to be as immaterial as technically possible. The details would be filled in later. Why was this? Because the whole point of the California Academy of Sciences, founded in 1853, is its research into and celebration of the natural world, and especially of biodiversity. What better way to highlight these endeavours than to build a new home that does as little as possible to obstruct the trees and lawns surrounding it in the Golden Gate Park, a home that touches the ground with the delicacy of a ballerina? The steel columns that support the enchanting green roof of this parkland pavilion are so thin, they must be held in tension by long wire cables. These not only permit the interior of the museum to be as transparent and as free from structural intrusion as possible, but, in the event of an earthquake, should allow the building to sway safely like a ship weathering a storm at sea. It was, in fact, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 that determined the academy's need for a new home in the first place. Until then it was housed in 11 buildings in Golden Gate Park, dating from between 1912 and 1976. Some were badly damaged by Loma Prieta. Since then, several much-loved old buildings in the park have been restored, including the late 19th-century Conservatory for Flowers - the biggest building of its type in North America - while such dazzling new designs as Herzog and De Meuron's copper-clad De Young Museum have added fresh charms to this vast outdoors space, claimed from Pacific dunes in the 1870s. Facing the De Young Museum across the park's open-air music concourse, the Academy of Sciences has been an instant crowd-pleaser. Its clear glazed walls reveal some of the attractions inside, notably the two great spheres of its planetarium and artificial rainforest. From the outside, you can see straight through the building into the park from almost any angle. Inside, the academy is as bright and airy as it is generously proportioned and clearly planned. The central lobby is lit by a over-storey whose windows actually open (far rarer than it should be), and protected from the sun by automatic blinds. Throughout most of the year, the building fills with ocean breezes sped up and slowed down, deliberately and to subtle effect, by the roof's artificial hillocks. Sunlight casts shafts of light and shadows across walls and floors. "You can say that the building is made of shadows," says Renzo Piano. "Being inside is like being under a tree in summer. The green roof with its bubbles is like foliage wrapping itself over branches. And Pacific breezes make sure you don't feel trapped inside some heavy institutional building. "This is a complex building, but we wanted it to feel natural and relaxed as well as easy to get around. Here you have scientists busy at very slow work, researching, and visitors who consume the experiences the academy has to offer in a few hours. But this was a good starting point for thinking about the design. When the academy started in the 1850s, there was always a kind of dualism at work. In summer, the scientists sailed on voyages of research and discovery, bringing their finds back to San Francisco. In winter, they were teachers, showing an eager public what they had found. So we have tried to create a building that balances the world of the scientist and the visitor, of science and nature, of technology and wildlife, all under one roof." The roof really is an extraordinary thing. Fortunately, there is a viewing platform from which visitors can watch it grow. Here Piano and Frank Almeda, the academy's botanist, have planted 1.7m native California plants. Beach strawberries, self heal, sea pink and California poppies are already attracting hummingbirds, bees and endangered species such as Bay Checkerspot and San Bruno Elfin butterflies. "It seems strange," says Piano, "but here on top of the new building we've recreated a patch of the original natural landscape of this part of California. At the opening, an American Indian, whose great-great-grandfather once owned the site, lit a pipe and blew smoke in an act of blessing across the roof. He told us he was happy that the spirit of the place had been reborn. Below us, 50 schoolchildren released 30,000 butterflies. They were attracted to the roof, too." The roof does more than attract wildlife; it also helps to keep the building's interior 6C (10F) cooler than a conventional covering would, while dampening noise in the galleries. And because it is surrounded by a band of 60,000 photo-voltaic cells, the academy will use around a third less energy than the maximum allowed by San Francisco's strict laws. "We could have thought of a different solution for the roof without plants and birds," says Piano, "but the green roof is about a new spirit for 21st-century buildings. We are learning to develop an aesthetic, as well as a practical technique to save energy, that demonstrates a concern for the fragility of biodiversity and the need to care for nature. This doesn't mean we have to go back and live in mud huts with green roofs. We can work with both new technology and nature to find the right balance." Seventy-one-year-old Piano, who made his name internationally with the design of Paris's Pompidou Centre with Richard Rogers in the 1970s, has made great strides in the US in recent years. As well as the California Academy of Sciences, he is currently working on, or has recently completed, buildings for the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. He has also designed a new headquarters for the New York Times in Manhattan. A man who, in his own words, was once one of the "bad boys" of architecture has become a kind of patrician figure among high-minded American cultural institutions. This latest building is an adventure on any level. The planetarium offers the thrill of journeys to the stars, while the rainforest sphere delights with four different habitats on four different levels. Elsewhere in the building, there is a swamp of alligators and a deep tank nurturing a living coral reef. A colony of Cape penguins can be found in a reconstruction of the 1934 Africa House. The scientists themselves can be seen at work through glass partitions. This is, I think, an important building. Built of recycled steel, 90% of it recovered from the old academy pavilions damaged in the 1989 earthquake, and locally sourced concrete, it is exceptionally "green" even before one takes account of its special roof. It is somehow classical, modern and organic in one and the same green breath. Schoolchildren and scientists are at home here, as are the thousands of living exhibits, those millions of rooftop plants and the winged visitors they attract. When Piano was designing his first major building in the US - the Menil Collection in Houston, completed in 1987 - I remember discussing the notion of "soft machine" buildings with him. How could truly modern buildings using the latest technology and materials be more gently related to our senses and with nature? There is a long way to go before architects, and their clients, strike the right balance, yet here in Golden Gate Park is an enjoyable, elegant and environmentally friendly building that should be recognised as a key staging post. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:11 am Science Weekly podcast: Improvisation and creativityMark Lythgoe from University College London discusses improvisation and the creative mind. He argues that improvisation is one of the most prized human attributes, allowing us to scale the heights of civilisation. In December, Mark will be speaking at Bristol University as part of a series of discussions between artists and scientists called The Creative Brain. We ask mathematician Marcus du Sautoy whether he is nervous about taking over from Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. Space tourist Richard Garriott tells us what it's like being back on boring old earth. Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample is also in the pod to offer up his pearls of wisdom on the past week's science news. Feel free to post your comments on the show below. You can also join our Facebook group, where you can scrawl your thoughts on our wall. Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 3 Nov 2008 | 12:05 am Mexico City's 'water monster' nears extinction (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Nov 2008 | 6:14 pm Scientists find genes that lift lung cancer risk (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Nov 2008 | 6:07 pm Solar Cells Set New Performance MarkResearchers are reporting the highest efficiency ever for one type of solar cells.Source: Livescience.com | 2 Nov 2008 | 6:07 pm
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