Archive for the ‘SCIENCE SPIN’ Category

4 May

The Gene Hunter: Dr Aoife McLysaght, TCD

Posted by seanduke in CAREERS, FEATURES, GENETICS, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , .


TEDx Dublin 2012

Aoife McLysaght speakingat the TEDx event in Dublin in 2012 [Credit: Science Gallery]

In World War 11 the RAF hired a statistician called Abraham Wald to analyse planes returning from air combat. Metal was scarce, and the idea was to only re-inforce the most vulnerable parts of the planes. The parts of returning aircraft that made it home full of bullets must be the toughest parts, Wald reasoned, and so a decision was made not to re-inforce these areas, but to use the scarce metal to strenghten the other parts of the aircraft.

Dr Aoife McLysaght, geneticist at TCD, understands Wald’s logic and applies it to her own gene hunting efforts. Dr McLysaght  is identifying genes that are most sensitive to being hit with ‘bullets’ – which in genetic terms means being hit with random gene mutations. This is important because it is known that in certain sensitive genes – right across all living species – having too many copies of a particular gene, or too few, can result in a disease.

School

Dubliner, Aoife, attended her local national school before attending St Andrew’s College, on Booterstown Avenue. She recalled that she although there wasn’t too much science taught in primary school, she was very interested and engaged by such science as was on offer. In particular, Aoife remembers presenting a science project with her best friend in sixth class, which involved explaining aspects of the weather to other pupils and teachers.

“I had fun little demonstrations, to do with the power of wind and air,” Aoife recalled. “We had a plastic bag with a book on top of it. We got the opening of the bag and blew into it and showed that it would lift the book. We also had a glass milk bottle, with a baloon on top that was not inflated. We placed the bottle into a jug of really hot water, and the air would expand and inflate the baloon. I remember have loads of fun doing that,” she said.

Her interest in science was strongly established by the time she attended St Andrews. She remembers that she was always engaged with science, and actively listened to the teachers, so that information went in, making life much easier when it came to passing the exams. When the leaving certificate rolled around Aoife chose to do Biology and Chemistry, but not Physics. She believes that was a mistake in hindsight as she always enjoyed physics.

Instead she chose to study geography, because it was regarded as a science subject by the universities. This was a mistake, she says now, because while she enjoyed physical geography – such as explanations of why earthquakes occur – she did not at all like social geography, which for her involved too much memorising of lots of very dull information. Her experience has told her in the years since, that people will succeed at what they enjoy. That was proven when her geography result proved her worst leaving certificate result.

At St. Andrews, she was inspired by the efforts of a great teacher, Dr Nick Frewin, a PhD holder, who taught her science and biology. “He was just really good,” recalled Aoife. “He spent a lot of time clearly explaining things, had well planned lessons, and there was a lot in it beyond the course. He was well liked enough for people to write him letters when he was retiring. When I did genetics, there was a class of 12 people, and three of those have been his [Dr Frewin] students, and [in] the year behind me we had another one,” said Aoife.

The role of the teacher is crucial, says Aoife, and she cited the example of the many people that say they can’t do maths. “The number of people who think they can’t do maths is too high – there are a lot of people that have been put off maths. They stop trying because they think they can’t do maths. The students underestimate their own abilities. Students should allowed have a bit of fun with maths. Games and puzzles for example,” said Aoife.

Recently, Aoife recieved a prestigious European Research Council grant – which are only given to the top tier of scientists in Europe – to try and identify disease causing genes. The aim she said is identify those genes that are vulnerable to changes in quantity. This might involve a reduction in the copies of genes, or too many copies. There is a certain amount of variation in the number of copies of genes between people, and it’s common. However, in some people in certain genes variations in gene quantities increase disease vulnerability.

This is an evolutionary approach to genetics, explained Aoife. The goal is to see which genes have tolerated changes in amount – high or low – over evolutionary time and which have not. The identification of those genes that have proven intolerant to change over evolution can provide a key to which genes are linked to disease today, the reasoning goes. “There is variation in [[gene] copies, because mutations happen,” explained Aoife. “DNA is a chemical that copies itself in cell division, and this is an easy mistake that happens a lot.”

Once the sensitive genes that have been linked to disease have been clearly identified, then it becomes possible to develop better and more precise ways to diagnose disease. Following on from that, if there are improved methods to diagnose disease at an earlier stage, then it should become possible for scientists to develop better disease treatments and therapies.

Communicator

Aoife is also one of the best scientist-communicators in Ireland, and is regularly invited to speak in schools and at public lectures about her work and its implications for society. She believes that it is important that some scientists communicate with the public, but she also acknowledges that although she enjoys this activity, not every scientist will feel the same.

“It is important that some of us do it, and there is support for that. I mean that it is recognised as a valid part of the job. A valid activity, that it is respected. Sometimes people might think it is a trivial activity. I don’t think that. I see science as part of our culture, we should all have access to that. A lot of people love music, but don’t have the intention of being a musician. It’s the same with science – people should have access to it,” she said.

For Aoife, science is about the ability to learn, to deduce, to understand something, even when it is not visible to the naked eye. It involves being able to think long-term, beyond our own lives. Science is exciting, interesting, dynamic, but it is a big mistake to try and push it onto people. It is also a mistake, she believes, for the Irish government, or any government to get too closely involved in deciding how funding for science should be spent. It would be better to fund the best people than to fund certain areas, she said.

She has some advice for young people that might be considering science as a career. “When I was young, I didn’t know you could be a scientist, I didn’t know any scientists. I didn’t know what I would end up being, if I studied science. My mum said to me, do what you enjoy the the job will follow. It’s very optimistic, but I kind of subscribe to that,” she said.

This article was first published in Science Spin, May-June 2013 issue.

6 Sep

A cycle helmet with built-in sensors and indicators

Posted by seanduke in SCIENCE SPIN, YOUNG SCIENTISTS. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .


Cycling in Dublin city is a dangerous business due to large volumes of traffic, unsafe or totally absent cycle lanes, and an inability of drivers to ready cyclists’ intentions.

Rory Hughes, a student at Gonzaga College, Ranelagh, can’t do much about the traffic or cycle lanes, but he has found a way to help drivers better anticipate cyclists’ behaviour on the road by inventing a cycling helmet with built-in indicators and a brake light.

Accidents can result when drivers misread cyclists’ hand signals, or miss such hand signals entirely due to a blind spot, inattention, or because of poor visibility. A cyclist turning right, for example, will be in trouble if a driver doesn’t spot a hand signal.

Enter Rory’s helmet, for which he deservedly won the Junior Technology Individual Award at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, back in January.

His idea is simple, yet ingenious. A cycle helmet that signals to following cars when a cyclist wishes to turn left or right, as well as having a brake light to show slowing or stopping.

Turn

Rory Hughes of Gonzaga College, pictured here wearing his award-winning cycle helmet with built in sensors and indicators

When a cyclist wishes to turn left, all he has to do is lean his head to the left, and the indicator for left comes on, while a buzzer lets the cyclist know that the indicator has actually come on. The same applies in reverse for a right turn.

This job is accomplished by an arrangement of built-in sensors, and wires, which Rory built himself, sometimes working at school, and other times at home.

When the cyclist has gone all the way around the corner, the indicator light automatically turns off, using more sensors called gyroscopes – the type of sensors that are used onboard spacecraft to provide astronauts with a clear sense of how they are orientated in three-dimensional space.

The turning off mechanism for the indicator lights is achieved by use of a class of sensors called gyroscopes, which are also used in space, to orientate a spacecraft in relation to the Earth.

The original idea for a helmet with indicators actually came from one of Rory’s friends, but his friend’s idea involved wires and buttons, which Rory felt would annoy and turn off potential users of the helmet.

It was Rory that came up with the idea of putting the indicators and lights all inside the helmet, which, he felt, would make it easier and more comfortable for cyclists to use.

Rory clearly impressed the judges with his schematic diagram, detailing how he had connected all the wires, motion sensors, batteries, and buzzers inside the helmet.

He filed a patent on the idea during the work of the BT Show in January last – a process he said was complex and required a lawyer’s assistance.

Certainly, Rory is a credit to his school, and to his teacher, Mr O’Briain. As for where me might see himself in terms of a career he said: “I’d definitely like to get into technology and I love building things, hardware, and then programming them to do things.”

This was first published in the September-October 2011 edition of Science Spin magazine

5 Sep

A (GREENHOUSE) GAS MAN: John Tyndall

Posted by seanduke in CHEMISTRY, IRELAND'S GREATEST, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , , , , .


John Tyndall of Leighlinbridge Co Carlow, pictured above, was the first to explain why the sky is blue and to discover ‘greenhouse gases’ in the Earth’s atmosphere (Credit: Wikipedia)

The first researcher to identify the ‘greenhouse effect’, to explain why the sky is blue, and to develop optically pure air – the foreruner of today’s cleanroom technology, which is used in the manufacture of high-tech electronic devices. These are just some of the many reasons why John Tyndall, from Leighlinbridge Co Carlow was certainly one of the most famous 19th century scientists in Britain and Ireland. A multi-talented man, he was also a brilliant science communicator, whose public lectures at the Royal Society in London were legendary, as were his many popular books on scientific topics. When he died in 1893 he died a rich and hugely successful man, leaving behind £22,000, the equivalent of £6 million today.  Not bad for a man born into a humble Protestant family in rural Ireland.

Tyndall’s ancestors were from Gloucestershire and had arrived in the southeast of Ireland in the 17th century. His background was certainly not a privileged one, and his father worked as a police constable. He attended local schools, where he learned subjects such as technical drawing and maths. He worked in Ireland for as a surveyor the Government doing land surveys and mapping, and moved to England in 1842, now in his early twenties and did the same. He benefitted from the railway building boom in the UK in the 1840s, and made a lot of money working for the railway companies, doing surveying work in that decade.

It seems, however, that although he was always adept at making money, money was not his God and he went into teaching in 1847 at an English boarding school in Hampshire. He moved to Germany a year later, to do a PhD under Robert Bunsen, of bunsen burner fame, at the University of Marburg.  He returned to England in 1851 and joined the Royal Society in London one year later. He would remain at the Royal Society all his working life, and became its Director.

Institute

The large and well-respected Tyndall National Institute in Cork was named in Tyndall’s honour. The reason the Institute named itself after him that is that he did a lot of research in areas that the Tyndall is interested in today such as the behaviour of light. Tyndall did some of the earliest investigations into the ‘guiding’ of light, and this is essentially what underlies optical fibre technology, which forms the basis for modern communications, particularly the Internet. He also did a lot of work on what would today be called ‘clean room’ technology. His work involved studying things that float in the air, and he developed some of the very earliest ‘optically pure’ air. Today, cleanrooms are used as manufacturing sites for producing advanced semi-conductors and opto-electronic devices.

Science communicator

Tyndall was a great believer in demonstrating things to students or the public in order to explain them. He gave lectures to the public on all kinds of topics, and he proved to be a brilliant natural science communicator and these lectures were very popular and attracted large crowds. This work also made him famous, and ultimately made him rich too.  He succeeded the famous Michael Faraday as  the Director of the Royal Institution and he continued the work of public outreach that Faraday had started. Tyndall was a brilliant 19th century ‘polymath’, meaning he was interested in lots of different things. He belived in getting the message over by actually demonstrating things to the general public. He was profilic, publishing many books, 17 in total, and wrote 145 scientific papers.

Personal life

He married late, at the age of 55, to a woman 25 years younger. They had no children. He left just over £22,000 pounds in his estate when he died in 1893. This was an enormous amount considering that a London police constable was paid about £80 per year at the time. If we do the comparative mathematics that means his estate was worth in the region of £6 million in today’s money.

He was someone who suffered considerable ill health. He slept badly, suffered from migranes and took ‘sleeping draughts’ to help him to sleep. These draughts were tonics used in the 19th century that people drank before bed to help them get to sleep. The draughts were administered to Tyndall by his wife, and

they proved to be Tyndall’s undoing as he died from an accidental overdose of chloral hydrate when his wife got some bottles mixed up. The woman was distraught, and no blame was attached to her at the subsequent inquest.

Aside from science, the other great passion in Tyndalls’ life was mountain climbing and each summer form 1856 onwards, he visited the Alps. He was the first to reach the top of the Weisshorn in 1861 and he climbed the Matterhorn in 1868, three years after the first ascent. He had caught the mountain climbing bug when visiting the Alps for scientific reasons. Today he has a glacier in Chile named after him as well as a mountain in California and another in Tasmania.

Legacy

There were a number of things Tyndall did which were ‘firsts’. He was the first to analyse the trace gases in the atmosphere by employing a technique that would later become infrared spectroscopy.  He used the technique to discover that there were traces of carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere. He concluded, showing brilliant insight, that they way that carbon dioxide and water vapour absorbed infrared radiation meant that they were keeping the Earth warm. He went further, and said without these two elements, life couldn’t exist on Earth.

He was the first scientist to attempt to describe precisely why the sky is blue. The simple version of his explanation is that it was all to do with the scattering of light. This was later replicated by Lord Raleigh, but Tyndall was the first to do it. He had many battles with creationists, who considered that life had arose spontaneously out of nothing. He showed that it was not possible for life to spring to life spontaneously through a simple experiment. He made a box very clean and took all the dirt out of the air, and waited. No life forms spontaneously arose.

Certainly, Tyndall is one of Ireland’s greatest ever scientists, and his influence over many areas, including science communication, remains strong to this day.

First published in the September-October 2011 edition of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in 2012.

5 Jul

THE PULSAR SUPERSTAR: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Posted by seanduke in COSMOLOGY, IRELAND'S GREATEST, PHYSICS, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , .


Co Armagh raised Jocelyn Bell Burnell was unfairly ignored for a Nobel Prize in 1974 when the Prize for her discovery of pulsars was awarded to a more senior colleague

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, pictured on the right, who grew up and was educated in Lurgan, discovered pulsars, a new family of incredibly compact tiny stars back in 1968. It was a discovery that many astronomers believed merited a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee agreed and a Prize was duly awarded for the discovery in 1974. The problem was the Prize went not to Jocelyn, but to her supervisor.

At the time she made the discovery, 67-year-old Jocelyn (who is still an active researcher) was a 24-year old post-graduate student. She was also a woman. Those things still mattered in science in the 1960s, and might have helped explain why the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded for the pulsar discovery, went to Jocelyn’s male supervisor, Antony Hewish and his senior colleague Martin Ryle. Many astronomers are still unhappy about this decision and have openly suggested that Jocelyn should, at the very least, been a co-recipient of the Prize. That the two prize winners never felt the need to recognise Jocelyn’s work, is a scientific scandal.

Obstacles

It was far from certain that Jocelyn would attain the heights she has attained in science, and she had to overcome many obstacles in her path. She was born inBelfast, but spent most of her first 13 years in Lurgan. She failed the ’11 plus’ exam, the test that children take inBritainandNorthern Irelandbefore entering secondary school. This exam is crucial as it usually determines whether a child is admitted to a ‘grammar school’ where the focus is on getting students to university. Her failure at the 11 plus wasn’t fatal, as she had been attending the Grammar School in Lurgan, and the school agreed to keep her on for a few years before she went off to a boarding school inEngland. However, she did admit much later that the failure ‘shook her’, and she didn’t chose to mention it until she attained the status of Professor.

Looking back today, Jocelyn believes that the 11 plus curriculum at the time didn’t suit her, as she said there wasn’t any science in it. Her scientific ability was certainly obvious when she came top of her class in her first term in secondary school at Lurgan Grammar. However, before that, there was another hurdle to cross. That came when the girls and boys were segregated into two groups in her first year of secondary school. Jocelyn thought that the separation might have ‘something to do with sport’, but was horrified when she realised that the boys were being brought to the science lab, while the girls were being packed off to learn about domestic science. It was the1950s and girls in Lurgan, and all overIreland, north and south, weren’t given any encouragement to do science. Jocelyn’s parents decided to ‘kick up a fuss’ and, as a result she was permitted to join the boys doing science, along with the daughter of a local doctor, and one other girl. It was a close call, andIrelandalmost lost perhaps its most accomplished ever female scientist before she even had a chance to show what she could do.

She finished out her two remaining years in Lurgan Grammar and then it was off toEngland. Jocelyn’s family were Quakers, and there was a family tradition of sending the children to Quaker schools inEngland. Jocelyn attendedMountSchool, inYork. She recalls that it was good to get away from home, though traumatic to begin with. In England, in the Fifties, girls were not discouraged from doing science, so it was a different atmosphere to Ireland. Jocelyn did very well in her studies, despite what she recalls as a mixed standard of science teaching.

She made it through the roller-coaster of her primary and secondary school education to get accepted into Glasgow University to study science. There she did well enough to be accepted to do a PhD in the University of Cambridge, a truly world-class university, choc-a-block with Nobel prize winning scientists, then and now. She began her PhD in 1965, working under the supervision of the aforementioned Hewish. The aim of the research project she was involved with was to find quasars. Jocelyn describes quasars as being “big, big things like galaxies, but they are incredibly bright and they send out a lot of radio waves”. The idea was to search for quasars by looking at natural sources of radio waves in the cosmos using a telescope array.

An array is a group of linked telescopes, and a special array was constructed for the project at a four-acre site at the Mullard Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge. Jocelyn got stuck into the nitty-gritty of getting the project up and running, and spent her time initially banging stakes into the ground and connecting miles of copper wire. Finally, in July 1967, the array was ready.

Accidental

Jocelyn began the job of monitoring the sky for rapid fluctuations in radio waves that might indicate the presence of a quasar at a particular location. She had to read through literally miles of paper, and wade through mountains of data, searching for tell-tale signs of a quasar.

On the 6th August 1967, a few weeks after the array came online, Jocelyn noticed something. She described the discovery that would change her life to this reporter in an interview in 2010:

“It was totally accidental. I was doing the research project I had been set very conscientiously and happened across something unexpected. The analogy I use is imagine you are at some nice viewpoint making a video of the sunset and along comes another car and parks in the foreground and it’s got its hazard warning lights, its blinkers on, and it spoils your video. Well my project was looking at quasars, which are some of the most distant things in the universe. [quasars] are big, big things like galaxies, but they are incredibly bright and they send out a lot

of radio waves, which is what I was picking up. [I was] studying these distant quasars and something in the foreground sort of went ‘yo-hoo’! – not very loudly shall we say it was a pretty faint signal, but it turned out after a lot of checking up, and a lot of persistence to be an incredible kind of new star, which we have called a pulsar – pulsating radio star.”

“They are tiny as stars go, they are only about 10 miles across, but they weigh the same as a typical star so they are very, very compact. The radio waves were coming naturally from some kind of star. We picked up these pulses and they were so unexpected that the first thing you have to do is suspect is that there is something wrong with the equipment, then suspect there is interference and then suspect something else, gradually force yourself to believe that it is something astronomical and it’s out there in the galaxy. The excitement came when I found the second one, because that really then begins to look like this is a new population we’ve discovered and we’ve just got the tip of the iceberg.”

Inside a few weeks Jocelyn had discovered three more radio wave sources that were behaving in the same way. This proved beyond doubt that here was a new, real and probably entirely natural phenomenon, though there was some talk – only partly in jest – about the possibility that these pulsating radio waves were being sent across the Universe by an alien intelligence.

A paper in Nature, the renowned scientific journal followed and it was published on the 24th February 1968. The press interest was huge after the paper came out, and Jocelyn and other people in the lab did a series of newspaper, radio and television interviews. Somehow she managed to get back to finishing her PhD, which she did in September 1968. But her life had changed, and she had become an overnight scientific celebrity, still only in her mid twenties.

Jocelyn said that the practical importance of her new found fame was that she never found it difficult to pick up a job when she was travelling around Britain with her husband, Martin Bell. He was a civil servant that regularly moved from city to city. Jocelyn followed him and worked part time for many years raising their son Gavin, who was born in 1973, and is also a physicist.

The down-side of achieving fame and success at an early stage was – as Jocelyn said to this reporter – that people expected her to come up with amazing discoveries all the time. A discovery such as finding pulsars comes only about once per decade in the astronomical community as a whole, and so it is a bit hard, she suggested, to live up to such expectations.

These days she continues to work as a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University where she is free to conduct research without too many other duties being imposed on her. Whatever she might do before she retires, her scientific legacy is secure. In 2010, a pulsar conference was held in Sardinia to honour her 45 years in science and to ‘christen’ a new radio telescope. A long-time colleague Australian pulsar researcher, Dick Manchester, was asked to deliver a speech at the conference, detailing Jocelyn’s contribution to science.

He said:

“I think Jocelyn’s fame is greater because she didn’t receive the Nobel Prize in 1974 than it would have been if she had. I believe that the furore that her lack of recognition caused resulted in a change of attitude by the Nobel Committee and I’m sure more widely as well, with a heightened awareness of the role of students in projects and the role of women in science.”

First published in the July-August edition of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in 2012.

10 May

The Volcanologist

Posted by seanduke in CAREERS, GEOLOGY, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , , , .


Studying maths and maths physics as an undergraduate at UCD led Chris Bean into exciting and unexplored directions, such as finding himself atop a volcano in Costa Rica, being interviewed by a TV crew, as he ‘listened in’ to a volcano.

Neither of Chris’s parents were scientists, and rather there was a strong interest in classical music in the house. He did a lot of music as a boy, and for a time he might have thought that his ultimate destiny was to be a classical musician. The boarding school he went to for a time specialised in music, but, he changed schools after the Junior Certificate when he realised that he was not going to follow a career in music.

UCD Volcanologist, pictured here, at work ‘in the field’ in Tenerife, with a volcanic crater in the background (Credit: Chris Bean)

The first time Chris recalls being interested in science was as a young boy, watching the historic 1969 moon landings. His father got him out of bed to watch the events unfold on what he remembers as a very speckly black and white TV. He was totally captivated – hooked – and he followed all the other Apollo missions in detail.

The interest in science continued from there, and by the time he was in 6th year in school he had begun to develop an interest in the Earth and its natural processes. That interest was triggered at that time  by visits to the geology museum at TCD.

A  friend of Chris’s was interested in physical geography – the study of the Earth’s natural features – and his friend’s brother was studying physics in TCD. “We used to go down there to hang out after school in 6th year to play snooker, sometimes popping into the geology department for a look around,” recalls Chris. “Yes, officially we probably shouldn’t have been there! but nobody ever tried to stop us.”

SCHOOL

At primary school there wasn’t much science taught, he recalls. This was before there was a proper science curriculum at primary level. There were nature studies, but even that was “on the light side”. He remembers being interested in the physical aspect of geography, learning about rivers and so on, but it’s a bit hazy, he says. Primary school students today have a more interesting programme he believes.

Nevertheless, by the time he entered second level his interest in science was gaining strength, and after completing the Junior Cert he decided to take physics for the Leaving Certificate. He went to two different secondary schools, St Finian’s in Mullingar, a school renowned for music, but that also had good science labs, and later to Synge Street in Dublin’s south inner city – a school with a great reputation for science and has produced several winners of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition over the years.

COLLEGE

After leaving school he decided to go to UCD to study science and his chosen subjects in his first year were physics,  maths and maths physics. There was no clear career path in his mind at this point, he just ‘followed his nose’ and did what he was interested in doing.

He loved the college experience, and enjoyed it much more than school. There was much more freedom, and it was much more open, he says, in terms of the learning experience. It required taking control of things for yourself, but that’s a good thing, he says, and college is a fantastic experience for students that “fully engage” with it.

By now, he found himself watching Earth Science documentaries on television and he realised he was interested in using maths as a way to study how the Earth’s natural processes, such as volcanoes and earthquakes, work. He started down this road by doing an M.Sc. in Applied Geophysics at NUI Galway. Next he did a PhD at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) and he  spent a lot of time in Karlsruhe University in Germany as part of that. This was a really exciting time for Chris, doing research and travelling the world to present his finding at various conferences. Some of the people he met abroad during this time are still among his best friends.

JOB

Chris says that he was “pretty lucky” to get a job at UCD immediately after he finished his PhD at the DIAS. Since then he has also had several visiting positions in France, Spain and the US. One of the great things, of course, about being a scientist – up to now at least! – has been that it offers the chance to work and live abroad, meet new people and learn about different cultures and countries, but still then still be able to come back to a job in Ireland afterwards.

In terms of his work, Chris says that he studies several aspects of geophysical science, that is the physics of the Earth in all its aspects. This includes learning about volcanoes, says Chris. Volcanoes are interesting, he says because we don’t know how they work. The goal is to figure out how volcanoes actually work, which is not to be confused, he says, with describing how they seem to be working.

The volcano work involves going to exciting places and collecting data on volcanoes. It also involves lots of computer simulations of volcano processes. Chris and his colleagues develop new models and write their own software to apply these models.

The work on volcanoes is interesting, but it can also be dangerous, even fatal. Some of Chris’s colleagues were killed in the 1993 eruption on Galeras, Columbia, but he says, such deaths are very unusual. He doesn’t worry too much about the dangers, but neither is he reckless. He cancelled a field experiment due to take place on a volcano in Costa Rica last year, as he was not happy about the safety arrangements.

He also likes to make the point that there is more to geophysics than studying hazards such as volcanoes and earthquakes. There are aspects that are important to civil engineering and building projects, mineral exploration, petroleum exploration, and, increasingly, in the renewable energy area.

ADVICE

Science is exciting, and fun, but like most things it requires dedication adn there is no quick or easy route to success. For someone that is very interested in science, then a career in science can be very rewarding, says Chris.

“The best thing is that fundamentally you are searching for ‘the truth’, for how things work and fit together,” says Chris.

“If you are doing your job properly you will be open to changing your ideas as new evidence requires and you certainly will not toe the partly line, instead you will think independently. The worst thing is that it is hard to switch off. When you walk out of the office your job often walks with you with stuff swirling around in your head.”

In terms of monetary rewards, he says that scientists might have been exploited somewhat in the past because they were so committed to their jobs.

This meant that they didn’t have to be incentivised financially, as a lot of them were driven first and foremost to discover new knowledge.

The upside of this, he says, is that science must therefore be a career with very high levels of job satisfaction, as people are not going into it for purely financial reward.

This situation might be changing, said Chris, and the future looks bright for science.

The best advice he would give is to for students to do what they love best.

“Do law or medicine of you are really interested in law or medicine,” he says. “If you are interested in science and creative new discoveries, do science and it can lead you so some very strange and interesting places.”

“When I was an undergraduate, I never realistically thought that I would be hiking up volcanoes in Costa Rica and getting paid to do it.”

This article was first published in the May-June ed. of Science Spin

4 May

THE ATOM SPLITTER: Ernest Walton

Posted by seanduke in CAREERS, IRELAND'S GREATEST, PHYSICS, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , , .


In 1932, aged 29, Waterford-born Ernest Walton, pictured here on the right, did something remarkable – he split the atom, or the atomic nucleus to be more precise, and the news stunned the world.
This colossal event in the history of science took place in Cambridge, UK, in the Cavendish Laboratory, a world-famous laboratory run by Lord Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander. Rutherford had won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1908 and was a huge figure in science in general and nuclear physics in particular.
Walton, meanwhile, was a brilliant apparatus man, a hands-on physicist, and he had personally built the particle accelerator machine that enabled the nucleus to be split. He worked closely with John Cockcroft, who was a theoretician. They were a perfect team. Cockcroft proved it could be done, and Walton then went and did it.

Newspapers around the world reported the news, and the Albert Einstein himself called to the Cavendish Lab to congratulate Walton and Cockcroft.

For Einstein, this experiment was the first solid evidence to support his famous equation e = mc2 which held that energy and mass were linked, and that it was possible to release enormous amounts of energy – if mass could be split apart.

EXPERIMENT 
The key to the success of the famous atom splitting experiment was perhaps the inspired decision by Lord Rutherford, Head of the Cavendish, to pair the hands-on Walton, with the theoretician Cockcroft.

Rutherford, recognised the talents of the two young geniuses at his disposal, and put them together. They were very different, but complimented each other.

At this time, The Cavendish and other labs, particularly in the US were in a race to see who could split the atomic nucleus first. The general thinking at the time was that particles, protons would need to be accelerated to very high speeds, at astronomically high electrical voltages – perhaps as high as one million volts – to make it possible for them to slam into atomic nuclei and split them.

Walton had done his PhD in the generation of high voltages and this was a continuation of that work. He got the voltage up towards 800,000 volts and they decided they would try and experiment and see what happened.

Walton got the machine going and crawled back across the floor of the lab towards a lead-roofed observation box – to protect against x-rays and high voltages. The protons were being slammed into a piece of lithium metal and he took at look now at the impact. He immediately began seeing little flashes.

He was elated, as the flashes, he knew could be an indication that the lithium atoms were being split into two helium nuclei, also known as ‘alpha particles’ which had been first discovered by Rutherford himself three decades earlier. Walton immediately called Cockcroft to come, he knew something was happening. He later described what looked like ‘twinkling stars’ – lots of them.

Cockcroft arrived, and Rutherford then appeared. The two younger men manoeuvred Rutherford into the small observation hut, which wasn’t easy, as he was a big man, it was a tight space, and, at this stage, the great man, wasn’t young either.

Philip, Ernest’s son, and himself a Professor of Physics at NUI Galway (recently retired) recalled what his father told him happened next. “He (Rutherford) was shouting out instructions – ‘turn up the voltage’, ‘turn down the voltage’ and whatnot. He got out, and without saying anything at first, he walked across the room, perched himself on a stool and said: “Those look mighty like alpha particles to me – I should know, as I was in at their birth.”

The atomic age had begun.

FIGURE 
Walton was an unlikely figure to be thrown into the media maelstrom that occurred after the 1932 experiment. It changed his life forever, and at a time when most scientists are only getting their careers started he had reached his pinnacle.

He was a strongly religious man all his life –  the son of a Methodist preacher who had travelled all over Ireland and lived in many towns on both sides of the border, including Cookstown, Bambridge, Dungarvan, Armagh and Drogheda.

Sunday’s were for religious service and nothing more, whereas every other day was all about work. He was also a non-drinker, with a few close, loyal friends.

He had attended Methodist College in Belfast as a border, where he was ‘Head Boy’ and he had developed a strong affection, which was returned for the school’s ‘Head Girl’, Breda. After they left school they went their separate ways, but after a chance meeting the relationship was re-ignited and the letters flew back and forth.

He returned to Ireland in 1934, not least because he wanted to marry Breda, who was working as a teacher in Waterford. They were duly married in Dublin, and set about raising a family from their home in St Kevin’s Park, in Dartry, Dublin 6.

Walton returned from Cambridge to head up an ailing Physics department, with just three staff. His workload was huge in terms of administration, and teaching. This all mean that from the time he returned Ireland, to TCD, he did little research.

He died in 1995, aged 92, and is remembered fondly by his colleagues and family as a quiet man, who had no interest in the limelight. Often he would sit in the staff room at TCD quietly humming a tune, when a visitor would come in, and be stunned to be introduced to Ernest Walton, the giant of Physics that split the atom.

Many students will remember him as a brilliant teacher, who often performed experiments on the bench, in front of the students during a physics lecture. His son Philip, the recently retired Professor of Physics at NUI Galway, recalls that his father spent many long hours in the attic at home, after dinner, preparing his lectures.

Others will remember him at the Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS for many years, when he could be found in teacher mode surrounded by an enraptured audience. For ETS Walton, teaching was a very important part of the scientist’s job.

To this day he remains the only Irishman who has been awarded a Nobel Prize in any field of science. That was in 1951, 22 years after the atomic nuclei was split.

This article was first published in the May-June issue of Science Spin

How Irish Scientists Changed the World, by Seán Duke, is due for publication by Londubh Books in 2012.

3 May

West Cork students put green, slimy invaders to good use

Posted by seanduke in ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE SPIN, YOUNG SCIENTISTS. Tagged: , , , , , , .


The beautiful beaches of west County Cork have sadly, in the past few years, been overwhelmed by hordes of unwelcome, green, slimy, smelly, and noxious invaders.

No, this story has nothing to do with certain human visitors to the area. Rather this concerns the arrival of a green algae, ‘Sea Lettuce’ – or Ulva Lactuca to be precise.

It is not clear why the Sea Lettuce has arrived in rural Cork in such numbers. The two most popular theories are that it has something to do with global warming, as the Sea Lettuce is a creature that thrives in shallow, warm waters, or that it is linked to the pressure put on the local waste water plant.

It’s said that the Clonakilty waste treatment plant can’t cope with the increase in holiday homes in the area in recent times.  The inevitable result, it is argued, is the leaking of raw sewage into the ‘run off’ water, upon which the Sea Lettuce thrives.

But, no one knows the exact cause for sure.

Neither is west Cork alone, as this is a global problem now, one that has reared its head in places as far flung as Brittany, Beijing and Australia.

SLIME

The local people in Cork have watched in horror as their beautiful beaches have disappeared under piles of green slime, sitting on top of the sand, emitting noxious gases and killing off some existing forms of sea life.

Enter three enterprising local Transition Year students, Muireasa Carroll, Mairéad Kingston and Denise Hurley, pictured above, from the Sacred Heart School in Clonakilty. They wanted to see if they could turn a ‘negative into a positive’.

They come up with a great idea. To harvest the Lettuce, use a machine to compress the water out of it, and mould it into briquettes for burning. They would then see if the Lettuce briquettes were a viable source of heat, and what gases they would emit.

They made their briquettes using a hydraulic pumping ramp. They tested the briquettes and found that they burned slightly longer than peat, with slightly less heat emitted. Also, the briquettes were ‘carbon neutral’. That meant that, unlike fossil fuel briquettes, they did not emit significant amounts of carbon dioxide ‘greenhouse gas’.

They appeared to have a viable ‘renewable fuel’ product that could be harvested cheaply from the strangled beaches in their locality. But, they didn’t stop there. They tested the briquettes for water concentration and found that even after they were compressed and moulded that the briquettes were made up of 25 per cent water.

If they can eliminate more water, they will have a product that burns even longer.

They also looked at the waste products from the burning of the briquettes – ash – to see if it could be put to good use. They found that the briquette ash was a very effective fertiliser and that it was also useful as a cleaning product to absorb stains.

All in all, it’s a brilliant idea, and reflects the move in recent years at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition discoveries that can help society to improve. Certainly, Sean Gallagher, one of the ‘Dragons’ from the RTE series ‘Dragons Den’ thought it was an excellent idea when he stopped to have a look while at the Show.

The girls are veterans of the Show and were also at the RDS in 2010. They impressed then too, enough to be offered a marketing course at TCD, which they took.

The Lettuce briquettes have been registered as a patent with the Irish patent office, and the girls want to develop the product into a business at some stage in the future.

They have also been invited to talk to local county councils, about their great idea.

But, for now, they have the Leaving Cert to attend to, but watch this space, this is an idea that could ‘find legs’ when the girls emerge from school in a few years time.

This project was the winner of the ‘Intel Students of Excellence Award, at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2011.

This article was first published in Science Spin (May-June 2011 Issue)

5 Apr

‘Rachel’s Water’ can prevent water shortages

Posted by seanduke in AGRICULTURE, EDUCATION, SCIENCE SPIN, YOUNG SCIENTISTS. Tagged: , , , .


Rachel Eustace, a second year student from Athy, has a novel idea for dealing with future water shortages in Ireland

First Published in March-April ed. of Science Spin

It seems odd that Ireland should ever experience water shortages, especially in recent years when rural Ireland has been repeatedly flooded by rainfall. That’s the way it is, that’s the way it always has been, but 14-year-old Rachel Eustace, a 2nd year at Ard Scoil na Tríonóid in Athy, has other ideas. She believes we should capture and use our rainfall.

In other countries people collect rainfall and use it for washing clothes, dishes and people. This rainwater is collected off roves and used for all purposes except drinking. In Ireland, we have good quality water available in rainfall, but we don’t bother catching it.

Rachael is clearly an articulate, very bright and practical girl. She wants to change the world, in her own way, but she has the talent to do it. It lifts the heart in Ireland’s darkest hour to see such enthusiasm, energy and talent in our young people. There is hope for us.

Rachel’s family gets most of its water from a well like their neighbours. During periods of heavy rain, and flooding, it is not possible to get water drawn from wells. This leads to the crazy situation where the fields all around can be flooded, while no-one has water.

Practical

Rachel thought to herself – and she is a practical girl remember – What can be done about it? She decided that she start to do something by taking samples of rainwater during rainy spells and send the samples off for testing to see whether rainwater was fit for drinking.

The people at Bord na Móna in Newbridge tested Rachel’s water samples, for water quality characteristics such as PH, conductivity, colour, turbidity and total hardness. The results came back. “They were all within standard – quite good results,” Rachel recalled.

These initial results were encouraging, but before Rachel could collect any more samples, the horrendous period of snow and ice before Christmas kicked in. There was no rainfall for sometime, as any precipitation simply fell as snow. Eventually, following the slow thaw, the first rains after the big freeze came and Rachel began collecting new samples.

These samples, which she numbered 3 and 4, were taken during the first rainfall events after the snow and ice. The samples were completely contaminated with bacteria, too many bacteria to even count. The reason for this was clear. During the freezing weather, the bacteria were not leaving the roofs of houses, they stayed there waiting to warm up.

Warm

Then when the weather finally did warm up, all the bacteria started to move, and they traveled down with the first rains of the warmer weather, down off the roof of Rachel’s home into her water collection container –a small, toy washing machine by the way. This mass migration of bacteria post-snow meant that there were massive concentrations of bacteria in these samples. This water was not drinkable, but the bacteria had at least left.

Two days later, the rain came again, and Rachel collected sample 5. This time the sample had no bacteria at all, she recalled. She was pleasantly surprised with the positive result. It showed that water quality collected from roofs can vary, but vary in a predictable fashion. The results show that it was important that  water is collected at least 15 minutes after rain starts to allow any bacteria present to make their way off the roof first. Also, to allow for a few days following a period of freezing conditions before samples are taken.

Based on all of this research Rachel came up with rainfall collection device. Her device had a screen to block out rocks and leaves. She used filter paper to stop muck and dirt getting into the water, and a micropore filter too, to stop smaller particles and bacteria. The water was then put in sterile bottle and exposed to ultra violet light. This light, many scientists now believe, can kill off 99 per cent of bacteria and viruses that may be present.

She had learned this from researching her topic, and applying it to improve her device.

Rachel was surprised by the positive reaction at the BT Show from members of the public to her water collection device. Some said it would be a great thing, once water charges came in, and water became expensive, while others asked her  when it will be available for sale. The interest got her thinking. She had not been planning to try and develop a saleable product, but now she feels she might like to do that. Her teacher, Ms Ní Fhaoláin agrees. No doubt we’ll be hearing more of ‘Rachel’s water’ in the future.

5 Apr

The ‘Stem-Cell Sheriff’

Posted by seanduke in CAREERS, SCIENCE SPIN. Tagged: , , , .


Stephen Sullivan is an Irish stem cell researcher working in California (credit: Stephen Sullivan)

First published in the March-April 2011 ed. of Science Spin

Stephen Sullivan is an Irish stem cell researcher working in the USA. He is a strong advocate for embryonic stem cell research in Ireland, and all the other types of stem cell research. He is passionate about his work, and believes stem cells have the capacity to alleviate human suffering. However, looking at the Irish situation in particular, he says he is disturbed that there are no laws governing stem cells. This creates the impression he says, that Ireland, as in its financial matters, is like the ‘wild west’ – a place where laws, if they exist, are ignored.

Child

Stephen Sullivan grew up as the youngest child in his family by 10 years. A curious boy, he became well used to asking questions of the older people around him that seemed to know much more.

One of those people that knew much more was his Dad. Stephen had a great relationship with his father, and recalls having long chats with him about all kinds of things. They were both “ideas junkies” as Stephen describes it.

Meanwhile, Stephen’s eldest brother helped to pique an interest in ideas, and the nature of the world around him, by having a simple light microscope present in the house. Stephen recalls looking at pond water under this microscope and being amazed by the diversity of life he could see in it.

Though there were no scientists in the family there was plenty of education and learning about, with surgeons on his mother’s side, and psychiatrists on his Dad’s side, he says.

School

Stephen went to primary school in Beaumont Boys School, and secondary school at Ashton multi-denominational school, both in Cork city.

He recalls the influence in primary school of a series of books called ‘Out and About’. These were nature education books that described everything from bird migration to the life cycle of the salmon. That helped stimulate the interest in science that was growing in his young mind, as well as nature trails when the teachers explained what frog spawn was, and how trees lost their leaves.

He was well and truly hooked on science by the time the leaving certificate rolled around, and he took all three main science subjects, physics, chemistry and biology. At that time, he enjoyed the fun of the chemistry lab, but biology was less appealing due to the lack of practical work, and the ‘learning by rote’.

However, perhaps his most important ‘school days’ experience was his exposure at Ashton to people from a variety of cultures, creeds and classes. He looks back and says that, Ashton felt more like what he felt a university should be – a place to learn from others and exchange ideas – than UCC did later on.

The influence of teachers was crucial, as is so often the case and he found that he did best in classes where the teachers were in love with their topics and there were several science teachers at Ashton in love with science.

Stem Cells

After an undergraduate degree at UCC, Stephen took a Masters degree at TCD. Then 1997 came, and the news that human embryonic stem cells – cells that are typically taken (with consent) from the excess embryos left over after IVF treatments – had been isolated for the first time. It was also the year that the world was introduced to ‘Dolly’ the sheep that had been cloned in Scotland.

These developments had a huge influence on Stephen and he saw immediately that stem cell research – where cells could be reprogrammed in the lab to become other cells – could be used as a new tool to combat disease.

He was determined now to do a PhD in stem cells, and he was also determined to do it at the lab that produced ‘Dolly’. He achieved that goal, to his great credit, due to what he calls his “natural stubbornness” and was accepted into the lab of the now world-famous scientists, Jim McWhir and Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh.

At the Roslin, he became aware, he says, of how science is so often misrepresented in the media, sometimes to a ludicrous extent. Like one story that reported that ‘Dolly’ had eaten several shepherds as well as Ian Wilmut. This planted a seed that science, and stem cells needed to be better explained to the public, and that this side of things was crucial to the well-being of the field.

His career was now firmly on an upward curve, and after Roslin, he went to Cambridge, and then to Harvard in Boston. He learned all about the famous competitiveness of students at Harvard, but managed to avoid getting ‘burnout’.

Frustration

A return to Ireland was always on the agenda, but he became frustrated with the lack of legislation governing stem cells here, the political apathy, and the splurging of funds into stem cell work that he considered of dubious quality. The situation in Ireland did not impress serious scientists looking in from abroad, he said, and made a mockery of the strategy of funding world-class science here.

He tried in vain to get a research group off the ground, but no proposal that even mentioned ‘embryonic stem cell research’ had a hope of getting funded. The politicians had no inclination to get involved in a row over funding research on human embryos, which would provoke fury in some quarters.

He decided to set up the Irish Stem Cell Foundation, along with other scientists, medical doctors, and bio-ethicists. The idea was to better educate people about stem cells, to advocate for all kinds of stem cell research here, and to push the law-makers to follow the UK, and introduce clear ‘stem cell laws’.

Meanwhile, he moved to the US, as he could not get support for the research he wanted to do in Ireland, and took at post at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. There he is simply let get on with his research, without worrying about politics. He is working, specifically, on finding new stem cells, in particular trophoblast stem cells. These are the cells that make the placenta. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop better drugs and treatments for disease.

Advice

It is very important to follow one’s own gut instinct when choosing a career, and to study subjects in university that you love, rather than have the points for, advises Stephen. This approach will lead to more happiness in life, he says.

His parents had bee ‘instructed’ to take careers in certain professions, and perhaps for that reason, says Stephen, they reacted against that pressure and told their own children to do follow their passion when it came to a career choice. The basic rule, he says, is that if you love science, you’ll probably be good at it.

“The points system and peer pressure can make people take choices not based on their innate abilities and interests, and that is a big mistake,” he advises. “You have one life, do what you like to do rather than what the system tells you, you have enough points for,” he adds.

One of the best things about being a scientist is that there is no reason why a scientist can’t work, and be very good at their job well into their 70s, says Stephen citing the example of Dame Anne McLaren, a lady who was in her 70s when he was working with her, and still “as sharp as a pin, and a great teacher as well as a superb scientist”.

G00d & Bad

Science is also one of the professions, he says, where it is possible to literally change the world. To make his point, Stephen said that he suffered badly from asthma between the ages of 7 and 15, but that his life was massively improved by an inhaler that could clear out his lungs. This demonstrated to him, at any early stage, how science and medicine can alleviate human suffering.

There is also the novelty factor – good for intelligent people that bore easily. Every day, says Stephen there is something new, and there is always the prospect of doing something in the lab that no-one has tried before. That’s and exhilarating feeling, he says.

What are the aspects of the job he doesn’t like as much? He says that he doesn’t like replying to correspondence from patients and their loved ones asking about where research currently stands in relation to the available treatments for injury and disease. At the moment, the answer is often that research has not yet gone far enough to actually provided ‘cures’.

But, if Stephen gets his way that will change some day in the not-to distant future, and researchers in Ireland will be helping to make it happen.

11 Jan

A ‘smartphone’ based defibrillator

Posted by seanduke in PUBLIC HEALTH, SCIENCE SPIN, TECHNOLOGY, YOUNG SCIENTISTS. Tagged: , .


Published in the Jan-Feb 2011 issue of Science Spin

Eighteen people die from cardiac arrest every day in Ireland, with two per week under the age of 35, and a whopping 70 per cent of those die outside hospital.

That’s according to figures from the Sudden Cardiac Death Support Group. This means there is a significant number of people that collapse from sudden cardiac arrest at home, on the street, playing football, or any number of places.

These people may have had a chance of survival if a defibrillator device was applied to them quickly to get their heart going again, but that wasn’t available. Therefore, the idea of two Belvedere College students, Owen Killian and Lucas Grange [both pictured here outside their school- Owen is on the right] to use a mobile phone as a defibrillator is a potentially life saving one.

The idea is that when someone collapses, a person – ideally with medical training – would arrive on the scene carrying their smartphone defibrillator. The first thing the smartphone user would do would be to attach a small peripheral device, a little larger than a matchbox in size, to their phone.

This device would have electrodes already attached and ready to go, and it would easily fit into a coat pocket, doctor’s bag, or someone’s briefcase. The operator would then attach pads to the person in trouble, and a special phone ‘app’ would be opened that would analyse the rhythm of the heart.

At the same time, a call could be made to the emergency services to inform them of the situation and ensure that they would arrive for backup if required. The phone then comes back with a reading which tells the operative if the heart rhythm is ‘shockable’ or not. If the answer is yes, the device applies the shock, and talks the user – if a non medical professional – through the use of CPR (cardio pulmonary resuscitation).

Owen Killian said that there are other AEDs (automated external defibrillator) on the market, but they are not light, with the lightest right now being 400g. The Belvedere lads say that their AED is much lighter than what is available right now, cheaper, simpler, more portable, and not designed just for doctors’ use.

The boys have ambitions to develop their AED into a real world commercial product, and they have got it as far as the ‘proof of concept’ stage just now. At the moment they are working on developing the parameters for the device to analyse heart rhythms that are shockable and not shockable.

The students are modest enough to state, meanwhile, that being lucky enough to be in a school with such great science facilities and teachers has helped greatly. “The reputation the science department has built up over the years of being an innovative, accessible and driven section of the school is greatly deserved,” said Owen.

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