Clever Tricks Improve Breast Scans
I like this story from the BBC’s web site.
One of the keys to fighting cancer is good diagnosis and the article shows how being clever with scientific, engineering and mathematical tricks, X-rays can be improved.
We’ll see a lot more of this type of innovation in the next few years and it’ll help in all sorts of fields and not just medicine.
Falling Out Of Love With Driving
The BBC is carrying a report about how we’re falling out of driving.
I had a stroke two years ago and my eyesight went, so I stopped driving. I could probably get my licence back, as my eyesight has improved, but I just don’t want the hassle.
I’ve moved from Suffolk to leafy Dalston in London and use buses and trains all the time now,
Do I miss driving? Not at all, despite my last car being a Lotus. My bank account doesn’t miss driving either!
And Now The Plastic Light Bulb!
Well not quite yet, but this report is encouraging.
Thinking how far lighting has come in the last ten years, what will be using in 2022?
And what will all this do for our electricity bills?
Cracking The Code
This story from the BBC’s web site shows how rapid DNA sequencing has been used to crack an MRSA outbreak.
It also shows how fast it will be in future to sequence DNA. This could lead to all sorts of new treatments for illnesses like cancer.
We should be hailing the scientists who did this! But others will say it’s wrong to mess with DNA.
As someone with a minor genetic disease, I hope we see more successes in the next few years.
On the other hand, if someone said to me, we could cure your coeliac disease, by giving you a gene change, I’d say no!
A Building For Eureka Moments
The winner of the Stirling prize was announced last night and it’s reported here on the BBC’s web site. I particularly liked this bit, about the winning building; the Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University.
Stanton Williams received a £20,000 prize. Director Alan Stanton described the design as a 21st Century cloister, which encouraged scientists to interact and exchange ideas.
“Two scientists working on two pieces of research could bump into each other in the corridor and have a eureka moment, and say, my God, there’s the possibility of some really interesting scientific breakthrough here,” he said.
“Quite often, accidents are important, in science as they are in any creative endeavour. The building is there to try to ambush scientists into meeting and talking.”
I’ve worked in some crap buildings, most notably the electronics lab at Enfield Rolling Mills, but some good ones too, like ICI’s state-of-the-art offices for the 1960s in Runcorn. But then until probably about 1980, I rarely saw a scientist, researcher or innovator in anything pleasant. Even banks in those days had some really grim premises, if Lloyds Bank’s offices in Lombard Street were anything to go by. The Chief Management Accountant, who I effectively worked for, had a dingy office tucked away on a mezzanine behind a stair-case.
Could all of this, explain our dismal economic performance in those years? Anybody with a brain felt unwanted and went where they were appreciated.
We really don’t take working conditions for researchers and innovators seriously. Hopefully, this new lab in Cambridge will set the new standard.
Access To Medical Records for Research Purposes
The Times today has an article entitled, NHS red tape ‘is strangling life-saving medical research’, which says it all.
If you consider that Richard Doll, proved the link between smoking and lung cancer using medical records, you realise how important this is, especially as the NHS database is the largest medical database in the world.
I don’t care what any researcher does with my medical records, provided what they do is morally acceptable.
Surely what you do is allow researchers to run queries on the database, provided the research has been approved by the NHS.
I’ve Got a Pet
But it’s only a mus musculus in the kitchen. Cheeky sod!
I think it’s more humane to trap them live and then take them to a research institute, so they can benefit all life.
Could Fracking Be The Saviour of the North?
I can remember a documentary on the BBC in probably the 1960s about how a Scottish company extracted oil from shale rock. I don’t know whether they still do. I have just found this museum to the industry and it says it closed in 1962.
According to today’s Sunday Times, there is enough shale gas in the shale deposits mostly in the north of England to last 70 years.
Now I know extracting shale gas is controversial, especially, where the process of fracking is used. There was controversy in the Blackpool are, as fracking was blamed for a couple of small earthquakes. Read about it here.
But then there was controversy, when horseless carriages first arrived on British roads and they had to be preceded by a man with a red flag.
I’m not saying there is no risk from fracking, but I do think, that with proper research fracking will be safe to use in many places in the world.
And eventually, it will be used in many places in the UK, when the problems are sorted out. After all, we mined coal for years, despite the subsidence risk nearby.
And remember that for the same amount of energy coal produces forty-percent more CO2! This is because coal is pure carbon, whereas natural gas is a mixture of Hydrogen H2 and Methane, CH4, so it produces a large proportion of water when it burns.
Hopefully, I’ll know more later in the week, when I have gone to the Geological Society of London to hear a lecture.
The other thing about shale gas in the UK, is that it is located where we need jobs; in the north of England. So it becomes a vote winner for whoever wants to play the shale gas card.
Any extraction of shale gas, should be linked to two measures.
1. A local extraction tax, that goes directly to the local authorities over the extraction. This was proposed in the seventies, by someone I knew, as a means of pursuing oil extraction in places like Surrey, which in his knowledgeable view was one of the most likely places to find oil in the UK. Imagine the fuss it would create if large quantities of oil were found under say Epsom. But if Surrey got enough money to build everything they needed, the reaction of some might be different.
2. Full insurance for any buildings damaged by extraction process.
Politicians and the press will see it as a simple black and white issue. Most will be against! I see it as a multi-coloured jigsaw, that must be based on sound technology.
I would start by setting up an well–funded Institute of Fracking, at a university that has the reputation to recruit some of the best researchers in the world. It may prove that fracking is a dead end but if it showed that it was economically viable in the UK, we would reap the benefit in spades.
I have just found this article from the American Consumer Institute. It makes a lot of interesting points. Note that the United States has a local extraction tax in some or all states and this seems to push opinion in various directions.
I think the worst thing we could do is ban fracking, with the second worst being to ignore it.
Whatever we do, because we have so much of this gas, we should set up some form of research institute.
There is also a page of expert opinion to the Qradilla report on the links between fracking and earthquakes at Blackpool.
Magnetic Soap
You might say so-what as there have been magnetic soap holders for years.
But Bristol University have come up with something special, if it can be used to say clean up oil spills or waste water.
There’s a more technical explanation here in The Engineer.
Could it be that the next ten years will be decade of chemistry, as micro-electronics have ruled for too long? I have also heard that some of the new techniques used in chemistry owe a lot to chip fabrication methods. After all you could argue that a lot of chips are just a three-dimensional array of atoms.
Daddy Of Them All
A ram has made a name for himself by escaping and fathering 33 lambs in one 24 hour session. It’s all here in the Daily Mail.
This reminds me of a conversation with a Research Vet at Liverpool University in the 1960s.
At the time, the M62 was being built, and the Ministry was worried that sheep would get on the motorway. The University had been asked to find a solution and found that moorland sheep could easily climb a chain-link fence several feet high. Judging by the lack of reports of sheep on the motorway these days, I’m sure that the research indicated a solution that worked well.
The Anonymous Widower 