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14,067 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science
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- September 13, 2007 (14:53)
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TUESDAY 20. SEPTEMBER, 2011
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17:18
Tracking equipment could be harming wild birds, experts warn
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15:10
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14:03
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11:35
Seismologists around the world in uproar at legal move, which they say is an attack on science
Seven scientists and other experts are standing trial on manslaughter charges for allegedly failing to sufficiently warn residents before a devastating earthquake that killed more than 300 people in central Italy in 2009.
The case is being closely watched by seismologists around the world, who insist it is impossible to predict earthquakes and say no major tremor has ever been foretold.
Last year about 5,200 international researchers signed a petition supporting their Italian colleagues, and the Seismological Society of America wrote to Italy's president expressing concern about what it called an unprecedented legal attack on science.
The seven defendants are accused of giving "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" about whether smaller tremors felt by L'Aquila residents in the six months before the quake, on 6 April 2009, should have constituted grounds for a quake warning.
Specifically, prosecutors focused on a memo issued after a meeting on 31 March 2009 of the great risks commission, which was called because of mounting concerns about the months of seismic activity in the region.
According to the commission's memo – issued one week before the big quake – the experts concluded that it was "improbable" that there would be a major quake, though it added that one couldn't be excluded.
The 6.3-magnitude earthquake killed 308 people in and around the medieval town, which was largely reduced to rubble. Thousands of survivors lived in tent camps or temporary housing for months.
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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11:26
As I was walking up the stair, I saw a knot of tangled hair
On my way a seminar today at CERN, I noticed a new feature. Antony Gormley, creator of the Angel of the North, metal guys standing in the sea and other things I like, has donated a sculpture which now adorns the approach to CERN's main auditorium.
Many projects explore connections, similarities and differences between science and art, and there's quite an active twitter feed @ArtsAtCERN dealing with those related to CERN.While combining art and science in various ways can be fun and stimulating (for example I like colourfield splash), I often find such projects a bit forced or unconvincing, sometimes highlighting a lack of understanding on both sides.
Though maybe that's no bad thing either.
Anyway, I know what I like and I like our new sculpture. I took the snap above myself just now, but here are some professional pictures of it being installed.
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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08:30
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08:30
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MONDAY 19. SEPTEMBER, 2011
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22:38
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22:30
They may not have the allure of organs such as the heart or brain, but without the thousands of tiny gastric pits in our stomachs, we would not be able to absorb the nutrients we need
There's a funny kind of hierarchy that exists among the organs. You simply don't hear bladder surgeons boasting about their art in quite the same way that heart and brain surgeons do. And yet, even the most humble body part has its own complex and fascinating physiology.
I realised this when learning about the structure and function of the stomach. Previously, I had thought of the tummy as a lowly place, a mere dumping ground for anything we might choose to stuff in our mouths. I couldn't have been more mistaken, and my new-found respect for the stomach gained focus when I read about the gastric pit.
If you look inside a stomach when dissecting a cadaver, or during an operation, it appears like a bag whose surface is thrown into a series of visible folds. These are called rugae, and enable the stomach to increase dramatically in size when it fills with food. What you can't see with the naked eye is that the lining of the stomach (the mucosa) is interrupted by multiple tiny openings, each of which leads to a tiny hormone-producing tunnel. These are the gastric pits and each one is lined with a number of different types of cell, producing a separate, important gastric secretion.
The cells at the top of the pits produce mucus, which protects the stomach lining against gastric acid. Deeper down are two other cell types. Parietal cells generate stomach acid as well as a substance called intrinsic factor, which enables a vitamin called B12 to be absorbed further along in the gut. The impressively named chief cells secrete pepsinogen which, when it mixes with stomach acid, becomes an enzyme called pepsin. This helps to break down the protein we eat into smaller units that can be absorbed.
The heart may be in charge of pumping blood around the whole body. The brain may be master of all we do. But, at the tissue level, wonders are also to be found in those organs that we may think of as being more ordinary.
Gabriel Weston is a surgeon and author of Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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22:29
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20:30
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19:28
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18:50
Under their white coats, scientists are much less intimidating than many people seem to think
Scientists seem to be appearing more and more on our screens these days, in films and TV shows and on the news. Despite the increased exposure, however, it can still be difficult to get an accurate impression of what they are really like.
For many people, scientists seem intimidatingly clever and as a result they see science as "off limits". In reality most scientists are pretty regular people, with different personalities and outlooks on life and science. But they don't often have the opportunity to talk about these things.
So I have made a film by interviewing six different scientists, to give them a chance to share their stories. They talk openly about how they got into science, why they like doing it, what they think it takes to be a good scientist and speculate on some of the big questions that still need to be tackled.
As you will see, these scientists are thoughtful, funny and enthusiastic people. If you would like to get to know them better, please take a look at the film.
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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18:07
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18:00
This year's runner-up in the Max Perutz Science Writing Award explains how his backroom work on measurement error can make the difference between a cure and a wrong conclusion
Hi there – I'm your friendly neighbourhood statistician, and I've got a few questions if that's all right. First up, how old are you? OK, and how much do you weigh? Good, good, now how many calories do you eat on an average day?
If you're anything like me you'll have had a mixed response to that lot. It starts off OK – I'm pretty sure I'm 24 – but it goes downhill from there. I don't have a pair of scales to hand, and I can barely remember what I ate yesterday, let alone work out an average.
Welcome to the world of measurement error, a place I have lived for the last three years of my life while working towards a PhD in statistics. I'd come into it off the back of theoretical training, but then I found out about this pesky thing called the "real world" where weighing scales aren't perfectly calibrated and people don't keep a record of precisely how many cups of tea they've drunk. Unfortunately, all the statistical models I'd studied relied on being fed data that are 100% accurate. For instance, when you see a headline about how eating red meat increases your risk of cancer by some percentage, this result will be (at least partially) based on asking real people how much red meat they eat. Unless you have a lot of money to spend it's unlikely your data will be perfectly accurate. If you blindly feed inaccurate data into statistical models you can end up coming to drastically wrong conclusions: the effectiveness of a drug could seemingly disappear, or we might mistakenly find that something causes heart disease when it doesn't. It's important, then, to be aware of the problems measurement error can cause and, if necessary, take it into account.
So what can we do? As is so often the case in statistics, we collect more data. In some cases we might be able to stretch our resources to get some really precise measurements on a small group of people, or we could measure some people more than once. Both of these methods give us more information about the measurement error: if you measure someone's weight twice and get 79.5kg and 80.5kg, that suggests the amount of error is pretty small, whereas if you got 60kg and 100kg, you might think differently. The error is just another unknown in our equation, and by collecting these extra data we can learn more about it. From here, there are all sorts of algebraic tricks that help us to turn this information into something we can reliably use, and it's at this point that I come in.
Despite being a relatively new area, there's already a mind-bogglingly large range of different models and methods for dealing with measurement error. As you may imagine, this can make it quite hard to know where to start if you've got measurement error and don't know how to deal with it. My work is, at its most fundamental level, about making these methods accessible. I look at things from the perspective of the non-statistician, trying to answer the questions they would want answering, as well as making it easier to act on any recommendations I might have. Primarily this involves writing computer programs that make implementing these complex methods in a general setting more straightforward, but I also look at some specific types of scientific study to try and provide more tailored advice.
By this point you might be wondering exactly what it is I do all day, and I'm the first to admit that a statistician's life is as glamorous as, well, as glamorous as you'd expect. I spend most of my time at my computer either writing code or playing with datasets. If it's a really exciting day, I might get some paper out and do a bit of algebra. My work may not appear as dramatic as that of my more practical colleagues, but my results have the potential to be just as significant. Statistics are the bedrock of almost every scientific study: get your stats wrong and everything else is basically useless. Measurement error is an often inescapable problem, and so a study that makes use of my results is one that can (I hope) stand up to greater scientific scrutiny.
So next time you see a headline about a groundbreaking medical discovery, spare a thought for the statisticians working behind the scenes. We might not be finding a cure for cancer, but we're the ones who can tell you if someone else has.
• Michael Wallace is based at the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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17:59
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17:30
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16:48
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16:19
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 19 September 1955
The sudden appearance of a large dark spot on the surface of the planet Mars was announced yesterday by the National Geographic Society in Washington. It was also claimed that this discovery supported the conclusion "that Mars is not a dead world, that the darkening is due to the growth of plant life." The observation has been made by Dr E. C. Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory, in South Africa.
Dr Slipher has spent a large part of his long life (he is nearly 80) photographing the surface of Mars.
This event is certainly remarkable, but it is unlikely that scientists will accept the suggestion that the appearance of this spot is evidence of vegetable life on the planet. Professor Znedik Kopal of Manchester University said last night that the claim "must be taken with a pinch of salt." The difficulty is that there are at least two ways of accounting for the appearance of dark spots on the surface of the planet and simple photography of them cannot decide between the two theories.
It is, however, clear that the dark spots must be produced by some active mechanism. Most of the surface of the planet is covered with a thick layer of sandy dust (it is a desert), and it is known that winds with speeds of several miles a second blow in the thin Martian atmosphere. Any dark material on the surface would rapidly become covered with a thin layer of obscuring dust if there were not some way in which it was regenerated.
The assumption that the dark patches are areas of vegetation has been common, for several decades. The difficulty is to see how any vegetation could grow in the planet's strange atmosphere.
The most favoured of the alternative theories is that the dark spots are caused by volcanic activity. Each black area would be brought about by pumice dust from an active volcano falling on the sandy desert and concealing it from view. This supposes that the volcanoes remain active for a considerable length of time, but there is no direct way of proving or disproving this.
To distinguish between these theories experiments are now being carried out in several laboratories throughout the world. In the end the question will be decided by the colour of the light which the spots reflect. When accurate measurements of the proportions of red, blue, and yellow light from the spots are available, these will be compared with laboratory measurements of the light reflected from pumice, lava, and vegetation. The prize will go to that material which best simulates the behaviour of the spots.
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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15:30
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13:46
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12:48
From the dark matter of the genome to dark matter in the cosmos, from microwave biomass recycling to the importance of happiness for creating a more productive society, Alok Jha rounds up some of the best science from last week's British Science Festival. Alok and the podcast team were in Bradford to hear presentations by leading British scientists and researchers.
Next week's edition of the podcast will be recorded in front of a live audience at the Natural History Museum's Science Uncovered event, which all our listeners are welcome to attend.
If you want to be in the audience and see Alok and the team in action just email your name to scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com. Hurry though as space is limited. Please put "Natural History Museum live podcast" in the subject line.
Subscribe for free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).
Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.
Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com.
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