inkycircus

The sound of silence

If you live in a big city like London, you have to get reasonably good at ignoring sound. I usually don't realise how loud my city is at night until I go somewhere that's extremely quiet, and I only notice when I can't sleep because it's too quiet. To truly keep out the sounds of the night in a city, you need to double or even triple glaze your window, which is fine really, it's not so expensive and it doesn't look that bad. But if the team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF in Darmstadt, Germany , could figure out a way to make their noise canceling window device commercially viable, they could have a huge city rat client base on their hands. The device is a piezoelectric patch which detects sound-generated vibration and then vibrates at a phase that cancels out the sound. Before I can get my silent night, though, the team need to make the patch transparent, minimize the cost of maintenance, and boost the effectiveness of the patch against intermittent noises - which could take a while. Good job I've just invested in some ear plugs.

ABC News Australia. (PHOTO: LOCOSTORM)

The lonliness of the long distance runner

My cousin is training for the Flora London Marathon at the moment, and is doing spectacularly well - she did a 3 hour, 18 mile run on Sunday. a)I myself probably couldn't even run for 18 metres, b)how she didn't get bored for all that time just running I'll never know. But anyway. The marathon is one of those things that pushes human ability to the max. One should think only of the original marathon runner, Pheidippides, who ran 26 miles from the town of Marathon to Athens with glad tidings, and then dropped dead - it's not a feat to be taken lightly. But for some people, the promise of torn muscles, chafed thighs, jogger's nipple, blisters, kidney problems, heart problems, dead toenails, dehydration, exhaustion and sunburn isn't enough of a challenge, and they have to run a marathon at the arctic. With two false hips, like Warrant Officer Steve Boswell.  Or in space, like NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.

For me, and we've already established that I'm quite lazy, being blasted up into space would be quite a good get-out clause for not having to run the marathon after all. But no. Sunita plans to follow through on the Boston marathon motto - 'It's all about the promises' - and to tether herself to a treadmill in the space shuttle for 3+ hours, and cover the 26 miles anyway, at the same time as her fellow runners in Boston. She'll incidentally have put a girdle round the earth twice in the process, actually travelling just over 50,000 miles before she reaches the metaphorical finishing line. How's that for going the distance?

Via BBC News. And you can see a pic of Sunita on her treadmill there too. PHOTO: PAUL KELEHER

The science of schmooze

I accidentally went along to an event last night that turned out to be quite the party. I volunteered to help a colleague man a stand at some science media thingy wotsit at the Royal Society, so turned up in my usual work uniform of jeans and MEC fleece ready to be in charge of the projector. What can I say, I'm a web geek not a fashionista. Anyway, along I went to the Royal Soc, and discovered that it was the Daily Telegraph's 'Scientists Meet the Media', the foremost science/media event of the year, and the dress code was 'lounge suits'. Cue a room full of the great and the good of Science Communication in Britain, in suits and swanky dresses, consuming champagne by the bucket-load. I did some schmoozing (despite my unprepossessing outfit) but I find that such a mortifying pursuit that I soon gave up and spent the evening eating delicious nibbles and star spotting. There were plenty of famous faces, but I was personally rather impressed to see Johnny Ball, Professor Steve Jones, and the god of natural history himself, Sir David, all chatting away together. Fun times. Next time I'll definitely have to make more of an effort with my outfit...

PS - You can tell the event was a swanky one from the napkin, I've never even seen a napkin printed up like this before...

On the EDGE of the evolutionary tree

The Zoological Society of London have launched a new campaign called EDGE, designed to raise awareness of the plight of a band of weird and wonderful creatures. EDGE stands for Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered, and includes such wonders as the slender loris, the bumblebee bat and the pygmy hippo. A new taxonomic "super tree" shows the relationship between different species, and shows how long ago each of these animals shared a common ancestor with another animal. 43 million years in the case of the tiny bumblebee bat, putting it very much out on an evolutionary limb.

Dr Baillie from the ZSL likens losing one of these species to losing the Mona Lisa, they are equally irreplacable and unique. The campaign will develop specific, local conservation plans, then recruit local students to work on the projects. It'll be funded by grants and donations, so if you want to help the long-beaked echidna, the northern hairy-nosed wombat, the aye-aye, the golden-crowned sifaka, the Japanese amami rabbit, the hairy-eared dwarf lemur or the Yangzte river dolphin, head over to ZSL's EDGE homepage here and donate. (It's worth a visit if only for the pictures of all these rare and really rather adorable animals...)

Via BBC News. Pygmy hippo photo courtesy of MAPE_S

For we all like foggy pudding

In the last few days of this week before Christmas, London (along with much of Britain) has been cloaked in a freezing fog. It has turned Heathrow into even more of a massive disaster than usual, which has had a knock on effect on the roads and rail networks, because everyone knows if there is one thing we Brits can't deal with it's 'adverse' weather.Everything grinds to a halt. Because I have no plans to go anywhere, I quite like the fog. It gives the city a Sherlock Holmes, Victorian kind of feel, largely thanks to the triangle of orange light under each streetlamp. And it makes it doubly cosy being inside.

The only effect this fog has had on me is to make me pick up a bit of meteorology, as every other news bulletin carries an item on the subject. The fog is apparently being caused by a large area of high pressure over the UK, coupled with weak sun and no wind. The high pressure traps moist air near the surface, which then cools, the water condenses and forms a fog particle. The more fog particles, the worse the visibility. Clearly there are a fair few particles in the air over London tonight.

Slightly off the subject, I looked up London fog in Wikipedia to find out about London Pea Soup fogs and what made them so bad,  and discovered that there is a drink called a London Fog that is made of steamed milk, vanilla syrup and an Earl Grey teabag. According to Wikipedia its very popular in Vancouver of all places...

(PHOTO: GWIRE)

A tornado WHERE?

North West London is not the most exciting part of the world. Nothing terribly dramatic happens here, it's a normal, suburban part of a big messy town. So when a tornado struck at 11am this morning, people were a bit shocked. Some woman in Kensal Rise had the side blown off her house by winds reaching over 100mph (see pic), bricks were thrown around, trees uprooted, and several people injured. It's all utterly bizarre and it lasted less than a minute.

I'm not very observant, so all I noticed over in White City was that around mid morning the sky went very dark, there was one flash of lightning, one big boom of thunder, a brief but heavy rainstorm, and then the sun came out again and I forgot all about it. But then a friend emailed me and sent me a link to a newstory saying a tornado had just hit a few miles up the road, and since then it's been all over the news. Eg here on BBC News. There are a few more pictures at the BBC here, and loads and loads more news stories from around the world via Google news etc. It seems I'm not the only one to be a bit suprised by it all!

It's just so weird that it happened here. It's right on my route home from work. A friend of mine lives in the road where it happened, and he said that when he looked out of the window it looked like something out of the Discovery channel... What's up with the weather!

Toot toot, beep beep

I am not normally one for conspiracy theories. But I am when it comes to parking. Parking wardens are out to get me. They can sense it when I venture out on the roads of London, and come running from the far corners of the city to screw me over. Because they know that there are never any parking spaces, and even if there are, some cretin will always push in front of you and nick them. Compelling you to park on a yellow line and thus lay your head on their metaphorical chopping block. Hate them.

Which is why I am jealous of the Parisians. A selection of mobile phone networks there have grouped together to produce a real-time GPRS map of car parks in the city. People helping motorists instead of shafting them. At last.

Via Gizmodo. (PHOTO: SRITENOU)

Nice one Arry

THESE GUYS WOULD FIT UNDER THE CHANDELIERS NO PROBLEM. (PHOTO: PAT-SWAN)

There is an exhibition being set up at the moment at Buckingham Palace and I really want to go. It's meant to celebrate and inspire young scientists, but I can't go because I'm not on the exclusive list of  aspiring scientist schoolkids. How unfair is that. Ok, so all this stuff was part of the Royal Society's summer exhibition so I could have gone to see it then, but how often do you get to see a Spitfire-sized Pterosaur (aka Pterodactyl) in a glistening ballroom full of chandeliers? The dinosaur is a Arambourgiania philadelphiae, nicknamed Arry (this will appeal to all Frank Bruno fans out there), and he is being wrestled into place by two scientists. These two scientists are highly educated, intelligent men, but this hasn't stopped the palace staff dubbing them "Pterosaur Bob" and "Pterosaur Dave". How good is that. Makes me want to go even more.

Via The Guardian.

Game On! at the Science Museum

There's a new exhibition called Game On starting at the Science Museum this Saturday, and I have big plans to go. It's set up like a whole timeline history of computer games and will apparently feature lots of old style nostalgic arcade games like Pacman here, and visitors will actually get to play on them. I approve. I was doing some research into the history of computer games for work today, and I found out that the blue ghost in Pacman is called Inky which pleased me quite a lot. And in the spirit of nostalgia I even dug out my old Gameboy and rode home on the tube today playing Super Mario Bros. Once a girl nerd always a girl nerd... See you at the Science Museum...

What makes the universe just right for life?

ONE TYPE OF STRING THEORY THAT I DO UNDERSTAND... (PHOTO: GASTONMAG)

On a random an inexplicable impulse, I went to a lecture on theoretical physics on Thursday night. I am not a particularly impulsive person. I am not a particular fan of theoretical physics. But I had recently acquired a copy of Paul Davies book "The Goldilocks Enigma", and when I saw that the author was giving a lecture at Imperial College I figured why not go along. I went by myself, took my copy of the book, and took a seat up the back of the lecture theatre. I then tried extremely hard to understand the next 60 minutes or so of argument and debate about string theory v multiverse theory v The Divine. And I must confess I didn't understand much of it. I don't see how strings can be one dimensional. And I don't quite get how there can be only one universe - surely there are infinite universes and we are a result of blind luck? And I really don't agree with the idea that someone designed it all just so. But I have the book, and I really did come away with a desire to fill in the holes in my knowledge about all this.

I also came away with two other things. One was being able to say at work the next morning (in answer to the question 'what did you do last night') "Oh not much, I went to a lecture in theoretical physics". And I also came away with a particularly terrible joke. A philandering string-theorist is being confronted by his angry wife about his latest affair. "How could you do this to me again?" she says. "But darling", he says, "I can explain everything"...