August 2008 Archives

In terms of the web, everyone's pretty busy putting the final touches to the soon to be launched IOP Member's Network - myIOP - and making sure that there are no glitches in the system when it goes live on the 23rd September.

One of the things that we'll hope to be doing is producing a number of short screencasts to show members how to use the system. Everything is very straightforward, so even the most technophobic out there shouldn't worry.

Having seen the system working, one of the things that impresses me is how easy it will be to connect to other member's not just regionally, but around the world too. Exciting times!

Today we've just had an interesting lunchtime talk by Adam Gibson who works in Optical Tomography at UCL's Medical Physics Department, who explained to us all the latest techniques used in medical imaging and how they all work together to help to diagnose and treat different conditions. Again, we hope to put the talk in the near future - so check back soon for the presentation!

I've also just come across CERN's Youtube channel - which is a great resource for any videos about what they're doing. No doubt you'll have come across some people out there who haven't got a clue what CERN is or what they're doing. Forward this video to them:

 

You can find Cern's Youtube channel by visiting our own Youtube channel and clicking on this link www.youtube.com/user/InstituteofPhysics and visiting our subscriptions.

I'm in the process of updating some case studies that the Institute has been asked to do for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on the (usually unintended) benefits of pure research, in this case cancer treatments and DNA.

One of the best thinsg about doing this is being able to find out a bit about some quite impressive research. If you'll forgive the cliche, here one really does learn something new every day...

One instance is this work by Oxford's Jonathan Bath and Andrew Turberfield on DNA Nanomachines (it's a year old, but I'd not seen it before):

"We are learning to build synthetic molecular machinery from DNA. This research is inspired by biological systems in which individual molecules act, singly and in concert, as specialized machines: our ambition is to create new technologies to perform tasks that are currently beyond our reach. DNA nanomachines are made by self-assembly, using techniques that rely on the sequence-specific interactions that bind complementary oligonucleotides together in a double helix. They can be activated by interactions with specifi c signalling molecules or by changes in their environment. Devices that change state in response to an external trigger might be used for molecular sensing, intelligent
drug delivery or programmable chemical synthesis. Biological molecular motors that carry cargoes within cells have inspired the construction of rudimentary DNA walkers that run along sef-assembled tracks. It has even proved possible to create DNA motors that move autonomously, obtaining energy by catalysing the reaction of DNA or RNA fuels."

If that's not a clear case for getting more government money for reseach, I don't know what is. (Though I suspect Prince Charles may something to say about it, having spoken out against  both nanotechnology and genetic tinkering.)

Another year and another batch of A-level results. It was good news for physics again this year as the number of students choosing to take physics at A-level continued to increase. Pleasing us, UK businesses and the government as the promise of more science-literate students begins to bear fruit. Great stuff.

Last week I went down to Cardiff to film the Eistedfodd where IOP Wales had a stand in the Science and Technology tent. It was my first visit to Cardiff and an Eistedfodd - I was pretty impressed, although the weather was a total let down - meaning many people were walking around soaked through to the skin and wandering around in wellies all day.

Nevertheless we managed to grab a few words with Angharad, the National Officer for Wales, who explained the reasons behind the IOP hosting a stand there. Here's the video:

 

 

We're still in the process of getting more videos on the iop.org site to help support any of our news items. Soon we'll be switching to Brightcove for most of our video content making it a lot easier for you to view all of our video content in one place. It will also make it a lot easier for you to embed and forward any of our content too.

IOP Publishing has also just started including video within their online magazines - one of the first to do this was Fibresystems.org. You can check out their interviews and video content here.  

As you may know, we're also improving our web-casting facilities at 76 Portland Place, so that in future we will be able to broadcast live any lectures or events that take place. As you can see, the guys are right in the middle of re-wiring both lecture halls with new audio and cameras:

 

 

We're hoping that many of the lectures that take place with the London branch will soon be available to all members where ever they are in the world! We'll keep you up to date as things progress!

The international part of my job seems to be dominating my workload this week.  We're making plans for the General Assembly of IUPAP (the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) which meets in Japan in the middle of October. 

We've already submitted nominations for UK and Irish representatives on IUPAP's 18 odd commissions, and we're holding a meeting of the current representatives here at 76 Portland Place on 16 September to identify any concerns or suggestions for the General Assembly.

 Then as soon as I'm back from Japan I'm off to Mexico to talk about IOP at the Congress of Latin American Physical Societies on 25 October.  This is a really good opportunity to explain our new policy - agreed at the July Council meeting - of offering low-cost digital membership to physicists from developing countries.  Wherever possible we want to organise this in partnership with their national physical societies.  So the Latin American Congress will be an excellent place to start.

Comedian Helen Keen

On Friday I visited Edinburgh to see a space-themed comedy gig at the Fringe: It is rocket science!, by Helen Keen, a former winner of Channel 4's New Comedy Writing Initiative Award. It'll feature on the back page of next month's Interactions, so I don't want to give too much away.

It tracks the development of spaceflight, and the characters involved, from German rockets to the near future, using costumes and shadow puppets to help explain some of the science involved -- all accurate, which you'd expect from a show given an Institute outreach grant and ably assisted by a real-life rocket-scientist, Chris Welch of Kingston University.

One thing that Helen said that I particularly picked up on was that she'd first become interested in astronomy, as a child, simply by looking at the sky, and added that growing up in East Yorkshire, with the nearest town being Hull, in the days before the internet, there was very little else to do. Probably thousands of children became interested in space in exactly the same way: I certainly did, growing up in similarly dull Durham.

But does this happen anymore? Just as Pro Evo Soccer on the Playstation means fewer kids actually play football, are children going to be too busy using MySpace to ever look upwards? Or, to put it another way: How can we utilise the internet as a substitute? There are a few interesting sites to get the public involved in real astronomy -- remote-control telescope "Slooh" and the recently completed Galaxy Zoo spring to mind -- but none aimed specifically at young people.

 

Occasionally there are significant scientific breakthroughs that general punters hear very little of. This week there was a breakthrough that the newspapers and news broadcasters barely touched, yet it was a major milestone for research across a range of crucial research areas, such as clean energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health care through to nanotechnology, materials engineering and IT.

Welcome to the IOP's first blog - as some of my younger colleagues would say, we are at last joining the 21st century!

I'm just back in the office from a great visit to the Diamond Light Source yesterday. I thought I knew a lot about Diamond beforehand, but until you actually see the scale of the facility, and get a flavour of the range of experiments that users will be able to do there, you can't really appreciate what a success story it is. Gerd Materlik showed us round, and we were comparing notes about interpreting fuzzy photographs of X ray diffraction patterns in the 1970's, compared to Diamond with its robotic sample changing every few minutes, and automatic data collection. I'm pretty envious. And thanks to everyone who showed us what they were working on and explained it with such enthusiasm.

Now I've got to get back to clearing my desk before I go on holiday next week. The main thing I need to do is sort out arrangements for a discussion we're organising in Parliament in October, to remind policy makers about the spin-off benefits you can get from fundamental research programmes. I need to find a really good chair - someone who can be firm but fair, and is a recognisable name, like a radio or TV journalist. Let me know if you have any ideas - or would like to volunteer yourself!