Recently by Christopher White

This is another one that's going to be written up at greater length for Interactions, but on Friday I had a very interesting day at the National Space Centre in Leicester, which I visited to cover their new "Space Academy" educational programmes.

The idea is to use space as a hook to provide curriculum support for pupils from Key Stage 2 right up to post-16 education. The Centre's position as both a working facility and an educational institution makes it a great choice of location -- and they've got some interesting items lying around: some solar cells from Hubble that were retrieved in 1993 after becoming unusable following micrometeorite bombardment, a test-tube of dust from a Martian meteorite and the logbook from the unsuccessful Beagle mission to Mars, which worked from the Centre. And the two disused rocket boosters decorating the canteen.

I had to chuckle, though, after viewing the animated film on the life cycle of stars in their Space Theatre. Though produced by the Centre's in-house team, the show had been commissioned by a planetarium in Nashville -- which meant that describing the development of stars using the word "evolution" was expressly forbidden, as was any reference to the Big Bang.

 

I was supposed to liveblogging this from the Science and Technology Facilities Council's "Big Bang Breakfast" event, but we had a bit of a technical failure. (Mildly ironic given that CERN famously invented the web.)

Luckily, CERN had no such problems.

The proton beams were oscillating too much at first, but were quickly brought under control as the tests went through more and more of the Large Hadron Collider's sections and finally right round the whole ring.

The LHCb detector first picked up some particle tracks around 9.30am UK time. This is what the first collisions detected in by the ATLAS (left) and CMS looked like:

 

 

 

Before these results came in, John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, reiterated the need for fundamental research such as this. He emphasised his point with a story of the first approval of UK involvement in expensive particle physics research, under Margaret Thatcher. Expecting her to be opposed to the idea, her ministers had carefully rehearsed arguments against involvement in a big, publicly funded, European project with little in the way of expected benefits. She allegedly replied: "Yes, but it is interesting."

 

 I'm sure the pupils from Langton Grammar School would agree with Mrs Thatcher. They were lucky enough to have previously visited CERN, and made an appearance at the STFC's switch-on event to share their new-found enthusiasm -- one girl has even decided to study physics at University rather than business as planned. It's certainly a refreshing antidote to the widespread comments on newspaper websites from somewhat hysterical Key Stage 3 and 4 kids panicking about the end of world -- partly attributable, I would imagine, to a lack of specialist physics teachers.

 

 

September's issue of Interactions has arrived and been distributed around the building.

Next up is the new newsletters for Council, staff and partner international physical societies.

We're hoping this will eventually also include an email newsletter sent out to all 35 000 members around the middle of each month -- in-between issues of Interactions -- to help keep everyone even more informed on all of the Institute's work in promoting physics.

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.)

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.