| Notes from Chicago I am Lily, a new postdoc at Argonne National Lab. I'm the one who thinks she can find the Higgs boson by listening to it. Thanks Jon for letting me play on your blogIt's a walk in the parkI moved here just over a week ago to work on Atlas physics analysis (Atlas is one of the detectors at the LHC). So far the closest I have got to doing any physics here is talking about ways to limit the shock a colleague gets from the carpet-humidity-doorknob setup in his office here. But that's a start.Argonne have excellent childcare facilitiesI'm loving it here so far. It was a tricky one deciding whether to move 4000 miles from London with an 11-year-old child and no driving license. I'm glad we did.Argonne is full of smart people doing interesting physics. My PhD was on the search for the Higgs boson, which is one of the few areas the people at Argonne aren't actively involved in. I'm giving a seminar about my research in the next couple of weeks which will either draw them in or put them off for life, or most likely a mixture of the two.I have done no physics whatsoever in the last week, so here is an edited summary of our experiences so far, to be filed under "non-physics".DeadBookMy laptop died the night we arrived here. We fell asleep watching the Simpsons, and when I woke up the next morning the old girl had given up the ghost. I got the whrrr but no ping, and a black screen. I wrote at the time "This kind of shit is almost enough to start me believing in god (one of the angry, vengeful ones that smites non-believers)." I'm over it now though, madly in love with a younger, faster model. And a bit poorer, but having a working laptop in my situation is priceless.The day after we arrived, around 50 soldiers checked in to our hotel, fresh from Afghanistan. Left to my own devices I would almost certainly have befriended them, but I was a bit scared. Blamed it on the jet lag. I didn't want them to laugh at my pyjamas. Which are definitely not Dr Who.The following day I finally decided that the intense pressure in my face and head was possibly not psychosomatic, so I went to Target, a massive supermarket. I had to sign an affidavit in order to purchase Sudafed. Apparently Sudafed is what crystal meth is made from. Felt fantastic all day. guardian.co.uk |
Mapping the flight of the bumblebee Scientists are studying how bumblebees adjust their flight paths to make the most efficient journey bbc.co.uk |
Nobel prize for chemistry awarded for new way to build useful molecules Three scientists share the Nobel prize for chemistry after developing a technique for assembling chains of carbon atoms to make novel drugs, agrochemicals and electronic coatingsThe 2010 Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who developed an efficient way to create chains of carbon atoms, a critical tool for the synthesis of complex molecules such as drugs and coatings for electronic components.Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University, and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Japan came up with efficient ways to link carbon atoms together. This process is important in synthesising, among other things, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and coatings for electronic components. The 10 million Swedish Kronor (£1m) prize will be shared equally between the three Nobel laureates.In nature, everything from penicillin to hormones, the scent of a flower and the colour of a person's eyes is the result of carbon-based molecules. Understanding how to synthesise chains of carbon atoms has given scientists skeletons upon which to build molecules with specific functions or properties, leading to the discovery of new medicines and materials such as plastics.Building the carbon skeletons, however, is not easy. Carbon atoms are stable and do not react easily with each other. Today's Nobel winners found ways of using palladium to catalyse reactions between carbon atoms without producing lots of unwanted by-products.Negishi said he was sound asleep when he got the phone call from the Nobel committee. "It was around 5am here and I went to bed last night well past midnight. I was extremely happy to receive the call."He added: "I would be telling a lie if I wasn't thinking about this. I began dreaming about this prize half a century ago, when I came to America and when I encountered several Nobel laureates coming to the University of Pennsylvania. Since then it has become my hopeful dream which I have been pursuing, [though] not as the only main goal."I have been telling people that my goal is half way over. I would like to keep on working for at least several more years. I would like to use the prize money to further propel my research."Negishi said that the significance of his work was that it allowed the synthesis of any carbon-based, or organic, compound of importance. "We believe that our technology will be applicable to a very wide range of compounds without knowing what they might be ... One of our dreams is to be able to synthesise any molecules we have in mind."David Phillips, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: "The metal-based 'coupling' reactions pioneered by this year's three chemistry Nobel laureates have led to countless breakthroughs. The Heck, Negishi and Suzuki reactions make possible the vital fluorescent marking that underpins DNA sequencing, and are essential tools for synthetic chemists creating complex new drugs and polymers."Yesterday the Nobel prize for physics was awarded to Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim, both at the University of Manchester, for creating wafers of carbon that are a single atom thick. Their unusual properties could transform electronics, from solar cells to computers and sensors.On Monday, the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine was awarded to the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, Robert Edwards.Phillips added: "With Geim and Novoselov from the University of Manchester taking the physics prize for their excellent work on graphene, I'm pleased to say this year's Nobels have had a distinctly chemical flavour."The Nobel prize for literature will be announced tomorrow morning, the prize for peace on Friday, and economics next Monday.Nobel prizesChemistryPeople in scienceScience prizesAlok Jhaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Oliver Sacks: The visionary who can't recognise faces No one blurs the gap between science and art like the author and neurologist. Just don't ask 'medicine's poet laureate' to recall the names of his patientsThe eyes, it's said, are the windows to the soul, but they're also portals to the mind or, rather, the mysterious workings of the brain. In his new book, The Mind's Eye, the celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks examines neurological disorders that affect vision. His aim, as ever, is to shed light on what goes on deep inside our heads. That, at least, is the scientific justification. But this being a Sacks book, what it's really about are the fascinating stories of ordinary people living with extraordinary conditions.Sacks has long been praised and criticised for the manner in which he combines hard science and literary observation. For many, he is the pioneer of a particular form of personalised essay that has helped rejuvenate scientific writing. In this respect, the New York Times dubbed him "a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine".For others, like the late psychiatrist Arthur Shapiro, Sacks's blurring of the boundaries between art and science is problematic and potentially misleading. Not alone among medical experts, Shapiro argued that Sacks is "a much better writer than he is a clinician".What both fans and doubters focus upon is Sacks's tendency to place himself in the action. In such classic works as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he is a kind of an active observer, much like a literary version of those documentary film-makers who thrust themselves in front of the camera.For Sacks, whose abiding subject is the duality of the mind and the brain, the intrusion is another means of exposing the interplay between subjective perception and objective reality. Or, as he once put it: "I regard everything I write as being at the intersection of the first and third person, biography and autobiography, as it were."In The Mind's Eye, he goes a step further by including a chapter on his response to his own medical condition, a melanoma of the right eye that was diagnosed in 2005. He writes about the disconcerting optical illusions he experienced as his brain attempted to compensate for the loss created by the tumour. It's not the first time Sacks has strayed into memoir. It's not even the first time that he's written about his own ailments. A Leg to Stand On (1984) recounted his travails after injuring his leg while fleeing from a bull.But it could be argued that this is the first time that Sacks has placed himself alongside his patients, so to speak. For another common gripe is that he uses his patients, exploiting their stories for his own writerly and commercial ends. The geneticist and disability activist Tom Shakespeare dubbed Sacks "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career".It's an accusation to which Sacks remains acutely sensitive. He has likened his sense of protectiveness towards those in his care to that of a parent for a child, which may not be an analogy that satisfies his critics. But he has also made a stern defence of medicine as storytelling. "My patients come to me with stories. They have predicaments. They have plights. They come in searching for ways of dealing with these things. There is something dramatic in all this."Dramatic, it's true, but also inevitably comic. In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Sacks described his lifelong prosopagnosia, or face-blindness – the inability to recognise faces. He recalled an incident that occurred after one of his twice-weekly visits to his psychiatrist. In the lobby of the shrink's offices, he was greeted by a soberly dressed man. "I was puzzled as to why this stranger seemed to know me, until the doorman greeted him by name – it was, of course, my analyst."Nor is his forgetfulness limited to faces. He also forgets places, routes and names. Although The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat gained almost universal rave reviews, an opposing voice was the philosopher Colin McGinn, who found it unreliable and sentimental. Sacks was so wounded by McGinn's review that he described it as a vivisection. Years later, having forgotten the author, he read a book of McGinn's and liked it so much he sent a fan letter. The two men met up and became friends. It was months before Sacks realised who his new friend was. Tellingly, although deeply hurt, he forgave McGinn.According to his oldest friend, the doctor and director Jonathan Miller, Sacks's memory problem goes deeper than forgetfulness. "Oliver has aspects of a Borgesian fantasist," Miller once noted. "He remembers things that never happened."There is also something Proustian about Sacks's writing, as seen in Uncle Tungsten, a memoir of his chemical-obsessed childhood that did for base metal what the Frenchman did for cakes. "I knew zinc – the dull, slightly bluish birdbath in the garden was made of zinc – and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in which sandwiches were wrapped for a picnic."Born in 1933, Sacks grew up in an intellectually ambitious north London Jewish household. His father was a well-respected GP and his mother one of the country's first female surgeons. Aged six, he was evacuated to a boarding school in Northamptonshire where, he says, he was regularly beaten by a sadistic headmaster.His parents, by his account, were not the most demonstratively loving of people. His mother would bring deformed foetuses back to the house and, eager that he should learn about anatomy, they would dissect them.Perhaps not surprisingly, he was an inquisitive boy who didn't naturally appreciate the kinds of boundaries that others took for granted. "Sacks will go far," said his headmaster at St Paul's school, "if he doesn't go too far."He studied medicine at Oxford and then fled to North America. From Canada, he sent a one-word telegram back to his parents: "Staying". In fact, he hitched to San Francisco, where he befriended the gay poet Thom Gunn and began a four-year residency at UCLA. Gunn encouraged him to write but secretly felt that he lacked empathy.He began to experiment with drugs, including LSD and amphetamines. "I would take a huge dose of amphetamine," he recently told the New Scientist, "400 tablets on the weekend – and basically have something like a nonstop orgasm for 48 hours." Eventually, he cleaned up his act and moved to New York, where he began a 45-year stint of analysis every Tuesday and Friday. In 1966, he started working with patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica, or chronic sleeping sickness, resulting in his breakthrough 1973 book, Awakenings. On reading Awakenings, Gunn wrote him a letter in which he marvelled at the depth of humanity displayed in the book. Gunn wondered if it was working with patients, taking acid or falling in love that had transformed his writing. Sacks wasn't sure, but he thought that psychoanalysis had helped develop his creative understanding of others.In total, he has written 11 books, while also practising as a consultant and an academic – he is currently professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University. His books, like his patients, he has spoken of as his children, in part, no doubt, because he has never had kids. Nor has he married or formed a long-term relationship, though it cannot have been through a lack of opportunity.For one thing, he is famous. Awakenings not only inspired a Harold Pinter play, but it was turned into a film in which Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was directed as a play by Peter Brook and formed the basis of Michael Nyman's opera of the same name. Yet he has spurned the celebrity milieu. An accomplished pianist and a compulsive swimmer, he lives in New York, but has never taken US citizenship. He's proud of his "resident alien" status, which he thinks suits his sensibility. By all accounts, each morning he eats the same breakfast – cereal and banana – and each evening the same meal – fish with rice.The core of his life remains his practice, which, along with his books and writing for the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, forms an impressive and singular body of work "I'm not a real poet, like Thom [Gunn]," he once observed, "but I have some poetry in me. I'm not a real scientist like Francis [Crick], but I have some science in me." His own optical trick is that he has been able to keep one eye on science and one on literature and each, in its way, has dramatically improved the vision of the other.Andrew Anthonyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
5 rare Sumatran elephants found dead in Indonesia JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Five endangered Sumatran elephants have been found dead in Indonesia, and conservationists said Sunday that they suspect farmers poisoned the animals to stop them from damaging crops.... hosted.ap.org |