TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Darwin returns to 50 Albemarle Street The descendants of Charles Darwin, his publisher – and his pigeons – met this week on the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species"That's the fireplace where Byron's memoirs were burned after his death because they were thought too salacious," my host Virginia Murray casually throws into the conversation as she shows me around the upstairs drawing room of number 50 Albemarle Street, just a few steps from Piccadilly in London's Mayfair.I am here on something of a scientific pilgrimage: to see the place where Charles Darwin and his publisher, John Murray III, discussed drafts of arguably the most important book in scientific history – On the Origin of Species. I had hoped to get a sense of the heritage of the book on the 150th anniversary of its publication, but I was not prepared for a fascinating all-round history lesson."This was the meeting place in England for literary and political types at the beginning of the 19th century," said Murray (the great great grandson of Darwin's publisher). At Murray III's soirees, Darwin rubbed shoulders with his great intellectual influences, the economist Thomas Malthus, the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell. And in its 234-year history, which began 21 years before the French revolution but sadly ended in 2002, the publishing house played host to the likes of Benjamin Disraeli, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, David Livingstone and James Watt. Busts of the latter two glower down at us from either side of a massive portrait of Lord Byron that hangs above the fireplace where the poet's diaries met their end.Tonight's soiree is touched by a more modern twinkling of stardust, with the novelists AS Byatt and Ian McEwan, and broadcaster Andrew Marr on the guest list. We are here to see a unique collection of Darwin artefacts that have been brought together for the anniversary – the climax of a year of Darwin-related events that began with the great naturalist's 200th birthday on 12 February.On display is the publisher's original "file copy" of On the Origin of Species, one of 1,250 copies in the first print run, which earned Darwin £180. This copy, which would now probably fetch something north of £100,000 at auction, is now part of a collection held by the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. The collection includes other treasures such as Darwin's submission letter to Murray and the entry for the Origin in Murray's financial ledger.Across the room is a collection of six live fancy pigeons – the same varieties that Darwin used as examples in the first chapter of his book to demonstrate the power of selection by human hand. "This is a world first," said Randal Keynes, one of Darwin's great great grandsons, who explains that this is the first time that the six varieties have been brought together since the publication. "If you gave them to an expert ornithologist he would say that they are not only different species but also different genera."And he's right. The tall, proud English pouter with its puffed-out chest looks nothing like the dainty Almond Tumber, while the scandaroon's massive beak and upright posture could hardly be more different from the fantail with its splayed plumage.These varieties would have been very familiar to people in the 19th century, but it was Darwin's genius to point out that they were all closely related to the rock dove (essentially the same as the pigeons in Trafalgar Square) and had all been created in a few generations by breeders selecting the characteristics they liked. His message: if people can do this, what could nature achieve with plenty of time on her hands?The most valuable thing in the room, at over £200,000, is a single leaf of Darwin's original manuscript owned by Keynes's father (pictured at the top of this article). The text reads:"Finally then, the facts too briefly given in this chapter, do not seem to me opposed, but rather to support the view that there is no fundamental difference between species and varieties."Darwin did not value the manuscript and gave it to his children to use as writing paper. It ended up forgotten in a cupboard at Down House, where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, but some of the leaves survive today. Thank goodness they did not end up in the fireplace.Charles DarwinEvolutionBiologyPeople in scienceJames Randersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'ClimateGate' What does the "ClimateGate" affair mean for science? news.bbc.co.uk |
Computers offer a faster way to cure humanity's ills Scientific research and medical breakthroughs increasingly depend on huge computer powerHOW DO YOU predict whether a given patient is likely to die from a heart attack? Conventional medical wisdom would base a risk assessment on factors such as the person's age, whether they were smokers and/or diabetic plus the results of cardiac ultrasound and various blood tests. It may be that a better predictor is a computer program that analyses the patient's electrocardiogram looking for subtle features within the data provided by the instrument.A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan analysed a large data-set of 24-hour electrocardiogram recordings collected at a Boston hospital as part of a clinical trial for a new drug. Employing a number of computational techniques involving algorithms for signal processing, data mining and machine learning, the researchers developed a way to analyse how the shape of the electrical waveform varies, a measure they dubbed morphological variability. At the heart of the approach are mathematical techniques used in speech recognition and genome analysis which allow researchers to compare individual beats. "We compute the differences for every pair of beats," reported one of the researchers. "If there is lots of variability, that patient is in bad shape."The team then applied their algorithm to a second set of electrocardiogram recordings and found that patients with the highest morphological variability were six to eight times more likely to die from a heart attack than those with low variability. They concluded that it consistently predicted as well or better than the indicators commonly used by physicians.In the same week, researchers at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge revealed that they had reconstructed the biological history of two types of cancer in a piece of research that, according to the Guardian report, "promises to transform medical treatment of the disease". The research exposed every genetic mutation the patients have acquired over their lifetimes, including the ones that eventually caused healthy cells in their bodies to turn into tumours.One of the diseases studied was lung cancer. The research revealed 23,000 mutations that were exclusive to the diseased cells. Almost all were caused by the 60 or so chemicals in cigarette smoke that stick to DNA and deform it. "We can say that one mutation is fixed in the genome for every 15 cigarettes smoked," said Peter Campbell, the scientist who led the lung cancer part of the study. "That is frightening because many people smoke a packet of 20 a day."Although these stories are reports about medical research, they are really about computing – in the sense that neither would have been possible without the application of serious computer power to masses of data. In that way they reflect a new – but so far unacknowledged – reality; that in many important fields leading-edge scientific research cannot be done without access to vast computational and data-handling facilities, with sophisticated software for analysing huge data-sets.In many significant areas, advanced research is no longer done by individuals looking through microscopes or telescopes, but by computers enabling investigators to collate, visualise and analyse the torrents of data produced by arrays of instruments such as the Australian Square Kilometre radio Telescope or the Large Hadron Collider.The man who did most to alert the world to the urgent need to take "computational science" seriously was Jim Gray, a much-loved visionary who worked for Microsoft Research. Towards the end of his life, Gray argued that we had moved into what he called "the Fourth Paradigm" of scientific research, which he dubbed "data-intensive scientific discovery". In 2007 he went sailing off the Californian coast – and simply disappeared. Neither he nor his boat was ever found, despite an intensive conventional search butressed by a huge online effort by volunteers who scanned satellite images of the maritime area where the boat was estimated to be.Last week, in a touching tribute to a lost colleague, Microsoft Research published a handsome book of essays in his memory. It's entitled The Fourth Paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery and is available as a free download. In it are 30 thoughtful essays on four areas which were central to Jim Gray's vision – environment, health, scientific infrastructure and scholarly communication. This book should be required reading for every policymaker responsible for science and technology to remind them that we now have to provide the resources to fund the IT infrastructure. If we don't give them these tools, then we cannot expect them to finish the job.Medical researchCancerGovernment BorrowingMicrosoftHeart attackJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
International Space Station crew takes spacewalk MOSCOW (AP) -- Two Russian cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk on Thursday intended to activate a new segment on the International Space Station so it can dock Russian spacecraft.... hosted.ap.org |
UN: Himalayan glaciers warning not backed up GENEVA (AP) -- A U.N. warning that Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than any other place in the world and may be gone by 2035 was not backed up by science, U.N. climate experts said Wednesday - an admission that could energize climate change critics.... hosted.ap.org |