Some Links

The Mystery Being Anaesthesia - Great article exploring the use and research of anaesthesia and frankly, how we know diddly squat about how it works.

Images of near-infra-red elephants - Not all elephants keep cool in the same way.

Republicans switch science for votes - Nature comments on the changeable nature of the GOP candidates views on science issues.

Neutrons escape our Universe? - Maybe and maybe we can measure it. Mind-boggling stuff.

Science for all - New Statesman discusses how science is not limited to the followers of one belief or none.

Pope sets up science foundation - Nice and well intentioned, but surely it would be better to just have your organisation embrace science in better ways wholesale rather than compartmentalising it off into a single unit amongst many?

Graphene can distil alcohol - or 'booze' as the BBC helpfully dumb it down as.

Non-existent weather forecasters? - Ahh, the British media and the weather. You've got to love them.

Revised Scottish Ballot Paper?

I was sent this by a friend. I have to say it is considerably less leading than the actual proposed ballot paper in the Scottish government's consultation paper. :o)

Scottish Referendum and Science

Well, today's the day that Alex Salmond and his SNP party finally start to make their official push to win the approval of Scottish voters for an independent Scotland.

All the indicators are that they face an uphill battle as opinion polls continue to show steep resistance to the idea. Just as well then that the SNP have given themselves almost three years to win over the crowd and present their arguments as to why independence for Scotland from the larger Union that is the United Kingdom would be a good thing for Scotland.

Rather telling though that Alex Salmond spent last night in London trying to persuade residents of the rest of the UK (note - that doesn't just mean England but Wales and Northern Ireland as well) that we will all be better off if Scotland goes independent (I guess the UK would be as the Scottish would be bailing their own banks out again in future...). We still have little firm detail on big issues such as the future of Scottish currency, defence and political engagement with both the remaining UK countries or the wider global community.

Unsurprising perhaps at this stage, but the SNP have been preparing for this for many years and now have to deliver answers rather than simply try to come to blows with the UK government whenever they don't get their own way.

Two consultations have recently been launched, one by the UK government and one (today) by the Scottish government. Both are simply about the mechanics of the referendum and make for some interesting reading with some clear divides between the two and the Scottish (primarily an SNP document) consultation launched today and the media coverage of the last few weeks only continues to highlight those differences.

That's nice, but one way or the other the referendum is happening so in the public sphere it is probably time to move the debate on to the merits (or not) of an independent Scotland but also the consequences for Scotland if it breaks away from the Union. Two issues there.

As an English-born scientist who has been working and resident in Scotland for six or seven years now I will apparently be getting a vote on this (provided I am still in Scotland at the time), so what happens matters to me personally and I really like being in this country and its people.

What happens to Scotland's science base is also of interest to me as currently it punches well above its weight (as does the UK as a whole, but Scotland proportionately higher) both in terms of publication output (one good way of measuring academic productivity) and also in terms of its share of research funding (important as this is what pays the bills other than by charging students which the Scottish government doesn't want to do very much of).

So, two questions:

1. If Scotland becomes independent what happens to its researchers given that a substantial proportion (a clear majority even) are not 'Scottish'? Many of us are either from other parts of the UK or Europe or completely international. What happens to us? I don't want to become Scottish as I regard myself as British and would want to keep that citizenship in preference to being Scottish. Technically then I would become a European/international/foreign/etc worker in that case. Will I (and my colleagues) require work permits? Visas? What happens during the period of transition? If the referendum happens in 2014 as the SNP hope I will be halfway through my first post-doc. If that is happening in Scotland will I be kicked out? And what if my funders decide my funding is strictly meant to be used at UK (i.e. no longer Scottish) institutions? I should imagine this might be splitting hairs in the short term but in the medium to long term how will Scotland support foreign researchers and the ease of movement that UK researchers currently enjoy and that research thrives in?
   
2. If Scotland becomes independent how does the Scottish government intend to make up the shortfall caused by decreased research revenue that would follow from no longer having access to the UK's Research Councils? Will Scotland simply divert the equivalent amount of money from its own budget based on population or instead maintain it at the previous proportion of Council funding? If the latter where will it obtain the extra funding from? Especially in the light that it will not be charging its undergraduate students any substantial amount of fees? Can an independent Scotland afford to do this?

These may seem like minor quibbles in the grand scheme but considering a lot of the hot air about how great an independent Scotland can be has now shifted to its intellectual and academic assets it is perhaps not such an irrelevant issue after all. Hopefully there will be some sort of forum to put these questions to those who can provide some answers to them.

Currently I doubt that is the SNP.

Gosh. A post on politics.

Science Satisfaction

Science is fun. And great. And makes me smile.

Three things have reminded me of that in the last week:

1. Submitting my first first author paper to a journal,
2. Being shown some amazing and completely unexpected results at a friends lab that I was visiting last week,
   
3. Some theory I'd been working on here and there for the last few months matching perfectly (after a quick, roughish analysis anyway) this mornings experimental results.

Nice.

Some Recent Links

Kepler Discovers A Tiny Solar System - A wee star with tiny planets around it.

Re-thinking an Alien World - Thinking about the rather extreme conditions on one of the other worlds found by Kepler. Hot temperatures? Rocks oozing supercritical fluids? And a year that is less than our day?? Nothing like that in our neighbourhood!

Is Nanotechnology Going To Send Us All To Hell? - From the Guardian, thoughts on the acceptance or not of transhumanism and confusions of what it involves by the religious.

Test tube Yeast Evolve Multicellularity - Scientific American reports on a set of experiments showing that the 'leap' from single celled organisms to multicelled ones may not have been such a big step as previous thought.

Controversial Cyborg Rat Tests Target Brain Treatments - The BBC reports on progress in experiments designed to replace defective neuroarchitecture in brains with microchips. Labelled 'controversial' apparently to create some form of 'balance' in the article because groups completely opposed to all animal experiments on principal are upset by it.

Herschel Telescope Revisits Cosmic Classic - The famous Eagle Nebula (of Hubble Space Telescope fame) now viewed in the infra-red by the Herschel Space Observatory and in x-rays by the XMM-Newton telescope.

And to end with mind your head if catching the train in Indonesia...

Death Penalty Poll

Polls are polls and probably should all be taken with a pinch of salt as so much depends on the exact wording of the questions but the Pew Research Center has just published some results from a wide survey of attitudes to the death penalty in America.

The death penalty for those convicted of murder is still favoured by two thirds of the population and not by one third. Thankfully from the look of it this support is seeing a(nother) decline in recent years.

Other than such outrageously high support for capital punishment in a country that often professes to be Christian (and indeed is perceived in this way by much of the world), what I find equally disturbing is the stark contrasts when support is broken down into sub-groups.

So in terms of 'race' 68% of whites support it contrasted with Hispanics at 52% and 42% for blacks. In terms of voting Republicans are at 73-84% in support of it depending on how 'liberal' they are (either way it is far above the national average) and Democrats are (mercifully) at 37%-55%.

But what I find most terrible is that amongst white protestants support is at 73-77%!! This is outrageous frankly. For a group of people who proclaim (often viciously) that they follow a man who preached forgiveness for one's enemies, grace as the solution to human sin (whether you want to cast it in terms of Original Sin or a human tendency towards selfishness etc) and love for all including the despised and criminal... well, I don't know what is going on there.

I'm not wanting to cast any stones here but to me those figures suggest that something has clearly gone very, very wrong with those followers of Christ and their understanding of his life and message.

Zebrafish Brain

I'll hopefully be scanning some of these little blighters at the end of next month. Here is a fantastic video of a zebrafish brain developing over the first three days of life.

More information and courtesy of the hard work of the European Molecular Laboratory.

Zebrafish are an exciting new avenue that medical research is now pursuing... if you feel inclined you could donate to those nice folks at the British Heart Foundation to help fund such research. Although none of my own at the moment I point out so I'm not trying to get you to pay for my work or anything.