Jacko's Simpsons appearance

I've been wondering since I saw the episode with the "big white guy who thinks he's the small black guy" whether this was really Michael Jackson doing the voiceover. Am glad to hear that it really was him:

Jackson's Simpsons episode to re-air as tribute

after all, who better to parody MJ than the man himself ?

cheerleader or watchdog?

Last week's cover of Nature confronts me with an uncomfortable choice: are science reporters cheerleaders or watchdogs? Well I don't like either of the metaphors, I would be more likely to describe my activity as that of building bridges, translating, communicating, interpreting ... Although there are occasions when I feel that certain parts of science are grotesquely underappreciated so I get out my pompoms and do a bit of cheerleading. More rarely, there are also occasions when I feel that scientists are going against the best interests of society, and I bare my teeth and let out some growling watchdog-like noises. But on the whole I am too busy building bridges across the Two-Cultures-Canyon to be bothered with either the cheering or the barking.

The reports and comments in Nature add to my increasing awareness -- which I talked about at the recent Copenhagen meeting and in my lectures in Germany -- that science reporting is changing quite drastically and rapidly, and we really need to think about how to ensure that the result we want to achieve, i.e. a reasonable level of public understanding of science, and public appreciation of the role science plays in our lives, doesn't fall overboard.

PS What I really don't understand is why the three cartoon characters on the cover had to be all male. Obviously they wanted to avoid the clichee of a female cheerleader, but a female watchdog would have looked really nice next to the male cheerleader ...

Schrödinger's Jacko

I had a very weird media experience on my way back from Germany. Having been cut off from electronic media since Thu afternoon, I arrived at Paris Fri morning and looked through the newspapers, both French and international ones. Only one of them (it may have been Le Figaro) had Michael Jackson's death on the front page.

I thought that was really weird -- surely, if he had died he would be on all the front pages, and it would be very difficult for one paper to get the story exclusively? Might they have been caught out by a hoax?

Unable to resolve this in situ, I took the Eurostar to London with a kind of Schrödinger's Jacko thought on my mind, wondering how he could be dead and alive at the same time. By the time I arrived at London, though, all the British papers whose early, Jacko-alive editions I had seen in Paris had changed their front pages, and he was all over the place. On the Guardian front page, poor old Farah Fawcett had to be dropped to make space for him.

So if future generations start asking where were you when you heard ... I'll have a more interesting story than on similar occasions (there are at least two catastrophic events which I heard about while sitting on the toilet, having walked past the radio and switched it on for the morning news!).

Anyhow. I can live with or without him and don't have strong feelings about his music one way or the other.

More importantly, I'm very excited that the first single from Shakira's new album is now online at her Myspace site. It's called "loba" (as in female wolf) and features her howling like a wolf :) Check it out.

spinning around

What's the connection between bird migration, hydrogen storage materials, membrane protein structure, and quantum computation? Well, all these, and seven other topics are investigated at Oxford University with the help of Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) spectroscopy, thanks to the new(ish) interdisciplinary research centre CAESR. Read my feature in Oxford Today which should be freely accessible to all.

Also, a short piece on the bird migration research has appeared in German, in Chemie in unserer Zeit [PDF]

catching up

A round-up of pieces that appeared while I was travelling (and giving lectures) in Germany:

Fence protection progress Current Biology 19, No. 12, page R465 abstract and restricted access to pdf file
This one is about the electric fence protecting the Aberdare Reserve in Kenya -- originally built for rhinos and elephants, but now mainly protecting woods and mitigating the effects of climate change.

Spinout stories Chemistry & Industry No. 12, 22.6., page 29.
Review of the book Spin outs, by Graham Richards. A snippet:

In this little book, part memoir, part advice to future academic spin-out founders, he very briefly sketches his involvement with Oxford Molecular and with Oxford’s wider technology transfer activities, along with the briefest of mentions of related activities in the UK, such as the British Technology Group, later BTG.

Chemistry & Industry No. 12, 22.6., page 31
Review of the book Origin of life, by Piet Herdewijn and M. Volkan Kisakürek.
Snippet:

Maybe the most original and influential thinker on the origin of life over the last couple of decades is Günter Wächtershäuser, a patent attorney who came to the field as a hobby researcher drawing up new theories in his spare time. His chapter in the book is definitely worth reading, even if it leaves the reader with the frustrating thought that if Wächtershäuser can’t crack the conundrum, nobody can.

leipzig

All going well, I should be in Leipzig by the time this post goes online (oh the magic of electronic time-travel!), where I'm speaking at the GDCh colloquium about my experience as a chemist turned science writer. Maybe also about what I learned from the Copenhagen meeting.

sitting on the fence

If this is Tuesday, I'm in Jena today, speaking at the GDCh colloquium.

Today's issue of Current Biology (Volume 19, Issue 12) should contain my piece on the fence around Aberdare Reserve in Kenya, which is being completed this year and has been praised for reducing human-wildlife conflict and protecting not just rhinos and elephants, but also important water resources.

a mathematician's tree

If mathematicians were to design trees, the result would probably look a bit like this sculpture:



which sits in the parks of Magdalen college, Oxford, and which I snapped from the River Cherwell on one of our canoe trips.

abrazos rotos

In theory, the UK premiere of the latest movie by Pedro Almodovar, abrazos rotos, at Somerset House, July 30th, should be open to the public, but I have been unable to buy tickets. Not sure whether that's just Ticketmaster being horrible again, or whether there were only a small number of tickets which actually sold out in a couple of days.

I may have to catch it in our local picturehouse cinema after all. Can't wait ...

MySpace -- rise and fall

It's a cruel world, where yesterday's shooting stars are already today's ashes ... There was an interesting piece on the reversal of fortunes of MySpace and Bebo in last week's technology Guardian. I guess it's just the fashion. MySpace is soooo 2006, and I reckon Facebook and Twitter will go the same way once we're into a new decade and something new has come up to push them from their pedestal.

Personally, I would have happily stuck with the 2006 model (i.e. MySpace) which still is the best for music and for meeting people who I would not have encountered otherwise. And I am relieved to find that the friends-drain I have experienced in MySpace isn't due to something I said ...

miscellaneous news

re-emerging from a phase where all my newspaper reading time was absorbed by trying to understand each day how the UK government survived the previous 24 hours, I'm rediscovering there is a world out there, though it hasn't changed all that much:

* the Miami 5 are still in jail

* Roman Abramovich is still obscenely rich, even with the financial crisis and all that. Btw, I completely missed that part of recent history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when all those billions were handed out to those people we now call "Russian Oligarchs". Does anybody understand why and how that happened ?

* oh, and the heir to the throne is still making life hell for architects

very depressing all that. Maybe the recent political crisis with its duck houses and failed coup attempts was more entertaining after all.

legislating life sciences

It is always intriguing to compare and contrast how legislation and public debates on bioethics subjects like stem cells, cloning, etc. differ between countries, even between those that share similar outlooks on other policy issues. On the occasion of the ongoing revision of the groundbreaking Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) in the UK, I've had a look at the state of play in the UK, US, Germany, and Brazil:

Embryonic developments
Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 11, R427-R428, 9 June 2009
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.05.036

abstract and restricted access to pdf file

PS I was about to use the phrase "debates on ethically sensitive issues" but then realised there are lots of things happening which I find unethical but which don't stir much debate in the Western world. Strange that.