ant orientation

In a feature that was a bit off the beaten track for me, I've covered the orientation of desert ants, which can make use of a wide range of tools from step counter to vibration sensing. One of the interesting questions in the field is how the ants compute the information coming from their various navigation tools and how they eventually decide where to go.

My feature is out in Current Biology today:

How ants find their way
Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 16, R615-R618, 21 August 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.08.004

Read the story in HTML and PDF format.

(free access)

Photo: Kathrin Steck.

¡no pasarán!

Loving this week's SPIEGEL cover showing Pussy Riot member Nadyezhda Tolokonnikova sporting a ¡No pasarán! T-shirt.

Der Spiegel, issue 33/2012

That brings back so many memories of Nicaragua solidarity events and all that :)

Those who "will not get through" according to the use of the slogan at the time, were of course the Contra - right-wing insurgents (as we like to say today) enthusiastically supported by that nice Mr Reagan. Earlier uses of the phrase include Spanish Civil War, says Wikipedia.

DNA origami

My essay review of the book

Materials Science of DNA

Jung-Il Jin and James Grote, eds., CRC Press 2012, ISBN 978-1439827413

appears in the August issue of Chemistry & Industry on page 51. It is premium content, but here's a little snippet:

All in all the book is accessible enough to serve a broad interdisciplinary field, so it can equally be recommended to biologists who want to branch out into nanotechnology and to materials scientists and nanotechnologists who consider adding DNA to their repertoire of nanoscale building materials. Even for those a bit further remote from it, this area is definitely one to watch.

amazon.co.uk

PS: If you're reading the magazine and have tried to figure out the connection between the picture and the review - there isn't one. Due an error, a completely unrelated (but nice) picture was printed with the review.

life is a mad circus

Review of (or, rather, a first attempt at figuring out):

Balada triste de trompeta (The last circus), Spain 2010, Alex de la Iglesia

based on DVD imported from France, as film was not released in UK.

I love Alex de la Iglesia’s knack for absurdity, and I don’t normally mind his over-the-top violence too much, as it is clearly described as absurd, so it’s just actors messing about with ketchup, as far as I’m concerned. So I do make an effort to get to see his films, even if it's sometimes tricky around here.

I suppose this one is about trauma handed down from the generation of the Spanish civil war to the next one, along with cultural traditions and the jobs of circus performers. Very normal in one way, but also completely pointless once you start to question it. As in the previous films I saw, there were lots of absurd details I liked in this film too, but I was somehow missing a positive element to balance it out. As the only female protagonist is variously beaten by one clown and kidnapped by another (just like in real life, come to think of it), I was missing a positive character, like the prostitute in 800 balas. The only relief we're getting here is the realisation that our real lives aren't quite as mad as the mad circus shown here.

Still no reason to censor it, as de la Iglesia clearly has meaningful things to say, even if he expresses them in unusual ways. For instance, the satirical depiction of Franco and his people will have been more meaningful for the domestic (and older) audience than for a foreign observer of post-Franco Spain like me. I'm looking forward to seeing what he will (one day) make of the absurdities of the current economic disaster that has befallen Spain.

I was intrigued to see the film uses a Spanish version of Je l’aime à mourir, by Francis Cabrel – wondering whether that’s what inspired Shakira to use it in the concert for the Live from Paris DVD. The film was released in Spain on December 17th, 2010, and the song showed up in the Paris concerts of June 13th and 14th 2011. You do the maths.

cover of the French DVD, which I ordered from amazon.fr. It doesn't have English subtitles though. There is a US edition available as region 1 DVD, under the title "The Last Circus"

both of us

I loved B.O.B.'s airplanes (with Hayley Williams) at the time, but that could have been a one-off. Now he's done it again, with Taylor Swift:

Oh, and price tag, with Jessie J, was good too. So, conclusion (and memo to Shakira) B.O.B. is the man to duet with ... seems a much nicer guy than that pitbull person.

mysteries of diatoms

I have covered the research relating to the silica shells of diatoms - their morphogenesis and use in bio-nanotechnology - for many years, but have now for the first time taken a look at the wider context of diatom biology and its links to climate change and other earth systems. The resulting epic feature article is out in today's issue of Current Biology:

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 15, R581-R585, 7 August 2012 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.07.041

HTML text Free access to PDF file (NB: my features remain on free access only until the next issue appears, i.e. normally 2 weeks, sometimes 3, and they return to free access a year after publication)

photo: Wikipedia

chocolat in lebanon

film review:

Where do we go now? (Et maintenant on va ou?)

I am getting increasingly paranoid about films that I would like to see but which aren’t shown in cinemas around here. So when I found out that Nadine Labaki, whose first film Caramel (2007) I had enjoyed very much when it came out, had a new film out, but it wasn’t showing up at our local independent cinema, I poked them via twitter and was told they’d show it “off-date.” Which they really did, a few weeks later, in a grand total of four showings. So having stuck my neck out, I really had to go and see it, and make some appreciative noises about it.

It’s received very little attention around here and I read a lukewarm review from Germany, but I really liked the film. The very obvious formula is, of course, to concoct fairy-tale solutions to real-world problems. A bit like in Chocolat, just that it’s set in Lebanon, and comically remote villages in Lebanon have a different set of problems from comically remote villages in France profonde. For instance, instead of one religion we have two. And instead of river pirates (or whatever Johnny Depp was playing in that film) we have Ukrainian burlesque dancers (though they are already part of the solution, not of the problem).

Anyhow, the peace of the village is severely threatened, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the crafty women of the village manage to save it, though their tricks and twists weren’t quite as predictable as you may think. The film has gorgeous images (some might say too beautiful, but it works for me), including some landscapes at dusk that really need a big screen to work. Altogether it’s a feelgood fairytale that isn’t going to solve the problems of the Middle East, but who or what is going to solve them?

PS Mark Kermode's review in the Observer is quite enthusiastic as well, though very short. I'm wondering if the fact that the dialogue is in Arabic makes a difference compared to European movies, in terms of explaining the poor showing and uptake (I was in an audience of 3). It would be surprising as most people here would have to read the subtitles even for the French and Spanish movies as well, but maybe these languages have a viable support group of speakers and fans here, while Arabic hasn't?

losing our ice caps

I've recently read "The goldilocks planet" for review (watch this space) and learned to appreciate the variability of Earth's climate on geological time scales. 3 million years ago (just a moment, for a geologist), we didn't have a permanent ice cap on the Arctic, and just over 30 million years ago, we didn't have one on the Antarctic either.

The way the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are developing right now suggests that we may be heading back to those warmer days, and man-made climate change is happening faster than any previous geological climate change.

How are ecosystems in the Arctic and Antarctic responding to the loss of polar ice that is happening already? And which of their responses may lead to dangerous positive feedback loops? I've looked into these problems for my latest feature which is out in Current Biology today:

Life changes as polar regions thaw

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 14, R547-R550, 24 July 2012 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.07.009

Read the story in HTML and PDF format.

Actress Lucy Lawless (Xena the warrior princess) took part in the Greenpeace campaign "Save the Arctic" (see this lovely interview in the Guardian. Maybe the scariest feedback loop of them all: that the disappearance of the Arctic ice will give us access to more fossil fuels to burn ...

PS More ice-melting news

Astrobiologie für Einsteiger

I’ve been quite busy over the last 12 months partly due to having two books to prepare in parallel, both to be published in German later this year. One is a collection of new(ish) nanoworld pieces, called Von Geckos, Garn und Goldwasser: Die Nanowelt lässt grüßen, due out in September.

The second, of which I’ve just finished processing the page proofs, is a German translation of Astrobiology: a brief introduction (based on the 2nd English edition which came out last year). This should be out in December, and you can already pre-order it on amazon.de and amazon.co.uk. And it will look like this:

And I just had a brilliant idea for a new project, so I’m off to write a new proposal …

PS: Astrobiologie für Einsteiger is one of the first two titles in a new series of short textbooks. The other one is: Chemie für Einsteiger und Durchsteiger by Thomas Wurm, out on the same day.

Turkey's biodiversity

My feature on biodiversity in Turkey came out last week while I was away:

Turkey's biodiversity at the crossroads

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 13, R503-R505, 10 July 2012 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.051

Read the story in HTML and PDF format. (NB: my features remain on free access only until the next issue appears, i.e. normally 2 weeks, sometimes 3, and they return to free access a year after publication)

Note that the captions of the second and the third region contain an error - the area where the photos were taken is called the Kars region (not Kagas). The region is correctly identified in the main text.

Map from Wikipedia - love this map a lot, as it shows immediately the reasons why Turkey has such interesting biodiversity ...

curiosity cover

Ahead of the arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory aka Curiosity on Mars (scheduled for Aug 6th), I have prepared a feature summarising what kind of things the new rover will investigate there. The article is in the July issue of Chemistry & Industry and it even made the cover:

Full text (HTML) - free access

PS the same issue also contains my review of the book
Advanced Oil Crop Biorefineries (RSC Green Chemistry)
that one is premium content, but I have a PDF file ...

ecce torpet probitas

by sheer coincidence I recently stumbled upon a song from the Carmina Burana which seems to sum up this week’s scandalous events quite nicely – it’s all about how honesty lies in a coma (the title), greed rules the world, people bend the rules to get rich quick, etc. Isn’t it amazing how prescient people were in the 12th century? Or alternatively, have we fallen back to the dark ages?

Latin text below the video, Latin text with English translation here (song no. 4, on page 5).

1.
Ecce torpet probitas,
virtus sepelitur;
fit iam parca largitas,
parcitas largitur;
verum dicit falsitas,
veritas mentitur.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad res illicitas
licite recedunt.

2.
Regnat avaritia,
regnant et avari;
mente quivis anxia
nititur ditari,
cum sit summa gloria
censu gloriari.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad prava quelibet
impie recedunt.

3.
Multum habet oneris
do das dedi dare;
verbum hoc pre ceteris
norunt ignorare
divites, quos poteris
mari comparare.
Omnes iura ledunt
et in rerum numeris
numeros excedunt

4.
Cunctis est equaliter
insita cupido;
perit fides turpiter,
nullus fidus fido,
nec Iunoni Iupiter
nec Enee Dido.
Omnes iura ledunt
et ad mala devia
licite recedunt.

5.
Si recte discernere
velis, non est vita,
quod sic vivit temere
gens hec imperita;
non est enim vivere,
si quis vivit ita.
Omnes iura ledunt
et fidem in opere
quolibet excedunt.