rio plus 20

In two weeks time, Rio de Janeiro will host another "Earth Summit" commemorating the 20th anniversary of the original one, where many of the environmental problems which we're still worried about were on the agenda. Mainly, the original Earth Summit led to a whole flood of further meetings and multilateral agreements, but there has been only very limited success in terms of making our use of natural resources more sustainable.

Rio+20 is a good point to take stock and check what has and what hasn't worked, and how to design and implement measures that will work and save our planet from our own activities.

I've written a feature about all this, which is out today in Current Biology and freely accessible to all (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) ).

Will Rio+20 find a way to more sustainable development?
Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 11, R425-R428, 5 June 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.028

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Photo: Denise Mayumi via Wikipedia

PS come to think of it, isn't it scary how all those celebrations from jubilee beacons to the olympic torch tend to take the shape of pointlessly combusting additional fossil fuels on top of the already unsustainable level that we're burning for energy and transport?

the dream of the celt

review of

The Dream of the Celt
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Faber and Faber (7 Jun 2012)
ISBN-10: 0571275710
ISBN-13: 978-0571275717

This fictionalised biography of Roger Casement should be one story, as it is the story of one man’s life, but strangely it feels like two stories glued together that don’t really fit. First there is the story of the man who successfully exposed the cruelty of colonialism in the Congo and in Peru in the late 19th and early 20th century. Especially in the latter episode, where the sheer greed of the (London-based) rubber company fuels a culture of violence and torture against the indigenous workers who harvest the caoutchouc, the theme of corporate responsibility chimes very nicely with today’s concerns, and Casement emerges as an undisputed hero. As a dramatic historical development with interesting characters, exotic locations and clear relevance for today’s world, this would have made a very nice book on its own, either as a factual or as a fictionalised work.

The other story is Casement’s role in the much messier business of Ireland’s struggle for independence, culminating in the Easter uprising of 1916. Here he joins the more radical camp of those who don’t believe in the promise of autonomy and go for full independence, even if it takes armed conflict to achieve it. Even more controversially, at the beginning of World War I, he tries to forge an alliance with Germany. In the end, however, he wavers and wants to call off the uprising, while a shipload of weapons from Germany is already on its way and cannot be contacted. Under circumstances that are still debated, the arms delivery finds no recipients at the arranged rendez-vous, Casement gets arrested, and the uprising fails. He is sentenced to death, and his appeal is quashed amid the revelation of homosexual adventures detailed in his “black diaries.”

Vargas Llosa tells the whole life story in long flashbacks remembered by Casement in his final days in Pentonville prison. On the highly controversial issue of the diaries, he assumes that they are genuinely Casement’s writing, but that some of the events recorded are imaginative extrapolations of more innocuous beginnings, rather than precise records of a steamy (and at that time illegal) love life.

I mainly read the book because of the Irish part of the story (as a cousin of my great-grandfather was second officer on the Aud (Libau), which successfully broke the sea blockade but failed to find a recipient for those weapons), but found that part of the book less engaging than the Congo and Peru story. I wasn’t getting much of a sense of place of Ireland, or a sense of why Casement became so obsessively nationalistic. I understand why Vargas Llosas, coming from Peru, wants to tie in the Irish story along with the history that is closer to home for him, but maybe – memo for anyone who wants to make a film out of this – I might have focused on the colonial locations a bit more, covering only as much of the Irish tragedy as is necessary to explain his fall from grace and ultimate execution.

amazon.co.uk

PS The original (El sueño del Celta) came out in November 2010, I can't think why it took the UK publishers more than 18 months to bring out a translation???

roundup of German pieces

My articles published in German this month include one about protein structure prediction, one about flu viruses, and a tongue-in-cheek appreciation of kitchen experiments.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft Nr 6, S. 18-20
Proteinstrukturen vorhersagen – dank Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen

Die dreidimensionale Struktur eines Proteins ist durch die Abfolge der einzelnen Aminosäuren eindeutig festgelegt. Trotzdem fällt es Forschern immer noch schwer, sie zu berechnen. Vergleiche zwischen verwandten Eiweißstoffen können helfen.
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Nachrichten aus der Chemie Bd. 60, Nr 6, S. 632
Experimentierkunst in der Küche

Nachrichten aus der Chemie Bd. 60, Nr 6, S. 654-655
Globale Grippegefahr

PS: nearly forgot:

Chemie in unserer Zeit 46, 134
Alzheimer-Demenz: Amyloid-Plaques - wie sie entstehen und wie man sie wieder los wird

social jetlag

From a paper in the latest issue of Current Biology, I learned that the habit of many people to switch their sleeping hours between a later weekend time and an earlier work / school time is now referred to as social jetlag in the chronobiological literature. The latest research links this seemingly innocuous behaviour pattern to obesity.

The more extreme variant, the lifestyle of shift workers, has been studied in some detail before, and it is well known that it has serious health implications, as our metabolism works according to our inbuilt circadian rhythm, not by our alarm clock and work schedule. I believe that the investigations have led to some improvements and people who want to soften the blow can treat their jet lag with the clock hormone melatonin, but I’m not sure how widely the problem is appreciated among people working variable shifts and among their employers.

The more widespread version of just having your sleep two or three hours later on weekends than on weekdays (equivalent to a return trip across several timezones each weekend) hasn’t been appreciated as a health risk so far, but the authors of the new study describe it as “chronic social jetlag” and show that there is a statistically significant link with obesity, at least for some who are sensitive to weight gain.

Intriguingly, those in the normal range of body mass index (BMI), there was no significant correlation between the number of hours of social jetlag (up to 5 hours – that must be stressful!). For those in the overweight to obese range however, the BMI appears to correlate positively with social jetlag above 1h.

There are some very obvious measures that could reduce this problem instantaneously, for instance, adapting school hours to the (typically late) chronotype of teenagers, but will anybody pay attention? I doubt it. Personally I’m in the clear – my weekend timeshift is typically less than half an hour, and I’m not overweight anyway.

Reference:

Till Roennebergsend, Karla V. Allebrandt, Martha Merrow, Céline Vetter: Social jetlag and obesity

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 10, 939-943, 10 May 2012 10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.038

abstract, video abstract

amyloid and Alzheimer's disease

Back in the late 90s, I was working with some model peptides which I had designed for use in studies of nascent protein folding, but they kept aggregating. Chris Dobson suggested to check whether the aggregates had the hallmark featres of amyloid, and indeed they had, so I slipped into the study of amyloid, which is the kind of tangled protein aggregate one finds in Alzheimer's disease, BSE, and Parkinson's. Quite a few others did at the time, as many proteins and peptides had the ability to form these structures, even if their native states had no disease association whatsoever.

I haven't done much about amyloid since publishing my last research papers, but recently spotted a few papers that looked promising both for the understanding of amyloid formation and for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, so I wrote a feature about these things, which is out in Current Biology today.

Understanding amyloid and Alzheimer's disease

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 10, R381-R384, 22 May 2012

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.006

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(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)

Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915)

(Wikipedia)

Beethoven duo

one of our current chamber music projects is the Duet no. 1 by Beethoven (originally written for clarinet and bassoon). Maybe if I practice hard for a year I can learn to play it at half the speed. Anyhow here is what the first movement should sound like

young cellist’s got talent

I managed to catch the final of the BBC competition Young Musician of the Year on Sunday and was completely blown away by cellist Laura van der Heijden’s rendition of the cello concerto by William Walton. OK, I’ll admit my ignorance and confess that I hadn’t known this concerto before. I realised very quickly that I had missed out on something rather spectacular. Laura duly won the competition – I have no idea how they make comparisons between musicians from completely different instrument groups, but I reckon her choice of an underappreciated but utterly wonderful concerto may have helped, as the other two finalists had chosen more middle of the road composers.

Anyhow, come Monday morning I fired up the computer and internet hoping to find a few more knowledgeable people spreading some insight and enthusiasm about this event and found … nothing. On the BBC website, a search for the name of the young cellist yielded some links to a footballer with a similar name. Searching for the name of the competition yielded the page where you can watch it on the i-player, but not even a statement of the result of the final. At least the Wikipedia page of the cellist had been updated but that may have been done by a family member.

One blogger discussed the event and also bemoaned the lack of impact. Apparently, not a single newspaper in the UK covered the final. Never mind the fact that she won a competition which only happens every other year and may well set her on a course as a successful recording and performing soloist, of which there aren’t all that many (it certainly didn’t harm fellow cellist Natalie Clein to win the competition in 1994), I would have thought that the way that Laura played that concerto at age 15 and a few weeks should have been worth reporting.

At 12:28 the BBC website got out of bed and bothered reporting the event that the corporation itself had broadcast from 6 to 8pm the day before. It was duly tweeted as “breaking news” on the BBC’s breaking news twitter feed. Only 16 hours late.

I hear that on the same weekend, a somebody with their dancing dog won Britain’s Got Talent. I reckon that the result of this competition was reported in every single newspaper, and many of them will have put it on the front page. Not to mention that the prize money at BGT is several orders of magnitude higher than at young musician of the year. And where is the recording contract for Laura (in analogy to the usual arrangements on X factor and similar competitions)? I would buy the CD of the Walton concerto immediately.

I am sure that Britain has got a lot of talent, but right now I am getting very depressed about the way in which Britain does or doesn’t recognise its talent, and about the message that this is sending out to young musicians.

dial M for Milly

Dial M for Murdoch

Tom Watson and Martin Hickman

Like many others, I suppose, I only really started paying proper attention to the phone hacking scandal when the Milly Dowler story broke on July 4th, 2011. Until then, the hacking saga was mainly about royals and some football people being hacked, and I’m not interested in either group of people, and didn’t have a high opinion of the papers involved and their editors to begin with, so there was no surprise element. The Milly moment changed everything, as it demonstrated very clearly how the tabloid folk trampled even on the people they pretended to stand up for (such as victims of crime). And it was immediately clear to me (if not to Rupert M) that this time they would not get away with it.

Luckily, a few brave investigators and reporters including the authors of this book and the Guardian’s Nick Davies pursued this story relentlessly from the beginning and worked hard to make the rest of us pay attention too. For us who missed all or parts of the beginnings, this book is a great way to catch up with the story and learn how all the different threads, including not just the phone hacking but also an unsolved murder case and multiple cases of police corruption, fit together and feed into the tangled web of inquiries we are witnessing today.

Up to and including the Milly moment, the book reads like a gripping thriller, as the quest for the truth looks very much like a lost cause for the fearless investigators who suspected that criminal actions were widespread at NI but couldn’t prove it yet. After the closure of News of the World, as our heroes are clearly on the winning stretch, the book loses momentum a little bit. It quotes from relevant inquiries in detail, even though at least today’s UK readership will remember the crucial moments of the last few months, so they could have been summarised a bit more concisely. It will be different for readers in a few years time, but by then the book will have to be updated anyway, to include new findings and those that are at the moment blocked by legal concerns.

Those lucky enough to live in a country whose media are not dominated by News Corp can read it as a fascinating tale of media power and corruption, essentially a modern day Macbeth. The moral is, if you give someone a bit of power, they will want more, and they will begin to think they can get away with murder.

amazon.co.uk

PS after posting this review on amazon, I immediately got two "unhelpful" votes, which is very untypical (I've been at 84% helpful votes for years now). I deleted the review and reposted an improved version, thinking maybe it was really not helpful enough, and got a fresh unhelpful vote within 12hours. I can only conclude that some NI-friendly troll is keeping an eye on these reviews and marking down those that praise the book.

do protected areas protect species?

My latest feature in Current Biology looks at some protected areas and which measures help to actually protect the threatened species in them. Examples feature Earthwatch research in Madagascar and Belize, as well as the work of Save the Elephants in Kenya.

Full text is freely accessible here (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) :

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Photo: Earthwatch/Ryan Cox.

addicted to you

I'm loving the new Shakira video, which was released just a few minutes ago:

and that wasn't a foregone conclusion, I could name one or two that I hate :) In this one, I'm loving the hat, in particular.

Now for the fun part, watching how UK music channels will completely ignore this. Living in the UK one can quite easily forget that this woman is quite successful in the rest of the world.

roadmap for regenerative medicine

Stem cells, cloning and regenerative medicine are issues on which UK research is doing really well in global comparison, partially due to the fact that the pioneering development of IVF raised awareness here and led to a reasonably sensible regulatory framework.

I've published quite a few pieces on this field over the last ten years or so. The latest feature is pegged to the strategy plan for UK regenerative medicine that the Medical Research Council together with other funding agencies released at the end of March.

A roadmap for regenerative medicine

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 8, R251-R253, 24 April 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.04.004

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(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)

Haydn for cello and flute

Here's a score we prepared earlier (and played last year). It's from a string duet by Haydn, and we adapted it for the flute. It's quite easy to stick together as the rhythm is mostly identical in both parts, and the parts individually are grade 3-4 level I would guess.



Next up is an adaptation of Johann Nepomuk Hummel's trio for piano, cello and flute in A major, op.78, which is essentially a set of variations on a Russian folk song called "Beautiful Minka." As the piano is quite dominant in this work and we don't have a pianist in the house, this one involves quite a bit of rearranging. We did just the theme last year, and I have now added one of the variations. Work in progress here:

Russian theme & variations