I’m in Dublin as a delegate at something called the Euroscience Open Forum. To me, it is a science festival, but in typical European style, it has a rather strange name. It consists of a series of talks, discussions, debates, workshops, plays, poetry readings and much else besides, covering all areas of science, from my […]
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The image to the left is a San Diego (in southern California, USA) beach scene painted using differently coloured bacteria, by Nathan Shaner and Paul Steinbach. A protein that fluoresces green was discovered in jellyfish. If you insert the gene for this protein into bacteria, then they fluoresce green. Then you can paint in green with these bacteria, using a plate covered by a layer of food that the bacteria will grow on. This green fluorescent protein has now been engineered to produce blue, yellow, etc versions so you can make and then paint with bacteria with all these colours.
Now, this is very pretty, but you may be thinking it is about as much use as these officials UEFA have put behind the goal lines in Euro2012 matches. This is not so. What reminded me of this painting is a meeting I had with my biologist collaborators at King’s College London.
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Yesterday and today, the University of Surrey ran two Open Days for prospective undergraduate students and their parents. They were very busy, today the university had over 2,000 visitors on campus. I organised the Physics bit, and we had at least 400 visitors over the two days. For his morning’s talk, I believe we were […]
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As a kind of homage to the recent post of my colleague, I too am writing from a conference set in the mountains. I’m in the Rila Mountains in Bulgaria. The name apparently comes from Thracian and refers to the abundance of glacial lakes that the mountains contain. So far, I’m a day and a […]
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Today is the centenary of Alan Turing‘s birth. He was born in London on 23rd June 1912. If you look at the Google homepage, the doodle is a Turing machine. Turing was one of the most brilliant people the Britain produced in the last century. He is one of the fathers of the computer you are using […]
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Some satellite images of Earth from space are not only beautiful, but make you think. They give a new perspective on the planet whose surface we spend our lives scurrying around on. Earth is very big of course. Its circumference is more than 10 million times the height of a human being. The image to […]
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