Life on Earth and the possibility of life beyond the stars fascinates Dr Lewis Dartnell.
I interviewed Lewis for Imperial College Radio, and this podcast is the full conversation. We cover Dartnell’s core research in Martian radiation, the recently launched Kepler telescope, possible earth asteroid strikes. Lewis describes how knowledge of conditions on other worlds might inform maintenance of the Earth.
The noisy aircon is regrettable; and as a result the sound quality is less than ideal.
Increasing demand for electric vehicles and portable electronic devices is driving a parallel need for environmentally friendly batteries.
But combining improved performance with safe, eco-efficient, operation is a tall order. Michel Armand and his team from the Universite de Picardie Jules Verne in France showed that a sustainably sourced organic version of the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery could provide the answer (Nature Materials, DOI:10.1038/NMAT2372).
Armand’s battery, built around a novel lithium-hydrocarbon anode, delivers up to three times the typical minimum energy capacity needed for practical applications but is environmentally friendly too.
The organic acids used to make the electrode are readily synthesised on a sustainable basis from abundant recycled plastics. They also appear as a metabolic by-product when bio-organisms act on common hydrocarbons like benzene.
The team say their device generates less heat and is more thermally stable compared with conventional Li-ion batteries with titanium or pure carbon electrodes. That makes it an attractive option for hybrid vehicles, where the presence of petroleum fuels alongside electricity makes battery meltdown unthinkable; w e glimpsed the consequences of thermal instability in 2006, when a manufacturing defect in Sony laptop batteries caused some devices to burst into flame.
Lithium-ion batteries must not show memory effect, so they retain their capacity when recharged from a partly charged condition. In the tests, performance of the organic battery dropped off only slowly during repeated recharge cycles, indicating a desirable reversibility of the chemistry. Before-and-after-charge x-ray diffraction measurements confirmed the structural stability of the electrode.
The team also say their device is lighter, the novel chemistry allowing replacement of heavier copper components with aluminium ones elsewhere in the battery. That makes all the difference in an electric vehicle where every gram counts.
It was sad to hear the news today that Waterford Wedgwood, the company formed from an amalgamation of Waterford glass and Wedgwood pottery, has fallen into administration.
The name Wedgwood, and its most characteristic and recognised Jasper Ware products, are well known icons of the British pottery industry. Perhaps less well known are the links between the founder of Wedgwood pottery, Josiah Wedgwood, and the Darwin family – including Erasmus Darwin, the inspiration for this blog.
As discussed in this earlier post, Erasmus and Josiah were close friends and core ‘Lunar Men’. The two exchanged ideas and letters on a range of topics from canals to pyrometers, Erasmus bringing his chemistry knowledge to bear in developing new colours for pottery. He later designed a windmill for grinding pigments at Wedgwood’s factory at ‘Etruria’.
Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah gave Erasmus music lessons and, by the by, came to marry his son Robert, establishing a trend maintained by Charles Darwin when he married his first cousin Emma, the daughter of Josiah (II).
Wedgwood’s most famous pottery design is the ‘Portland Vase’, a reproduction in Jasper Ware of a piece of (probably) Roman cameo-glassware. In 2003, something of a controversy blew up regarding the true age of the vase, one which, as this Guardian article explains, science was not able to unravel.
Portland Vases are still being made at Wedgwood but, priced at £4893, are evidently not moving in sufficient quantity to save the business. When Erasmus received one of the first of these technically challenging pieces, he characteristically proceeded to analyse and document the various Roman scenes; he dedicates 7 pages of text and 4 fold-out drawings to it in his Botanic Garden of 1791.
Update 5 Feb 2012 Wedgewood Museum to close (In the Guardian) Link HERE
What do Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and Tim Jones have in common?
I leave you to cogitate over the more obvious parallels in literary and political acumen shared by these well known London gentlemen – they are irrelevant to the point. More pertinent is that we have all four, variously over two centuries, enjoyed roast beef in the Grand Divan at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand; roast beef served in the traditional manner: carved at the table, with a good dollop of coarsely shredded horseradish sauce.
For me, the recent occasion for this most English of dining extravagances was my wife’s birthday. She with whom, amongst the chandeliers and paneled oak, I once again shared a fulfillment that only the stimulating permeation of allyl isothiocyanate into nasal mucosa can deliver.
In truth, I had no idea what caused the alarming pungency of the horseradish, and no amount of distracted shuffling of fork about the savoy cabbage and roast potatoes helped explain the strange sensation – quite unlike the ‘hotness in the mouth’ of a curry or the ponderous burn of ginger. So what’s it all about?
It turns out the active ingredient in horseradish – allyl isothiocyanate – is a volatile irritant. Being volatile, it can quickly get to the nasal passages where the endings of the trigeminal nerve complex come close to the surface. On the other hand, the main active compound in chili and curry, capsaicin, is a non-volatile, oil-soluble, molecule that travels most readily through the lipid membranes of the oral cavity; it makes your mouth and tongue feel hot. Interestingly, the menthol found in mint is both volatile and oil soluble, giving us that difficult to describe sensation of heating and cooling in both nose and mouth.
I also discovered during my research that allyl isothiocyanate is used to make adhesive for sailmaking, and stumbled across this patent describing the applications of horseradish as a treatment for nasal and sinus dysfunction, delivered by literally squirting the stuff up your nose. Something to try between courses maybe?
As we approach the 5th November, many people in the UK will be considering which firework party to attend. But on the night, they probably won’t be thinking too hard about why they’re standing out in the cold, gripping a baked potato, and “oohing” and “aahing” to the explosive delights. Because the British public have been doing this for a while – 403 years to be exact, since that fateful day when a bunch of disgruntled catholics tried unsuccessfully to vapourise King James I and the English parliament. There you have it: gunpowder, treason and plot.
Thankfully, science as a social construct goes beyond applying the physical consequences of rapid combustion under containment to the government of the day. Centuries before Guido Fawkes got his catholic knickers in a twist, enterprising chemists were delighting expectant crowds at fireworks displays.
A popular 18th and 19th century venue for fireworks was the Vauxhall Gardens pleasure park in London. While the elaborate promenades, bandstands, and the ‘firework temple’ have all disappeared, youngsters can still be found unwittingly (and illegally) maintaining the firework tradition on the patch of public park that remains, as this picture from 2003 shows.
The manufacture of fireworks has always been a risky business. Factories typically comprise many small and separated work units, such that if one goes up in smoke the remainder are isolated from the blast. This aerial photograph well illustrates the layout at the now defunct Standard Fireworks plant.
Fireworks manufacturies do not make for good neighbours, as this 1858 newspaper report of a terrible accident in central London illustrates (interestingly the year before Vauxhall Gardens’ final closure). While regrettable, the event deliciously opportuned some wry social commentary towards the religious establishment and aristocracy of the day.
Also of interest:
Coke and Borg’s Biography of Vauxhall Gardens (Guardian review by PD Smith here)
When it comes to buying books, I’m either very keen and go straight for the new hardback edition, or I’ll trawl the bargain basements for unwanted and long forgotten editions selling at three for a fiver. I’ve just finished one of the latter, and can belatedly vouch that Heather Pringle’s Mummy Congress is the most interesting, original, and frankly amusing treatises on preserved corpses you’ll find.
Maybe it’s old news (Mummy Congress was published in 2001), but it’s ghoulishly intriguing to learn that mummies have until quite recently been used to make paint for artists. Human flesh and bone, combined with the resinous embalming materials of the time, make all the difference in achieving the silky texture only Mummy can deliver. Available into the early years of the twentieth century, the paint left the market when the supply of mummies dried up.
Further research convinces me that despite the horrified reaction of artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones, on discovering the true nature of what they had happily been throwing at the canvas for years (Burne-Jones even gave his tube of Mummy a decent burial in the back garden), our national galleries must be displaying a fair selection of canvases and boards that are essentially smeared with dead people.
According to Pringle’s sources, Martin Drolling’s L’interieur d’une cuisine, now in the Louvre, is a prime candidate, although in this case the mummies were of more recent French origin. But what about Burne-Jones? His pictures do have that atmospheric brownish aura about them.
Science, in the form of mass spectroscopy, can help identify ‘mummy’ paintings. The molecules associated with bitumen, asphalt, and human remains all have their tell-tale signature. Yet the technique hasn’t been widely used, probably due to the disincentive of an invasive procedure, the results of which can only turn people off.
If anyone knows more about this fascinating topic please get in touch.
