A traveling exhibition about the sounds and songs of life
Just in time for our Caturday morning video smile, an astronomy video about cats
Here's an astronomy video about cats, just in time for our Caturday morning video smile! This video is a chat with (a man whose name will delight birdwatchers everywhere) Brant Widgeon, who is an Astronomical Image Enhancement Engineer. He's the guy who takes x-ray images of galaxies and other celestial formations and colour enhances them so they are transformed into gorgeous screensavers for your computers. I know this will shock you, but Mr Widgeon's job is actually quite challenging.
As you will see in this video, one of the most technically challenging parts of Mr Widgeon's job is dealing with ... you got it ... space cats:
Visit AndyFreeberg's YouTube channel [video link].
"Hello? I trust you and I love you."
NOTE: the silly cat/pet/animal videos shared here on Saturday (Caturday) mornings are intended to amuse. This feature is intended to help hard-working and stressed-out people shed their professional façade so they can be better friends, companions, parents, family members and drinking pals to those in their personal lives. Any relationship between these videos and science or any scientific principle is sweet when I manage to present a solid connection to you, but is random, mostly unintended and usually coincidental.
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Health researchers claim maintaining healthy lifestyle and eating well could prevent as many as a third of all cancers
Foodstuffs and drinks need to contain less sugar, salt and fat in order to help combat the growing number of people developing cancer, campaigners against the disease have said.
The call from the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) came as it released fresh estimates that the number of Britons being diagnosed with cancer annually will rise to almost 400,000 by 2030.
The UK will see about 396,000 new cases of cancer a year in 2030 – a 30% rise on the 304,000 seen in 2008 – according to WCRF projections released today to mark World Cancer Day.
Its analysis of the likely increase in cancer cases in all 27 EU member states by 2030 says that the UK will have the 16th biggest proportionate rise and Ireland the biggest with a predicted 72% jump, followed by Cyprus (55%), Luxembourg (53%) and Malta (49%).
The WCRF identified the ageing population as the key factor behind the rise, because cancer affects mainly the over-60s. But it also said improvements in lifestyles, such as eating better, maintaining a normal weight and taking exercise could prevent as many as a third of all cancers.
"Measures to tackle the fat, sugar and salt content of food and drinks and to improve the opportunities for physical activity are the type of developments we need to cut these predictions of future cancer cases," said Dr Kate Allen, the science and communications director at WCRF International.
It wants to see mean salt intake fall to 5g a day by 2025, a big drop from the current average in the UK of about 8g, and for total fat intake to make up just 15-30% of people's energy intake by the same date.
To achieve that it wants action to "encourage nutrient-dense relatively unprocessed foods and discourage sugary and alcoholic drinks".
Cancer incidence is rising, and experts expect it to keep rising, mainly due to ageing, but also obesity and alcohol misuse. But WCRF's estimate of a 30% rise by 2030 is lower than Cancer Research UK's prediction, made last October, of a 45% leap to around 432,0000 cases by the same date.
The trend has prompted concern that the NHS may not be able to keep pace.
"We know the numbers of people getting this disease is increasing and these figures by the WCRF should signal alarm bells for the NHS and how we plan future cancer services. Macmillan Cancer Support's own research showed that four in 10 people will now get cancer in their lifetime," said Ciaran Devane, the charity's chief executive.
On current trends the number of people in the UK who have been diagnosed with cancer will double from two to four million over the next 20 years, added Devane.
Dr Emily Power, health information manager at CRUK, said: "With more cancers being diagnosed, it's crucial that cancer services worldwide prepare for the growth in demand. It's also important that we do everything we can to improve the early diagnosis of cancer."
But medical and scientific advances mean patients diagnosed with cancer are twice as likely to survive it as they were 40 years ago, Power added.
The Department of Health said: "This data shows the challenges we face from an ageing population and the rising burden of cancer. That is why we are investing more than £750m over the next four years to make sure people are diagnosed with cancer earlier and have better access to the latest treatments. This includes a range of public awareness campaigns on the signs and symptoms of cancer.
"Through our investment and modernisation of the NHS, we will save 5,000 more lives every year by 2015 - closing the gap in cancer survival between us and the best-performing countries in the world.
"But we know that up to half of all cancers could be prevented by changing our lifestyles - eating better, doing more exercise, drinking less and stopping smoking.
"That's why through Change4Life we are encouraging everyone to make small lifestyle changes that really make a difference, like being more active, eating more fruit and veg, fewer calories and less fatty foods. We will shortly launch a campaign to raise awareness of the risks of drinking too much alcohol."
Denis CampbellOne of the best discussions I've had in the comments on this blog was about entropy, and it took us from black holes to a cup of tea. This excellent video completes the journey, and then some
Entropy always increases, and this is the most obvious way of telling which way time is running. It's known as the second law of thermodynamics. It's fascinating, to the extent that the discussion about a cup of tea at the end of this blog about black holes and fuzzballs was at least as interesting as the seminar which inspired the article in the first place.
If you share my fascination, I recommend this video on time and entropy, which I was pointed to on twitter by Sean Carroll.
As they say in the film, electromagnetism and gravity are symmetric under a change of time direction - they work just the same backwards and forwards. The film doesn't mention it, but there are some weird corners of physics that are not symmetric under change of time direction. The weak nuclear force breaks this symmetry. This is connected with why there is more matter than antimatter around, and is something LHCb is studying at CERN, for example. But it doesn't seem to be connected with the "arrow of time" we get from entropy, at least as far as we know.
I'm reading "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K Dick right now. The most memorable image I have of entropy comes from his book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (from which Bladerunner was made), where he uses the term "kipple" to describe the junk which tends to overwhelm us unless we fight it. The run-down city-scapes, filmed so well in Bladerunner, are full of it. So are most of the drawers in my house. It's not my fault, it's physics.
Jon ButterworthWhen Richard Handl was arrested for attempting to split the atom on his stove, he joined a growing band of home experimenters cooking up all kinds of trouble behind the kitchen door
Ängelholm is a pretty southern Swedish town, famed for its clay cuckoo manufacturing, a clay cuckoo being a kind of ocarina, which is a kind of flute. The crime rate here is practically zero. Except one of its residents was last year arrested for trying to split the atom in his kitchen. His name is Richard Handl and he buzzes me into his first-floor flat.
I wanted to meet Richard because I keep seeing reports of home science experimenters clashing with the authorities. There's been a spate of them this past year or two.
I glance into Richard's kitchen and recognise his cooker from the news. It was horrendously, alarmingly blackened then, but it's clean now.
"So, you aren't currently doing any experiments?" I ask him.
"I'm banned," he says.
"By whom?" I ask.
"My landlord," he says. "And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority."
Then we sit on the sofa and he tells me his story.
When Richard was a teenager, everything, he says, was fine. "I had friends. We'd go partying. I have Asperger's, so I was a bit of a nerd, a geek. My interests were chemical experiments. I'd make solutions that changed colour. When I was 13, I made some explosives in the garden, using gunpowder, stuff I got from a paint store and from my father's pharmacy. He had sulphuric acid, nitric acid. Visiting my father in his pharmacy was very exciting."
His father assumed Richard would grow up to be a pharmacist, too. He was, Richard says, happy and proud of his son, as it was his dream to raise a boy to follow in his footsteps. But something unexpected happened to Richard 14 years ago, when he was 17: "I became very aggressive to people," he says.
"In what way?" I ask.
"It was towards my father," Richard says. "Sometimes I hit him."
"In response to what?"
"Very small things. Like if he was late and didn't call."
"Was he worried about you?"
"Yes, he was quite worried about me. He took me to the hospital, so I could talk to psychiatrists. They said I was depressed. And I had some paranoid disorder."
"And all this just came from nowhere?"
"It just happened," he shrugs.
Richard worked in a factory for four years, but his disorder meant he spent most of his time in his flat. His love of chemistry continued undimmed, but the possibility of him becoming a pharmacist had practically gone. So, instead, he decided one day to start a collection – he would scour the internet and buy an ampoule of every chemical element. He quickly realised he had to downgrade his ambition. "There are some very unstable radioactive elements, like polonium and francium, that last just a couple of minutes and then decay. They're impossible to get."
But he persevered with the others.
"Do you have any of them still here?" I ask.
"Sure," he says. "Would you like to see them?"
He disappears into his bedroom and returns holding a basket filled with ampoules of gold and silver and platinum and thallium and beryllium. Some are solid blocks, some glittering shards, others shining slivers. The basket looks like a treasure chest.
"This is the most amazing one," Richard says, picking up an ampoule marked "Cesium". It looks like solid gold. "Watch," he says. "If you warm it up…"
He closes his fist around it for 30 seconds. Then he shows it to me again. It has melted. We both look at it, amazed, as if we've just witnessed a magic trick.
"And then," Richard says, "I began to collect radioactive elements like radium and uranium and americium."
Richard was Googling "americium" one day when he found a story, in Harper's magazine, chronicling the life of a Michigan boy named David Hahn who grew up in the 1990s. There was something about Hahn with which Richard identified. Both boys spent their childhoods blowing things up in the garden. Hahn once turned up at a Boy Scouts meeting in Golf Manor, Michigan, with a bright orange face due to an accidental overdose of canthaxanthin. Hahn got expelled from camp for dismantling a smoke detector (he was trying to extract the americium – pretty much everything you need to split the atom you can find on eBay or in smoke detectors and antique luminous dial clocks).
Those were the days before the internet, so getting hold of information about how to build a nuclear reactor was more complicated for Hahn than it would turn out to be for Richard. He learned how to do it by writing to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and pretending to be a physics teacher. Did they have any pamphlets on how to split the atom?
"Nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium, Professor Hahn," they wrote back.
And that's how David Hahn managed to turn his potting shed into a nuclear reactor.
It wasn't long before the Michigan police cottoned on, and in June 1995, 11 men in protective suits descended on the dangerously irradiated shed. He was shut down.
Sixteen years later, in Ängelholm, Richard read the Hahn story and felt inspired to try it out himself. This is how Richard went about trying to split the atom. First, he got a saucepan. Into it he put his radioactive elements – the americium and radium. He mixed them up with sulphuric acid and beryllium, and turned on the stove. The mixture bubbled up crazily, splashing all over the cooker and the floor. He quickly turned off the hob and posted a picture of the carnage on his blog, with the caption "The Meltdown!".
His plan, he says, was to repeat the experiment, but this time collect into a test tube the neutrons that were emanating from the concoction. Then he'd have fired the "neutron ray" at a chunk of uranium sealed in a glass marble.
"What does the neutron ray look like?" I ask.
"It doesn't look like anything," Richard says. "You can't see it."
"How do you know it's there?"
"You have to measure it with a Geiger counter," he says.
"So what you're saying is, you'd point the test tube filled with neutrons at the uranium marble, and that's what would split the atom?"
"Yes," Richard says.
Richard never did collect the neutrons into a test tube. After the meltdown, he decided to email the Swedish Radiation Authority to double-check that what he was doing was above board.
"Hello!" read his email of 18 July 2011. "I'm very interested in nuclear physics and radiation. I have planned a project to build a primitive nuclear reactor. Now I'm wondering if I'm violating any laws doing so?"
They emailed him back on 11 August: "Hi. The short answer to your question is that if you build a nuclear reactor without permission, you are violating strict laws. It is a criminal offence and can lead to fines or imprisonment for up to two years."
Richard was surprised. "The amount I had was very small," he says, "so far away from the amount needed to make a dirty bomb or something like that. To get it to explode, you must have something called a critical mass, which is 50kg of radium or 6kg of plutonium. I had 5g. The worst that could have happened was I might have got radiation in me."
"And got cancer years later?" I ask.
He shrugs. "Yes."
Even though it took the radiation authority three weeks to respond to Richard's email, everything moved very quickly after that. Within days, they'd turned up at his flat with the police.
"They told me to get out with my hands up. They scanned me with Geiger counters. There was nothing. They measured the whole apartment. They said I was arrested for a crime against the radiation safety law."
And that's it, so far. Sixteen weeks have passed and nothing has happened to him, besides making headlines all over the world.
"I don't regret it," he says, "because it was exciting. I'm sad I can't do it any more."
We glance at his basket of elements. "There are no other experiments you could do with these?" I ask.
"I can," he says, "but I don't want to."
"What could you do?" I ask.
"I could…" Richard pauses. "This thallium is very, very poisonous. If you break the ampoule, it would start to react with the air and oxidise. Thallium oxide. Very poisonous. If you get it on your fingers, you can die."
"But you would never consider…"
"No, no," Richard says. He pauses. "Actually, I'm thinking of trying again to become a pharmacist. I'm going to read up some courses from the high school and begin to study in the university."
Back home, I remember the moment Richard shrugged, unconcerned, at the possibility of developing cancer from his experiments. This happens a lot with home experimenters. Something clicks in them and their science becomes more important to them than their safety. It happened to the Brazilian priest Father Adelir de Carli, who in April 2008 strapped 1,000 helium party balloons to a chair and lifted off from the port city of Paranagua.
He'd been inspired by a truck driver named Larry Walters who in 1982 had attached 45 weather balloons to a chair and soared to 16,000ft, waving at passing Delta and TWA pilots before landing 20 miles away in Long Beach. "The more I look at it, the more I'm glad I did it," Walters told the New York Times at the time. "It's something for when I'm an old man. So many people have dreams and they never follow through on them.''
Twenty-six years later, Father de Carli was so captivated by the experiment, he reportedly forgot to check the weather forecast, and to learn how his GPS worked. He was blown off course and drowned.
Then there were the two racing car drivers who, in the summer of 2010, poured four gallons of methanol into a barrel in a parking lot in Washington State, sat on top and lit the fuse. They were envisaging a "barrel ride". It was supposed to slide across the parking lot. Instead it exploded. One of them, a former American Sprint Car Series national champion called Travis Rilet, suffered 70% burns. The other, an Australian crew member called Tyson Perez, died.
In Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, a man named Paul Moran was jailed for three months last October for accidentally setting fire to his block of flats while trying to turn his faeces into gold. He had left the stuff on an electric heater and it caught light.
"It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist's dream, but wasn't going to succeed," the judge said when sentencing him.
But no home experiment has gone wrong quite so heartbreakingly as that of the Pambakian family. The Pambakians live in a cottage very close to my own house, so one day I stop on my way home to have a look. There's a Volvo parked in the driveway. In the boot is a bag filled with medical supplies, bandages, some Brasso, some old wellies, a duvet, all jumbled up. The wing mirror is stuck together with tape. There's stuff here that would save your life if administered by a medical professional, but it's all quite haphazard.
Dr Yvonne Pambakian won't talk to me about the tragedy that occurred inside the cottage. So instead I sit on the press bench of her General Medical Council fitness to practice hearing and listen to her testimony and cross-examination.
Five years ago, on 20 June 2007, she made an emergency call from the cottage. Her 22-year-old sister, Yolanda Cox, had gone into anaphylactic shock. When the paramedics arrived, they asked Pambakian what had happened.
"I gave her a drug for her asthma," she told them.
Yolanda was rushed to the Royal Free hospital where a doctor, Alexander Mackay, asked her and her mother to explain exactly what they'd injected into her.
"They wouldn't say," he later told the coroner. "They said I didn't need to know anything and the drug was extremely safe." It seemed they were trying to protect some secret ingredient they'd been developing. "Some time later," Mackay told the coroner, "they brought in paper information in two files." The family were, in fact, injecting each other in their kitchen with an experimental drug of their invention, which they'd called B71.
Yolanda died a week later, on 27 June 2007.
Pambakian and her mother, she tells the hearing, began their experiments back in the mid-90s, pooling their areas of expertise (she's a GP, her mother an immunologist). One day, they had a kind of eureka moment. To summarise it: some diabetes sufferers have an autoantibody that's responsible for their resistance to insulin, and the Pambakians supposed that, as insulin resistance is so uniquely destructive, if they could derive a peptide from the autoantibody, it would be uniquely curative. So they did, and they called it B71. They began posting patent applications. B71 would treat – and this is just a small sample – asthma, diabetes, psoriasis, eczema, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, depression, Parkinson's, migraines, multiple sclerosis, premature baldness in men, obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, cystic fibrosis, insomnia, cancer and HIV.
They managed to persuade some Dutch money people to bankroll the business and embarked on two clinical trials in the Netherlands. That was in 2005. For two years after that, nothing happened. The whole thing seemed stuck in limbo.
And then one day in April 2007, they got an email. A woman called Caroline, a friend of one of the Dutch backers, had just been told she was dying of cancer. She was 33, with four children and – according to doctors at the Royal Marsden hospital – had only three months to live. "If there's the remotest chance the drug might prove beneficial…" the backer emailed.
So on Good Friday 2007, Pambakian travelled to Caroline's home, with a vial of B71 in her bag.
"You wanted to try out a theory," GMC prosecutor Stephen Brassington says at the hearing.
"I wanted to offer her a treatment," Pambakian snaps back.
So she prayed, and then she injected Caroline with a mammoth 6mg of the drug – a dose four times higher than they had given the Dutch trial volunteers. Caroline survived the injection, but later died of her cancer.
Brassington is incredulous. This is not how science works, he says. Science is all about assiduously gathering data, about treading gently, about conducting delicate clinical trials.
"I didn't have safety data in thousands of people, that is true," Pambakian admits. The way she says "thousands" is fierce, irritated, superior, as if the GMC panel live so far inside the box, they can never understand the kind of maverick thinking that changes the medical world.
When Pambakian arrived back at the cottage, they decided to make themselves test subjects. Of course, they were far from the first doctors to self-inject at home. For centuries, scientists have been deliberately infecting themselves with gonorrhoea and yellow fever; they've become morphine addicts and cocaine addicts in their hunt for new anaesthetics. The doctor who discovered in 2003 that stomach ulcers came from a bug and not from stress did so by drinking a potion containing the bug. So the Pambakians mixed up some more gigantic 6mg doses. And they injected themselves. And that's when Yolanda said she didn't feel well, and she slumped on the sofa.
"When the ambulance crew arrived, you told them that it was a treatment for asthma," Brassington says.
"When the ambulance crew came, there was no time to sit and discuss the workings of the drug," Pambakian replies. "I just wanted them to concentrate on getting the tube down her lungs. On giving her a chance to live. I'd have told them anything." She pauses. "Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare. We're talking about a few people a year in the whole country. It was not in my mind. Perhaps it should have been, but it wasn't." She falls silent for a moment. "Now it's on my mind all the time. Now I don't take a Nurofen without thinking about it. Now it's on my mind all the time."
And at that she seems to diminish, like a balloon losing its air.
"Your judgment entirely deserted you," the prosecutor says.
"I think 'entirely' is a bit…" She trails off.
"Doctors who ignore the proper, ethical process of clinical research expose their patients to unnecessary risk," he says.
"I suppose so, yes," she says, quietly.
"You fell seriously short of the standards expected from a registered medical practitioner," the prosecutor says.
There's a short silence. "Yes," she says.
A few days later, the GMC gives its judgment: "Your name will be erased from the Medical Register." And she leaves the hearing, no longer Dr Yvonne Pambakian, but Yvonne Pambakian.
Soon after I watch her hearing and meet Richard Handl, I receive a slightly alarmed email from Jason Bobe, who runs DIYbio.org, an online community for home science experimenters. I'd emailed him as part of my research. He says he's worried my article may discourage home science. Maybe, he suggests, I should talk to Victor Deeb, whose experiments in his basement went disastrously wrong in a very different way and whose story might offer a counterbalance.
Deeb lives in a small Massachusetts town called Marlborough. He's retired, in his mid-70s, and although he's lived in the US almost all his life, he still has a strong Syrian accent, which gets stronger as he becomes more incensed down the phone.
Three years ago, on 5 August 2008, a policeman happened to be driving past Deeb's house. "He saw smoke billowing from the air conditioner in an upstairs room, so he called the fire department." Deeb speaks in short, exact phrases, as if he considers our conversation to be like a chemical experiment, requiring complete precision.
A plug had shorted in the bedroom. The fire department put out the fire, glanced into the basement and immediately called for emergency reinforcements.
"The whole fire department came," Victor says. "The FBI. Even the CIA was here. It couldn't have been any more crazy. They went into the sewer system to see if I was dumping anything down the toilet."
What they had found in the basement was 100 bottles of chemicals. None was hazardous. There was nothing poisonous. "I was working on a coating for the inside of beverage cans containing no Bisphenol A," Deeb says.
BPA, he explains, is standard in beverage can coatings. The problem is that it can seep into the drink and play havoc with our hormones, causing men to grow breasts and girls as young as seven to have periods. Back in 2008, he says, "there were few references in the media to the negative effect of BPA. Currently, there is a deluge of articles. So my desire to eliminate BPA was ahead of its time." He pauses. "I spent an enormous amount of time with the authorities, trying to explain what I was working on, but they had no perception. No concept."
And so he watched as they hauled away all the chemicals and test tubes in a truck. "I had a box full of files and notes and comments," he says. "Twenty years' work. They hired two PhD chemists to go through the box, looking for confirmation that there were hazardous materials in the basement. When they couldn't find anything, they left the box out in the rain. It destroyed all my notes. Twenty years of my life and work and efforts to help others down the drain."
"When they realised their mistake, I presume they apologised and paid you a settlement," I say.
"The opposite!" he says. "They're suing me for the cost of emptying my basement."
For America's online community of home science experimenters, the most outrageous moment of all came when the enforcement officer, Pamela Wilderman, explained her decision-making process to the local paper: "I think Mr Deeb has crossed a line somewhere," she said. "This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."
"Allow me to translate Ms Wilderman's words into plain English," wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide To Home Chemistry Experiments. "'Mr Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I'll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.' There's a word for what just happened in Massachusetts. Tyranny."
Before I hang up, Victor Deeb says he wants to remind me of something. He says that for every David Hahn and Richard Handl, there's a Steve Jobs and a Charles Goodyear. "They started at home. Goodyear developed the vulcanisation process by mixing sulphur with virgin rubber on his wife's stove in their kitchen."
And then he is gone, to do – he says – what he spends every day doing. He's going to try to remember what he'd written on the pages in the box that was left out in the rain.
Jon Ronson'Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished'
One day, Jacqueline Rose came across a troubling passage in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, Marcel, lies beside his sleeping lover Albertine and masturbates against her. "It seemed to me at those moments," writes Proust in Carol Clark's recent Penguin translation, "that I possessed her more completely, like an unconscious part of dumb nature." Professor Rose, feminist and psychoanalytic critic, bristled. "I thought 'This is ridiculous – she'd have woken up by now!' I had my feminist reaction – which is not my most obvious default position – which is just let the woman speak."
So Rose decided to awaken Proust's lover from her implausible slumber. In her 2001 novel, Albertine, the protagonist was not, or not merely, a wronged woman needing feminist liberation from a suffocating male neurotic's dismal sex act. Rose says: "The postcard version is: 'Poor girl falls in love with rich, sick aesthete. He traps her in his apartment. She dies.' There's a real feminist gothic narrative here – a horror story in a way."
She didn't want to tell that story. Rose's aim, as Alex Clark put it in her Guardian review, was to "return to Albertine her intelligence". "It's not that I wanted her to be innocent," says Rose. "I wanted to unravel her from the inside." But there was a limit to how much Rose could unravel. "People have been very cross with me for not representing her as an antisemite. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't enter into the skin in that way."
That compunction is both understandable – what Jew wants to ventriloquise an antisemite? – and mystifying since Rose's vocation is that of fearless critic, ready to fight with Ted Hughes over her interpretation of Sylvia Plath's poetry and to battle against those who hate her for daring to psychoanalyse Israel. In Proust, to whom she returns repeatedly in her work, Rose found a Jewish writer of greater imaginative ruthlessness. It is Proust who goes right into the psychic space of his enemy. For instance, Proust writes about the Baron de Charlus who, in one incendiary passage of antisemitic sex fantasy, imagines a Jewish acquaintance's mother being beaten. "It would make an excellent show," salivates Charlus, "the sort of thing we like, eh, my young friend … to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving a well-earned punishment to that old cow."
Rose quotes this passage in her new book, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, as an example of "the logic of projection". It's the European baron, not hated, exoticised, Jewish (m)other, who, Rose writes, "truly deserves, longs for, a thrashing".
"This is Melanie Klein stuff," she says. "You project on to the other the bits of yourself that you can't stand, but the function is to utterly purify yourself of the feeling. So your innocence is a form of violence against others." Proust got to this thought before Freud and his successors; indeed, Rose teaches an MA seminar at Queen Mary's College, London, to test her idea that there is no thought Freud had that Proust didn't have with greater complexity.
What will scandalise some about Rose's new book is that she uses psychoanalysis on Israel. But isn't putting the Jewish state on the couch shaming? Rose retorts: "I think it's Nietzsche who says somewhere that it's the people who are walking around happy, as if everything's perfect, who have something to be ashamed of. For psychoanalysis, psychic difficulty is your birthright and it's our attempt to repudiate it that makes it worse. So the point for me in using psychoanalysis to understand why a traumatised people might find locking themselves into a traumatised identity is to treat them with the greatest respect."
Not all Zionist positions warrant psychoanalytical critique. "The strand of Zionism I'm interested in is the one that seems unable to see the Palestinians and seems unable to recognise the darkness of its own history." It is the strand that won't recognise what Jews did to Palestinians in 1948 and Israel's role in facilitating the Sabra and Chatila massacres in 1982.
Rose denies she's anti-Zionist. "It more than makes sense as a nationalist movement. A wonderful Russian formalist thinker called Victor Shklovsky, talking about the aesthetic choices facing the avant garde under Stalinism, said: 'There is no third way and that is the one we're going to take'. I don't see myself as an anti-Zionist or a Zionist: I see myself as a reader of Zionism trying to understand why it's so powerful and why it does seem to find it very hard to look at its own past."
Critics, especially those who oppose the Independent Jewish Voices group she helped establish in 2007, doubt Rose's third way. Mail columnist Melanie Phillips charged Rose with being a Jewish persecutor of Israel who implicitly suggested that "the Jews are responsible for their own destruction", while a Jerusalem Post review of books about Zionism, which included Rose's 2005 The Question of Zion, suggested that "Iran's president is not alone in wanting to wipe Israel off the map."
Unabashed, Rose writes in her new book that the history of the Jewish people "makes it perhaps uniquely hard for Israel as a nation to see itself ever as the agent of the violence of its own history". Rose provides me with the gloss: "Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished."
An essential part of Jewish history she considers in the new book is the Dreyfus affair, about which Proust wrote and agitated. The wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew in the French army accused of spying for the Germans in 1894, and its aftermath convinced Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, there was no future for Jews in Europe. "When I discovered that it's not just 'The Holocaust therefore Israel' but 'Because of Dreyfus therefore Israel', my ears pricked up," says Rose. She recognises that either justification of Israel is contentious, and that for many Zionists the state's existence is justified not by the Holocaust but by ancestral rights to Palestine.
Rose was born in London in 1949 into a Holocaust-traumatised family. Her grandmother's family perished in Chelmno concentration camp. Hers was, as she puts, "one type of North London Jewish survivor family who, to survive, internally entrenched itself in Jewish ritual".
"It was observant and desperate that we continue the faith. There was no mixing of meat and milk, there were two sinks in the kitchen and if anything got mixed up it had to buried in the mud outside. It was very powerful but it also went with a set of prohibitions about what we could talk about." The Holocaust, in particular, was never discussed. Non-Jewish boyfriends were intolerable.
As Rose tells me this, in the living room of her West Hampstead flat, I think of what she writes in her new book about Proust's father, the epidemiologist who devised the notion of the cordon sanitaire. Her family similarly erected a post-Holocaust cordon sanitaire, what Rose calls a "defensive form of Jewishness closed in on itself, with no sense of Jewishness as culture, knowledge or history". No wonder she finds Proust so important: it was he who, more than any other writer, thought about, she says, "the uncertainties of hearts and minds and the porousness of boundaries between self and other, both as pleasure and as danger".
But her family's history is more nuanced: yes, her grandparents entrenched the family in Jewish ritual, but Rose's own parents felt thwarted by it. "My mother was very hostile to being Jewish because it had been such a restrictive life for her. It had stopped her taking up a place as a medical student; she was married at 20 – because that was what you did."
The next generation found a Shklovskyan third way of being Jewish between entrenchment and rejection. Rose notes that around the same time as elder sister Gillian was working on Emil Fackenheim's Holocaust theology, cousin Braham Murray (artistic director of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre) was producing a Holocaust interpretation of Macbeth, and she was working on the Holocaust in her interpretation of Sylvia's Plath's poem "Daddy". "We all three turned to this at about the same time in our lives, and it was an attempt to retrieve those parts of Jewishness and Judaism and Jewish history which, because of the weight of what it meant to be Jewish in that generation, we felt we hadn't been able really to explore."
The brilliant Rose sisters crossed their family's cordon sanitaire. Both went to St Hilda's College, Oxford – Gillian to study philosophy, Jacqueline English. But Gillian was quickly lured across the border from anglophone philosophy to study German idealist philosophy. Wasn't Gillian's embrace of German thought a family scandal? "She would say, rather as I'm using Proust and Freud, that she's working with the tools to predict, dismantle and forestall what happened in Nazi Germany."
After graduating, Jacqueline was lured to Paris. There she did a maitrise in comparative literature and started a doctorate about children's literature inflected with her new passion, Freud. "I loved Paris so much. I loved living in a foreign language." And more than that. The feminist critic Julia Kristeva became, as she puts it, her ego-ideal. "I just thought: 'Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.'" When she returned to England aged 23, she passed off the initials on her Yves Saint Laurent scarf to leftwing friends as standing for Young Socialist League. She doesn't say whether anyone believed her.
Why return? "I just thought wouldn't it be interesting to go back and become involved in a dialogue between French theory and English culture and the differences between them. It was like making myself a stranger in my own land. If you're Jewish, you always feel a bit of a stranger in your own land."
Back home she met Juliet Mitchell whose 1973 Feminism and Psychoanalysis enthralled her. "I remember thinking 'Thank heaven for this book. I can be a feminist and interested in psychoanalysis.'" She and Mitchell later translated some of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's texts into English, and his ideas percolated into the PhD she wrote on JM Barrie's Peter Pan under supervisor Frank Kermode. "I think Peter Pan is about adult desire. It's about the fantasy of a child, of a moment that he will never have to relinquish. But if you think of it as an injunction on the child, Lacan would say you are refusing to allow the child to be released into their desire, which is that they must become this asexual screen of utter purity which is what Peter Pan is. It's a collective passion [Barrie's] tapped into."
Does your treatment of Peter Pan connect with your later work? "I think it does because so much of my writing is about the myth of innocence in relationship to feminism, Sylvia Plath, and Zionism." Rose fell for Plath while teaching a women's writing course at the University of Sussex in the 1980s. She put Plath on the syllabus. "I read the criticism and it was so misogynist, pathologising, overconfident, disgusting. And then I read the feminist response and I thought it was over-idealising her in a way, so I knew there was something going on that was explosive around her."
Plath was a perfect subject for Rose, in that the poet confirmed the critic's conviction that feminism needed to take on board the psychoanalytical project and, in particular, that women's fight for redress of historic injustices must "be backed by an understanding of our own psychic investment as women in everything we engage in, including our own oppression". In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Rose wrote: "One does not become pure as the other falls into the dirt."
Plath, she says, "had so much to be angry about and she produces the most devastating indictment of a certain kind of patriarchal mindset in her writing. But it never stops her thinking about her own implication in those structures and the complexity of female psychic life. That's why 'The Rabbit Catcher' for me was such an important poem because the trap everybody identifies with patriarchy, with Hughes described as a piece of female anatomy, almost." But that interpretation angered Hughes when he saw the manuscript. He thought Rose was calling his dead wife a lesbian. "Hughes said: 'In some countries it was grounds for homicide to speculate on a mother's sexual identity.' Would I please remove my interpretation of 'The Rabbit Catcher'? And I wrote back saying: 'Look, I'm thinking about Freud here and his critique of civilised normatised identity,' which I thought would appeal to Hughes."
It didn't, but Rose didn't back down. Later she felt more sympathetic: "I think it's impossible for him. If you've had the tragedy that he has had, how can you not read the poetry biographically and how can you not read interpretation biographically? I must say I came to understand the situation better on the publication of my sister's book Love's Work" – Gillian's memoir written as she was dying – "because you can see how difficult it is for a family to deal with a book that touches upon things that are so private."
Gillian's early death from cancer in 1995, aged 48, cast Jacqueline into a mourning that, she says "will never be complete, nor would I want it to be". The first book she wrote after her sister's death was the novel Albertine. "I didn't feel I could write in an academic way. It's exhilarating and frightening letting the floodgates open."
Around the same time as her sister's death, Jacqueline and her then partner, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, adopted a baby girl from China. Intially, she thought of writing a book about Mia. "In five minutes I thought this is wrong, it's her story, even though she was a baby at the time. So then I took off with the Albertine project." Mia is now 17 and hoping to study photography at university. Rose's current partner is Jonathan Sklar, the psychoanalyst.
In her living room is something unexpected – a box of Marilyn Monroe DVDs. Rose has been boning up on Monroe for a lecture, which will eventually form part of a book provisionally entitled Women in Dark Times: From Rosa Luxembourg to Marilyn Monroe. It will be her return to feminist theorising. How do Rosa and Marilyn connect? "They both straddle the divide between political and inner life. I read Rosa's letters and the relationship between her political concept of spontaneity and the unknownness of revolutionary life and the unknownness and intimacy of personal life. It seemed her notion of revolutionary and personal lives were inextricably linked."
Why is Monroe interesting? "There's been so much written about her as a screen on to which everybody projects their fantasies. I think that's complicit with her victimisation. I think she knew exactly what was happening to her. I think she was casting herself as a sort of lead in the detritus of postwar American culture. Everything from the commodity to the sexualisation of women to the crass materialism to McCarthyism." Classic Jacqueline Rose feminism: woman as more than victim, implicated in and maybe even conniving at her own oppression.
Enough about feminism. After the interview Rose emails me, hoping I can stress that she isn't done with the Middle East conflict. She's written four books dealing with that conflict and, if she has her way, there will be more. "As Edward Said wrote about getting involved in the Palestine-Israel conflict – once you're in you're you're there for life. I spent five years with Plath and then said goodbye. You don't say goodbye to this."
Stuart JeffriesJust as it seemed that spring had arrived early, a cruel Siberian freeze has blown in and left wildlife in a state of confusion. Balmy temperatures in January were a wake-up call for many creatures, with reports of frogspawn in the West Country and West Wales, and sightings of ladybirds over southern England, even though ladybirds are supposed to spend the winter dormant in dense vegetation or bark crevices. A few butterflies have also been flitting around, particularly red admirals and peacocks, and even red-tailed bumblebees have buzzed around, identified by the red tail poking out from their big hairy bodies.
Some hibernating mammals also broke cover and started foraging. Small hedgehogs were seen wandering around, although their larger, older fellows have stayed hibernating. A few bats also took wing in brief forays before they returned to their roosts and sank back into hibernation. But there are serious risks to breaking hibernation this early, because it uses up valuable energy reserves before there is much food to find. And now the weather has turned cold, these early risers face being seriously weakened by the time the proper spring arrives.
Not all our mammals hibernate, though. Bloodcurdling noises are increasingly heard in towns and cities at night. They are the mating calls of foxes – the male fox makes short, sharp barks and are answered by the eerie scream of the vixen when she is ready to mate.
Paul SimonsOur pick of the most alluring and innovative entries to the 2011 International Science & Engineering Visual Challenge
Hot on the heels of a major study showing malaria deaths are twice what everybody thought – and that the disease kills older children and adults as well as babies in large numbers – comes a WHO study showing the highest levels yet of drug-resistant TB
Following the dramatic new figures on malaria deaths from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, which I wrote about here and here, we now have new figures for multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation.
It shows the highest-ever recorded levels of MDR-TB. In some countries, 65% of patients who have previously been treated for TB end up back in hospital with a drug-resistant strain. The clear message is that their TB was not sufficiently well treated the first time around. It has to be said that it is all too easy for this to happen, when each patient has to take a six-month course of treatment. New, shorter-course drugs are urgently needed. This study ought to give further impetus to the drive to find them.
TB is an area that I know the IHME will be addressing before long, as part of its project, which has taken five years of work so far, to get the best possible handle on global mortality rates from all causes. They have tackled maternal mortality – their study showed it was lower than thought at a third of a million rather than half a million a year – and given us the first global data on breast and cervical cancer. Since their director Christopher Murray has been studying TB for 30 years, expect some interesting data from that quarter at some point.
The WHO report is not (necessarily) about deaths, but they are up against the same problems as IHME – the absence of good data or, in some countries, any data.
But a lot of hard work has gone into persuading and helping countries to test for resistant TB strains and record what they are finding, and China has now introduced a nationwide TB survey that will help control the disease in its huge population. Lead author Dr Matteo Zignol, from the Stop TB Department at the World Health Organisation says:
Surveillance of resistance to drugs is the cornerstone of TB control. Following 15 years of intensive effort, we now have high-quality data for two-thirds of countries in the world. At the same time, we don't know the full extent of the problem because we lack data from many countries, in particular India and most of Africa where the TB burden is high.
Cases of MDR-TB have now been reported in 80 countries and XDR-TB (extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis), which is even harder to treat, in 77. Just under one in 10 (9.4%) of all resistant cases were XDR. In some countries, nearly 30% of all new cases are drug-resistant, which means the new and harder-to-treat strains are being passed around. Eastern Europe is a concern. High rates of drug resistance were reported in Belarus, Estonia, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan. Nobody knows how bad it is in Africa, where TB is so prevalent.
Counting the numbers is vital. It shows the scale of the task ahead, says Zignol.
The number of TB patients diagnosed and treated for MDR-TB is increasing worldwide but much remains to be done. In 2010, only 16% of MDR-TB patients were given appropriate treatment.
And without the appropriate treatment, people with drug-resistant TB are highly likely to die.
Sarah BoseleyThis drab British mystery bird has a colourful sex life that would make America's Tea Partiers faint
Hedge accentor, Prunella modularis (protonym, Motacilla modularis), Linnaeus, 1758, also known as the hedge sparrow, the shuffle-wing, or as the dunnock accentor, the European dunnock or, most famously (especially in Britain), just as the dunnock, photographed in Brereton Heath Local Nature Reserve, Cheshire, UK.
Image: Roy Hill, 23 January 2012 (with permission) [velociraptorize].
Canon EOS 5D Mark II 135mm f/2L + 1.4 extender
As a reminder, here's the original mystery bird image I shared two days ago:
Question: This British mystery bird is well-known for a particular life history trait that has been the subject of many studies and even several books. What trait is this? Can you identify this bird's taxonomic family and species?
Response: This is an adult dunnock, Prunella modularis, a small monomorphic brown and grey passerine that lives unobtrusively in thickly vegetated areas such as hedgerows, scrub, brambles and bushes.
These small, drab birds are sometimes confused with Old World sparrows, especially house sparrows, Passer domesticus, but are actually more closely related to the thrushes (Turdidae) or the Old World warblers (although the taxonomic placement of these birds remains unclear at this time). But unlike these other birds taxa, the dunnocks have thin pointed bills that are well-adapted for consuming insects, worms and spiders in summer, and seeds and berries in winter. Interestingly, the entire genus, Prunella, was originally given the generic common name of "dunnock" although the generic common name "accentor" seems to have displaced it for all its congeners for reasons that sound inexplicable to me.
The dunnock's conservative appearance is a direct contrast to its colourful reproductive behavior and extraordinarily flexible mating patterns, which have been the subject of large number of research papers and several books. In fact, this feature of dunnock life reminds me of a number of politicians.
The birds' mating systems include a number of interesting arrangements starting with the traditional one male and one female pairing, but also including more exotic pairings, such as one male with two females, two males with one female, and several males with several females. Not only do these birds' flexible social arrangements arise from selfish individuals competing to maximize their own reproductive success, but another species -- the cuckoo (a brood parasite) -- adds a confounding variable to the dunnocks' reproductive efforts. Since TwitchEd wrote so engagingly about this in the comments section accompanying this original mystery bird, I'll quote him:
These are are fairly quiet, unassuming birds. You'll often see them lurking underneath bushes or shuffling around flowerbeds, looking quite boring. But did you know they have riotous sex lives that might make Russell Brand blush?
We often think about birds living perfect lives as if in a Disney movie. They snuggle up together in their nest, have lots of fluffy babies and stay faithful for life, right? Not true, unfortunately.
These birds have adapted to make use of different breeding strategies. Both males and females want make sure their genes are passed on to the next generation. Where food is plentiful, territories need not be so big, and so there's less opportunity for overlap with those of other birds. Where life is tougher, the territories need to be bigger and that means more interaction with other members of its own species.
For females, that may mean mating with more than one male, in the hope that they'll both help rear her chicks.
Clearly, that doesn't suit the males. So before mating, they may try to remove a rival's sperm by pecking the female's rear end (the cloaca - through which both poo and eggs exit) and encourage her to eject it!
However, what works for one pair of dunnocks might not work for another. There are several different strategies they might use:
• A male paired with a female (monogamy)
• More than one male paired with the same female (polyandry)
• A male paired with more than one female (polygyny)
• 'Pairs' with two males and two females (polygynandry)
And it's all going on in your shrubbery...
In all, it makes for an impressive social life for these conservatively-attired birds. If these birds' reproductive behaviours interests you, I highly recommend these two fascinating and well-written books for further reading:
You are invited to review all of the daily mystery birds by going to their dedicated graphic index page.
If you have bird images, video or mp3 files that you'd like to share with a large and (mostly) appreciative international audience here at The Guardian, feel free to contact me to learn more.
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The worldwide rise in rhino poaching is forcing zoos and safari parks in Britain to adopt costly security measures
Opening the door to the animal house, passing a rhino on the way and patting the giraffe inside, Sarah Forsyth points out small white boxes that dot the walls. "Everywhere you look there's a detector or a motion sensor," she says, chuckling in front of one that presented the security firm with a peculiarly zoo-specific problem. "These are the ones the giraffe were licking."
She can laugh about it now, but two months ago, when Colchester zoo decided to put in place the £300,000 alarm system, Forsyth's overriding emotions were panic and disbelief.
As curator of the resident rhinos – five southern whites – she is responsible for their care and protection. So when the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) warned all zoos and safari parks that poachers could be targeting the animals for their horn, she was understandably appalled.
"Just the thought of coming in one morning and finding that was more than we could bear to think about, let alone actually facing the reality," she says, as Flossie, Otto, Emily, Cynthia and Zamba kick up dust in the winter sunshine. "After all these years, how can things be getting worse rather than better?"
The NWCU's warning – described by its head, Detective Inspector Brian Stuart, as "appropriate and proportionate" given the intelligence – followed months of mounting concern worldwide over the rise in rhino poaching, fuelled by a rumour that horn could cure cancer. Not only were European museums and zoos being robbed of their horns, but live rhinos in Africa and south-east Asia were being killed or maimed at a dizzying rate.
In 2007, an estimated 13 rhinos were killed in South Africa. Last year, the toll was at least 443. Both the Javan rhino in Vietnam and the western black in West Africa were declared extinct.
According to the police, the threat has become so acute that even live animals in UK captivity are at risk of attack. The fear is that organised criminals could imitate their counterparts in Africa by shooting rhinos with a tranquilliser gun and chainsawing off their horns down to the skull – a bloody and brutal process that usually proves fatal.
"It just goes to show how crazy the demand is," says Neil D'Cruze, of the World Society for the Protection of Animals. "Natural resources have been depleted to the point where they're having to look elsewhere to obtain it." Despite having no proven medicinal properties, rhino horn is now being sold on the global black market for as much as $65,000 a kilogram (£41,000). It is, Stuart says, a "commodity with an ever-rising price".
Dominated by serious organised crime, the illegal trade in wildlife is an increasingly complex and sophisticated black market, says D'Cruze. Rhino horn is the must-have derivative for consumers in parts of Asia and beyond, but those who police the trade in Britain see everything from tortoises to tiger bone, birds of prey to bear bile, for sale.
"As far as the endangered species trade is concerned, most people know about it but they think it's something that happens in Africa or Asia," says Sergeant Ian Knox, of the Metropolitan police wildlife crime unit. "What they don't realise is that because it's a trade there's a supply end and a demand end."
Jewellery made from elephant ivory; birds of prey exchanging hands for £50,000; leopard bone sold as an ingredient in traditional medicine: all of these have been reported to police in the UK in recent years, and all are signs of a booming trade.
On the contrary, Stuart says, the anecdotal evidence from abroad would suggest a rise in reported crime – although that could be down to greater public awareness and more concerted law enforcement, he adds.
Despite its size, many feel the illegal trade is not getting the attention or resources it deserves. "I don't think it's given enough prominence," says Stephanie Sanderson, of Chester zoo. "I don't think the general public realise how important it is and what the consequences are."
Sanderson says the issue has led her and her colleagues to believe that "a number of our species" – not just rhinos – are under threat. A man once tried to smuggle out a parrot, she recalls.
The issue of resources came to a crunch in London last year when it emerged that cuts were threatening the Met's specialist unit, which had only three members of staff as it was.
Warning that the illegal trade could flourish in London without the wildlife crime unit, the World Society for the Protection of Animals stepped forward with a "significant" sum of money that enabled Knox to expand his unit.
D'Cruze says the predicament was symptomatic of the prevailing attitude towards wildlife crime police. "The fact is that at the moment – and this isn't to do a disservice to the unit; I think this applies to all [wildlife crime] enforcement agencies throughout the world – they're seen as the Mulder and Scully of the police department," he says.
Knox and Stuart vigorously reject this claim; the latter insists that the NWCU has "had nothing but support".
But Stuart agrees there remains a perception of "high profit, low risk". The maximum sentence for trying to export a rhino horn out of the UK is seven years under the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979. "Balance that up," Stuart says, with a case reported this week of three rhino poachers sentenced to 25 years in jail in South Africa.
In the paddock at Colchester, rhino calf Zamba drinks alongside his mother, Cynthia. His existence is testament to the battle being fought to save the species. The two-year-old was born through artificial insemination in 2009, the first in the UK. Months earlier his father Simba's horns were stolen after he died of natural causes. The poacher, Donald Allison, from Preston, was caught trying to smuggle them through Manchester airport on his way to China.
The shock of that incident, Forsyth says, made Colchester even more determined to act. "It was bad enough to lose a horn off an animal that was already dead," she says. "But to do it to an animal that's alive – we can't even risk it."
Lizzy DaviesThis distinctive Australian mystery bird is named for one of its life history traits
Mystery Bird photographed in New South Wales, Australia. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]
Image: Marie-Louise Ng, 24 December 2011 (with permission) [velociraptorize].
Nikon D7000
Question: This distinctive Australian mystery bird is named for one of its life history traits. What trait is that? Can you identify this bird's taxonomic family and species?
The Rules:
1. Keep in mind that people live in zillions of different time zones, and some people are following on their smart phones. So let everyone play the game. Don't spoil it for everyone else by identifying the bird in the first 24 to 36 hours.
2. If you know the mystery bird's identity, answer the accompanying questions and provide subtle ID hints so others know that you know. Your hints may be helpful clues for less experienced players. Keep in mind that some hints may read like "inside jokes" and thus, may discourage others from participating.
3. Describe the key field marks that distinguish this species from any similar ones.
4. Comments that spoil others' enjoyment may be deleted.
The Game:
1. This is meant to be a learning experience where together we learn a few things about birds and about the process of identifying them (and maybe about ourselves, too).
2. Each mystery bird is usually accompanied by a question or two. These questions can be useful for identifying the pictured species, but may instead be used to illustrate an interesting aspect of avian biology, behaviour or evolution, or may be intended to generate conversation on other topics, such as conservation or ethics.
3. Thoughtful comments will add to everyone's enjoyment, and will keep the suspense going until the next teaser is published. Interesting snippets may add to the knowledge of all.
4. Each bird species will be demystified approximately 48 hours after publication.
You are invited to review all of the daily mystery birds by going to their dedicated graphic index page.
If you have bird images, video or mp3 files that you'd like to share with a large and (mostly) appreciative international audience here at The Guardian, feel free to contact me to learn more.
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University cites its First Amendment commitment in supporting its climate scientist Michael Mann's right to give lecture
In an uncharacteristically angry post at the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andy Revkin has hit out at a "shameful attack on free speech". It relates to a Facebook campaign which is calling on Pennsylvania State University to "disinvite" Professor Michael E. Mann, the director of its Earth System Science Center, from giving a lecture next week entitled: "Confronting the Climate Change Challenge."
The Facebook campaign has been initiated by a seemingly conjoined group called the Common Sense Movement/Secure Energy for America Political Action Committee. Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress has investigated the people behind it and describes it as a "coal-industry astroturf group". Here's a video from the Common Sense Movement's "I Am Coal" campaign, which gives an insight into its worldview...
The group argues on its page:
At a time when Penn State should be doing everything possible to regain its status as a bastion of truth and integrity, the last thing they should be doing is supporting someone of such questionable ethics and motives with our tax dollars.
There is no place for this brand of extreme political activism, disguised as academics, at Penn State now or in the future. University leadership should be ashamed for continuing to provide Mann with such high visibility – at our expense.
Revkin is particularly angry – quite rightly - at the group's templated letter it is asking supporters to send to "daily newspapers near you", which includes the accusation that Mann, one of the world's most high-profile climate scientists whose private emails were among those illegally released online in 2009, is "conspiring with his left-wing cronies to intimidate and silence those who would dare to question his intentions".
Revkin even took to Facebook himself, posting: "Antidemocratic, hateful, and coal-backed smear campaign against a scientist I've sometimes disagreed with but who has every right to state his case at Penn State or anywhere else."
The efforts of those behind the campaign of intimidation against Penn State appear to have come to nothing, though. Common sense (of the real variety) reigns, as a spokesman has just confirmed to me:
Penn State has a deep and profound commitment to the First Amendment and the principles of free speech and expression. Our role as a university is to serve as a marketplace of ideas and by allowing this talk we are protecting the civil liberties of our students, faculty and staff. There are no plans to cancel his speaking engagement.
Michael Mann's research has undergone several rigorous national reviews and investigations and in each case his work has been upheld.
In 2011, the National Science Foundation completed a review and upheld Mann's work. The NSF review was the second major investigation at the national level of his controversial research into climate change. In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences completed an inquiry into Mann's findings at the request of Congress. Again, his research was confirmed.
In 2010, Penn State conducted its own four-month investigation into allegations of research misconduct against Mann and a panel of five University faculty members from various fields determined that the scientist violated no professional standards in the course of his work.
The spokesman added that such a lecture would typically attract 300-400 people. On the question of security, he said: "We evaluate every event on campus from a security perspective and will determine if additional steps are warranted."
He added: "We have received only a handful of comments [about the lecture], and the majority of those are supporting free speech."
Leo HickmanSpherical objects discovered in Bournemouth garden found to be sodium polyacrylate, an absorbent polymer used in nappies
The suggested explanations for the mysterious blue balls that appeared in a Dorset garden have ranged from the unlikely — the eggs of a marine creature – to the downright bizarre – the bodily secretions of angels.
Scientists at Bournemouth University have announced they have solved the puzzle. There is no need to prepare a welcome for extra-terrestrials. The blue balls are almost certainly sodium polyacrylate or waterlock, an absorbent polymer used in nappies and by florists and gardeners as a way of keeping soil moist.
It is still not clear how the substance came to be in the garden but it may be that a heavy hailstorm that seemed to make the balls appear had quickly saturated the sodium polyacrylate crystals, and so caused them to rapidly increase in size.
Earlier this week, Bournemouth resident Steve Hornsby reported how the sky above his house turned dark then yellow. A violent hailstorm followed and afterwards he found odd gel-like blue balls in his garden.
A jar of the crystals was taken to the school of applied sciences at the university, which has spent the week trying to work out what they are.
Scientists quickly established the crystals were not a life-form. They then drew the water out of them by slowly drying them in an oven and used FTIR spectroscopy, which measures how a sample absorbs or transmits light.
This established the balls' "molecular fingerprint" – the procedure often used in crime scenes to establish the nature of a particular substance.
Research assistant Josie Pegg confirmed the substance was sodium polyacrylate. It is sometimes used in gardening or agriculture to improve soil – as well as being used in nappies.
The puzzle of how the substance got into Hornsby's garden remains but, admittedly, it is not the greatest of mysteries. "Perhaps someone was having clear-out and chucked them over the fence," said Pegg. The heavy rain may have turned effectively invisible dry crystals into the gel-like blue balls.
Pegg did not think her work has been a waste of time. "It has attracted lots of interest and been a break from the norm," she said. But next week she will go back to her normal day job, studying aquatic ecology.
Steven MorrisSquabbles at a 'vulture restaurant', a rescued orangutan and her baby and wintry scenes are among the pick of this week's images from the natural world
Virus experts in the US say outbreak of genetically engineered bird flu could be worst influenza pandemic in history
A group of the leading virus experts in the US has called for new, permanent restrictions on research in the face of a new genetically engineered flu virus that could kill half the population of the world.
Scientists are currently observing a 60-day moratorium on research into the bird flu virus, after two groups found a way to make it infectious through airborne transmission.
An outbreak of this virus could be worse than the 1918 Spanish flu that killed tens of millions of people, warned Michael Osterholm – who has led research into previous dangerous outbreaks – at a public meeting on censorship in science in New York on Thursday night.
"Frankly, I don't want a virus out there that, even if it was 20 times less lethal, would still be the worst influenza pandemic in history," he said.
Professor Osterholm is a member of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which in December asked the journals Science and Nature not to publish the full research on the virus.
Bird flu, or H5N1, has so far infected 583 people according to World Heath Organisation figures, mostly in South East Asia, and killed 344 – though it is believed the proportion of fatalities to infections might be lower, as some may have caught the virus but not been hospitalised.
It can currently only be caught by close exposure to infected birds.
However, the new research demonstrated that the virus could be mutated, through genetic manipulation and other methods, into a form that was transmitted between ferrets in airborne droplets from coughs and sneezes.
Ferrets are considered a good model for human-to-human virus transmission.
The NSABB said this posed a huge risk to the world.
"If this virus were to escape by error or by terror, we must ask whether it would cause a pandemic," said NSABB chair Paul Keim in an interview published in Nature this week.
"The probability is unknown, but it is not zero. There are many scenarios to consider, ranging from mad lone scientists, desperate despots and members of millennial doomsday cults, to nation states wanting mutually assured destruction options, bioterrorists or a single person's random acts of craziness."
Professor Osterholm said he considered the new virus a worse threat than the return of smallpox.
"I wouldn't like to see smallpox get out of the lab, but if it did it wouldn't overly concern me," Osterholm said. "We could contain it. The same thing is true with Sars. But influenza would scare the hell out of me, because it is the most notorious, the 'Lion King' of transmission."
"Once it's out there, it's gone, it's worldwide."
However, he said the research could have positive results, such as finding a better vaccine, or improving virus detection in the early stages of a pandemic if it emerged naturally. He said virus surveillance at the moment was "like a whole lot of broken smoke alarms".
The meeting agreed that restricting research, and access to research data, would have bad consequences for science, because new advances often come from unexpected places.
Several speakers said the publication of redacted data should only be a temporary measure until a better solution was hit upon.
Professor Arturo Casadevall, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who is also on the NSABB board, said he had originally been against restricting research but had been persuaded it was necessary.
"If it is the worst case scenario half the people you know will die, and half the people you don't know will die," he said. "If it is two orders of magnitude (100 times) lower, you are looking at 7 million deaths.
"These viruses were generated in the laboratory … when these things get out and they recombine with existing strains, I think it will be very unpredictable, and this is a risk I think is very high."
However, he said research should continue in a more regulated way.
"Since 1997, we have had sporadic occurrences of this organism," he said. "We did not know it had the potential for mammal to mammal transmission. Now that we know, humanity is under threat and this work needs to go on."
Dr Laurie Garrett, from the Council on Foreign Relations, said any move to control or limit research into influenza would also limit the ability to protect against it if it emerged naturally.
But she added that the more laboratories around the world worked on the virus, the greater the risk it would escape – even in the US, there were hundreds of breaches of quarantine in the highest-level labs.
And she said the spectre of a biological weapon based on the virus was raised "very, very high".
She warned that if scientists agreed a way to move forward among themselves, without consulting more widely, they may discover the issue will "blow up" once the public is made more aware of it.
Alan Ruldolph, from the US Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said information on the virus was "relatively uncontrollable", and the focus on bird flu should be on how to prepare for and respond to an outbreak.
It is estimated more than 1,000 scientists already know the details of the censored research.
Professor Peter Palese from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine said the moratorium should end and research should continue.
He said the risk of the virus spreading to humans, and the level of danger it posed, had been vastly overestimated.
"All evidence we have now suggests H5N1 isn't easily transmitted to humans, and these experiments don't make it more likely," he said. "When do you stop being afraid?"
Virus experts from around the world are to meet in Geneva this month, at a meeting of the World Health Organisation aimed at assessing the risks, and benefits, of research into the bird flu virus.
This is my "quick skim impression" of three books -- a field guide to birds of New Zealand, and two Lab Lit novels -- and an audio CD of birdsongs of the northern Neotropics
One of many shelves in GrrlScientist's library [library-ise].
I sometimes receive books in the mail, as review copies from publishers, as gifts from far-away friends and rarely, as my personal purchases (although I try to reserve my book purchases for once-a-year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so my purchases are usually transported on the train and wheeled home as a small moveable library, not delivered singly to my door by a postman). Because I am an unapologetic bibliophile, bookworm and a science/nature book reviewer, I like to let people know what books are available out there based on what I've received. Unfortunately, you are all so far away, so instead of hosting a book party in my flat, I'll do the next best thing: I'll host a book party on my blog each Friday of the week when books arrive by giving you my quick "first impression" of these books and relevant links so you can get a copy of the book if you wish:
A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand by Julian Fitter and Don Merton (Princeton University Press; 2012) [Amazon UK; Amazon US].
I generally avoid using photographic field guides as my main field guide because the photographs are not -- cannot be -- consistent from one to the next, thereby making comparisons impossible, but I do make extensive use of photographic field guides to check my field IDs. But that said, I do rely on photographic field guides when they are the most accurate and up-to-date books available. According to Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, "this is probably the best photographic guide to the birds of New Zealand currently available." So I am very pleased to add this excellent new Princeton University Press title to my "mystery birds reference library" for use with the daily mystery birds.
More about A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand:
I also received a couple novels this past week -- lab lit novels.
Lab .. wha? you ask.
Allow me to explain: there are lots of novels about police engaged in policing, detectives detecting, lawyers lawyering, and medical doctors doctoring. But what about scientists ... erm, scientisting? I don't mean stories about mad scientists trying to take over the world -- those characters are rare in real life but they certainly do clog the literature. Instead, I am talking about novels about the "99 percent" of scientists who are living believable lives and who are devoted to doing credible research.
This genre is known as "lab lit". As a scientist, I can safely say this is my favourite sort of book to read, and in fact, I've devoured every lab lit novel out there. Ok, I've read almost everything out there as it turns out because I recently heard that there are two lab lit novels that I'd neither read nor even heard of. Oh, happy day!
As soon as I heard this happy news, I sent email to the author, Steve Caplan, asking for a review copy of each title. Much to my delight, I didn't have to grovel and both books quickly arrived in the mail. Personally autographed. Double happy day!
The first book, Welcome Home, Sir by Steve Caplan (Anaphora Literary Press; 2011) [Amazon UK; Amazon US], is hot-off-the-presses and is the reason I heard about Steve Caplan's novels in the first place. Briefly, this novel is about Dr. Ethan Meyer, a biochemistry professor who teaches and conducts scientific research at an American academic institution. Outwardly, he is a poster-child for success but inwardly, he feels as though he is coming apart at the seams, as he struggles to deal with his mental health issues.
The other book, Matter Over Mind (2010) [Amazon UK; Amazon US], is the first lab lit novel published by Steve Caplan. This is the story about Dr. Steve Miller, a 38-year old biomedical researcher, who is struggling for tenure, searching for a cure for bipolar disorder (manic-depression), and for balance in his life -- not necessarily in that order.
I am not saying very much about either of these books because I am fairly certain both will rate a more detailed full-length review after I've finished reading them, and I don't want to spoil that for you.
Last but not least, I also received an audio CD of birdsongs. Some of you may recall me mentioning that I've got a rather extensive collection of audio birdsong CDs, so this is a welcome addition. Not only does it add more birdsongs to my audio library, but I also have a lot of really high-quality CDs to compare it to.
This CD, Birdsongs of the Northern Neotropics: Southern Mexico to Costa Rica by Scott Connop [Turaco Nature: 2011; NHBS (UK); Buteo Books (USA)], would be especially fun to play at a book party, if only you all were close enough to visit with your own armload of book (and CD) treasures. This CD includes the songs and calls of 99 species of birds that occur somewhere from southern Mexico through Costa Rica. Scott Connop recorded these bird sounds at 4 locations in Mexico, 3 locations in Belize, 1 location in Guatemala and 12 locations in Costa Rica. Since there is a strong bias for Costa Rican species, you will especially want this CD if you are planning trips to either Oaxaca or Guerrero, or a visit to the Mayan ruins of Belize and Tikal.
This audio CD includes some of the more obscure lowland forest birds found in these regions, such as the orange-breasted falcon, tawny-chested flycatcher, keel-billed motmot and wrenthrush, along with many better-known species, such as the tinamous, quail-doves, owls, leaftossers, antpittas, wrens, and numerous flycatchers. The recording length for each species' calls and songs is reasonable and the sound quality was good enough to delight my flock of birds as I listened to this CD one very cold evening.
Birdsongs of the Northern Neotropics: Southern Mexico to Costa Rica includes one audio CD, shrink-wrapped in a slim CD case. The cover of the accompanying 6-page booklet features a colour painting of an ochre-breasted antpitta, Grallaricula flavirostris. Like most audio CDs, the collection of species included is not exhaustive, but is reasonably inclusive. The common and scientific name of each species is said aloud at the beginning of the audio file, and is printed in the booklet along with the location where the recording was made. Font size in the booklet is quite small; reading it may require a magnifying glass.
I was pleased that this CD reached me in excellent condition; neither the Canadian nor the German postal systems managed to crush it or its case into dust en route.
That's all for this week!
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We're throwing open our doors on 24 and 25 March to host talks and debates about the frontiers of particle physics, neuroscience and the law, and host masterclasses on podcasting, journalism, web tools and photography
Do you have a burning question about the Higgs boson, supersymmetry or the standard of the coffee in the canteen at the home of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva? On Sunday 25 March as part the Guardian's Open Weekend, three scientists at the cutting edge of physics will be on hand to answer all the most basic or esoteric questions that may have built up in your mind (where they might well be burning a hole) over the past year of incredible research results.
Led by the Guardian's Ian Sample and our superstar physics blogger, Prof Jon Butterworth, this is your chance to get a possible explanation for those strange, apparently faster-than-light neutrinos, and find out what happens after the LHC has finally found the Higgs particle. It may be just the start of the many wonders that will emerge from the collider in the coming decades.
Physicists Dr Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool and Prof Ben Allanach of the University of Cambridge will also be on hand to guide you through the new frontier in our understanding of the fabric of the universe.
Continuing the physics theme we have the celebrated author and broadcaster, Jim Al-Khalili, who will be interviewed on stage on Saturday afternoon. Regular readers of the Guardian's science pages will know we're big fans of Prof Al-Khalili's work. His history of Arabic science, television programmes on electricity, atoms and chaos, and Radio 4 interviews of scientists will provide plenty of talking points as the good professor takes us on a tour of his life and work.
Hopefully we can also prod him to reveal more about his upcoming projects, including a much-anticipated new book that examines how the ideas of quantum mechanics are starting to be used to explain biological processes. Watch this space.
For anyone who like a bit of ethical debate with their science, Sunday's session on neuroscience and the law might fit the bill. Geraint Rees, director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, will discuss how our ever-improving understanding of the brain might impact on the way we treat defendants in the courts. Chaired by Matthew Taylor of the RSA, this discussion will focus on how neuroscience fits into the needs of the law.
What constitutes sufficient legal evidence and what role can neuroscience play in building the cases of prosecutors (and defendants)? Will brain scans one day detect deception in someone accused of murder or determine whether a claimant is malingering rather than feeling genuine pain when suing for a personal injury? The ethicist John Harris and barrister Michael Mansfield QC will make their cases.
Other friends of the Guardian appearing over the weekend include David Miliband, Polly Toynbee, Charlie Brooker and Ian McEwan.
Science and tech fans will find a whole range of delights on offer during the two-day festival, including how to make podcasts and videos, guides on web tools and journalism, and even a masterclass in photography.
We hope to bring you some teasers from the sessions over the coming weeks, either in this blog or on the Science Weekly podcast, so keep an eye out, get involved in the discussions and, hopefully, we will see you in March.
Alok JhaThe worst spate of dolphin strandings in a decade will be brought to the attention of Congress
Scientists in Cape Cod are trying to determine what is causing dolphins to swim dangerously close to shore, with more than 100 becoming stranded in the last three weeks.
Members of Congress are due to be briefed on Friday about the strandings, the worst such event in more than a decade. Volunteers are maintaining coastal vigils and trying to get the animals back to sea.
"What is different about this particular event is that instead of having one discrete event, it is this string of ongoing strandings that started on 12 January and is just continuing," said Katie Moore, who manages marine mammal rescue operations for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "It's day after day after day."
Moore is due to brief members of Congress on the strandings, which have been concentrated along a 25-mile stretch of coast that runs between the towns of Dennis and Wellfleet in Massachusetts.
It's not unheard of for dolphins to swim too close to shore, said Teri Rowles, who heads the marine mammals division of NOAA, the government agency that monitors oceans. "The Cape Cod area is a hot spot for mass strandings," she said.
But it's rare for such events to be confined to a single species – the common dolphin, in this case – and it was the worst such stranding since 1998.
Of the 111 that have come ashore, 81 were found dead, or died soon after they were stranded. Rescue workers, trundling along through the muck with specially adjusted stretchers, have eventually been able to return 30 surviving dolphins to the sea, Moore said.
But they remain baffled as to what caused the animals to swim so dangerously close to shore. Theories include the dolphins being lost, confused by changing tides or potentially diseased.
"In the ones we are finding alive, we are not seeing any consistent diseases or anything indicating a pattern as to why they might be stranding," said Moore. The dolphins were male and female, young and fullgrown. Most appeared healthy, although lab tests are still being processed.
There have been no severe winter storms: as in much of the north-east, the weather has been unusually warm for this time of year.
But Rowles suggested the animals could have become confused by changes in water temperature or tides that led them into Cape Cod Bay, or by the irregular features of the coastline.
There is also the possibility the dolphins could have been victims of their own natural sociability, simply following one another to their doom.
"These are very intelligent animals with very large brains, but there is something about the way they bond to one another," Moore said.
Those strong bonds serve the dolphins well in the wild. When they get into trouble, the dolphins stick together. But Moore added that social cohesion could sometimes be deadly. "That bond becomes a liability when they get into shallow water, and that may be why they mass strand."
Suzanne GoldenbergPeople are more likely to give in to urge to tweet or check email than other cravings, say US researchers
Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.
They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.
A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory.
The results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.
The participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength (up to irresistible), whether it conflicted with other desires and whether they resisted or went along with it. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" reported.
"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," said Hofmann. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting "pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations".
The researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest "self-control failure rates" were recorded with media. "Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money."
The academics, who included one each from Florida State University and Minnesota University, said the subjective reporting of desire was relatively low for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, apparently challenging "the stereotype of addiction as driven by irresistibly strong desires".
They added: "Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people's identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked."
Hofmann told the Guardian: "Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not 'cost much' to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.
"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time.".
Hofmann added: "We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them – they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for."
Würtzburg had been the testing ground because he had worked there as an assistant professor until recently.
What do nuclear reactors, marine diatoms and Monet have in common?
This week's element is cadmium, represented by the atomic symbol, Cd, and the atomic number, 48. It is a ductile silvery metal that is special because it is corrosion resistant. Cadmium once had a variety of uses but because it is highly toxic and readily accumulates in living things, its use is being phased out, although it still is in demand by the electronics industry.
Named for cadmia (also known as calamine), a naturally occurring form of zinc carbonate, cadmium was originally discovered independently and simultaneously by several Germans after heating cadmia. Cadmium is rare in the earth's crust, but typically co-occurs in zinc ores so it is a common byproduct of zinc production. It sometimes is a byproduct of copper and lead production as well.
Cadmium has a wide number of uses, only a few of which I briefly mention here. For example, it is used in nuclear reactors to absorb neutrons released by nuclear fission; it is a critical component of rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries and cadmium-telluride solar panels; it is a stabilizer in PVC and adds fatigue resistance to many solders.
Beautiful ... cadmium is well-known to artists and art lovers because it formed the basis for several very popular pigments that range in colour from brilliant yellow, orange, and red through brown, depending upon the proportions of selenium and sulfur that are also added to the paint. Cadmium-based paints were celebrated for their vibrant and long-lasting colours, and the two most popular of these pigments were cadmium red (cadmium selenide) and cadmium yellow (cadmium sulfide). Monet, one of my favourite painters, typically used cadmium yellow pigments, for example. But cadmium is/also was used as a pigment in many other substances, ranging from plastics and rubbers to vitreous enamels.
... but deadly, cadmium is very toxic like its "big sister", mercury, which is found immediately below it in the periodic table. Cadmium has no known biological role in most living things, but it mimics the role of its "little sister", zinc, which is an essential trace element. Cadmium bioaccumulates in a number of food crops, particularly rice, lettuce, spinach, cabbage and turnip. For these reasons, it is important that all cadmium-containing items, such as batteries, are properly disposed of to avoid contaminating the environment.
Cadmium is utilised by the marine diatom, the unicellular microalga Thalassiosira weissflogii, in a cadmium-based carbonic anhydrase enzyme that catalyses the conversion between carbon dioxide and carbonic acid. It apparently has a yet-to-be-discovered biological role in the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, which absorbs and concentrates cadmium to high levels, even when growing in cadmium-poor soils.
In vertebrates, cadmium accumulates in the kidneys and to a lesser extent in liver, where it remains for as long as 30 years, causing irreversible damage. Cadmium accumulation causes cancer in some animals, although the link between cadmium and cancer is weak in humans.
If you are a smoker, you should also know that nicotine plants accumulate cadmium in their leaves, which is then transferred to you whilst puffing away. According to a 53-page review of cadmium research that was published in 1998, on average, smokers have 4-5 times higher blood cadmium concentrations and 2-3 times higher kidney cadmium concentrations than do non-smokers [free PDF]. As much as 50% of the inhaled cadmium in a cigarette is absorbed through the lungs and smoking is a significant source of cadmium in humans, especially in the EU, where most other uses of cadmium have been severely reduced or stopped altogether.
Here is the professor, telling us a little more about cadmium:
Visit PeriodicVideos's YouTube channel [video link].
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Video journalist Brady Haran is the man with the camera and the University of Nottingham is the place with the chemists. You can follow Brady on twitter @periodicvideos and the University of Nottingham on twitter @UniNottingham
You've already met these elements:
Silver: Ag, atomic number 47
Palladium: Pd, atomic number 46
Rhodium: Rh, atomic number 45
Ruthenium: Ru, atomic number 44
Technetium: Tc, atomic number 43
Molybdenum: Mo, atomic number 42
Niobium: Ni, atomic number 41
Zirconium: Zr, atomic number 40
Yttrium: Y, atomic number 39
Strontium: Sr, atomic number 38
Rubidium: Rr, atomic number 37
Krypton: Kr, atomic number 36
Bromine: Br, atomic number 35
Selenium: Se, atomic number 34
Arsenic: As, atomic number 33
Germanium: Ge, atomic number 32
Gallium: Ga, atomic number 31
Zinc: Zn, atomic number 30
Copper: Cu, atomic number 29
Nickel: Ni, atomic number 28
Cobalt: Co, atomic number 27
Iron: Fe, atomic number 26
Manganese: Mn, atomic number 25
Chromium: Cr, atomic number 24
Vanadium: V, atomic number 23
Titanium: Ti, atomic number 22
Scandium: Sc, atomic number 21
Calcium: Ca, atomic number 20
Potassium: K, atomic number 19
Argon: Ar, atomic number 18
Chlorine: Cl, atomic number 17
Sulfur: S, atomic number 16
Phosphorus: P, atomic number 15
Silicon: Si, atomic number 14
Aluminium: Al, atomic number 13
Magnesium: Mg, atomic number 12
Sodium: Na, atomic number 11
Neon: Ne, atomic number 10
Fluorine: F, atomic number 9
Oxygen: O, atomic number 8
Nitrogen: N, atomic number 7
Carbon: C, atomic number 6
Boron: B, atomic number 5
Beryllium: Be, atomic number 4
Lithium: Li, atomic number 3
Helium: He, atomic number 2
Hydrogen: H, atomic number 1
Here's a wonderful interactive Periodic Table of the Elements that is just really really fun to play with!
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