Events

Dear All,

I have just got back from Cheltenham and upon reflection I am very pleased to have taken the time to go.

Attending talks outside of even my branch of science let alone my area of science allowed dormant recesses of my brain to be reawakened. I particularly enjoyed being challenged ethically and morally by talks such as the ‘Vegetative State,’ nasally by ‘Insect Communications’ on insect pheromones and on my ability to think infinitely by ‘Life in the Cosmos.’

Even the less memorable talks would have been really good talks anywhere else without having to be compared to such excellent talks.

An association with UCL seemed to crop up in almost every lecture and Dr. Andrea Sella (UCL Chemistry) and Prof. Mark Maslin (UCL geography) seemed to be everywhere.

It was clear through all the talks that it is not necessarily what you are trying to say that makes a talk interesting but how you say it. In the right hands the common rush (juncus effusus) could become the most fascinating plant you have ever heard of and in the wrong hands the majesty of space a snore inducing subject. The power and buzz of good communication was everywhere and has inspired me to try to improve my own communication.

Anyway back to communicate with my computer. I hope that it has been good, while I have been away.

Your Computational Chemist

Dear All,

Today I was struck by the ethical and moral issues raised in the talk ‘Vegetative state’ where Adrian Owen talked about his latest research.

New research has been carried out using MRI scanners on patients who had been clinically diagnosed as being in a ‘vegetative state’. The MRI scanners can show which parts of the brain are active. A ‘vegetative state’ is defined as wakefulness without awareness. A person in a vegetative state may therefore have their eyes open but do not know about the environment around them. They are unable to follow instructions such as ‘Please raise your hand now’.

It has now been shown that some people who appear to be in this state are aware. In an MRI scanner the patient is asked to think of ‘tennis’ or ‘moving between rooms in their house’. The active parts of the brain are very different when thinking about these two things and the people in an apparently ‘vegetative state’ could switch between them when asked showing them to be aware. They then moved to asking yes and no questions with ‘tennis’ for yes and ‘moving through rooms of the house’ for no.

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Dear All,

Today I was expecting talks on food but was most inspired by the talk ‘Snake Bites’. The talk was introduced by Mark Maslin (UCL Department of Geography) and in doing so he let it be known that he had helped to choose the speaker, David Warrell.

‘Snake Bites’ was paradoxical in nature as the snake is full of contradictions. It is on the one hand a beautiful creature admired and even venerated by some and yet causes a strong and sometimes irrational fear in others.
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Dear All,

My first Cheltenham festival day of lectures seemed full of fears for the future. Mark Maslin (head of the Department of Geography at UCL) chaired ‘The Limits of Our Planet’ and the closely related ‘Acid Acidification’, and then Andrea Sella (UCL Department of Chemistry) was the experimental star of ‘Endangered Elements.’

‘The Limits of our Planet’ highlighted that we have already passed the sustainable limit of our planet in terms of the rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and the nitrogen cycle. More than 100 species for every million become extinct at the moment, which in my mind is 100 above the ‘acceptable level’, but the experts have put the ‘acceptable level’ at 10. Climate change was measured on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which gets enough media attention for everyone to know that it needs reducing. The nitrogen cycle is less well known and the amount of nitrogen that humans take out of the atmosphere to use as fertiliser is at 121 million tonnes per year compared to the sustainable level of 35.

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