OneGuyFromBarlick

BBC, 12 August 2014
Purer-than-pure silicon solves problem for quantum tech
By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News
In a quantum computer, pure silicon is not enough - only one specific type of silicon atom will do. The good stuff is silicon-28, and physicists in the US have worked out how to produce it with 40 times greater purity than ever before. Even better, they can do it in the lab instead of relying on samples made ten years ago in a huge, repurposed plutonium plant in St Petersburg. This promises to solve a serious supply problem in quantum computing research....
More here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28632263

Thanks for that Tiz. Big Harry told me many years ago that Quantum Computing would change the face of the globe and I haven't heard much about it lately. I wonder whether I will live long enough to see it?

BBC, 15 August 2014
`Thousand-strong robot swarm throws shapes, slowly'
"Engineers in the US have built a swarm of 1,000 little robots that can shuffle into specific formations on command. Each of the identical robots is given a picture of the required shape, and then they work together to make it happen. It takes up to 12 hours, but then this is the biggest throng of robots ever built and studied in this way. Inspired by biological examples, like cells forming organs or ants building bridges, the work could help develop self-assembling tools and structures...."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28739371

A bit like the infinite number of monkeys eventually producing a bible!
I have a question Doctor Barnes.... To your knowledge, is there any truth in the widely held belief that tradesmen and women like butchers could get fat by absorbing animal fat in the course of their job?

Stanley wrote:....To your knowledge, is there any truth in the widely held belief that tradesmen and women like butchers could get fat by absorbing animal fat in the course of their job?

No. Some fat can permeate into the surface of the skin of course (the basis of using oils & fats in cosmetics to `soften the skin') but I don't believe we could absorb sufficient to have any effect on our adipose tissue. It would have to pass through the layers of skin, through the walls of blood vessels, and be transported in the blood to the adipose tissue (`body fat'). Skin doesn't possess the mechanism for absorbing and transporting fat in blood. In contrast, fat (triglycerides) in our gut is emulsified, then broken down to smaller molecules (monoglycerides and fatty acids) which can then be absorbed by the cells of the gut wall. Once in the cell these molecules are used to synthesise new triglycerides which are made into lipoproteins, then absorbed into the lymphatic vessels and pass eventually into the blood circulation. If we could absorb fat direct from the skin into adipose tissue then men would be stuffed full of all that oil and grease that they've handled over a lifetime and women would be full of all the cosmetic creams and the like that they've used on their skin!

Thanks Peter. I was always sceptical about it. I know where to file the information now!

as apprentices we were advised never to place oily rags in overall trouser pockets because of possible groin cancer ?

The oily rags would be a different issue - petroleum oils contain small amounts of carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene. These are small, volatile molecules (which is why you can smell them) and they can penetrate clothing and skin, so the advice not to put oily rags in a trouser pocket was probably sensible. The danger wouldn't necessarily be cancer of that local area of the body, it could be quite remote from there. Carcinogens usually have `target' organs or target tissues in the body where they do their damage and this target can be distant from where the chemical gains entry.

On the other hand, we shouldn't be too paranoid about oily rags and the like. Most of us, especially men, have been exposed to petroleum oils to varying degrees. There are lots of `enemy' chemicals in the natural environment and over the millennia the animals, including our ancestors, have adapted repair mechanisms for dealing with them.

Mule spinners used to be subject to cancer of the scrotum from the fine mist of oil thrown off by the spindles at waist height. It was eventually identified, the oil changed and more frequent changes of clothing advocated. Another problem with waste and rags soaked with organic oils in the mill, whale and linseed oils mainly, was that in bulk they could spontaneously combust and so 'sweeps', the oil contaminated waste from Loom-sweeping were always stored in a fireproof building separate from the main building. So your instructors were right Bodge, never put oily rags near your knackers!

Apparently, men doing the same mule spinning job in the USA and getting the same soaking with oil didn't get scrotal cancer, even though the oil was petroleum in origin. The difference is claimed to be that in the UK the same machines were lubricated with Scottish shale oil which contained more of the coal tar type of chemicals.

Very likely correct Tiz. The oil was very thin and always described as 'spindle oil'. The shale oil was thin enough to be used for oil lamps and as it was often associated geologically with coal I can well imagine it having more phenols in it. The by-product from coal gasification was scrubbed with water and produced some very nasty but useful chemicals. It was very common in those days for people with respiratory ailments to be taken on top of the retorts and made to inhale the fumes that escaped from the charging holes. I have references in the LTP to this being very common and the workers assisted mothers with young children. The same belief was common about the fumes from the gas tar boilers used on road works and hence came what I believe are the apocryphal stories of babies falling into the hot tar.

See THIS for the latest research into how Tuberculosis moved round the world. It looks as though the early European settlers weren't the guilty parties in introducing the disease to North America.

I like the way science is increasingly used to fine tune and improve our understanding of history, and the TB work is a good example. Another recent example is a British archaeologist/scientist who has been using the new LIDAR scanning method (as seen on Time Team!) to `look beneath' the ground surface and reveal what other geophysics scanning techniques miss. She's not alone in using the method but the interesting aspect of her research is that she's using it to reveal many Nazi concentration camps than we hadn't known about, and more detail about the ones we did know existed. It's not only good archaeology but it's reinforcing the evidence of the Holocaust and helping to defeat those nutters who claim it never happened.
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There are concerns about another possible volcanic eruption in Iceland. It's located under the Vatnajokull glacier and the reports says: "Authorities say any eruption in the volcano, which sits under an ice cap, could result in flooding of the area north of the glacier. The volcano was said to be stable on Wednesday but scientists warned that it is big enough to disrupt air traffic over the Atlantic if an eruption does occur."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28870969

Many years ago when I was working with English Heritage in the Lake District I said that one day we would be able to scan the ground and pick up Stone Age footpaths. The experts laughed at me and said it was a pipe dream. They said the same thing in 1980 when I said we should computerise the LTP transcripts.... not a dry seat in the house! Some people can see further into millstones than others...

BBC, 27 August 2014
`Iceland volcano: New quakes raise concern over large eruption'
A volcanic system close to Iceland's Bardarbunga's volcano was hit by a magnitude 4.5 earthquake in the early hours of Wednesday. It adds to concerns that magma from Bardarbunga could feed into the nearby Askja volcano. British and Icelandic scientists say that 50 million cubic metres of molten rock has moved in a 24 hour period. If it continues to head north, it could link up with the Askja system and trigger a large eruption. Scientists working in the area have said that they will be withdrawing from the exclusion zone on Wednesday after they have deployed some more instruments."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28943708

Scientists who study volcanoes have a fanatical interest and take many risks. When they decide to leave it's time to put on the hard hats! For all the research and monitoring nobody really knows what will happen with this volcano. All we can do is watch the unfolding events - this is Nature at work, proving who's in charge!

And we kid ourselves that we are in charge......

There was something about humans and neanderthals on the radio this morning and it referred to humans as being the species "in charge of the planet", or some similar phrase. If I were a rat, shark, termite, ant, cockroach, water bear or one of a number of other species I might wish to argue with that claim - they may have less obvious control over the planet but they'll probably still be here even if we humans are annihilated by nuclear war or global warming.

Water bears, or tardigrades, are small (about 1 mm) 8-legged animals renowned for being robust. Wikipedia says about them: "..tardigrades can withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 10 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce." Not bad, eh!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

It reminds me of Hitch-hiker's Guide in which Adams postulated that mice were running the show....

See this LINK for a report on the World anti-doping Agency's efforts to find a test to detect athletes using Xenon and Argon to raise the red blood cell count in their system, this makes them more competitive.

An interesting fact. If the surface of our planet Earth was smooth - instead of having mountains, valleys and ocean trenches - it would be covered in water to a depth of 4 kilometres. If we didn't have plate tectonics, with it's associated mountain building, volcanoes and earthquakes, there wouldn't be any land for animals to live on. They could have evolved in the sea, to fly in the air and to live on ice floes, but there would be no `land' as we know it.

Tizer wrote: but there would be no `land' as we know it.

I'm not sure about this. The Earth isn't a perfect sphere.
Mean radius 6371.0 km
Equatorial radius 6378.1 km
Polar radius 6356.8 km
The water should flow towards the poles therefore there should be a dry belt round the middle?

Everybody knows it's flat......

What happens at high & low tides ?

Plaques, the slight flattening of the sphere at the poles is due to the centrifugal force `throwing outwards' the equatorial region (possible because the earth's interior is largely molten rock and iron rather than solid). The water on the Earth's surface is subject to the same force and would follow the same shape.

Bodger, the high tide is caused by the sea being drawn upwards by the moon's gravity, creating a bulge of water on the Earth's surface*. As the moon and Earth rotate the bulge moves around the globe. This bulge would still occur if Earth had a smooth surface covered with 4 kilometres depth of water. We'd need a much bigger moon to create a tide big enough to expose land under that 4 km of sea!

*Actually it's two bulges, one facing the moon and the other on the opposite side of the Earth. I've copied the following text because it explains the phenomenon much better than I can:
"Water on the opposite side of Earth facing away from the Moon also bulges outward (high tide), but for a different and interesting reason: in reality, the Moon and the Earth revolve together around a common gravitational center between them, or center of mass. Here's a rough but helpful analogy: picture yourself swinging a heavy object attached to a rope around your body as you rotate. You have to lean back to compensate, which puts the center of mass between you and the object. With the Earth-Moon system, gravity is like a rope that pulls or keeps the two bodies together, and centrifugal force is what keeps them apart. Because the centrifugal force is greater than the Moon's gravitational pull, ocean water on the opposite side of the Earth bulges outward. "
http://www.moonconnection.com/tides.phtml

What an asset to the site this man is! I think he got you P!