Summer science bonanza

After its summer break OxSciBlog returns ready for the new academic year with highlights of Oxford science in the news over the last few weeks:

The camera-shy Bornean clouded leopard has, for the first time, been photographed in its natural habitat by a team including Susan Cheyne and colleagues from Oxford University's WildCRU, part of the Department of Zoology.

Susan, you'll recall, supplied us with regular updates about her expedition to study agile gibbons in Indonesian Borneo. In other work she and a conservation team at Sebangau National Park snapped the rare and elusive feline using an automated camera trap. As BBC Online and The Telegraph reported, confirmation of its presence highlights the need to protect the region's habitat.

Whose hand? 
Elusive animals are hard to capture but what about those elusive tricks of the mind? Lorimer Moseley from Oxford's Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics  and colleagues have discovered that healthy volunteers can be tricked into believing that a rubber hand was their own rather than their real hidden limb.

ABC News Online explain that the team found the 'trick' caused temperature in the real hidden hands to fall, a change that did not occur in the rest of the healthy volunteer's body. As New Scientist comment, understanding the mechanisms involved is important as disowning an arm or a leg  is a common symptom of stroke anorexia and schizophrenia.

Breaking the waves 
Elsewhere a wave turbine shaped rather like the blades of a lawnmower could be a great leap forward in renewable energy, according to Alok Jha writing in The Guardian. The turbine (Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine - Thawt) developed by Martin Oldfield and a team from Oxford's Department of Engineering Science, would have blades 10m in diameter and 60m long if scaled up to full size. 

These cylindrical rotors roll with the ebb and flow of the tide, capturing more energy than conventional windmill-like turbines and could be strung together across a channel. Two rotors joined together could produce up to 12 megawatts of power, enough to heat up to 12,000 homes.

Fighting flu 
Medical matters hit the headlines as new trials of a vaccine that could protect against multiple types of flu are starting at Oxford University and could pave the way for a 'universal' flu injection that might help protect us against any future human flu pandemic.

Sarah Gilbert of Oxford's Jenner Institute led the team whose research was reported in (amongst others) The Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Sarah told the Daily Mail:  'With this vaccine, we could end up having pretty much everyone vaccinated - a situation more like measles, where you don't really need it any more.'

From the heart 
Meanwhile, research published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice revealed that four million people are at high risk of cardiovascular disease but don't know it yet.

Andrew Neil, the professor of epidemiology who led the Oxford University team, commented to The Independent's Jeremy Laurance: 'Our findings reinforce the need for a national cardiovascular risk assessment programme and we welcome the announcement by the Department of Health that plans are being put in place to institute primary care checks.' Whilst it was reassuring that 60 per cent of those at risk had been identified 'the challenge now is to identify the other 40 per cent.'

Reach for the stars 
I've often thought that the Galaxy Zoo project, led by a team including Oxford's Chris Lintott , deserved its own TV documentary as it has such a great story to tell about how members of the public can help to do some amazing science, epitomised by the recent discovery of a new class of astronomical object by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel.

So it was great to see that this month's Sky at Night is a Galaxy Zoo special featuring Chris, Hanny, Kate Land and friends. If you missed it you can still view the programme on BBC iPlayer here.

Back to the Bang 
Finally, spare a thought for life, the universe and everything in the build up to the switch on of the world's biggest ever physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In a comment piece for The Times, Oxford physicist Frank Close explained how the giant particle-smasher will take us back in time to when the Universe was less than a billionth of a second old.

Frank writes: 'we are but flotsam on a sea of “dark matter”, whose existence has been inferred from theoretical cosmology but remains undetected. What that dark sea consists of, how it was formed, why there is any matter at all rather than a hellish ferment of radiation, are unknown.'

It's just one mystery that we hope the LHC will shed light on.

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