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Gives you the inside track on science at Oxford University: the projects, the people and what's happening behind the scenes. Curated by Pete Wilton, science writer and OU Press Officer.

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Dementia carers: help needed

Jonathan Wood | 18 Nov 09 | 0 comments

Hospital care for dementia sufferers has been in the headlines this week but a recent report for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics has highlighted that carers of people with dementia need more support and advice.
Carers particularly need that advice and support in tackling the difficult ethical dilemmas that they face on a daily basis. These could be having to lie to a spouse to be able to get them to a day care centre, or worrying about a family member slipping in the bathroom - when going into the bathroom with them and intruding on their privacy can be very upsetting.
The report also highlighted that the services needed by people with dementia are often not available until a crisis occurs.
Professor Tony Hope, a psychiatrist with many years of experience of working with people with dementia and a Professor of Medical Ethics at The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, chaired the working party that produced the report. OxSciBlog caught up with him to learn more.
OxSciBlog: What were the main findings of your report?
Tony Hope: Ethical issues arise frequently for carers in their day-to-day care. These issues are often difficult and stressful, and carers receive little help with these ethical issues. We also found that there’s often a stigma associated with dementia that is still a major problem for those with dementia and their carers.
Many people with dementia receive little support after initial diagnosis is made. In addition, some professionals withhold information from family carers that such carers need in order to properly fulfil their caring role because of excessive concerns about patient confidentiality. What is more, the amount spent on dementia research in the UK appears small in comparison with its importance. For example, cancers are about three times as common as dementia but receive about ten times as much research funding.
OSB: What are the sort of ethical dilemmas that families and carers of people with dementia experience?
TH: Carers routinely face dilemmas, such as whether to tell the truth or not when the truth causes some upset or stops the person taking part in an activity that is enjoyed. There’s the difficulty of balancing the need to minimise risk with enabling the freedom of the person with dementia, for example where a person may be at some risk from wandering or from cooking for themselves.
Similarly, technology, such as tracking devices or home video monitoring, might reduce risk but also invades privacy. And importantly, the carer’s own needs and interests have to be balanced with those of the person with dementia.
OSB: What can be done to help support carers?
TH: More information and support from professionals is needed in dealing with ethical difficulties. Forums to enable carers to discuss the difficult decisions with each other would also help. And carers need to be seen as ‘partners in care’ by professionals – unless there is evidence to the contrary there should be a presumption of trust in carers by health and social care professionals and by care workers.
OSB: Can you give any examples of where this is working well?
TH: There are many examples where things are working well, but they are sporadic and only available in some places. There are about 20 Alzheimer cafes throughout the country where people with dementia, their carers, and local professionals can meet. Admiral nurses provide support to carers in their home, but are not widely available.
In some areas, a GP with a special interest looks after the residents with dementia in all the local care and nursing homes, while a few hospitals employ specialist nurses or doctors for those who come to A&E departments or require treatment not primarily related to the dementia. And there are a few meeting places where people with dementia can attend film showings or have access to a hairdresser without feeling awkward.
OSB: What would you like to see happen next?
TH: We would like to see more support for carers – for example through more trusting relationships with professionals, opportunities to meet and share experiences with other carers, and encouragement to consider their own needs too. People with dementia need improved access to leisure activities that others take for granted. Shops, restaurants and leisure centres have a legal duty to enable people with dementia to access their services.
We recommended that the Equality and Human Rights Commission should provide practical guidance on how to enable people with dementia to access services. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, a wide range of services can be accessed. This is not true in the case of dementia. This is in part because some of the services required for people with dementia are classified as social care, rather than health care. Dementia is a medical disorder and the availability of services should not be determined by the classification of the type of care needed.
(Full story)
Lessons from Nature's motors

Pete Wilton | 16 Nov 09 | 0 comments

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How does the machine that enables bacteria to swim actually work?
Matt Baker of Oxford's Department of Physics and colleagues are investigating this machine: known as the bacterial flagellar motor.
Matt recently became a NOISEmaker and is helping to explain the wonders of thrashing bacteria, as well as spoken word poetry, MCing and fencing, to school students (read his NOISE blog for more). I asked him about Nature's motors and his first taste of science communication:
OxSciBlog: How does the bacterial flagellar motor compare to manmade motors?
Matt: Baker: The Bacterial Flagellar Motor (BFM) is only 40 nanometres (nm) across, approximately one-thousand times smaller than the smallest speck of dust, and can rotate at up to 40,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). By comparison, Formula One engines are metres in size and are can operate at 20,000 rpm, and some jet engines rotate at 150,000 rpm.
The BFM can not only rotate very fast, it can also change direction of rotation in thousandths of a second, and it is this ability to switch the direction of rotation which enables bacteria to navigate their environment, moving in alternating ‘runs’ and ‘tumbles’ toward areas of high nutrient.
We aren’t able to make a motor anything like the BFM at the moment, in terms of size and structure, speed and function, and yet this motor assembles itself in the cell membrane and is responsible for one of the oldest sources of motility on the planet.
OSB: What are you hoping your investigations will reveal about it?
MB: Our group work on resolving the discrete steps that constitute this rotation. Rather than spinning smoothly, the rotation of the BFM is made up of tiny 14 degree steps, which, when the motor is moving fast, appear continuous.
Personally I have built a temperature controller to explore the motor’s rotation at high and low temperatures, to investigate how the speed and energy source change with temperature, and in the future to explore how the frequency, size, and distribution of steps may change.
OSB: How do we think the environment affects the motor's behaviour?
MB: The motor is powered by an ion gradient, that is, protons or sodium ions, depending on the type of bacteria, flowing from outside the cell, at high concentration, to inside the cell, at low concentration.
So the environment and the concentration of salt or the pH of the solution, affect the amount of energy available to the motor. In different environments it has different amounts of energy available and will rotate at different speeds, driving different loads.
OSB: How might what you find inform the creation of new technologies/devices?
MB: Motor proteins convert chemical energy into mechanical force, and this is the basis of movement, which is essential to life. They are found in myriad places such as muscles (myosins), inside cells (kinesins/dyneins) and in the rotary motor of bacteria.
Currently we aren’t able to build dynamic motors that are only 40nm in diameter, or composed of 45 different types of self assembling proteins, that can convert chemical energy into a mechanical rotation. Part of learning to develop these motors is understanding how these biological motors function, how they have evolved, and then adapting these learned lessons.
One approach is to use components of these motors to make new motors, such as the chimeric motor used by our group that is powered by sodium ions, or to use cobbled together parts of other rotary motors to build synthetic swimmers. Investigations like this allow us to begin to dream about the day where we might be able to build a protein motor for a specific task.
OSB: What's been the highlight of being a NOISEmaker so far?
MB: Being a NOISEmaker has introduced me to a great group of people that are doing interesting science, that is relevant to the community, and are excellent at communicating and explaining their research. It’s also taught me a lot about how to present your research to the public and to the media. It’s been a great window into the world of public relations, with which I had no familiarity, and also it has helped me meet some interesting people that I hope to work with in the future.
The highlight, so far, has been an introductory day where we brainstormed some ideas for novel ways of bringing science into the public, and then being able to try some of these ideas out at a festival called Underage where we presented different aspects of science to 15 year-olds.

(Full story)
Life of a revolutionary

Jonathan Wood | 11 Nov 09 | 4 comments

‘He saved lives but didn’t touch anyone. He took medicine out of the lab and put it in society.'
So Conrad Keating describes the achievements of Professor Sir Richard Doll, the giant of Oxford medicine who helped determine the link between smoking and lung cancer, took on ‘Big Tobacco’, and continually showed the value of evidence-based medicine in guiding public health decisions to benefit the greatest number.
Conrad, writer in residence at the The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Oxford University, has just written the official biography of Doll (featured in last week's Oxford Times). And Conrad is clear: Doll was a revolutionary, not just in medicine but a social revolutionary too.
He wasn’t a hands-on doctor, he never saw patients – but he established evidence-based medicine as the pre-eminent tool in public health care. ‘The tools of his revolution were pencils and graphs,’ Conrad explains. ‘If you look at the papers in the British Medical Journal in the 1950s, none of them had any stats. Today they all have stats. Doll made doctors count.
‘With Richard, it was all about risk and how to evaluate it. It was a new approach to science, one of philosophical detachment and persuasion through numbers. Richard was always independent and went with the evidence.’
While Doll’s work on smoking and cancer is routinely described as having saved countless millions of lives, Conrad notes with a smile that Richard would probably say that he had ‘prevented premature death’, not ‘saved lives’.
Part biography, part British social history
But Conrad also feels that in writing Doll’s biography that he has written a social history of Britain. Despite Doll coming from a background that was solidly establishment, the suffering, social conditions and mass unemployment he witnessed as a young man in the 1930s radicalised him.
‘His politics pushed him towards public health medicine and doing the greatest good for the greatest number. He didn’t want to just look after the rich,’ says Conrad.
Doll went on the Jarrow march in 1936, when there was 80% unemployment among men in the North East, and treated the marchers’ blisters. He was at Dunkirk, and campaigned for the formation of the NHS – to the point of almost being ostracised from the medical establishment – despairing that only the rich could afford good doctors.
His antifascist politics in the 1930s also led to him joining the Communist party. ‘He described himself as a democratic communist,’ says Conrad. He was a member of the party until May 1957, by which time he had become disillusioned after Soviet tanks had rolled into Budapest and – characteristically – when he felt he could no longer believe or buy into the science coming out of the USSR at that time.
When Doll came to Oxford in 1969 as the Regius Professor of Medicine, some still didn’t want ‘Red Richard’. Yet they were soon won round by his science, Conrad says. Doll would also go on to accept a knighthood and appear as an expert witness for British Nuclear Fuels, showing his independence on every matter.
<To read the rest of the article click on 'full story' below>
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Science in stitches: Darwin's Leftovers

Pete Wilton | 10 Nov 09 | 1 comment

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Once he'd finished On the Origin of Species what did Darwin do with his vast collection of stuffed reptiles, mammals, fish and birds?
Have an office clear-out: or at least that's the amusing idea behind Darwin's Leftovers, a collection of stitched artworks created by over 60 knitters that's on display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History [OUMNH] until 27 November.
According to lead artist Liz Lancashire each element of the display celebrates a key part of Darwin's life and thinking: from the Galapagos iguanas and tortoises that showed how natural selection could cause new species to evolve to exploit new environments, to hummingbirds with their odd-shaped beaks giving an ultimate example of specialisation in nature.
She said: 'Charles Darwin had many hundreds of stuffed animals in his cupboard and I wanted to recreate some of the paraphernalia of his scientific collection and capture the day he had an office clear-out!'
All this month Liz will be helping the Museum run a series of workshops for both adults and children exploring the wide variety of 3D knitting and other textiles techniques used to create these curiosities.
It sounds like the perfect skill to learn in the run-up to Christmas: so if you see an iguana-shaped present nestling under your Christmas tree then you'll know you've got Mr Darwin to thank for it.
Darwin's Leftovers is on display in the main gallery of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History until 27 November
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Do we need dark matter?

Pete Wilton | 06 Nov 09 | 3 comments

It’s the biggest problem in physics: the matter we can see in the universe accounts for just five per cent of the observed gravity that holds galaxies together.
The conventional explanation is that enormous amounts of invisible dark matter make up the missing 95 per cent but some have argued that it’s Einstein’s theory that’s at fault.
In a review in this week’s Science Pedro Ferreira of Oxford’s Department of Physics and Glenn Starkman of Case Western University assess how alternatives to dark matter are shaping up.
‘For over 25 years there has been a proposal that there is no dark matter, that we are simply misinterpreting the data and that what in fact is happening is that we don't understand gravity,’ Pedro tells me.
‘A rudimentary alternative was proposed in the early 80s but only recently were a few complete theories constructed that modify Einstein's theory of general relativity and that could in principle solve the dark matter problem without dark matter.’
Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom got the ball rolling in 1983 with a proposal that became known as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). Other alternatives build upon this work, such as Jacob Bekenstein’s TeVeS.
Pedro comments: ‘In the review we emphasize two main things. First of all that all of these theories seem to bring in something akin to dark matter through the back door. It is not that they need dark matter as well as modifications to gravity but that any attempt to modify gravity necessarily generates something dark.’
‘The second point is that, even though waters seem to be muddied, there should be observational tests which can distinguish between the two paradigms. By looking at how galaxies are distributed and how they distort any background light, it should be possible to pick out clues for modified gravity, i.e. to test whether Einstein was indeed correct.’
The hope is that galactic surveys, such as those carried out by the Joint Dark Energy Mission or Square Kilometre Array, will be able to see if the telltale signs predicted by these alternative theories really are out there.
Professor Pedro Ferreira is based at Oxford’s Department of Physics
Read more in a related article in Scientific American
(Full story)
Test spots dementia warning signs

Jonathan Wood | 05 Nov 09 | 1 comment

A story earlier this week gave hope that a new method might be sensitive and reliable enough to help predict who will develop early memory problems that could later lead to dementia.
BBC News Online reported that ‘memory and language tests can reliably reveal “hidden” early dementia’.
These tests aim to detect small slips in memory or slight loss of fluency in speech, and could help doctors monitor people coming to them with memory complaints.
It also could help researchers in this area, as Rebecca Wood, Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, points out in the BBC Online piece: ‘Being able to spot and measure the initial stages of dementia is a crucial challenge if we are to improve drug testing and lay the groundwork for prevention trials.’
Oxford University researchers in the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA) were behind this study, funded by the Alzheimer's Research Trust and others. They gave a group of 241 healthy elderly volunteers regular tests that were designed to measure their use of language and their learning and memory abilities. They did this for a very long period of time: 20 years.
By following the volunteers for this length of time, the study, published in the journal Neurology was able to show that the results of the Cambridge Cognitive Examination could reliably predict when a healthy elderly person was likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, a frequent precursor to dementia.
Professor David Smith of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, who led the study, explains: ‘In normal elderly people, those who perform very slightly below average in two cognitive tests (use of language, and learning and memory) are likely to convert to a state called ‘mild cognitive impairment’ sooner than those who score just above average on the tests. People with mild cognitive impairment have a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease later on.’
91 of the participants developed mild cognitive impairment during the study. Older people and those scoring lower on the language or memory tests were more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment more quickly.
‘These sensitive tests indicate that some changes that are marked in Alzheimer’s disease actually occur many years before the disease is apparent,’ says Professor Smith. ‘This implies that the disease process goes on for many years, but it also allows us to detect the disease long before it can be diagnosed.’
‘These simple tests could be used in memory clinics to help predict when elderly people will become cognitively impaired,’ he adds. It also raises the prospect that, should preventive methods be developed for dementia in the future, these tests could be used to identify who would benefit from early treatment.
(Full story)
Breaking the resolution barrier

Pete Wilton | 03 Nov 09 | 1 comment

When Robert Hooke first published his book Micrographia in 1665 he demonstrated the wonders of what could be seen through a microscope.
Ever since then scientists have been attempting to image smaller and smaller objects using first light and then electrons: but these efforts to achieve ever-higher resolution run up against fundamental physical laws.
Today many scientists are developing techniques to sidestep these 'resolution limits': Angus Kirkland of Oxford's Department of Materials is one such scientist and his Oxford group, working with JEOL in Japan, recently reported how they have been able to achieve a resolution of 78 picometres at an electron energy of 200kV in Physical Review Letters.
I asked him about resolution limits and how they can be overcome:
OxSciBlog: What determines the conventional resolution limit?
Angus Kirkland: In a light microscope the resolution limit is determined by the wavelength of light. In an electron microscope the wavelength of the electrons is far smaller but the resolution is limited by the quality of the electromagnetic lenses used to form the image. These impose a resolution limit that is far worse than that to be expected from the electron wavelength. It is convenient to think of the resolution limit as an effective aperture; the larger this aperture, the better the resolution.
OSB: How has your work overcome this limit?
AK: Tilting the direction of the electron beam by around one degree has the effect of shifting the position of the resolution-limiting effective aperture. By computationally combining images acquired with several different incident beam directions we can create a synthetic aperture, which is larger than in any single image, hence increasing the resolution. In our paper we use this 'aperture synthesis' approach to improve the resolution by up to 40 per cent compared to a single image.
OSB: What is the significance of attaining a resolution of 78 picometres?
AK: Improved resolution increases the range of materials and structural orientations that can be imaged in the electron microscope. The particular value of 78pm has enabled us to image silicon in a specific orientation as a test case for the method.
OSB: What might it mean if it was possible to break the '30pm barrier'?
AK: With an electron microscope capable of 30pm resolution it is believed that the scattering cross-section of the atoms themselves will limit the resolution attainable and as such this is the ultimate resolution target.
Professor Angus Kirkland is based at Oxford's Department of Materials
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Fossil webs snagged dinosaurs

Pete Wilton | 31 Oct 09 | 0 comments

At Halloween our thoughts turn to spiders and all things scary but how about spiders and dinosaurs?
Martin Brasier of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences has shown that amber found by amateur dinosaur hunters contains threads of the world's oldest spider webs - webs that were spun 140 million years ago.
The Oxford team report their results in the latest issue of the Journal of the Geological Society.
Martin comments: ‘This amber is very rare. It comes from the very base of the Cretaceous, which makes it one of the oldest ambers anywhere to have inclusions in it.'
Their evidence shows that the webs these threads belong to would have graced lush prehistoric forests frequented by dinosaurs such as Iguanadon and Allosaurus.
The web-spinners in question were closely related to the modern day orb-web, or garden spider. ‘These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky droplets along the spider web threads to trap prey,’ Martin explains.
‘We actually have the sticky droplets preserved within the amber. These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge.'
The cobwebs were preserved in tree sap, possibly emitted by trees in response to fire damage, which then fossilised into amber. To reconstruct the webs, the scientists focused through the amber at 40 different positions, tracing it through the layers and then splicing it together again using a computer technique called confocal microscopy.
As well as the amber, there are several other types of deposit at the site which are showing remarkable levels of preservation, including silica and phosphate minerals.
Martin adds: 'It’s part of a larger project which is yielding rich rewards. There’s still a lot more to find, and we have even more exciting things to report in the near future.'
(Full story)
The rewards of serendipity

Pete Wilton | 29 Oct 09 | 0 comments

When, in 1985, Mark Moloney began to investigate how penicillin was formed he didn’t imagine that it would lead to advances in polymer chemistry and a new spin out firm employing 17 people.
As we’ve highlighted before Oxford was where vital research into the chemical, pharmacological and clinical development of penicillin took place (starting in the 1930s with Florey, Chain & Heatley).
But even by the 1980s quite how penicillin was formed chemically in its fungal source was still poorly understood, and the relevant chemical reactions were known to be highly complex and very unusual.
Mark, of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, tells me: ‘Our strategy to unravel this process involved working with highly reactive chemical entities called carbenes, which we used as a type of chemical ‘warhead’ to bind with, and allow subsequent identification of, the enzyme binding site which controlled the remarkable chemical reaction leading to the formation of penicillins.’
‘This was ‘pure’ academic research, with no obvious immediate use, and could never therefore be construed as ‘applied’.'
Polymer problem
The idea that this penicillin research might be relevant to polymers came from Bill Norris who had previously worked with Mark at Oxford’s Dyson Perrins Laboratory before moving to ICI Specialties.
Mark explains: ‘He rang me up and presented me with a problem he was working on relating to dye migration in plastics. This was a long-standing difficulty, well known in the industry, and relates to the instability of mixtures of polymers, resulting from their extreme chemical inertness and very different chemical properties.’
‘He suggested that my carbene reagents might provide a solution, in which we would use the ‘warhead’ properties to attach the relevant molecules of the materials together.’
They developed the idea and used an undergraduate project to test its practicality in the lab but Mark says that the notion that penicillin research might have an immediate impact on polymer chemistry ‘seemed ridiculous’ and that results from the initial work were unpromising.
‘But the germ of an idea had been sown, and the more we looked into it, the more the idea had potential; there had to be substantial value in simple chemical technology that permitted direct modification of a polymer surface.’
By 1998 they had established that it was possible to modify the surface of many organic polymers and inorganic materials to introduce colour using a simple chemical process. Mark describes this discovery as ‘unprecedented’:
‘Although we initially focused on colouring, principally because it gave an immediate initial indication of success, we had it in mind to design a process that would enable introduction of other types of functionality.’
Developing ideas
Convinced that the idea was worth pursuing, in 2003 Mark used funding from internal OU sources to appoint researcher Jon-Paul Griffiths, who rapidly developed a number of aspects of the idea, and retained complete ownership of the intellectual property.
‘This funding enabled us to take the basic idea and demonstrate that it could be used to incorporate not only colour, but biocidal, fluorescent, adhesive, and pH sensing effects onto polymers which would normally be considered to be chemically too inert to allow such modification.’
‘We even surprised ourselves at what was possible; for example, we discovered that we could introduce fluorescence onto diamond, and have more recently demonstrated that we can impart aqueous and organic dispersability onto C60, carbon nanoparticles and nanotubes.’
After patenting some of this work Mark and colleagues sought to commercialise it through launching a spin out company, Oxford Advanced Surfaces (OAS), in July 2006 – with the help of Isis Innovation.
The new firm moved to facilities in the Centre for Innovation and Enterprise at Begbroke Science Park, just north of Oxford. The location was perfect, giving them access to the surface characterisation facilities of the Materials Department at Begbroke, but still keeping them close to the Department of Chemistry.
In 2007 OAS Group plc was listed on AIM, and now employs 17 people. The firm is currently developing the carbene technology, trademarked as ONTO, both in-house and in collaboration with companies in fields as diverse as electronics to commodity goods and healthcare.
Looking ahead, Mark comments: ‘We are satisfied that our technology is robust and delivers measurable effects against commercially relevant objectives, but the challenge now is to demonstrate that it can be done within the financial constraints imposed by the market.’
In October 2009 Mark Moloney received THE's Serendipity Award for his work, an award that celebrates the unexpected outcomes of research.
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Energy meter gets smart

Pete Wilton | 26 Oct 09 | 0 comments

Last year we highlighted the smart meter technology from Oxford that would enable households to monitor which individual appliances are consuming electricity in real-time.
The technology was developed by Malcolm McCulloch and Jim Donaldson in Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science and was spun out, with the help of Isis Innovation, into a new firm: Intelligent Sustainable Energy (ISE).
Now Navetas Energy Management has helped build the ISE technology into the first commercial product: the Navetas Zeo Smart Hub (pictured above).
The real 'smart' part of the device is that it can calculate the energy use of each individual appliance by connecting to the energy supply at a single point - using patented artificial intelligence and signal processing techniques developed at Oxford University - without the need for a plethora of different sensors.
ISE say that the technology developed for the meter can identify where 90 per cent of energy is consumed within the home: whether that's in your oven or washing machine, your tumble dryer, kettle, toaster or even your lighting. They believe it could help homeowners shave up to 20 per cent off their electricity bills.
It looks like a good time to bring such a clever meter to market with the Government recently announcing that it wants all UK homes to be fitted with a smart meter by 2020.
Read more in this related article in The Guardian
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