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It emerged today that more drivers are using hand-held mobile phones than two years ago, despite the introduction of tougher penalties, BBC News online reports. The Transport Research Laboratory is worried because phone-using drivers are four times more likely to crash and their reaction times are likely to be slower.

It may be that a group of neuroscientists at Oxford University can help in dealing with this kind of distraction and improve drivers’ reaction times. They believe that understanding the way we respond to danger signals and make life-or-death decisions can enable us to make improvements in car design. Leading car manufacturers are now taking an interest in the hope of making us better, safer drivers.

The problem with using a phone is that talking while driving increases the risk of an accident. ‘People think that they can do both, but they can’t,’ says Professor Charles Spence of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. ‘The brain is configured to respond best to one spatial location at a time. So looking in one direction at the road and listening in another to a caller on the mobile phone at the same time can’t be done well.’

It is now possible to make transparent loudspeakers which can be incorporated into a car windscreen. This enables people to look at the road and listen to a phone conversation coming from the same direction, Charles Spence’s group has shown.

Senses & signals
There’s no doubt that improvements to driving safety are still needed, with 2,538 people killed on the road in 2008 and 26,034 seriously injured. Human error contributes to the vast majority of road accidents, and loss of control of a vehicle or failing to look properly are contributory factors in many of these incidents.

Many new technologies are gradually being added to cars to improve safety. These include sat-navs, hands-free mobile phones, and warning signals. A number of cars now have systems that can sense nearby vehicles and warn the driver when anything gets too close.

But Charles Spence and colleagues believe that the designs that engineers have come up with - using displays, flashing lights, and bleeps - don’t always make it easy for drivers to make decisions based on the information they’re given.

He believes we can do better: ‘All our decisions and actions are based on our senses and go through our brains. Knowledge of how we respond to sights, sounds, touch and feel should enable us to come up with better, neuroscience-inspired designs for alerting drivers to danger.’

The latest work from Charles’ research group, published in the journal Human Factors, demonstrates how warning signals given to the driver through the headrest can improve the speed with which they can respond to the danger, potentially reducing the number of front-to-rear-end collisions.

The work makes use of recent neuroscience research showing that the space behind the head, where you can’t see what’s going on, is treated in a special way by the brain.

‘Our brains react immediately and automatically to things happening in that space in a defensive response to potential danger.’ says Charles Spence. It is similar to the margin of safety or ‘flight zone’ seen in many animals.

His group, with funding from Toyota, carried out experiments showing a short warning sound from speakers just behind a driver’s head can improve the speed of response to danger by nearly four tenths of a second over warning lights placed further away, like those on a dashboard.

Attracting attention
An alarm signal in the close protective space around the head is better at breaking into the driver’s attention, getting the driver to turn their head to where the danger may be (to look in their side mirror for example), and allowing faster decision-making about the need for braking or avoidance actions.

Charles Spence has also shown that the type of sound and the position of a warning signal matters for the driver’s response time. ‘It is much better to use a car horn as a warning sound rather than a generic electronic beep, because people know what the sound of a car horn means,’ he says. ‘If that sound also comes from where the danger is, rather than on the dashboard, you improve a driver’s response time by four tenths of a second.’

‘Our sense of touch is one of our greatest senses and we don’t use it in driving,’ he adds. His group has investigated incorporating vibrating signals into seatbelts, the driver’s seat, the steering wheel, and the foot pedals. Adding a vibrating warning signal can take another two tenths of a second off response times in driving simulator experiments.

An improvement of five tenths of a second is thought to be enough to reduce front-to-rear-end collisions by 60 per cent, so multisensory warnings that combine vibration, sound, and appropriate location of the signal could make a significant difference to road safety. Volkswagen is hoping to make use of this work.

The neuroscience of our senses could also improve car design in other ways, suggests Professor Spence. ‘The sound of a car’s engine can affect how we think about a car. You may want a car that sounds powerful or sporty, for example. Rather than engineer that satisfying roar into the engine, it may be simpler to subtly change the sound the driver and passengers hear inside the car and improve the way they feel about their driving experience.’

These ideas can be taken further. He adds: ‘You could combine psychology and knowledge of people’s likes and dislikes to introduce smells and fragrances into the car interior to relax passengers or perk them up. You could incorporate this with GPS systems to give fragrances according to the environment you’re driving through. It may even be possible to make the multisensory experience of a car interior so pleasant that you want to stay sitting there even when you’ve reached your destination.’ 

A book currently doing the rounds at the Copenhagen climate talks highlights the impact that biomimetic science could have on medical and green technologies.

Gunter Pauli's The Blue Economy gives the work of Fritz Vollrath of Oxford University's Department of Zoology and the Oxford Silk Group as an example of where learning from nature can pay off.

Fritz started off by studying how the golden silk orb weaver spider in Panama composed and recycled its silk and managed to spin it into complex three-dimensional forms.

Researchers at the Group were able to apply these lessons to processes to manufacture silk tubes and filaments that could be used as conduits for nerve regeneration, medical sutures, and devices to regenerate damaged cartilage and bone tissues. They also showed how such materials could be used to replace titanium parts in products from razors to airplane parts.

Pauli argues that replacing current industrial processes with more biomimetic ones could help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as shepherding the planet's scarce resources.

Fritz and his team have already made a number of contributions to turning such ideas into commercial realities with the founding of spin-out firms such as Orthox, Suturox, and Neurotex, all based on pioneering research at Oxford.

Fritz tells me that he hopes there could be many more benefits from the group's ongoing research which received a boost last year with an ERC Advanced Grant supporting his SABIP - Silk as Biomimetic Ideals for Polymers project.

Could spiders and silkworms really help to save the world? Watch this space...

In this guest post David Ferguson of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences writes about his research into volcanoes:

Earlier this summer I took an unexpected journey to the Afar Depression, a vast remote desert in the north of Ethiopia.

The Afar region is famed among adventure tourists for it’s sweltering temperatures, saline lakes and numerous (and often active) volcanoes. It was the latter of these that was responsible for my impromptu trip.

On the 28th June an instrument carried by a NASA satellite, designed to measure temperatures on the Earth’s surface, detected a new area of intense heat emissions whilst flying over Afar. The most likely cause of this thermal signature was an active lava flow, the product of a new volcanic eruption. As soon as we received this data we raced out to Ethiopia to try and catch the eruption in progress. You can read about our trip on The Guardian's Science Blog.

A week after our sudden departure we were back in the UK. The souvenirs from our unexpected trip: a box of fresh lava samples, visual and thermal images of a newly formed volcanic fissure and some slightly melted shoes (new lava flows require very sturdy footwear!).

Afar is the site of intense geological activity, a manifestation of the Earth’s crust being split apart by the movement of tectonic plates. The key to why so much of this geological activity is concentrated here is the presence of great volumes of magma beneath the surface. Periodically, a batch of this magma surges upwards from deep in the crust, splitting the ground apart as it forces its way upwards and, in some cases, reaching the surface and erupting out onto the desert floor.

During the past few years Afar has seen a marked increase in this magmatic activity and every so often we get the opportunity to try and collect some samples of the magma from new lava flows. By studying the chemical composition and physical characteristics of these, currently rare, eruptions we hope to learn about the magma reservoir beneath the surface and also whether we can expect more eruptions in the near future.

A problem in forecasting volcanic eruptions in this part of Afar is that this type of volcanism is not often seen on dry land. As tectonic plates are split apart they tend to sink down into the Earth’s mantle (much of Afar is currently below sea level) and as such the areas where this geological process occurs (called ‘rifting’) are typically found at the bottom of the oceans.

There is, however, one other region on Earth we can use as a comparison to Afar without the need for a submarine. That is Iceland, where the fracture zone that splits apart the oceanic crust beneath the Atlantic Ocean takes a brief detour onto land. In the late 1970s Iceland experienced, over a nine-year period, a series of events similar to those currently happening in Ethiopia.  Using the data we gathered on the size and duration of this recent eruption (and also a previous one in 2007) we can compare our data to the pattern of eruptions seen in Iceland during that time.

Similar to Afar, the Icelandic activity began with several pulses of magma forcing their way upwards into the shallow crust, which, despite causing earthquakes and ground fractures, did not make it all the way up to erupt at the surface. 

However, as the magma continued to surge upwards over several years more and more eruptions occurred, most of these lasting longer and erupting more lava than the previous one. By comparing the patterns of earthquakes and eruptions observed in Afar over the past few years with the Icelandic data we have forecast that there is a high likelihood that over the next ten or so years this part of Ethiopia will experience several more (and potential much larger) volcanic eruptions.

Our findings on this are currently being peer-reviewed for publication in an academic journal. In the meantime, however, we will continue to monitor this part of Afar and to catalogue and study future activity.

You can read more about this work on the Afar Consortium website.

David Ferguson is based at Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences.

How can some sportsmen and women, in the heat of the moment, play on through pain that would floor anyone else?

Bert Trautmann, the Manchester City goalkeeper, famously played on through to the end of the 1956 FA Cup final - holding on for a 3-1 win - despite suffering a broken neck from a collision in the second half.

Similarly, why do some people seem to suffer long-lasting debilitating pain when others are better able to cope? Each of us individually can also experience pain differently at different times.

Pain of course is a subjective, variable and very personal experience that involves far more than a simple reaction to injury or damage. And although doctors can only rely on what each patient says about the pain that they’re experiencing, it is important to try and diagnose, monitor and manage that pain effectively.

Professor Irene Tracey’s group at the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain has used brain imaging techniques for a number of years, aiming to provide an objective measure of individual experiences of pain.

By understanding how the brain processes the information coming from all the body’s senses as pain, they can begin to pick out differences between people.

Their latest results, reported this week in the journal PNAS, demonstrate that people’s personalities matter in their experience of pain. People that are more anxious, or worried about feeling pain, have differences in connectivity within their brains that make them more susceptible to actually feeling pain.

The team applied short laser pulses to the feet of 16 willing and healthy volunteers just at the point where they started to experience the pulses as being painful (‘you can ratchet up the laser pulses so you feel them as warm, then hot, then the point where you say “yeah, actually, that hurts now,”’ explains Irene.) These brief laser pulses were applied 120 times to each volunteer, and around half the time the volunteer would declare it was painful and half the time not - even though the pulse was exactly the same every time.

MRI brain scans during these experiments show that the volunteers’ brains were more active in pain-processing regions when they described the laser pulses as being painful - so this was a real experience and not down to any report bias or artefact.

But the researchers wanted to understand exactly what made one stimulus painful at one time while the very same stimulus at another time was fine.

‘We looked at the period just before the stimulus and asked “is there a difference in the way certain regions of the brain are connected or communicating before the stimulus is applied?”’ explains Irene. ‘The answer is that there is a striking difference.’

The researchers focused on the connection between ‘higher’ parts of the brain involved in the processing of pain, and part of the brain stem that can powerfully alter the experience of pain - turning its level up or down.

When there was good coupling between the two areas before a laser pulse, the volunteer felt no pain, and when the connectivity was poor, the pulse was experienced as painful.

Most interestingly of all, however, was that people that were more likely to be anxious or vigilant about pain (as scored on their answers to a questionnaire for these traits), showed poorer connectivity in general between these brain regions.

This difference in the hardwiring of the brain could account for how people with different personalities respond to pain, suggests Irene.

‘We now want to know whether we are born with this, or whether the brain becomes wired like this as it develops,’ she says. ‘It’s a chicken and the egg situation. We only have a snapshot in time with this experiment. We can’t tell what comes first.’

Yesterday what started out as an exchange on Twitter blossomed into a full scale debate on the future for basic and curiosity-driven research.

The debate, Blue skies ahead?, was organised by THE and featured a panel including Science Minister Lord Drayson, Suzie Sheehy from Oxford University's Department of Physics, Colin Stuart, Alom Shaha, and Lewis Dartnell, with Brian Cox chairing the lively discussion.

One of the main topics was the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) with its emphasis on putting a greater emphasis on the 'impact' of proposed research projects.

Suzie said: 'Meeting Lord Drayson again was a good experience, and I commend his interaction with real scientists through forums such as Twitter and the blue skies debate.'

'It was certainly an intense experience for me to have to speak directly after Lord Drayson initially, particularly as most of the points I had prepared were very well addressed in his opening remarks. It certainly made me think on my feet!'

She cites the effect on scientific output when it is assessed with regards to impact as the most interesting point raised during the debate. This morning physicist Brian Cox commented on his Twitter stream about the difficulties of measuring 'impact' in any meaningful way.

Asked about the questions she wished had come up, but didn't, Suzie told me:

'The first point I wish had been raised was my concern that making the outlook of scientific research 'impact' focused brings up the issue of how much scientists earn. I was offered a job straight out of undergraduate that would have paid me more than I will earn in research science for possibly the next 10 years.'

'We don't do science for money, we do it because it is interesting and we think it is important. Shifting the focus to 'impact' may be the final straw for many good scientists who may either leave the field, or leave the country to 'greener pastures'.

'It would have also been good to discuss the issues of under-represented groups in science, particularly the issues of women in physics and the possibility of programs to support more flexible working arrangements such as part-time postdoctoral fellowships.'