Features

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to plug tonight's Horizon [BBC Two 9pm] featuring Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and everyone's favourite QI fall guy, comedian Alan Davies.

Alan hates maths - but is that just because he doesn't understand it? Enter Marcus with some explanations of how maths can help in all kinds of situations; from correctly sizing up probabilities to playing beautiful passing football.

The BBC tell us: 'Together they visit the fourth dimension, cross the universe and explore the concept of infinity. Along the way, Alan does battle with some of the toughest maths questions of our age. But did his abilities peak 25 years ago when he got his grade C O-Level? Or will Alan be able to master the most complex maths concept there is?'

You can whet your appetite with some great probability and football related video clips on the BBC website. So will Marcus change Alan's mind about maths by the end of the show? You'll just have to watch and find out...

'Horizon: Alan and Marcus Go Forth and Multiply' airs tonight on BBC Two at 9pm.

UPDATE: You can watch the programme on iPlayer (next 20 days).

Are there spiders in the store room? How about woodlice in the hall? And did anyone see beetles in the headteacher's office?

Pupils around Oxfordshire are looking into these and other questions as part of Bug Quest 2009, a six-month research project to survey invertebrate biodiversity across the county.

It's the the third time that the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) has staged a Bug Quest event and this time the emphasis is on pupils doing more of the research themselves: placing insect traps in locations around their schools, uploading data on the types of insects captured to the Bug Quest website as well as photos of any puzzling or unusual invertebrates.

The project began in January and at the latest count around half of the 42 schools taking part have entered their first batch of results with Sunningwell Cof E Primary School and Checkendon Cof E Primary School achieving the coveted accolade of buggiest schools in January!

Those taking part receive regular updates from Colin A Cricket with information on the Bug of the Month: March is officially Beetle Month [Colin tell us that the UK's largest insect is the Stag Beetle].

Bug Quest runs until June with bug identication sessions for teachers and a special morning reception on 14 July where pupils can bring along homemade bug models and the prize for this year's buggiest school will be awarded.

Next month Oxford engineers will start investigating what kind of composite materials would make for stronger, stealthier and more durable submarines.

Composites are already being used in warships because they can be made stronger and lighter than metal parts and are less susceptible to corrosion. They have also been shown to resist the forces unleashed in an explosion better than metal.

The Oxford team will begin their EPSRC-funded project by testing how composites submerged in water respond to a shockwave generated by a metal projectile. High-speed cameras will capture how the materials deform under the pressure.

Testing and modelling is vital to determine what the best structure for a submarine composite would be – many composites, for instance, are made out of a ‘sandwich’ of different materials – as well as how composites fare after being submerged in water for a long time.

Vito Tagarielli, one of the Oxford team led by Nik Petrinic, told The Engineer: ‘We hope to reduce the weight of the submarine so there is less inertia and it can have higher acceleration and easier manoeuvrability.’

‘[Also] If a submarine is made of composite it makes it invisible to modern sea mines that detonate when they recognise a specific magnetic or acoustic signature.’

The project runs for five years and involves a host of industrial partners alongside the Ministry of Defence.

When is a hole not just a hole? When it’s a nanopore: a hole 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

Oxford spinout Oxford Nanopore recently announced how such tiny holes can work as part of a DNA sequencing system.

As Mark Henderson reported in The Times DNA sequencing, which is used to build-up an individual’s genetic profile, is currently very expensive and without a cheaper way to do it the era of personalised medicine – when treatments can be tailored to a person’s unique genetic make-up – will have to wait.

Enter Oxford chemist Hagan Bayley and colleagues who, working with Oxford Nanopore (which Hagan founded in 2005), have found a way to detect the four DNA bases using nanopores.

Current sequencing techniques require DNA samples to be amplified (which can introduce errors), cut to the right length, attached to a bead or surface and given a fluorescent tag which has to be read with expensive imaging equipment.

The beauty of the new approach is that it does away with the tagging and enables the DNA bases to be snipped off a strand one by one and then fired through a nanopore. Each base disrupts an electric current passed across the nanopore by a different amount so the DNA base ‘letter’ (A, C, G or T) can be read.

At present the order in which the bases are detected is not necessarily the same as the actual sequence in the intact DNA strand, but the researchers are now working on streamlining the process so that as each base is cut it is fed into the nanopore in sequence – effectively ‘reading’ the strand like one long sentence.

This technology could be a big step towards a $1000 human genome – regarded by many as a key cost target that would make personalised medicine based on an individual’s DNA sequence truly affordable.

No surprise perhaps then that earlier this year leading biotech firm Illumina invested $18m in Oxford Nanopore towards developing the technology as part of a wider commercialisation agreement.

Read a report of this research in Nature Nanotechnology.

Professor Hagan Bayley is based at Oxford’s Department of Chemistry.

Congratulations to Oxford's Mark Roberts who was runner-up in the latest I'm a Scientist: Get me out of Here!

The online competition enables school pupils to quiz six scientists about their work and life as a researcher. Pupils vote off a scientist one-by-one until the group is whittled down to the last two and then vote for a winner.

Mark's specialist subject was bacteria: in particular the soil bacterium R. sphaeroides [it forms the orange writing in the petri dish above]. This bacterium is ideal for studying bacteria signalling as it's non-pathogenic, so its DNA is safe to chop and change.

Mark told me: 'The event was great fun and I got lots of different questions: everything from what my favourite and worst parts of my job are, how much I get paid, to questions about my science - so how bacteria sense and live.'

'I had one really interesting question about how viruses can jump species (like avian flu!) and then completely random questions like what music do I like or what is your favourite cheese!'

'My favourite question was - what would you rather cure AIDS or cancer? - which was a tough one to answer. I went for AIDS as, given there is one target, that should be easier.'

Although Mark didn't win the £500 first prize (to be spent on science communication) he is still looking to get involved in more work with schools as well as develop a website for pupils with information on how bacteria live.

Mark Roberts is a postdoctoral researcher in Oxford's Department of Biochemistry and a tutor at Lincoln College.