Features

Last year Oxford introduced the world to the wonders of 'crowcam': a new way of spying on the behaviour of wild birds using a combination of radio tracking and miniature video cameras. It was the first time that wild birds had been observed in this way and revealed some fascinating insights into the natural behaviour of Caledonian crows.

Now researchers Christian Rutz and Lucas Bluff, of Oxford's Department of Zoology, have created a guide for anyone wanting to follow in their pioneering flight path and video track other wild birds - or indeed mammals and reptiles. Their 'how to' guide is the highlight of this week's Biology Letters and comes complete with helpful diagrams and even an animation to show how the technology works and how it can be used.

Perhaps because the footage from the tiny, tail-mounted cameras isn't as flash as you'll find on nature documentaries I think the scientific importance and usefulness of it was underestimated at the time (despite some very nice coverage - everyone loves crows!). It will be interesting to see how other researchers adapt the technique to take a peek into the wild behaviour of other species. Do salamanders have a secret life? Are hedgehogs and robins as cuddly as everyone thinks? The answers could surprise us and, more importantly, open up new avenues of research.

More details at Oxford's Behavioural Ecology Group

According to research by French and US physicists road networks don't just look like the veins of a leaf: mathematical models show that they grow in a similar way. In fact road networks in all cities are driven by the same simple mechanism in spite of cultural and historical factors.

'Cities are not just the result of rational planning - in the same way that living organisms are not simply what is in their genetic code,' comments co-author Marc Bethelemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

Jukka-Pekka Onnela  of Oxford's Department of Physics, tells New Scientist that these results, from a simple mathematical model, agree well with data from real city road networks. He says that using the local efficiency of connections to drive road network growth looks to be a truer fit with reality than using the total cost of travelling across the network: 'Especially given that the time scale of city growth (possibly thousands of years) and the time scale of urban planning (perhaps tens of years) are so clearly different.'

Dr Jukka-Pekka Onnela is a Junior Research Fellow in Complex Systems and Networks Research at Wolfson College

An international team publishing in this week's Nature have given fresh insight into how flu outbreaks are 'different every time'.

Oliver Pybus of Oxford's Department of Zoology and colleagues unravelled the story of 1000 complete genomes of human flu virus: It's the first analysis to look at how the whole genome of flu evolves in time and across space.

Oliver told OxSciBlog: 'We showed that the genetic diversity of the  virus waxes and wanes in line with the actual number of infections, and that the annual outbreaks in places like New York are not descended from each other - instead, they are 're-seeded' each year from a 'source' population, within which transmission is more constant. We call this our 'source-sink' model of global flu evolution.'

It suggests that a 'reservoir' of flu virus is held in the tropics, and that this spills over every year into more temperate zones; reseeding them.

The team showed that there is frequent 'reassortment' or genetic exchange among flu strains on a global scale. The analysis helps to explain the 'antigenic evolution' of the virus, that is, change in the virus that makes it less well recognised by the human immune system. Previous work on antigenic change has focused on two parts of the flu genome  (called HA and NA) - the new research demonstrates that evolution in other, less studied, parts of the genome may be equally crucial to the process of antigenic change.

The new findings could give fresh leads in the global battle against human flu, a virus that kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people around the world each year. 

They're short, lasting just 65 femtoseconds, but the light pulses produced by Oxford scientists could be very important for quantum computing.

Why? Well that's almost fifty times shorter than any single photon previously produced and, in a quantum information device based on light (where photonic logic gates replace electronic ones), having a stream of identical, high-quality single photons on tap is vital.

Peter Mosley of Oxford's Ultrafast Group, co-author of a Physical Review Letters paper on the research, explained: ’It is possible to make photons in pairs by sending laser light through special crystals. When a pair has been created, the detection of one of these photons heralds the presence of its twin. However these twin photons are entangled, meaning that the properties of one photon are inextricably linked to those of its partner and detecting one can ruin the quantum state of the other.'

‘Our technique minimises the effects of this entanglement, enabling us to prepare single photons that are extremely consistent and, to our knowledge, have the shortest duration of any photon ever generated. Not only is this a fascinating insight into fundamental physics but the precise timing and consistent attributes of these photons also makes them perfect for building photonic quantum logic gates and conducting experiments requiring large numbers of single photons.'

In the Oxford experiment the pairs of photons made had a central wavelength of about 830 nm, at the border between visible and near-infrared light. Each of these photons was about 65 femtoseconds (65 millionths of a billionth of a second) long. In units of space, they were about 20 microns long. The shortest previously produced single photon was about 1 picosecond long.

'Creating single photons even under controlled conditions is extremely challenging,' said Peter. 'Even the purest laser light beam consists of many photons all bunched together. Our approach enables us to generate individual photon replicas, identical packets of light of very short duration that are ideal for quantum computing.'

Peter Mosley is a member of the Ultrafast Group, part of Oxford University's Department of Physics

What do you get if you mix mathematics, music, dance and sculpture? Probably something a lot like The 19th Step, an experimental project involving Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy.

Marcus mentioned this to me a while back: how he had come across artists from many different disciplines who were fascinated by the work of Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges and wanted to join forces for a collaborative performance. The first performance is tonight at Roehampton University.

The flyer explains it like this: 'On the 19th Step of a basement staircase in a building about to be demolished in downtown Buenos Aires, writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines an aleph, a point in space that contains all other points (past, present and future)...'. Marcus will be performing alongside dancers and musicians to 'create a complex patterning of spaces, layering understanding of time, numbers and relationships.'

I remember being captivated by Borges's Labyrinths, a book of short stories that still casts a spell over my imagination today and acts as a touchstone of fiction with my circle of friends. It's a great Rubik's cube of a book, full of strange angles, patterns and configurations of the past, present and future. Every mathematician should read it... So should everyone else.