Features

Does the universe harbour other intelligent lifeforms? According to this NYT article it could do but they may be a whole lot quieter than we first supposed. It makes the point that as older broadcast technology is phased out and replaced by more efficient cable and satellite options we beam less powerful transmissions into space: and if we are getting quieter then it's likely our galactic neighbours are too.

It's perhaps a useful reminder that detecting anything in the wider universe (as well as here on Earth) depends on signals getting through. Scientists are developing some clever tricks to squeeze more information out of these signals - for example gravitational microsensing, recently used to detect two extrasolar planets - but we still rely on 'listening' to the universe. Just as archaeology is not about what was there but what survives, so the search for life is not about what's out there but what reaches us. And of course it may be quiet because there's nobody else out there.

We all woke up this morning to be reminded that the earth doesn't always sit placidly under our feet. Yet the earthquake the UK experienced in the early hours of this morning doesn't bear comparison with the catastrophic quakes of the past or ones predicted for the future. According to Shamita Das from Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences the severity of particular quakes may be down to speedy 'super-shear' waves travelling down the straight portions of faults at twice the speed of the original shockwave. In her comparison of data from the the 1906 California earthquake with data from a similar earthquake that occurred in 2001 in Kunlunshan, Tibet, she found that these 'super-shear' waves could explain why similar magnitudes of earthquake can cause much greater devastation in some areas than others. 'Long straight faults are more likely to reach high rupture speeds,' Shamita commented. 'The fault starts from rest, then accelerates to the maximum permissible speed and continues at this speed until it reaches an obstacle such as a large 'bend'. If the next earthquake in southern California follows the same pattern as the ones in California in 1857 and 1906, and in Tibet in 2001, a super-shear rupture travelling southward would strongly focus shock waves on Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.' Shamita is currently in San Francisco continuing her research, so she missed the UK's latest teacup rattling moment. Let's all be grateful that Britain lacks California's long, straight 'freeway' faults.

While astronomers have welcomed the stay of execution for UK involvement in the Gemini telescope, there's been no such good news for particle physicists: in fact it gets worse with recent reports confirming that the UK will withdraw from the International Linear Collider (ILC). I've reported the background to this story before but felt compelled to return to the plight of the ILC. Big international facilities - especially those that haven't been built yet - aren't always easy to care about. People ask: why should we spend millions of pounds looking for things we aren't sure even exist? I'd urge anyone who thinks this to visit the excellent ILC site describing what it is and why it's needed. 'Exploring the Quantum Universe with accelerators is like sweeping a searchlight methodically to find something small in the dark' it reads, 'The ILC is our searchlight to illuminate the unknown. We know about some of the things we are looking for: dark matter, the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and superparticles. And we know where to direct the searchlight to find them - and possibly discover things along the way that we didn't expect. Up until now, our searchlights have not reached far enough. By building the ILC we will have one that does.' Perhaps the problem is one of perception: that with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) already being built we don't think we need another expensive accelerator, but the LHC and the ILC are very different beasts. The LHC's muscular proton-smashing could perhaps be likened to flashes of lightning that illuminate the entire quantum landscape but all-too-quickly fade. The ILC's searchlight is needed to follow-up the clues provided by the LHC, to properly illuminate the detail and complexity of our universe at its most basic level: as Oxford's Brian Foster (European Director of the ILC) said, the LHC is 'likely to raise questions that only the ILC can answer'. Put this way we are in danger of acting out the plot of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in reverse: by building a machine that will provide us with the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything but failing to construct one that will give us the ultimate answer. [Hint: It's probably not 42].

'Fusion' was the theme for last night's lecture in the series celebrating Oxford's Centenary of Engineering Science. But this wasn't the fusion at the heart of our sun but the fusion of ideas, techniques and talents that is biomedical engineering. Speaker Lionel Tarassenko gave us a dizzying whistle-stop tour of advances since the 1960s: everything from artificial knee joints to tumour-spotting algorithms, needle-free drug delivery to diagnosing sleep disorders. What struck me was how biomedical engineers were involved at every stage of the development of medical technologies and techniques: from the fundamental science that makes them possible to modelling and analysis to prototypes and commercial products. Biomedical engineering fuses with the work of so many other disciplines, making links here with medicine, there with computing, materials science or maths - and it is only through these 'broad and deep' collaborations that breakthroughs are made.

As well as past advances Lionel's talk also gave an inspiring insight into the future of biomedical engineering. In the future humans will be enhanced by machines not as cyborg supermen but rather as more robust, more durable versions of ourselves. At the moment we've got used to the idea that if we lose a hip we can have it replaced but soon bioreactors will enable us to grow the billions of stem cells we need to replace the soft tissues that make up tendons and ligaments. That essential organ the liver will get a new lease of life too as ultrasound bubbles clean up tumours and new techniques keep donor livers alive outside the body. A revolution in how our bodies are remotely monitored, using technology such as Lionel's BioSign, will help doctors and nurses identify those at risk of life-threatening conditions and treat them before the most severe symptoms necessitate emergency medical treatment - that's both traumatic and expensive. Thousands of lives will be saved and the quality of hundreds of thousands/millions more will be improved.

Will this vision become a reality? If it does it's likely to be, at least in part, thanks to Oxford's new Institute of Biomedical Engineering, due to officially open on 16 April this year. 

For the first time astronomers have found a multi-planet system orbiting another star using gravitational microlensing, today's Science reports. The international team - which includes Oxford physicist Alison Crocker - observed two stars: making use of the effect that the nearer star's gravity bent the light of the more distant one, magnifying it. Using 11 telescopes they watched for a week as the merged images of the stars brightened and dimmed. From the light curve charting these changes in brightness they were able to detect the influence of the two planets. The planetary partners they found are like  'scaled down' versions of our own Jupiter and Saturn (approximately 70 per cent and 27 per cent of the mass of Jupiter respectively) and could not have been detected using standard techniques. Alison's involvement in the project came about in an unusual way: 'I was observing at the MDM observatory on Kitt Peak when I got a telephone call around four in the morning asking whether I would be willing to observe this microlensing event,' she said. At the time she was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College USA: 'I didn't feel qualified to make this decision myself, so I woke up my supervisor, Brian Chaboyer, to check if it would be okay to stop our observations and look at the microlensing event. We were able to observe the event that morning and one additional morning, contributing some of the light blue points to the light curve.' The finding suggests that many more multi-planet systems are out there, waiting to be discovered using the new technique. Alison describes her role in the work as 'very minor' but said that she's thrilled to be part of such an important discovery. At Oxford she is now back to her original research interest; studying star formation in galaxies.