Features

As BBC Online and New Scientist report methane is disappearing from Mars far faster than it vanishes on Earth, but why?

This is the big question posed by the French research behind these reports published in this week's Nature.

But, although the researchers gather the suspects - life, volcanism, an unknown natural process - in the drawing room like a scientific episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot, the findings get us no closer to knowing who the real culprit is.

Fred Taylor of Oxford's Department of Physics, for one, isn't clear what's new here: 'We have known for some time that the photochemical lifetime of methane on Mars is too long to be consistent with the recent measurements,' he tells us.

'Therefore there must be another sink for methane on Mars, probably oxidising material like peroxides and perchlorates in the soil. It would actually be surprising if this were not the case, as this new paper recognises near the end.'

He goes on to point out that it's also not news that there's little chance of life near the surface of Mars, which is why all planned missions aim to dig deep into the Martian soil to look for telltale signs of biological activity.

Fred adds: 'What is interesting is that there is methane there in the first place. Whatever its source, it is probably being vented from well below the surface, and if it isn't a biological source it still must be something interesting like geothermal activity or small cometary impacts.'

Improvements in electron microscopy have enabled scientists to see how materials made from carbon can rapidly change their structure atom by atom.

An international team led by Oxford University scientists report in this week’s Nature Nanotechnology how they used new advanced electron microscopy to image carbon atoms in graphene, a material that is of particular interest because of its remarkable electronic properties.

The new state-of-the-art electron microscopes commercially available are fitted with a special component that reduces aberrations and this produces images with higher resolution.

'It is important to be able to image carbon based molecules and nanostructures in real time in order to track their motion. Nature has constructed life based on carbon atoms and man-made synthetic carbon nanomaterials are the future of nanotechnology applications,' said Jamie Warner of Oxford University’s Department of Materials, lead author of the paper.

'However, carbon atoms are particularly hard to image because they are light and structures they are arranged in are so easy to destroy using high energy electron beams.’ 

‘We were able to use a lower energy electron beam in an electron microscope and adjust the imaging conditions to enable fast frame acquisition (12 per second) at a magnification of 2 million times. That’s about 10 times faster than anyone has managed before.’

This enabled the team to monitor a variety of shape and structural changes occurring in graphene, which is the key to some of the material’s unusual properties.

Jamie told us: ‘The way in which the low energy electrons interacted with graphene layers was unique. Normally, high energy electrons punch many holes through layered graphene sheets, however in our case the low energy electrons eroded single sheets of graphene one by one and smoothed out the edges of the material.'

'This opens new insights into the creation and modification graphene structures which may lead to improvements in their utilization in electronic devices.’ 

The research was carried out by a team including scientists from Oxford University, IFW Dresden (Germany), the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Imperial College London.

Technology designed by scientists at Oxford University and Leeds University can learn British Sign Language (BSL) signs from overnight TV broadcasts by matching subtitled words to the hand movements of an on-screen interpreter.

The work [detailed here] is a crucial step towards a system that can automatically recognise BSL signs and translate them into words.

A major challenge in recognising signs is to track the signer’s hands as they move on the broadcast – no mean feat as these can get lost in the background, blur or cross – and the arms can assume a vast number of configurations.

The system tackles this problem by overlaying a model of the upper body onto the video frames of the signer by looking for probable configurations, finding the large number of frames where these can be correctly identified and then ‘filling in the gaps’ to infer how the hands get from one position to another.

Another big challenge is to match a target word that appears in a subtitle to the corresponding sign – particularly difficult as words and signs often appear separated in time and words can be signed in many different ways so the corresponding sign may not appear at all.

To overcome this problem the system compares a small number of sequences in which the target word appears in the subtitles with a large number of sequences in which it does not.

Within this footage it then finds the 7-13 frames that appear often in the ‘target word’ sequences and infrequently in the ‘no target word’ ones. This enables it to learn to match over 100 target words to signs automatically.

'This is the first time that a computer system has been able to learn signs on its own and on this scale in this way - with just the information available in the broadcast’s subtitle information and video frames and without the need for humans to give it annotated examples of what each sign looks like,’ said Andrew Zisserman of Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science who led the work with Patrick Buehler at Oxford and Mark Everingham of Leeds University’s School of Computing.

Mark Everingham said: ‘It demonstrates the sort of very tough problems which advanced image recognition technology is starting to be able to solve. These technologies have the potential to revolutionise the automated searching, classifying and analysis of moving and still images.’

This research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Microsoft and the Royal Academy of Engineering. 

Supershear earthquakes, as this New Scientist feature explains, are the seismic equivalent of a sonic boom.

In these potentially very destructive quakes the rupture travels so fast that it overtakes its own shock waves.

The article highlights the work of David Robinson and Shamita Das from Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences who are trying to predict where these super-fast quakes are likely to strike next.

They compared past supershears looking for similarities and then looked for faults with the same characteristics: land-based faults that don't deviate by more than 5 degrees over a distance of 100 kms.

What they found were 26 sections on 11 different fault systems around the world that the researchers dubbed 'earthquake superhighways'.

What's especially worrying is that seven sections of superhighway run through highly populated areas - including along the San Andreas Fault under San Francisco and near Rangoon and Mandalay in Burma - with millions of people potentially in danger. 'The density of population in some areas of Asia we looked at is incredibly high. That really surprised me,' David told NS's Richard Fisher.

But as the article explains we just don't know enough about supershear earthquakes yet to advise engineers and planners what to do about them.

We just have to hope that the next one strikes in some remote and uninhabited area giving scientists vital data about these potentially devastating quakes.

Who really invented the wonder drug penicillin?

Alexander Fleming is the name in our history books but tonight a new BBC drama highlights the role Oxford University scientists played in this vital medical breakthrough.

Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin, which airs on BBC Four tonight at 9pm, tells the story of the team which turned Fleming's discovery, that the mould Penicillium notatum produced a substance that inhibited the growth of some bacteria, into the drug that transformed medicine.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: 'Alexander Fleming had ‘discovered’ penicillin, essentially by accident, in 1928, but he and his colleagues found that the culture extract containing penicillin was unstable and the antibiotic was impossible to isolate in a pure state, and so they effectively gave up research on it.'

The Oxford scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were key members of the team which began comprehensive experiments with Fleming's mould in 1939, soon after drafting in their colleague Norman Heatley to help solve many of the problems involved in turning out a useful product.

Florey's successor as Head of the Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, Sir Henry Harris, has written an excellent summary of how the drug was developed and the many scientists who contributed.

In it he highlights the 'forgotten man' of the Oxford group, Norman Heatley, who controversially did not share the 1945 Nobel Prize for the discovery with Fleming, Florey and Chain, writing:

'Heatley's contributions were critical. He first devised the cylinder-plate diffusion technique that provided a reliable and sensitive assay for penicillin and that was later adopted as the standard assay for antibiotic activity.'

'He then suggested a procedure for extracting from organic solvents, in which penicillin was soluble, a stable salt that was soluble in water. This procedure formed the basis of an early counter-current distribution apparatus which Heatley devised and built.'

In advance of the programme being shown Norman Heatley's widow Mercy told the Oxford Mail:

'My husband was particularly good at extracting it [penicillin] from things - I think it seemed to grow best on grapefruit... I feel sad Fleming is always named as the discoverer. I think what happened was he was always happy to talk to the press, whereas Florey wasn’t keen to talk to them and have his team disrupted, which is why Fleming received all the publicity.'

Hopefully the programme will help to set the record straight about who really deserves credit for a drug that's saved so many lives.

Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin will be broadcast on BBC Four on 29 July at 9pm