Features

Find out about insect birth control, machines made from DNA, and weird quantum properties that could power supercomputers, in Oxford University exhibits at this year’s Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

The exhibition, that starts today in London and runs until 8 July, also features Oxford research into creating a genetic map of Britain.

The insect control exhibit explains how genetically modified (GM) insects can help to tackle dengue fever, a potentially fatal mosquito-borne disease which infects 50-100 million people each year in over 100 countries.

A new technique creates GM 'sterile' male insects which are released so that wild females mate with them. These females then have fewer offspring or none at all and, if enough sterile males are released over a long period, this can significantly reduce, or even eliminate, the population.

Michael Bonsall of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, lead exhibitor of insect control, said: 'Our approach uses advances in genetic engineering in a bid to address the challenge of insect pests. Our research draws on many scientific disciplines, from ecology to health economics, and demonstrates that it can be effective'.

The nano-scale transport exhibit, meanwhile, looks at what we could learn from self-assembled motors found in the natural world and about how we could build our own molecular machines.

The flagellar motors that power bacteria, and the kinesin motors that transport cargoes within cells, are just two of the systems Oxford scientists are investigating.

The exhibit also explores how DNA can be used as a construction material: making tiny 'walkers' that can control chemical reactions, as well as containers and geometric figures.

Quantum of spin is an exhibit all about the science of 'spin'; a weird quantum property that is possessed by electrons and atomic nuclei.

Visit this stand and find out how technology harnessing spin is used in hospital MRI scanners and how Oxford research is examining how it could be used to build the ultimate supercomputer, and even find out how robins and other birds find their way during their long migrations.

'It seems like Nature has some secret that lets it make complicated stuff in an effortless way,' Stephen Wolfram recently told an audience at Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute.

In his talk, that you can now watch online, Wolfram, the scientist behind Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, explored how advances in computation could benefit mathematics.

One of the key ideas he put forward was 'computational irreducibility' – the idea that some computations cannot be sped up by any shortcut, the only way to figure out what is going to happen is to simulate each step.

'People sometimes say that the reason the mathematics that we have is the way it is, is because that's what we need to describe the natural world, I think that's just not true,' he commented.

He suggested that much of the reason mathematics covers the areas it does is historical, building on work begun by the first mathematicians in ancient Babylon.

Computational irreducibility, he said, is a 'junior version of ‘undecidability'' – the idea that when you ask the question of what will ultimately happen the answer is something that is undecidable. Whilst there are over three million theorems in mathematics these are all things that turned out to be decidable/provable.

There isn’t much undecidability in mathematics because maths is set up to examine those things its methods can make progress on: 'mathematics has navigated through these kind of narrow paths in which you don't run into rampant undecidability all over the place.'

Ask mathematical questions at random, he suggested, and you would soon run into undecidability. But perhaps through exploring the space of all possible theorems, using tools such as Wolfram Alpha, you might find new paths.

He described the point of Wolfram Alpha as 'to collect as much knowledge as possible and make it computable', and that this approach could be applied to find out which theorems about a particular structure or system were 'interesting' or 'powerful'.

A pilot study focusing on one particular area of maths, continued fractions, is already showing that the process of organising theorems in a way that’s systematically computable is leading to new advances, he said.

In a contrast to the days when mathematicians did all of their calculations by hand, the future of mathematical process could be that, by entering some details of a system, within seconds they would automatically see a range of theorems about it.

This would give a window on what he called a 'vast ocean of unexplored generalisation of mathematics that exists in this computational universe of possible systems.'

The talk took place at the Mathematical Institute on 12 June 2012.

Costly and rare indium, used in solar cells, and screens for TVs, computers, and mobile phones, could be replaced with abundant and cheap zinc, scientists at Oxford University believe.

Because of its combination of high transparency and high electrical conductivity indium tin oxide (ITO) dominates the global market for coatings for solar cells and LCD displays. The market for the material is estimated to be worth $26.8bn by 2016.

However indium, a so-called 'rare earth' metal, is relatively scarce and expensive and its supply is tightly controlled - China produces over half of the world’s indium and recently reduced its export quotas.

Peter Edwards and colleagues at Oxford University's Department of Chemistry have been investigating how to make alternative coatings from cheaper, more abundant materials. Their research has come up with new coatings based on silicon-doped zinc oxide.

The Oxford team has been working closely with Oxford University Innovation, the University's technology transfer company, to protect and commercialise its research. The team has just won the Materials Science Venture Prize, awarded by the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, to develop manufacturing processes for the group's coatings.

Peter comments: 'Zinc is a much more abundant material than indium, and our silicon-doped zinc oxide material offers electrical conductivities around two thirds of ITO, with comparable optical transparency. In addition to solar cells, our new coating could be used with lighting displays and LCD displays used in smart phones, computers and televisions.'

Jamie Ferguson of Isis Innovation said: 'There is an exciting opportunity here for the UK – which already has strong glass and high-technology manufacturing industries – to capitalise on new technologies. Projects such as Professor Edwards' transparent conductors offer the chance to strengthen our advanced materials manufacturing base by producing highly competitive new-generation materials.'

The £25,000 prize money will be used to trial manufacturing techniques and demonstrate the use of the new thin film coatings in photovoltaic products, organic light emitting diodes and LCD displays. The work will be led by Peter Edwards and Vladimir Kuznetsov at the Department of Chemistry.

Technology originally developed to track badgers underground could soon be used to locate people in an emergency situation such as a bomb attack or earthquake.

GPS is good at pinpointing locations in open spaces but below the surface it's a different story. The limitations of conventional tracking technology were exposed in the 2005 London bombings, and numerous earthquakes since, where the emergency services struggled to locate people in underground areas or buried beneath debris.

Positioning indoors is also a challenge, with no clear winning technology that is able to address people's day-to-day needs, such as finding their way around an airport.

In 2009 Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni, from Oxford University's Department of Computer Science, faced similar problems when they joined a project to study badgers in Oxford's Wytham Woods. The animals spend much of their lives underground where conventional technology couldn't keep tabs on them.

The solution developed by Andrew and Niki is a technology based on generating very low frequency fields. This has the unique advantage of penetrating obstacles, enabling positioning and communication even through thick layers of rock, soil and concrete.

'Most technologies are only checking the magnitude of the signal – the signal strength from each transmitter – to work out distance,' Andrew told Mark Piesing of Wired.co.uk. In contrast the new technology measures 'vectors, which give you the magnitude and direction… Our technology can work out your position in three dimensions from a single transmitter.' This contrasts with other approaches such as GPS or WiFi which are based on triangulation and typically require signals from at least four transmitters.

After the work with badgers the team realised the technology had potential applications in many areas such as location-based advertising, finding victims in emergencies, and tracking people and equipment in modern mines. They started working with Oxford University Innovation to commercialise their research and are currently raising money for a spinout firm, OneTriax, to be led by CEO Jean-Paul van de Ven, who has significant experience in mobile location based services.

The basic software has already been developed and the team believe that obstacles, such as the fact that low frequency fields vanish very quickly, can be overcome with clever signal-processing algorithms.

The aim is to incorporate the new technology into smart mobile devices: a demonstrator on an Android platform is being developed and, once the technology is perfected, versions suitable for popular smart phones, such as the iPhone, shouldn't be far behind. 

Transit of venus

Photo: Andrew Steele

Venus is visible as the dark spot at the extreme right on the face of the Sun.

Andrew, from Oxford University's Department of Physics, told me:

‘The shots were taken with a normal digital SLR and a fairly long lens (70–200 mm plus a 1.7x teleconverter), but nothing more complex than that. You should of course never look at the Sun with the naked eye, especially through a camera or telescope, but on this occasion the thick clouds had a silver lining and protected me - and, as a bonus, made the shot a lot more atmospheric too!’