Features

This beautifully preserved 525-million-year-old fossil is barely 4 cm in length, but minute details can be seen including 36 tiny tentacles along one feathery arm.

Discovered in Yunnan Province in China, the new fossil belongs to an important group of primitive sea creatures that used the tentacles for feeding.

The creatures secreted a substance that built up into a hard tube around their soft body, with the tentacles extending from the top of the tube to catch plankton.

Previously only the tubes have been seen in detail but this new fossil clearly shows the soft parts of the body.

‘Amazingly, it has exceptionally preserved soft tissues – including arms and tentacles used for feeding – giving unrivalled insight into the ancient biology of the group,' says Professor David Siveter of the University of Leicester’s Department of Geology, who led the research.

The fossil was discovered by a team from Yunnan University in China, the University of Leicester and included Derek Siveter from the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford. Details are published in the journal Current Biology and the study was funded by the Royal Society and the National Natural Foundation of China.

The fossil belongs to a group called pterobranch hemichordates which are related to starfish and sea urchins.

About 30 species of pterobranch are known to exist today, but 380-490 million years ago a group of these animals, called graptolites, were common across the prehistoric oceans. Pterobranches also show some characteristics that offer clues to the evolution of the earliest vertebrates.

Chemical rainbows and robotic vehicles were just some of the topics local pupils explored as part of University events for National Science & Engineering Week.

On 15 March 63 students aged 11-13 from 16 schools in the Oxfordshire area tested their science skills at the Salters' Festival of Chemistry.

In the morning they played chemical ‘Cluedo’, where teams took the role of forensic scientists solving a crime by analysing samples found at a crime scene.

The experiments included a flame test to identify different metal ions and chemical tests to identify non-metal ions. Guest of honour Lord Butler of Brockwell, from the Salters’ Company, joined one of the teams looking to identify the culprit.

Colourful solutions
In the afternoon the teams went ‘Over and Over the Rainbow’ where they had to get to grips with the principles of density and miscibility and use organic and inorganic solvents to come up with their own chemical rainbows.

‘The students had to stack the solutions in the correct order, the most dense at the bottom and the least dense at the top and alternate the organic and inorganic solutions so that they did not mix,’ said Matthew Lodge of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, coordinator of the event. ‘Students were marked on their rainbow's quality and the time it took them to make it.’

After making rainbows the teams were introduced to polymers and made a nylon 6-6 string from two different chemicals dissolved in two immiscible liquids. The nylon 6-6 forms at the interface and can be drawn out as a thread and schools were judged on the length of their nylon 6-6 cord.

The day ended with a physics and chemistry talk from Hugh Cartwright. Prizes were then awarded by Malcolm Stewart, head of the judging panel.

Robots & geckos
On 10 March an event at Begbroke Science Park saw 34 pupils aged 14-16 from two Oxford schools learn about the benefits of innovation.

Students from Cherwell School and Marlborough School were introduced to the latest in robotics research: Paul Newman from Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science showed them the Bowler Wildcat vehicle his team are using to develop robotic technology to automate the cars of the future. 

‘It was really interesting and cool to understand how close we are to the reality of self-driving cars, that was just a dream years ago,’ said Dionne Franklin, a student from Marlborough School.

They also visited the impact engineering lab, the Oxford University Supercomputer and got to see CyberSEM, an online resource offering remote access to a powerful scanning electron microscope located at Begbroke.

Having been suitably inspired the students were then invited to turn inventor by coming up with their very own business ideas based on the latest discoveries which they had to pitch in a ‘Dragon’s Den’-style presentation.

The winning idea was ‘GeckoMan’, from Marlborough School, a project looking to turn technology mimicking the gecko’s sticky feet into a gravity-defying amusement activity.

Festival of Chemistry schools:

Abingdon Preparatory School - Frilford, Abingdon
Bedford Preparatory School - Bedford
Carterton Community College - Carterton
Didcot Girls' School - Didcot
Dragon School - Oxford
HE Middle School Team - Leighton Buzzard
Magdalen College School - Oxford
Moulsford Preparatory School - Moulsford-on-Thames
Our Lady's Convent Senior School - Abingdon
Oxford High School - Oxford
St Andrews School - Bedford
The Cotswold School - Bourton-on-the-Water
The Grange School - Aylesbury
Tudor Hall School - Banbury
Vyners School - Ickenham
Winchester House School – Brackley

Innovation Showcase schools:

Marlborough School - Woodstock, Cherwell School - Oxford

A new way of detecting TB inside cells has been developed by scientists from Oxford University and NIH in the US.

Methods for diagnosing TB haven’t changed much in a century, still relying on the staining of tissue sections and chest X-rays.

In a recent issue of Nature Chemical Biology Ben Davis, from Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, and colleagues describe a new method which can, for the first time, detect TB inside cells using a small molecule.

‘We designed and created a fluorescent sugar that we discovered is a substrate for an enzyme, Ag85, found on the surface of TB bacteria,’ Ben told us.

‘The sugar is a variant of one that TB uses but is not used at all in mammalian biology. The Ag85 enzyme takes this and attaches a greasy lipid tail - this greasy product then becomes buried on the greasy surface of TB. The result is that the cell surface of the bug is fluorescently 'painted'.’

Ben explains that the net result is a selective labelling of TB even when the bugs are found inside mammalian macrophages, where it normally lies dormant in infected hosts. Other bugs are not labelled and other sugars do not work, so it's very selective.

He adds: ‘We've been able to use this here to map out aspects of TB cell biology but the implications for diagnosing and monitoring TB as a disease are clearly much broader.’

Professor Ben Davis is based at Oxford University's Department of Chemistry.

New radar imagery from the Alos satellite is helping researchers to map the devastating earthquake which hit Christchurch, New Zealand, on 22 February.

The Comet team, supported by the Natural Environment Research Council [NERC], are using Alos radar data to build up a picture of how the earth deformed during the quake in a synthetic aperture radar inteferogram.

'It's like a contour map but it's showing to the south-east of Christchurch that the ground motion is towards Alos. That's uplift,' Comet member John Elliott, from Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, told Jonathan Amos at BBC News Online.

'And then right under Christchurch, we see subsidence. That's partly due to liquefaction but it's mainly due to the way the Earth deforms when you snap it like an elastic band.'

During earth tremors the loose sediment on which Christchurch is built acts like a liquid and amplifies any shaking. Faults in the area are 'blind', that is invisible from the surface, meaning potential dangers are hard to spot or plan for.

John added: 'People knew they could get earthquakes further into the mountains; that's how they've been built in some ways, through earthquakes and all the faulting... But to get an earthquake right under their city will have been a surprise to nearly every single person.'

The team are hoping more data will help them to link the most recent shock with the larger quake which occurred in September last year.

Dr John Elliott is based at Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences.

One of the key theories underpinning modern physics is being tested by the latest results from the LHC’s ATLAS experiment.

Supersymmetry theory says that every particle must have a Supersymmetric partner particle yet so far ATLAS hasn’t found a single one of these ‘sparticles’.

I asked Alan Barr, one of the Oxford University physicists behind ATLAS, about these new results and whether the theorists should be worried…

OxSciBlog: What is 'Supersymmetry' and why is it important?
Alan Barr: The subatomic world is described by a theory known as the ‘Standard Model’, which seeks to explain the basic building blocks of the universe, and the forces by which they interact.

The Standard Model has been very well tested over the last several decades, but it's known to have several nasty problems: for example it does not explain the origin of the gravitational force, nor does can it account for the invisible ‘dark matter’ that seems to make up the bulk of the universe. 

The theory of ‘Supersymmetry’ extends the Standard Model, and solves many of its problems. The clearest prediction of this grander theory is that for every known type of particle there should be a Supersymmetric partner particle, known as a ‘sparticle’.  

OSB: How is ATLAS helping in the search for ‘sparticles’?
AB: We can hunt for sparticles by studying the debris from the collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Einstein's famous formula E=mc² tells us that energy can be turned into mass, so provided that the collision energies are high enough - and that the new particles are light enough - then we expect that some fraction collisions will produce sparticles. The heavy sparticles will rapidly decay, but they should leave tell-tale signs in the ATLAS detector.
 
OSB: What do these latest results from ATLAS tell us?
AB: Our team has looked for the signs of particular sparticles - the so-called ‘squarks’ and ‘gluinos’ - from the data recorded by ATLAS last year. Our results show is that if these sparticles do exist, they must be heavier than previously thought. They must weigh more than about 800 protons - otherwise we would have seen them already. 

OSB: What more needs to be done to find out if Supersymmetry is real?
AB: There's certainly lots more work to do. We'll soon be firing up the accelerator again, and also increasing the rate of collisions. Then in 2013 we'll start running at even higher energies, which should give us sensitivity to even higher mass sparticles. 

OSB: What would it mean if we could prove/disprove Supersymmetry?
AB: If we can prove the theory to be correct then we can hope to learn about the 'missing' 96% of the universe - the part which is not made out of atoms. Quite apart from the cosmological implications this would be a most impressive experimental confirmation of a very elegant theory of nature.

If none of these sparticles can be found, even in the highest-energy collisions, then it's back to the drawing board for the theorists...

Dr Alan Barr is based at Oxford University’s Department of Physics.