Features

'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. 

Smokers and obese people cost healthcare systems less than healthy people, according to a new study from Holland reported in PLoS. But that headline doesn't tell the whole story writes Klim McPherson, Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford, in a companion article. The reason for the difference? Being obese shortens your life expectancy by around five years, while smoking reduces it by around seven years. Shorter lifespan = less total healthcare costs and reduced need for expensive care and treatment for ailments associated with old age. Professor McPherson comments: 'Certainly those who are obese and those who smoke will live fewer years on average, but will these people be compensated by enriched quality of their fewer years?' The research, he argues, doesn't shed any light on this quality of life issue as well as the cost dividend of improved health on other areas such as productivity at work, he adds: 'Translating individual costs and benefits to societal costs and benefits is never straightforward, and their study successfully emphasises the problem.'

Writing in today's Telegraph Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy deflates the hype surrounding latest media wunderkind Garrett Lisi. It had been widely reported that unemployed surfing physicist Lisi had 'done an Einstein' and, working outside the physics establishment, come up with a 'theory of everything'. Sound too good a story to be true? According to Marcus it is; the theory falls down where Lisi attempts to combine the symmetries of quantum physics and relativity. Marcus's conclusion: they just don't fit.

Yesterday the Messenger probe sailed within 125 miles of the surface of Mercury. This closest fly-by of the planet since 1975 has provoked considerable interest ahead of the probe going into orbit in 2011. Oxford scientists are involved in another Mercury mission, BepiColombo, due to launch in 2013. They are co-investigators on the MERTIS instrument which will examine the surface composition of the planet - in particular looking for feldspars - as well as examining how heat travels across the surface and heat flux in Mercury's interior.