The Shell Questacon Science Circus turns 21 - and its 5 years since 2001

The Shell Questacon Science circus, the most extensive science outreach program of its kind in the world, celebrated its 21st birthday with a gala event and a book launch in the Great Hall of Parliament House last week.

Each year, the circus sees over 100000 people, travels 25000 kilometres, runs professional development courses for 600 teachers and visits about 30 remote aboriginal communities as well as hospitals, nursing homes and special schools. The Circus is supported by the Shell Company in Australia, The Australian National University and Questacon, with the sponsors at the event confirming their support into the future. I’m a graduate from the class of 2001.

Canberra turned on a typical day for the occasion, with the top temperature of 5 degrees only being reached when the fog cleared at 4 pm. A crowd of 400 well rugged up guests, including members of parliament, past and present circus members, distinguished guests and school children from Evatt and St Thomas More’s primary schools, travelled to parliament house, where the circus had set up a number of interactive exhibits.

Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, was opened in 1980 by the ANU, and was then located at the former Ainslie Primary School in Canberra with only 15 interactive exhibits. However, there was a desire, in the words of founding director Mike Gore, that Questacon “should not simply be another building but that it must develop programmes that will reach out to all Australians – both in our cities and in the remote rural areas”. So Questacon got together with Shell, always looking to work on their public image, as well as focusing on science and education, and ANU, who provide the academic qualifications to those who run the circus, and in 1985 started the national touring program.

"The principal strength of the Science Circus, and the reason it has remained as one of the world’s leading science centre outreach programmes, is because of this partnership between two national institutions and the private sector," said Graham Durant.

Russell Caplan, Chairman Shell Companies in Australia, was pleased to announce Shell’s commitment to the circus for the next three years, "It is with pleasure that Shell commits to the future of this programme for the next three years so that it can continue to bring groundbreaking science experiences to regional and remote Australia."

ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb was glowing in his praise of the circus, as well as of his own university. “More than 250 science communicators have graduated from the programme via ANU to make a contribution in media, government and the private sector. The ANU Science Communication course at the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science is very much at the heart of the Science Circus.”

5 years on from my own circus year, here are my not particularly sciencey, largely censored, in no particular order, and including everyone, top ten things I remember about 2001:

1.Team Speedball – James, Cristy and myself assembled Speedball, the exhibit where you throw a tennis ball at a speed gun, so many times in 2001 that we could do it blindfolded. That exhibit has also given me 5 years of physio on my shoulder – for the record my best was in the 120s, only beaten that year by an 8 foot professional baseballer, or at least that’s what I remember. We also entertained each other, laughed, cried, and saw aliens together on the remote aboriginal communities tour. I’m still searching for the video James made from that tour, if anyone has it.

2. Dave’s Bone – Dave had massive cow leg bone that he was to use in his structures show. We travelled with it all through northern NSW, until it was tragically lost. I’m not sure if Dave knows this, but Marcus found it and hid it for a while. You’re outed Marcus!

3. The moobs cake – Anita and Belinda decided I had male breasts, and so made me a cake on my birthday in far north Queensland shaped as such. Quite obviously, I do not possess such features. Although, as I am continuously told, I have lost weight since then (I’m all of 6 foot and 75 kg by the way, and was back then too!)

4. Balloons – Doing the balloon show with Olivia, and have one student leave in tears screaming "Not the balloon, noooo!" when I threatened to pop one. And how easy it was to amuse high school students with the big long balloon.

5. Eating and Drinking – The Cowra trip with Merryn, Deno and Pete contained some fantastic cooking from Pete. I also remember a Melbourne Cup themed evening with Lish in Victoria – I made Hors Doeuvres, get it??? – and end-of-the-foodbox dinners were always something to behold. It was easy to tell that Anita and Olivia sustained themselves on beans most of the time. Only two of us completed 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes when we decided to tackle that obstacle. One was myself; the other was Merryn, who has returned as coordinator in 2006 to teach them a thing or two. The next morning we had to find lost hire car keys – we did end up finding them in a wet sticking garbage bin at the bottom of a large skip. I apologise for not contributing much to the search. I didn’t lose them by the way, the culprit shall remain nameless.

6. Love - The rumour that Owen and Lish were secretly dating at the end of the year. Liz and Cristy coming all the way down to Victoria to cheer up me and James. Marcus and Nadya in FNQ. Sam celebrating her one-year wedding anniversary in a Hungry Jacks somewhere near Moree. And what happened in outback NT stays in outback NT.

7. Flight – Richard doing the flight show and throwing his plane into a fluorescent light, making it fall from the roof and smash. More than once do I remember Richard throwing that polystyrene plane into a roof or ceiling fan.

8. Truckie – Mick the truck driver. Nuff said.

9. Schools and Science – yes we must be a little serious and soppy and say that the actual experience of going to the schools was amazing. We sometimes did silly things (planes into ceilings, a smashed flask of liquid nitrogen), we sometimes did odd shows (did I hear someone say “light show” James?) but all in all it was a fantastic time that I think I am only appreciating 5 years out. It’s a pretty cool buzz you get from it, and the hours of travelling were totally made up for once we got to the schools. Seeing Mez and Deno putting in such a big effort now makes me think I should humbly apologise to Lish, Fletch and Pete for all the stuff I put them through. I might, later...

10. And to finish... Music – The continuous beat that surrounded Graham everywhere he went. However, this was not the musical highlight of my year – that honour falls to Scandal’us, that supreme band from Popstars 2, who Belinda and I met at Canberra airport. I also have strong memories of James singing Sheena Easton’s classic "My baby takes the morning train", and "Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz". Second in my musical highlights comes from the Marco show Marcus and I decided to put on, a show which revolved around two wizards, myself (the straight one) trying to help Marcus (the funny one) recover his voice, which had been lost in a failed experiment, and along the way turning him into a dog. At the end we form a band, as you do. Ah, what brilliant songs, and the one school we actually did the songs it in front of – we retired them after that show, although we continued to do the rest of it – loved it, even though we were rather embarrassed so ran out of the classroom at the end. I have recently uncovered the songs from the depths of my old computer – reworded versions of Eminem’s "Stan", and the Flintstones theme. I vividly remember saying to Marco during the show "Hey Marco, lets do the songs!" With Marcus saying, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea” with his eyes saying "You idiot Marc! Don’t you even think about it." In any case, I won out and we did them – but only once.

INTRO:
My Nitrogen's gone cold, I'm wondering why it's messing with my senses
The morning rain clouds up my window, cause when warm air cools it condenses
And even if it didn't, it'd be a gas, but at minus 197 Celsius
It's a liquid and its not a gas, its not a gas

VERSE 1
Dear Marcos, I wrote you but you still aint callin'
I watched your science show, it was enthrallin'
You know man when you got the chain and ball
And put it in the nitrogen it got small
I didn't get it, so why don't you call?

Sometimes I take notes too sloppy when I jot 'em
And the show was cool, but how it happened I forget 'em
I'm going to start my own band too man
I got the dances and the dance moves, just like you taught 'em
Guess what I’m going to call it man, I'm a name it Marco

I'm sorry to hear about Marco's finger
I hope it grew back, he's a good singer
I got a room full of your posters and pictures man
I know you probably get this every day, but I’m your biggest fan
Hit me back, just to chat, your biggest fan, this is ...........
PS We should be together too

VERSE 2
Dear ...........
We meant to write to you soon sooner, but we've been busy
We hear you're forming a band, how far along is ya
Look, we're really flattered that you called your band that
And just remember, when things get cold they contract

And remember, when it comes to vibrations, slow is low
And when it comes to instruments man, home made is the go
So now you know
But we gotta split now, we gotta hit the road

Cause we gotta see all the schools
But you guys were really cool
You guys are a good crowd
Stay proud
We'll see you round
This is Marco

Our other song was from the Flintstones:

Nitrogen, liquid nitrogen
It's the coldest thing you've ever seen
It's a boiling liquid
At minus 197 degrees

If you put a balloon into it
You will see it shrink down quite a bit
We know sounds are caused by
Vibrations, yes vibrations
And if you do it slow
You'll get a low note
But if you do it fast
You'll get a high note

Ah educational, and fun.

Listen to this show here, and hear me sing (oh dear)...

Footy Science

You might think that the last thing going through a soccer player’s mind would be science. It’s difficult to imagine a striker contemplating the current nature of the universe just before game time, or the coach giving a short tutorial on statistics for inspiration. Soccer may be the beautiful game, but what of the science behind the artistry?

With the soccer world cup currently being played in Germany, and with the great Australian team performing exceptionally well, it is a good time to take a look at the Science of Soccer.

Excitement Plus:
Many football fans probably know this, but now science has proved it. Soccer is not only the most popular sport on the planet, but it is also the most exciting. Eli Ben-Naim, Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico took a look at a range of sports to find out which one had the most upsets – that is, when the underdog, the team with the worst record, actually won. They reckon that the more often a score line is unpredictable, the more exciting the sport. The team analysed results from over 300,000 games of hockey, American football, baseball, basketball and soccer. Their results showed that the frequency of upsets was highest for soccer, followed by baseball, hockey, basketball and finally American football. This suggests that soccer is the most exciting sport on Earth.

And the winner is….
There are some scientists out there who think they can predict the winner of the World Cup. Decision Technology, a firm of prediction experts who claim to be the best predictors in the world, has invented a computer program that boasts a better record than any bookmaker. The computer has studied the score lines of 4,500 games between 200 countries since 2002 and come up with forecasts for every initial group match in the Cup. It has correctly predicted 53% of English Premier League games since 2002, compared to newspaper tipsters, who predicted at 43%. For what its worth, they predicted Brazil to win followed by France, Germany and Holland. The fact that it didn’t pick Australia to win tells me that it can’t possibly be accurate!

Red cars go faster
Could the colour of your jersey really make a difference? Russell Hill and Robert Barton from Durham University in the UK tracked the winners of boxing, taekwondo, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling, and found that in these sports where the athletes do not wear national colours, but are randomly assigned either red or blue, the red competitor won over half the bouts. But it was in close matches where the red garb really mattered – the red side won at 62% in these encounters. Such effects may be due to instinctive behaviour. Perhaps human competitors experience a testosterone surge while wearing the colour, or feel submissive when facing a maroon opponent.

Don’t get me offside
But in some bad news for sports fans, scientists in the Netherlands have found that it is almost impossible for linesmen to keep their eyes on the players and the ball at the same time – meaning that bad off-side calls and terrible goal judgements are inevitable – and anyone who saw the Japanese goal against Australia knows what I mean. Raoul Oudejans from the Free University of Amsterdam asked three professional linesmen to assess 200 potential offside situations, and found that they got it wrong in 40 of those cases. They think that this is because of perspective error caused by the linesmen having to work on the sideline, and they suggest that they should work from the stands where such problems can be countered.

Head problems
And in more bad news for soccer players, heading the ball has been linked to various peculiar head and spinal injuries, whilst it has also been linked to an increased chance of motor neuron disease.

Fight for your right to party
But just be careful partying if your team wins. Studies suggest that crowds are more unruly when their team wins than when it looses. Mind you, with games on at 3am in the morning, I’ve been too tired to party. Go Australia!

See http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn9312.html for more science of soccer stories.

We are publishing this one early due to recording constraints with CRI.

Listen to this show here

Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, not around the eyes....

Ever seen people clucking like chickens, pretending to be Michael Jackson or doing other outlandish things, supposedly under the influence of a hypnotist? Does staring at a swinging watch really make you fall into a trance-like state where you are so susceptible to suggestion that you think onions taste like apples or that you can see everyone in the room naked? And does hypnotism have anything to do with zombies?

The topic of hypnosis is a controversial one. Some scientists charge that hypnosis is simply pseudo-science with no credibility, whilst many therapists use it for medical reasons, and evidence exists for its use in pain relief. People have been pondering and arguing over hypnosis for more than 200 years, but science has yet to fully explain how it actually happens. What we do know is that it is a process by which a person induces an altered state of awareness in another person. It is not the same as sleep, however, and you do not lose control over your mind or feelings. Despite popular belief, you do not weaken or surrender your will to any other person. You are fully conscious, but you tune out most of the stimuli around you, as you do when intensely reading or driving.

In conventional hypnosis, you approach the suggestions of the hypnotist as if they were reality. If the hypnotist suggests that the onion you are eating tastes like an apple, you’re brain will think that it does indeed taste like an apple. If the hypnotist suggests that you are drinking a beer, you'll taste the beer and feel it cooling your mouth and throat. But the entire time, you are aware that it's all fake, like when you’re watching a movie. You tune out your normal worries and doubts and become engrossed in what you are seeing. You are also highly suggestible, however a hypnotist can’t get you to do anything you don't want to do.

One theory of how hypnosis works has to do with your subconscious. In your everyday life, you are only aware of what’s going on in your conscious mind – like thinking of the right words to say to that cute girl, thinking about a problem at work or how much pepper to put in your stir fry. But your subconscious mind is also helping you make these decisions by doing all the behind the scenes thinking. It accesses a vast reservoir of information stored in your brain that helps you solve problems. It puts together plans and then takes them to your conscious mind for a decision. When a new idea comes to you out of the blue, it's because you already thought of it unconsciously.

Your subconscious also takes care of all that stuff you do automatically, like breathing. Your conscious mind could not handle it if you had to think of having to breathe all the time. Also, you don't think through every little thing you do while driving a car – a lot of that is left to your subconscious.

Psychiatrists theorise that hypnotism can calm the conscious mind so that it takes a less active role in your thinking processes. In this state, you're still aware of what's going on, but your conscious mind takes a back seat to your subconscious mind. Effectively, this allows you and the hypnotist to work directly with your subconscious. Without the conscious mind to think through everything you do, you may be open to the suggestions of the hypnotist.

But what of zombies, creatures apparently risen from the dead and desperate to eat brains? There have been sightings of zombies across the world, and one theory was that these were people so hypnotised that they had lost complete touch with reality. It may defy belief however, but zombies have been actually proven to exist in real life, but their hypnotism is the result of some incredibly potent drugs and not the work of a hypnotist.

Zombies have been discovered on the Caribbean island of Haiti. They are people who have been almost killed by a mixture of toad skin and puffer fish, which makes the victim soon appear dead, with an incredibly slow breath, and an incredibly slow and faint heartbeat. In Haiti, people are buried very soon after death, because the heat and the lack of refrigeration makes their bodies decay rapidly. So you have to dig them up within eight hours of the burial, or else they'll die of asphyxiation.

When raised from their burial spot, they are made mad, by being force-fed a paste made from Datura, or Jimsons Weed, which breaks your links with reality, and then destroys all your recent memories. So you don’t know what day it is, where you are or who you are. The zombies are in a state of semi-permanent induced psychotic delirium. They are then sold to sugar plantations as slave labour.

Thankfully, your local doctor can’t put you into this type of state with everyday hypnosis!

Listen to this show here

The Networked World

These days you can do almost anything on the internet – there’s everything from internet banking and internet dating, to music and video downloads, both legal and illegal. Most busy people see more advertising on the bottom of emails and on pop-up internet ads than on the TV or the radio. And why use a travel agent to book a holiday or a work flight when you can do it from the comfort of your own home or office? This week we will take a look at where this technology came from, and where we might be heading in the future.

The history of the internet, along with that of the microwave, hang-gliders and smoke detectors, can be traced back to the cold war between the US and the USSR. When the USSR launched the Sputnik program to demonstrate that artificial satellites could be launched into orbit around the Earth, the US realised that the USSR had developed the capacity to rapidly exploit military technology. So in response to this, in 1958 they created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to try and wrestle back the technological lead.

DARPA started to investigate the idea of linking computers together to share information, and so they started to network radar systems across the US. JCR Licklider had the vision that the universal networking of computers could potentially be a unifying human revolution, however it would be many years before this vision came to fruition.

Robert Taylor, the head of the information processing office at DARPA, intended to realise Licklider's dream, and with Larry Roberts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started up a plan to build such a network. This network, called the ARPANET, had its first link established in 1969 between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute, and following links to the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara were added during the same year. By 1981, the ARPANET was growing rapidly, with the 213 hosts, and would become the technical core of the future Internet. By this stage, all US National Laboratories were also connected for scientific research purposes.

In 1983, the US National Science Foundation constructed a university network backbone that was opened to commercial interests in 1995. This networked merged into other pre-existing networks such as Telnet, and somewhere around this time, the word “Internet” came to describe the global network that we know today.

During the 1990s, the internet truly gained public acceptance. In 1991, the research organisation CERN made the "World Wide Web" project public, and in 1994 there was growing public interest in the Internet, which was previously seen as largely technical or academic. The growth of the internet is often attributed to the lack of a central owner, which means that the network can grow without bounds and without any one company exerting too much control.

But what of the future of the internet? Many people in recent times have been talking of "Web 2.0", which refers to the second generation of services available on the World Wide Web. These allow people to collaborate and share information more easily online. So instead of having a static website at your finger tips, the web will be more dynamic and interactive, with new concepts such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds abounding. Check out the CRI website for CRI blogs, and even Mr Science has a podcast at feeds.feedburner.com/MrSciencePodcast.

Whilst not everyone aggress on what Web 2.0 means, the basic idea is that users generate content, rather than simply consume it from an unchanging website, and that open programming interfaces let users add to a web service and easily get data from it. Users tag pages they like, so that instead of a company deciding which news articles you should read, the most popular and highly ranked sites from that day are displayed. You could also add to the content by modifying it yourself – the idea behind wiki pages – or create your own blog. Advertising is more targeted towards the user by reflecting the content of the page you are currently visiting, and the pages you have visited in the past, as well as what you have previously searched.

So get our there, create a blog, post on forums, listen to podcasts, and contribute to the not-so-brave, but slightly cool, world of Web 2.0.

Listen to this show here

Community Radio

This week I was privileged join the Diffusion Science show team on 2SER 107.3 FM Community Radio, and host this week's show. The Show has a broad mix of Science - new science, hard science, pop science, historical science and very silly science, and is run by a great bunch of guys and girls.

The show, formerly known as Discovery Science before the Discovery channel threatened a law suit, is recorded in the Sydney studios of 2SER, broadcast on 107.3 FM and streamed over the web at 9am Thursday mornings. We are broadcast on the Community Radio Network via CBAA and picked up by seventeen stations around Australia (that we know of).

The show can be picked up on podcast at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DiffusionRadio

There are old Discovery feed listeners, and new Diffusion podcast listeners, and has been the third most popular science podcast in the country, something of which Mr Science can only dream, although I'm sure there are untold millions of Chinese barred from visiting blogger listening in to the show, fantasising about podcasts!

You can email the team at: diffusion@2ser.com

She seems to have an invisible touch

Imagine the things you would do if you had Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Everyone has had this fantasy, but now it seems that this staple of science fiction from Star Trek to Dr Who may be close to science fact, although it requires a little imagination, and a little faith in some extraordinary mathematics.

Within the last few months, a number of theories for developing cloaking devices have been unveiled. Two recent reports in the magazine Science have described how experimental "metamaterials" can change the way light bends around an object, to create an illusion that we might call a mirage.

Metamaterials are composite materials that are designed to have interesting properties, such as the ability to bend light. They contain microscopic rods or metallic rings that can be tinkered with to interact with light in controllable ways, such as to manipulate how quickly light travels when near particular parts of the material. However, despite our espionage fantasies, any invisibility cloaks made out of the material in the near future would be extremely heavy and thick, and you would not be able to see out of them.

Physicist Ulf Leonhardt, of the University of St Andrews and an author of one of the reports in Science, wrote "Imagine a situation where a medium guides light around a hole in it. The light rays end up behind the object as if they had travelled in a straight line. Any object placed in the hole would be hidden from sight. The medium would create the ultimate optical illusion: invisibility." This is like what happens to water when it runs around the outside of a smooth rock in a river, and occurs in our case here because of refraction - a characteristic of light where it takes the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, path. We can see refraction by simply dropping a pen in a glass of water and observing that it looks like its bent, when we know its not.
Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London, author of the second report, also predicted that with sufficient funding, the first of these devices could be around within 5 years.

These devices could also be used to hide objects from other electromagnetic waves and even sound. This has obvious Defence applications. David Schurig of Duke University in North Carolina and Pendry’s co-author stated that this Defence goal "would be to conceal an object from discovery by agents using probing or environmental radiation." This is a different method of stealth than modern methods used to hide planes from radars. Current stealth technology revolves around reducing a plane’s "Radar Cross Section". Radars work by sending out electromagnetic radiation, and then detecting when it reflects back off its target. To reduce the amount of radiation that is reflected back by the plane, we can design the plane’s shape such that reflections do not go back in the direction they came, we can make it out of a material that is non-metallic and so less reflective, and we can paint it with paint that absorbs the radiation. But these methods never make a plane entirely invisible to radar. With this new technology, the hope is that the radiation does not even hit the plane in the first place.

Along with the problem of not being able to see out from the inside of such a material, is the fact that the more types of radiation against which that we make the material work – for instance, if the material cloaks against visible light and microwave radar – the more expensive and difficult the material is to produce.

Another recent study comes from Professor Graeme Milton, of the University of Utah, and Dr Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici, of the University of Technology, Sydney. They studied materials with bizarre optical properties first postulated in 1968 by Victor Veselago, a Russian physicist, to show that light could cancel itself out in some scenarios and make an object look invisible. This work remained a strange mathematical fantasy until six years ago with the creation of superlenses that can make objects, when placed near them, invisible. When an object is bathed in light of one colour, the light becomes trapped near the lens and "almost exactly cancels the light incident on each molecule in the object, so it has essentially no response to the incident light. Numerically we see that the molecule is effectively invisible."

This is a mathematical solution. The real test for any of these invisibility solutions will be when someone finally makes one and experiments with it. Until then, the best example of invisibility is that of Professor Susumu Tachi of Tokyo University, who made a suit with a video camera out the back, who's images were projected on the front of the suit, so it seems as though you were looking "through" the wearer. This didn’t quite work perfectly however, as you need to be looking from the right angle for it to be effective. So until our mathematical fantasies come true, we can only fantasise about a future where the Invisible Man is a possibility.

Listen to this show here

What the Hack?

Computer hackers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just curious to see what they can do and don’t cause any harm, others look for flaws in software design and work out ways to exploit them. Some seek power, others seek thrills, some steal money and others steal secrets. We see them in movies all the time. But the term hacker can mean many things, and they’re not all negative.

At their best, hackers may be people who know various programming languages and interfaces so well that they can write software expertly and quickly. These hackers can be brilliant at their tasks, writing detailed programs with little guidance in very quick time.

At their most interesting however, hackers can exploit computer security systems and gain unauthorized access through their own skills, tactics and knowledge. I’m sure that many listeners have been victims of this type of hacker, having perhaps had a Trojan horse, which is a program designed to look like legitimate software, but actually does something malicious, downloaded onto their computer.

A notorious, or famous depending on your point of view, computer hacker is Jonathon James, who obtained access to the source code on the International Space Station that controlled critical life sustaining functions such as oxygen filtering. He also intercepted communications between U.S. Department of Defense officials at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency who were discussing nuclear strategy, and obtained usernames and passwords of Defense Department officials. And he did this all at the age of 15!

Gary McKinnon is another infamous hacker, who is accused of the "biggest military computer hack of all time". The unemployed computer systems administrator is accused of hacking into 97 US government computers, including networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, the US Air Force, and The Pentagon. The costs of tracking and correcting the problems he allegedly caused are estimated to be around $US 700 000.

Another, rather ingenious, hacker is Noah Burn of South Carolina in the US. Burn exploited a software flaw in the game EverQuest II so that his character within the game, a barbarian called Methical, could sell lots of desirable goods, and therefore make lots of virtual money. Now this might sound like it’s not worth the effort – after all, all this extra money is just virtual money, and you can’t spend it in the real world. However, with online gaming becoming more and more prevalent, a real life market has been set up on auction sites such as e-bay, whereby you can buy virtual goods for real life money – that is, you can buy the goods and have your character possess them, without having to earn them within the game. In this way, Burn made roughly $US 100 000 in the real world due to a minor glitch in his virtual world.

Indeed, this real life market for online commodities has taken off to such an extent that some players have been collecting real life money for destroying the property of other characters, or even the characters themselves. One such online character is Istvaan Shoaatsu, who is a mercenary destroying other characters for a profit within the game Eve Online. And whilst Shoaatsu may profit in the real world from these activities, those whom he destroys lose their own virtual money, which has taken time to earn and has a real life worth. Indeed, violence from the online world has spilled over into reality. Qui Chengwei from Shanghai, having loaned his valuable sword to a friend Zhu Caoyuan within the game Legends of Mir, actually murdered Zhu in real life when he discovered that Zhu had sold his sword on to another buyer.

This highlights an area where our laws are just not ready, as we have never had to develop laws for such situations. Another area where this is the case is in the situation of bio-hackers, who are similar to computer hackers, but instead of tinkering with computers and software, they experiment with DNA and other aspects of genetics. It is thought that in the future, computers themselves will contain biological devices. But until then, the risk of bioterrorism and biohackers with evil intent is high. Imagine if you could isolate the DNA of dangerous viruses and create even more deadly bugs? Tom Knight of the Massachusettes Institute of Technology thinks we have absolutely no choice but to try and do this better and faster than the bad guys, and work out ways of lessening the possible damage caused.

See Tim Guest’s book Second Lives, which will be published in 2007, for more information about online/offline adventures.

Listen to this show here

Scientific Dating Tips

Some of us are pretty unlucky in love. The old tricks of buying flowers, buying dinner and whispering sweet nothings just isn’t working. Perhaps its time to turn to science to win us the heart of that special person. But can science successfully play Cupid? Here are some tips from society’s most lucky in love, the scientists.

Make your Body talk
Forget the pick up lines. Body language is more important than the smoothest of opening lines. When you meet someone for the first time, 55% of the initial impression is based on your body language, 38% is based on the tone, speed and style of your voice and only 7% on what you actually say! So what sort of body language should we employ? Mirroring the other person’s movements and posture is a good start. Most people do not realise they are being mirrored, but will view you favourably. Adopting particularly masculine or feminine postures can also help, like putting your hands in your pockets to puff out your chest.

When I look into your eyes...
It may seem like a pretty simple act, but looking into someone’s eyes can have a powerful impact. Gazing into someone’s eyes lights up parts of the brain associated with feeling good. Psychologist Arthur Arun performed an interesting study where he asked people, who had previously never met, to stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes. Their feelings of attraction rocketed compared to staring at other parts of the body. Indeed, one of these couples ended up getting married!

Our pupils dilate when we are interested in at what we are looking, and it has been shown that people are attracted to large pupils – in the way that people find big-eyed puppies cute! Indeed, in medieval Italy, ladies put bella donna in their eyes to make them look bigger. This is not particularly wide spread these days, as bella donna is a poison!

Be afraid, be very afraid
There is a strong connection between anxiety, arousal and attraction, and it has been found that couples who meet when physiologically aroused, or who experience fear together on a first date, have an increased chance of having romantic feelings for each other. No one is quite sure why this happens – it could be that the adrenaline rush from the danger is misinterpreted as attraction – but it suggests that a bungee jump first date could be a good idea. Or at least, choose the suspense or horror film over the chick flick.

Be Funny
Love and laughter go together. If you can make your partner laugh, you have a stronger chance of them falling for you. If you have ever noticed that couples in love tend to find each other funny whilst the rest of us think that their jokes are pretty bad, it is because a compatible sense of humour seems to be one of the keys to love.

Can there be more than one “one and only”?
Do we each only have one “soul mate”? Is there really such a thing as finding your one and only beloved in a world of over 6 billion people? Evolutionary psychologists at Indiana and New Mexico Universities used computer simulations to examine this question of how to best choose your partner from a set of prospective lovers. They set up their experiment such that the person making the choice of partner examined a bunch of potential partners to determine how attractive they were, and how high he should set his sights. Once this decision is made, based on those prospective partners he has seen, he goes for the next person who he comes across that fits his criteria.

The researchers found that one should only examine 9% of all the possible partners out there, before making your choice. For example, if you were at a party of 100 people looking for love, you should only scrutinize the first 9 possible mates you come across before focusing your attention on that special someone. Examining less than this number means that you do not collect enough information to make a good choice. On the other hand, examining more means that it is more likely that you wont choose your best possible choice as they are more likely to be amongst those you examined and then ignored before choosing. Whilst this model is far too simplistic to be an accurate representation of the search for love, it tells us that we should not search forever, as it is likely that we may let our true love pass us by.

So let us know how these tips work for you, as it would seem that love does not follow a rulebook.

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Sniffing out a partner

What makes you fancy someone? What is it that you look for in a partner? This week on Mr Science, we will continue our exploration of the science of love, and take a look at how your genes, your nose and even the Internet can all play a role in for whom you fall.

There are some facts that are unavoidable – some people are simply just beautiful. Perhaps they have symmetrical faces – it has been shown that men prefer women who are close to symmetrical. Perhaps their bodies contain the golden ratio, as discussed in previous weeks in the Mathematics of looking Beautiful. In women, men seem to look for full lips and soft facial features. In men, women seem to prefer broad shoulders and the appearance of sexual potency. The desire for these features seems to be conscious and universal.

However, not everyone can end up with the Brad Pitts and Natalie Portmans of this world. It would seem that people fall for those who have similar attractiveness, intelligence and "status" to themselves – that is, those within their league. If everyone fell in love with a movie star, only very few people would end up breeding, and this is obviously bad for evolution.

On the more subconscious level, a set of genes known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), seems to play a role in to whom we are attracted. We actually look for people who have a different MHC to ourselves. The MHC helps us fight off pathogens, so the offspring of two people with different MHCs has a broader immune system than the offspring of parents with similar MHCs. And it would seem that our noses sniff out this difference. A 1995 study by Claus Wedekind of the University of Bern discovered that women prefer the smell of sweaty shirts from men who have a distinctly different MHC to themselves. This is similar to the situation with rats, who smell the pheromones in each other’s urine to determine their resistance to disease.

An interest exception to this rule is for women on the contraceptive pill. These women prefer men with a similar MHC to themselves. Women’s preferences also change throughout their menstrual cycle, as during periods of high fertility they prefer men with strong masculine characteristics, whilst at other times, prefer more stable caring men.

Another recent, rather Freudian, finding is that we seem to prefer a partner who reminds us of our parents. Men seem to prefer women who are like their mother, and women want the man of their dreams to remind them of their dad. David Perrett of the University of Scotland performed a computerised study where he morphed pictures of participants’ faces into the faces of others, and discovered that his participants preferred the faces that contained fractions of their own face – even though they could not consciously determine their own faces on the screen. He suggested that this was because these faces remind us of the faces we constantly see during our early childhood – the faces of our parents. It has even been suggested that we prefer someone to smell like our parents. It would seem that we are seeking our partner to possess an immune system which is a blend of the tried and true immune systems of a parents, and that of one that is completely different to our own, to make sure our offspring has a wide range of genes for immunity. We seem to desire a balance between inbreeding and outbreeding.

Not all relationships however are born out of compatible genes and smells. Many modern relationships start in that very modern of media, the Internet. There is growing evidence that the Internet can be more conducive to open relationships than first meeting in reality. This phenomenon has been called the “hyperpersonal” effect by Joe Walther of Cornell University, and refers to the fact that when communicating by typed messages, we have more time to construct our responses and are often more intimate and honest. By not having to look at, or hear the person to whom we are talking, we can focus solely on what we are saying and not the way we look or sound. This allows us to build positive impressions of each other without the visual clues that might have normally put us off. This means we get to know each other from the inside out. Walther also uncovered that, despite its ease, people are less likely to lie online, possibly because there are no uncomfortable consequences.

Another researcher, Katelyn McKenna of Ben Gurion University, thinks that in some cases, an attraction built on the Internet that may not have started in real life, may be strong enough when the couple do finally meet offline. Indeed, McKenna thinks that sometimes starting the relationship in the safe environment of the Internet, where people are more honest and open about themselves, may be preferable. The danger is that, because there is no physical contact, participants in online romance may fill the gaps with what they would like to believe about the other person, and not what is actually the truth.

The road to true love seems to be a mix of the conscious and the unconscious, and may take unexpected turns. Until next week, try and find yourself an object of affection, and next time on Mr Science, will we take a look at how you can best scientifically woo your love.

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Love is a many splendored thing

Love has inspired painters, songwriters and artists for centuries. Singers have cried that love will tear us apart and that love will lead us back together, that love can be tainted, and that the look of love is something to be desired. Some cultures have more than 10 words for love. But now scientists are starting to get interested in this fundamental human emotion, and this week on Mr Science, we will start a series of shows looking into this crazy little thing called Love.

The scientific understanding of love is still in its early stages, however when it comes to those warm tingly feelings inside us, it seems that our biochemistry is to blame. Right from the moment we are born, chemicals in our brain effect how much we bond with those around us. The love of a mother for a child is perhaps the most fundamental of loves, and scientists are now starting to understand that this love is cemented by a hormone called oxytocin. Late in pregnancy, the number of oxytocin receptors in the brain increases because of heightened levels of oestrogen. During childbirth, the hypothalamus gland releases high levels of oxytocin that then bonds to the many receptors, thus making the mother effectively “addicted” to her child. This makes evolutionary sense, as a strong bond between mother and child is essential for the child to survive.

Oxytocin is also thought to be associated with long lasting intimate relationships between adults. Oxytocin is released during intimate physical contact between partners, and boosts trust between partners whilst also helping people overcome “social fear” when getting to know each other. A study of “investors” and “trustees” at the University of Zurich suggested that with just a sniff of oxytocin, those playing the role of investors would hand over all their money to phoney anonymous trustees without any guarantee of its return. Those in love would recognise the thought that your partner can do no wrong.

But whilst oxytocin cements close relationships, other chemicals get us to that stage. Lust is driven by testosterone and oestrogen. These hormones encourage us to get out there and meet people, and cause the initial attractions. After lust comes attraction, and this is the stage that most people regard as being love-struck. You are unable to think about anything else and you spend hours daydreaming about that special person. Sometimes you don’t even need to eat or sleep. A group of neuro-transmitters called monoamines are to blame here. You are the victim of dopamine, which is also activated by smoking, adrenaline, which makes you sweat and your heart race, and serotonin, which has been shown to be associated with mental disorders. It would seem that you would have to be mad to be in love. Indeed, studies in Italy have shown that some people recently in love suffer some symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Some even suffered depression!

Another interesting chemical in the brain associated with long-term commitment is called vasopressin. The amount of vasopressin in the brain seems to determine whether or not a couple will remain monogamous. Monogamy, or having only one partner, is not as common among mammals as one may think. Although having monogamous parents could help in child raring, less than 5% of mammals have only one partner. Nature provides a good example of how vasopressin can determine monogamy. The Prairie vole bonds very closely to its mate, whilst its relative, the meadow vole, is promiscuous. It seems that the difference between these species is the amount of vasopressin receptors in the brain. In the prairie vole, when the hormone is released during physical intimacy, there are many receptors with which it can bond, and the deep monogamous relationship is cemented. In the meadow vole, there are very few receptors, and so the feelings of love are not generated and the meadow vole moves on to its next partner.

So it would seem that we are at the mercy of our biochemistry, and that love may indeed give us a mental disorder. In the next few weeks on Mr Science, we’ll have a closer look at what we look for in our perfect partners, and also how to best scientifically woo your lover. We’ll also take a look at internet dating.

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Venus - Hell's Kitchen

Imagine a planet that’s about the same size as Earth, made up of the same rocky material, with Earth-like features such as clouds and volcanoes, and just a little bit closer to the Sun.

But now imagine that this planet has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, an atmosphere that would crush you, and where it rained sulphuric acid everyday.

This place is Venus. Venus is named after the Roman goddess of love, but this week on Mr Science, we will discuss a planet that has nothing to do with love and is about as close to Hell as you can possibly get.

Back when the solar system was being formed, Earth and Venus looked quite similar – they were both rocky, inhospitable places with volcanic eruptions spewing carbon dioxide into the air. Both had water vapour in their atmospheres. On Earth, this water vapour turned into clouds and eventually the oceans. On Venus, which is 30 per cent closer to the Sun, it was slightly too hot for liquid water to form and eventually the sun's radiation broke apart the water molecules.

On Earth, the oceans dissolved much of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide and helped create limestone and other minerals. On Venus, all this carbon dioxide, with no water to dissolve in, continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, until the pressure was 90 times that of Earth’s. This caused a runaway greenhouse effect. With radiation from the Sun not able to escape from this dense atmosphere, the temperature got hotter and hotter until the average temperature reached 450 degrees Celsius. It was liquid water, or the lack of it, that made all the difference.

So could we possibly ever go to this place? The first landing on Venus was in 1966 when a Soviet probe called Venera 3 crash-landed on the surface. In 1967, Venera 4 descended through the atmosphere sending back readings, but its batteries failed before it touched down. Venera 5 and 6 were crushed by intense atmospheric pressures. Finally, in 1975, a descent vehicle from Venera 9 made it to the ground. No human has ever been there.

On April 11 2006, the Venus Express, which is a European Space Agency mission, successfully assumed orbit around Venus, and it plans to map the Venusian surface for about two Venusian days. This may not sound like a long time, but this actual equates to about 500 Earth days. This means that Venus rotates very slowly. Another usual facet of Venus’s rotation is that rotates in the opposite direction to the other major planets – that is, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. Scientists do not know why Venus rotates so slowly and in the opposite direction, but it is thought that is has something to do with solar heating of the thick atmosphere, friction and tidal forces.

So to survive on Venus’s surface, you would need to be able to withstand incredibly hot temperatures, intense atmospheric pressure and acid rain from the sulphuric acid clouds. It would seem therefore unlikely that life as we know it could live on Venus’s surface.
But some scientists, like NASA’s Geoffrey Landis, think that life may exist up above the clouds. At 50 km above the surface, the temperature range is between 0 and 50 degrees Celsius, the air pressure drops to 1 atmosphere and the gravity is 90 percent that of Earth’s – very pleasant conditions for life, or at least, microscopic life. Indeed, scientists have discovered that the chemical carbonyl sulphide is found in Venus’s atmosphere. This is a compound that is difficult to make using natural processes and is usually found as a bi-product of life.

But it would seem that Venus has nothing to with its namesake, the goddess of love. However, stay tuned for next week’s Mr Science, when we take a closer look at this topic of love, and see whether there is any science behind human attraction.

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A land of hobbits, giant rats and miniature elephants?

Ever wondered what it would be like to be stranded on a deserted island?

What if that island was a lost island of pony-sized elephants, gigantic lizards and even miniature humans? Sound far-fetched? Whilst the idea may be fanciful, scientists think they may have discovered such a place.

The island is called Flores, and is east of Java in Indonesia. A team of Australian and Indonesian paleoanthropologists and archaeologists were looking on Flores for evidence that the Homo sapiens species of humans – the species that we all are – migrated down through Asia and into Australia about 50 000 years ago.

What they found was truly astounding.

They found the remains of at least seven individuals of some type of human, but a type that looks nothing like us. These humans were only about one meter tall, weighed only 25 kg and had brains that were four times smaller than our own.

Scientists now call them Homo floresiensis, on account of where they were discovered, although they are more commonly, and perhaps cruelly, known as Hobbits, after the little human-like species from The Lord of the Rings.

What was even more surprising was that their remains suggested that they may have survived as recently as 12 000 years ago – which means that some of the stories passed down by the local people in the area about seeing little people could possibly be true! Even an editor of the reputable science magazine Nature has suggested that it is not beyond the realms of possibility that one day we may find a human-like species like this still alive and well somewhere in an uncharted part of the world. It is even more likely that, as Homo sapiens and the hobbits were living in the same part of the world at the same time back then, they probably came face to face.
There is currently debate about how to classify these hobbits. It is not sure yet whether they descended from Homo erectus – the same species from which we Homo sapiens descended – or whether they could even be an off-shoot of modern humans – they did have quite sophisticated tools, and although their brains are small, they are big for their size.

It is thought that Homo erectus, a tall not-quite ape, not quite homo-sapiens creature, travelled out of Africa, colonised Asia and then stopped. There’s never been evidence that they travelled over water – simply because they weren’t smart enough. Is this evidence that they did? Or is this evidence that these hobbits are more like us than we think?

What seems clear though is that the reason this species is so small is because of the conditions in which it lived on the island. When they came to the island, and its unsure how that happened at the moment, they would have found a small island with limited resources. As generations passed, they evolved to get smaller and smaller, as in this way they would require less food to survive. Also, having a smaller body in the hot and humid conditions meant that was easier to cool down and less heat was made within the body when they moved around.

Some scientists think that this is an example of island dwarfing, which is a biological phenomenon by which the size of an animal isolated on an island shrinks dramatically over generations. It is a form of natural selection in which a smaller size provides a survival advantage.

But these hobbits were not the only species on the island that were a little strangely shaped. Dwarf elephants were also found on the island and were probably hunted by groups of their hominid counterparts. These animals, called Stegodons, were smaller than modern water buffaloes and also suffered island dwarfing.

Not every species on Flores is small though. In contrast, Flores is still home to a giant rat, which has a head and body size of about 45 cm, and a tail length of up to 70 cm, which means that they can stretch over 1 m! The island is also home to the Komodo dragon, a giant carnivorous lizard that can be as long as 3 m and weigh around 70 kg. If its initial bite doesn’t kill its prey, the over 50 different strains of bacteria in its teeth will. This prey includes pigs and even water buffalo. It might have been able to stay huge on the island, unlike the elephants, because these elephants, and perhaps even our hobbit friends, were the perfect meal size for them.

But whilst the giant rats and dragons survive to this day, the mini humans and elephants do not. Scientists think that they fell victim to a volcano eruption about 12 000 years ago. But could these strange and wonderful species exist somewhere else in the world? Be careful next time you’re shipwrecked and wash up ashore on a deserted island. A race of three-foot high humans who hunt elephants that only come up to your waist, and eat rats as big as dogs may await you. And be careful of the dragons with deadly bacteria-laced saliva. Who ever said science was dull?!

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Want to travel through time, or to the edge of the universe?

Imagine seeing the great wall being built, visiting your great, great, great grandchildren in the 23rd century, or instantly travelling to the other side of the universe.

Time travel and wormholes used to belong to the minds of science fiction writers. But, with a little inspiration, scientists have begun to show us that science fact can be just as strange as science fiction.

Einstein's special theory of relativity shows that time travel into the future is actually possible – there is no reason why we can’t do it. We just don’t know how to yet. Einstein’s theory suggests that the way we feel time going by is related to how fast we are moving. Objects travelling at speeds close to the speed of light (about 300 000 kilometres per second) age slower than objects which are not moving.

In 1975, Professor Carrol Alley tested Einstein's theory using two synchronised atomic clocks. Carrol loaded one clock onto a plane, which was flown for several hours, while the other clock remained on the ground. At the end of its flight, the clock on the plane was slightly behind the one that was left on the ground – that is, time had actually passed more slowly for the clock on the plane than the one on the ground. It had travelled every so slightly forward in time. So to travel into the distant future, somehow scientists need to come up with technology than can allow us to travel somewhere near the speed of light.

But what about time travel into the past? In theory, nothing in the laws of physics is stopping us from doing it, however, no one quite knows how to do it.

According to Einstein's theories, any object with mass will cause a warp in space-time, similar to a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. Because space and time has been stretched, clocks operate slower close to Earth than in the vast areas of space. Previous theoretical designs of time machines have used this concept of mass distorting space-time, however these theoretical machines require a tremendous amount of energy to work.

A professor of theoretical physics named Ronald Mallett came up with another idea. He believes that anything containing energy could warp space-time, and as a result, he has designed a time machine that uses light, rather than mass. His theoretical time machine consists of a ring of two intense beams of light, circling in opposite directions. By slowing the light down in an ultra-cold bath of atoms and increasing the intensity of the beams, he thinks space-time inside the ring would become warped. Eventually, space and time would become so distorted by the circling light that time would become a dimension similar to space - a dimension that you could move along! If you entered the ring and walked in the correct direction, you could walk backwards through time - maybe even passing yourself as you entered the ring!

However, there are lots of problems putting Ronald's theory into practice. The temperature of the ring would have to be close to absolute zero (-273°C), so humans would find it difficult to use. And it would also be impossible to travel back to a time before the machine was switched on. Perhaps this is why we’ve never met anyone from the future!

So, what about these wormholes? Can we travel across the universe instantly using one?

The universe appears as three dimensions in space (up-down, left-right, and forward-backward) and a fourth dimension known as time. Wormholes are connections between two different places in space and time. This is difficult to visualise in four dimensions, but it is easy to see in two. Imagine two points on an sheet of paper. You could travel between the points by following a line on the piece of paper, or you could fold the paper over so that the two points touch. By folding the paper, you are making a 'wormhole' in the two-dimensional paper world.

Although there is no experimental evidence for the existence of wormholes, theorists believe that they may exist. Wormholes first appeared possible in Einstein's theory of gravity, in 1913. However, physicists had almost forgotten about them until the eighties, when Carl Sagan included them in his novel Contact, in which the main character travels to another part of the universe to visit another civilisation.

To be stable, wormholes need lots of what’s called negative energy. Quantum mechanics suggests that it exists, but we haven’t found it yet, and we don't know whether the laws of quantum mechanics allow enough negative energy to be concentrated in such a way as to allow wormholes to exist.

One possible location for wormholes is at the centre of black holes. Travelling through one of these might prove extremely difficult however, since the wormhole would be so unstable that it would collapse as soon as a spaceship (or even a ray of light) entered it. This is because there would not be enough negative energy to hold it open.

So don't pack your bags for a trip to the other side of the galaxy just yet, or for a trip back in time. Scientists haven’t found any wormholes yet, or made a time machine. So we do know that a wormhole is not going to get you across Beijing in time for work after you’ve slept in.

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Black Holes

What are black holes? Can we use them to travel through time? Where are they and what creates them?

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What is DNA?

What is DNA? What does it stand for and what does it do? Can we change it and change ourselves?

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What are Dreams?

Why do we dream? Do they mean anything? Can we control them?

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What do ears do?

What do ears do? Do we really need them? How do they work, and what else do they do but help us hear?

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Global Warming

What is Global Warming? Are humans creating it and is there anything we can do about it?

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Can we live forever?

Can we live forever? What is stopping us from becoming immortal? Are we the first generation to live to 150?

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Can Scientists Predict your Music Taste?

Has it come to this? Can science now predict something as personal as the types of music that someone likes? This week we take a look at some of the advances being made into helping us broaden our music appreciation, and predict the unpredictable.

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