Biofuels – Why bother?

A while ago someone figured out that the Earth's ever fluctuating climate was now changing too quickly and blamed it on excessive emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities. The scientific community, policy makers and the general public more or less agreed that something ought to be done to prevent a global catastrophe. One of the main sources of such climate-harming gases is burning fossil fuels for our transport and industries. Conveniently, such fuels are also a cause of great economical and geopolitical distress in the whole world, since every country needs them but only a handful are able to supply them.

One possible solution for these issues is the use of "biofuels". Biofuels are burned to release energy, much like conventional fuels, but whose energy was stored by consuming (sequestering) carbon dioxide in the first place.  In other words, using biofuels only releases the carbon dioxide that was removed from the atmosphere by making it, resulting in no overall increase. The most obvious example of biofuel is wood.

This grass is grown as an annual crop for biofuel, burned at Drax power station in Northern England.
Photo credit: Allan Harris (Creative Commons)

Would you like to write for us?

Do you work in science and could share some of the things we don’t know about your area of expertise or research?

We’d love for you to write a guest blog post for us to publish on this site.

The process is pretty simple, all we need is a:

• Few hundred words on a topic of your choice
• Relevant image or two if possible
• Couple of sentences about you to help readers learn more about our guest bloggers.

We’ll run the post past our editorial team here before it’s published just to check it’s clear and easy for our non-scientist readers to understand.

As you can tell from our name, we are focussing on the Things We Don’t Know in science, so some background on the topic you're writing about is fine, but remember to tell us mainly about the things that are still open questions.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post for Things We Don’t Know drop us an email (contact@thingswedontknow.com) or leave a comment below.

Why do we yawn?

Babies: A common cause of yawning worldwide.
Image credit: Björn Rixman (Flickr/Creative Commons)

With a newborn baby at home, you probably won't be surprised to hear I yawn a lot these days. But why do I do it? Although the answer seems obvious: "I'm tired", the question "why do we yawn" is very much unsolved.

Boredom and tiredness are the two most stereotypical reasons for yawning, but what's the connection between these two conditions? Neither explains why we yawn because we saw somebody else doing so, and there's even a good chance that simply reading this article will make you yawn - and hopefully not because you're bored! Why do we yawn? Is there a physiological reason? Or a psychological one? How about evolutionary? Why can't we control whether or not we do it?

It has been suggested, and even taught, that yawning is a response to a need for more oxygen in the brain, but this has been shown to be wrong¹. But what about temperature? It could be that we yawn because the brain is getting too hot, and that yawning helps cool it down again. The cooling effect is thought to come from both the air flowing through the skull as a result of the deep breath, and by increasing the blood flow to the brain by stretching the jaw. This research so far seems promising, but this still wouldn't explain why it's contagious.

Things We Don't Know on stage in Berlin

The Sophiensæle, Berlin - former meeting place of the German Communist Party, and now a theatre, is probably not the sort of place you expect to find a group of entrepreneurs explaining their new business ideas. And yet earlier this week, that is exactly what happened.

Sophiensæle, Berlin

When I received an email from Thom Reinhard via the Hub, it immediately leapt out at me as something special. A business school graduate turned artist, Thom was looking to combine the worlds of business and art with his partner Monica Truong. Specifically, they wanted to put social enterprise on the stage.

You probably know Things We Don't Know is a social enterprise. What may not be obvious is that in order for us to focus on explaining science well, we have to pay a lot of attention to aesthetics, design, language, imagery... in other words, art. 

Their concept was quite straightforward - they wanted to conduct an experiment. "What happens if you take an entrepreneur looking for funding, have their pitch rewritten by a team of artists, get a professional actor to train them and put them on the stage?" The result is the theatre performance "Invest In Me!", part of the Freischwimmer international arts festival, now touring Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The opportunity to connect with "non-traditional" science audiences was too good to miss. When I contacted Thom and Monica, they were immediately as excited about what we're doing as we were about them, and in August we announced that we would be joining their project.

A few short but very intensive months later, Tuesday evening was the show's première where we had a very warm reception from the audience. I can't say too much about the show itself without giving away surprises for our future performances, but it was great to connect with people from both the art and business worlds, and hear their feedback and perception of what we're doing. I will say that we have three very unique social entrepreneurs, with very different concepts and equally unique performance styles.  It was particularly interesting to hear one person describe our concept as creating the first "uncyclopedia", we hadn't really looked at it like that!

Setting up the "Invest In Me!" stage

For anybody who saw us on stage and is now reading the site, thank you for your support! Next stop: Vienna.

We’re recruiting!

Would you like to join Things We Don’t Know in explaining the questions to which science still seeks the answers?

We are creating an interactive repository where people can read about all the mysteries that science has not yet found the answer to - in other words, the rationale for current scientific research.

To help fill this repository with the "things" that we don't know, we are employing interns from universities around the world, and have a new vacancy.

We’re looking for a student currently studying Chemistry, or a related subject, to join the team on a part time basis. The role will require you to explain complex problems in simple language, and involve interviewing science researchers at your institution and writing up these pieces for the database. You will learn and develop a range of skills - improving writing skills, learn how to interview people, manage your own time etc.

The role is a paid internship, working part time (approximately 10h/wk) initially for a 3 month period, starting in January 2013.

Our main office is in London, but our team is intentionally distributed around the world and we rely heavily on digital communication and collaboration tools. As the role is intended to run concurrently with studies, we don't expect the successful candidate to be working from our London based office. Indeed, given the role requires talking to researchers at your university, it would make little sense! Therefore you will be "working from home". 

If this opportunity interests you and you think you fit the criteria please send your CV and covering letter to our recruitment team by emailing recruitment@thingswedontknow.com by 17:00 on Friday 30 November 2012.

Open Questions in Embryo Development

There are many things we still don't know about the very first hours of an embryo's development. In this time, does an embryo separate its back from front? Left from right? Or is this decided later?

We know about certain pathways that are involved in the early development of embryo.  But do we have the whole picture? And how can we even try to look at it?

This is what I am interested in my work. On my daily commute people often ask what it is that I work with. I tell them I use a technique to try to look at all the proteins at once within early embryos, mass spectrometry proteomics.

"What kind of embryos?  Human (with varying tones)? Mouse? Rat?"

"No."  I reply.  "Frogs."

A frog embryo, more commonly known as 'Frogspawn'.
Image credit: Andrew Michaels (Creative Commons)

Investigating Fragile X syndrome

Our research focuses on the neurons in networks in the brain and aims to understand the mechanisms that underlie the workings of our minds.

Our approach is to study how networks of nerve cells in the brain communicate together, how they connect with each other and how a change in a single gene in the brain can alter a brain network. The Human Genome Project has shown that humans have 20-25,000 different genes. We're still working on the exact number, but current estimates put it at 23,229¹. Around 20,000 (86%) of these genes are thought to express in our brains², but again, the exact count is unknown. Given these vast numbers, it may seem surprising that one gene can have a strong effect. But a single gene really can cause the difference between say a normal IQ and having learning difficulties & cognitive impairments. For example, take the intellectual disability and autism disorder, Fragile X syndrome: people with this monogenic disorder have an impairment of one specific gene³. This results in cognitive impairments, anxiety, higher levels of autism & epilepsy along with other non-cognitive symptoms. Within the brain itself, we find the structural connections made between nerve cells, the synapses, look different to those in an unaffected brain. The synapses are more immature in their development, on average, and are more abundant in the brain.

Synapses in a typical brain network, and those in a Fragile X network.
Image credit: Meredith lab, VU University Amsterdam

But how do we study the effects of a single gene on brain cell networks in a cognitive disorder? And is the increased number of structural connections between nerve cells in Fragile X syndrome reflected in brain function? To directly test our ideas that there are changes occurring in brain networks due to a single gene, we use brain tissue from  genetically-engineered mice to measure functional connections between nerve cells. We test if a nerve cell is connected to its immediate neighbours ('short-range') or to more distant nerve cells ('long-range' partners) using a combination of electrodes to measure neural activity and fluorescent dyes that monitor changes in brain network activity⁴.

Do Aliens Exist?

Asking scientists if they believe we're being visited by aliens in little flying saucers is likely to get you a few funny looks. Yet there are a number of scientists interested in the question "Do aliens exist?". The key point here, is that the two questions are completely different.

Many scientists believe there is life elsewhere in the universe. Some even believe it's likely to exist on other places within our solar system, such as on Jupiter's moon Europa. That's not to say they believe in UFO's - this life could be as simple as bacteria.

The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope near Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Image credit: NAIC 

Scientists have been searching of evidence of intelligent life on other worlds for more than a century - a search known as SETI. The most famous aspect of this search is probably SETI@home, which allows people to download an application onto their home computers, to analyse data from the Arecibo radio telescope (left). The program has been running for more than a decade (since 1999) and has attracted more than 5 million participants. They are searching for a radio signal that might be coming from an intelligent species, elsewhere in our galaxy - the Milky Way.

But is there likely to be another civilisation out there for us to detect?