Chance & Necessity

The Marangoni effect

Liquids form approximately spherical droplets because of surface tension. Surface tension is a force acting at the surfaces of liquids that tends to contract the area of these surfaces, and a sphere has the minimum surface area for a given volume. This is cute. But even cuter is that any time the surface tension of a liquid is not the same everywhere ,then the areas of the surface at lower surface tension tend to expand while those areas at higher surface tension contract – this is called the Marangoni effect and is illustrated in the YouTube clip above.

Learning from my old boss

3foldway Twenty plus years I ago I was a fresh-faced PhD student, and my then PhD supervisor, George Jackson was selling the science his group, including me, did. I remember that he was a fan of triangles like the one shown above. His group was doing both computer simulations and theory at the time, and he wanted to make the point that they complement each other, and help to understand and predict experiment.

Evaporation!

A few weeks ago, our new boss, Vice Chancellor Professor Max Lu, visited the physics department. He started last year and is touring the departments in his new domain. I think it went well, it was good to both tell him what we do, and listen to what he had to say. In a UK academic environment that often looks dominated by league tables and competition, it was good to hear him stress the importance of our teaching students great stuff, stuff that they will use and that will make them better people.

More and less snow on the roof of Europe

Earlier this week I was at scientific meeting on how water freezes, a key problem in understanding how the cold clouds and snow form. The very last talk I caught before I had to leave to catch my train, showed some striking data. We know that ice and snow in the atmosphere almost always start to form not just from water on its own, but from water in contact with a tiny particle in the atmosphere. So the number of these particles and their surface properties greatly influence how clouds and snow form. If, for whatever reason, there are many of these particles in the air, we may get more snow.

People in this country have had enough of experts

The title is a quote of Michael Gove — to be fair on him I think he was referring to economists – a profession whose track record of consistently making inaccurate predictions is notorious. But still, as a PhD educated scientist, the quote does rankle a bit. Although that may be just my natural reaction to Michael Gove – he could read the phone book and I’d still get grumpy.

Making spines in two steps

This is a sea urchin, sea urchins can’t move fast so rely on these spines and the fact that they have a hard shell, to protect them from predators. Both the spines and the shell are made from crystalline calcium carbonate in the form of a mineral called calcite. Scientists have long been fascinated by how animals such as sea urchins grow these calcite crystals to form these striking spines.

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

The title is part of a quote by Marc Andreesen, an American IT entrepreneur*. The full quote is: “The spread of computers and the internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” I got it from the book I am currently reading: Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez. I have just started reading the book, and it is very entertaining. In a nutshell, the author’s style is: I’m a bastard but less of a bastard than many of my ex-coworkers, and I’m charming :). This is quite refreshing. Chaos Monkeys is mainly about his time working in IT companies in Silicon Valley, including at Facebook.

Self-assembly pope and self-assembling proteins in soap

Over the Christmas period I have been trying out a few beers, including Brewdog’s weirdly named Self Assembly Pope. This beer is a porter, with some cocoa, coconut and vanilla added to spice it up. It is a pretty good porter, although I am not a big fan of coconut, on its own or in beer, and so probably will not be coming back to it*. What I will be doing in 2017 is working on getting membrane proteins to self-assemble into as large and as regular crystals as possible. This is part of an EU-wide network on membrane-protein crystallisation that will be starting in 2017. Membrane proteins are proteins that live in back-to-back layers of soapy molecules — which is what cell membranes are. Membrane proteins are important as many (by some measures a majority) of drugs target these proteins.

An early Christmas present

Right at the beginning of this year, I was on a bid for EU funding, to develop new approaches in crystallising membrane proteins (an example membrane protein is shown to the left). The proposal was submitted in January. At the start of May we found out were on the ‘reserve list’, whereupon we assumed that that was it, we were unsuccessful. We exchanged gallows-humours jokes about feeling like an Olympic athlete who finishes fourth, and just misses out on a medal. A bit later we found out that the success rate was about 6%, apparently we were part of the 94% who failed. Six months has now passed since we learnt this, and we heard nothing from Brussels.

The milk-fueled conquest of Europe

I had milk on my breakfast cereal this morning, and I am writing a new lecture on evolution for my biological physics course. The connection between these two facts is the lactase enzyme. Baby mammals of all mammal species drink their mothers’ milk, which contains a lot of its calories in the form of the sugar lactose. The baby mammals produce the lactase enzyme in their guts to digest the lactose. But when they grow up they no longer drink milk, and as lactose is rare except in milk, the growing mammals stop producing the lactase enzyme.