David Bradley – Page 64

Carrying bituminous coals to Newcastle

This is one of those stories that somebody on social media will shout at me and say it didn’t happen. Well, it did.

When I moved down south, I didn’t have a car, didn’t even drive. So, I used to jump on a train every few weeks to visit my parents who were still living in my hometown. It was a three-hop journey: Cambridge to Peterborough, Peterborough to Newcastle, and then a Metro ride to the family semi-detached pile.

I always took a rucksack. The one that I’d taken around Europe Inter-Railling, the one I’d worked around the US with, same one that I’d tour Australia a year later with the ultimately-to-be Mrs Sciencebase, and then again backpacking in Botswana and Zimbabwe back in the early ’90s. I’ve still got the rucksack.

It is fairly spacious, looks very battered these days, but wasn’t quite so battered the time I was pulling it out from the luggage storage area on an Intercity 125 as we pulled into Newcastle on one of the aforementioned trips back to the homestead.

As I was manhandling my luggage, the train was slowing quickly. An elderly American gent who had been sitting with his wife and another American couple in their requisite pastel-shaded polyester slacks, shirts, and blousons, as well as attendant golfing type hats offered to help. “No, it’s fine, thanks, I can manage, I responded,” struggling to get the bulging back full of what was basically a laundry todo incarnate for my mother.

He turned away, appeased and retorted to his friends that, “Oh, look Newcastle…as in carrying coals to”. Gentle giggles from the other American gent, and a sniff from one of the wives not at all impressed by his knowledge of British idioms. The other woman, presumably a former mining engineer, then asked the group and pointedly looking at me as she did so, knowing that I was obviously about to disembark asked “So, is that coal bituminous?”

Her accent was so rounded, so American, almost Pythonian in the Idle sense of the philosophy restaurant and the weird scientific poignancy of the question startled me somewhat. Was I being pranked in some weird Candid Camera style jape? Was Jeremy Beadle about? It was several years before Harry Hill. I’d done a coal module with Harry Marsh in my chemistry degree at Newcastle, inevitably, you might say, despite the Thatcher years. But, did I know? No I didn’t.

I flung my now safely dislodged rucksack with its malodourous offering of sweaty cottons and woollen socks over my shoulder leaped from the train and dashed head first for the barriers that would lead me to that final Metro hop to the coast.

Bituminous? Why? Why were these four unassuming Americans with their knowledge of my hometown’s most famous idiom so intrigued by the type of coal it might have been that was being taken. Had I been hallucinating? Was I part of some live-action re-enactment of a Monty Python sketch that had never been screened? Obviously not.

Oh, and it would have been bituminous, I think, not lignite and most probably not anthracite.

Footnote
I ran this a ten-part-thread true story on Twitter, each par was edited down to fit the twitter character limit.

The invention of vaccines

Somebody just made the brilliant suggestion on an anti-vax discussion group that doctors, instead of injecting chemicals, should inject a tiny bit of the virus so that the body can build up natural immunity to the disease…

…basically, they just “invented” vaccination.

What do the antivax brigade think doctors are injecting now? Fairy dander and unicorn tears?

Betelgeuse pronunciation

TL:DR What is the correct pronunciation for the star named Betelgeuse. It’s not “beetlejuice”, it is Beh-tell-jerrz.

Betelgeuse is the bright red star you see in the constellation of Orion. It’s actually a red supergiant and looking at the constellation you might imagine it as the top of his right shoulder (top left of the constellation, assuming he’s standing facing you) It is a variable star and brightens and dims periodically. Betelgeuse is so big that if you swapped our Sun for it, it would reach as far as the solar system’s asteroid belt, engulfing the orbits of Mercury, Venus, our own planet, Earth, and Mars.

Betelgeuse is occasionally in the news because some astronomers think its recent unprecedented dimming might indicate that it is about to explode and become a supernova. If it did, it would be bright enough to be visible to the naked eye even during daylight hours if it were above the horizon during the day. Of course, because Betelgeuse is so far away, if we see it go supernova, then we know that explosion will actually have happened some time in the Middle Ages and the light has only just reached us after centuries of travelling across space to reach us.

Meanwhile, the far more controversial issue is how does one pronounce the name of this star. It’s definitely not Beetle Juice, regardless of the movie title, although far too many American astronomers and pundits do pronounce it like that.

The name comes from an Arabic phrase meaning “the armpit of Orion”

That phrase is pronounced ebt-el-jowzah, roughly. The “j” is a zh sound like the G in the name Genevieve. It’s not a hard j as in June and it’s definitely not the “g” of Gloria. Etymology does not define pronunciation, but the closer to the root we can be the better, I’d say, and astronomical writer Paul Sutherland agrees with my pronunciation and if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me:

Bettle Jerrz – with that softer sounding “J”

Oh, and one more thing, despite all the hyperbole about Betelgeuse, Sutherland points out that by definition it’s a variable star and they vary, sometimes quite a lot. [UPDATE: My friend Paul, sadly died on 20th June 2022]

Meanwhile, check out my photography guide on taking snaps of the stars, including one about Orion’s Sword and the Orion Nebula.

The odour of ordure

If the manure they delivered with which you plan to fertilise your #AllotmentLife soil still smells of manure then it has not rotted down sufficiently to be a good fertiliser that won’t compromise the growth of root vegetables, such as carrots and parsnips, for instance.

I’ve not worked out exactly why, but a likely explanation is that you want root veg to probe deep and grow their tap root a long way into the soil, if the nutrients they need are near the surface and at high concentrations, then they won’t need to probe so deeply to feed the green part of the plant and to bloom so that they might reproduce. But that doesn’t really explain why if you plant carrots on soil with fresh horse manure as fertiliser they tend to bifurcate into two roots and roots with side-arms etc.

Anyway, allotmenteer friends had a delivery. The horse muck is apparently well rotted and we’re to take a dozen barrels if we want it for our own plot. Right next to that male is some bovine ordure, bullsh*t to you and me…although actually its from bullocks rather than bulls, a minor detail. It doesn’t look half as wholesome as the more pebbly horse dung though, more like a big pile of claggy brown mud full of straw. Not fun to shovel over the plot I wouldn’t have thought.

Unweaving the rainbow

Newton (in)famously split sunlight into the visible spectrum with his prism. His findings revolutionised optics but led to accusation of his unweaving the rainbow. As if that somehow subtracted from our appreciation of the natural world. To my mind, it does nothing of the sort. Knowing that white light comprises all the colours of the rainbow and these can be separated at the interface of two materials of different refractive index actually adds to the beauty.

Knowing a rainbow is photons of different frequencies stimulating the cells at the back of your eyes and impinging on your brain’s visual cortex does not detract from the fact that a rainbow is still a wondrous and beautiful thing. Those with the artistic aesthetic get that as do those of a scientific bent. Those with only the artistic aesthetic don’t get the bonus of understanding the science. I’d always choose being a polymath over one or the other and many in science are both scientific and artistic. Although it often seems that too many people in the arts are less interested in the flipside of the reality perception coin.

As you know by now (surely?), I take a lot of photos. Birds, moths and butterflies, flowers, trees, beaches, sunsets, moonshots, and more. Occasionally, I’ll post one on my Instagram with a sciencey caption just for fun.

Viz, a recent trip to the North Norfolk coast in search of avian visitors such as Snow Buntings and Shorelarks, had me snapping the waves too with a short shutterspeed on the camera to capture the action. I posted a frozen wave and captioned it as “Agitated aqueous sodium chloride solution”. It is what it is. One view offered a tongue-in-cheek response: “Looks much nicer than that description.”

Well, yes, admittedly, it does. But…I assume visitors can appreciate the little chemical joke alongside the photo. It’s not a great photo and I could’ve also talked of the fractal nature of fluids in motion, fluid dynamics, hydrogen bonding, and other such matters. Knowing about such things does not take away from how peaceful and wondrous it is to simply watch all those refracted solar photons skipping over the waves as they break on a windy shore as the sun goes down. It’s not gilding the lily, it’s not unweaving the rainbow, it’s adding new layers to our understanding and appreciation of the natural world. Do you get my meaning? Do you too aspire to be a polymath or do you prefer to sit in one camp only and ignore and miss the joy of the flipside?

I just searched the Sciencebase Science blog for the word polymath and discovered that I wrote a very similar essay to the above about a decade ago, here.

Snow Buntings at Holkham Beach

Second trip of the year to the North Norfolk coast. A much brisker, sunnier day than our New Year’s Day trip to RSPB Titchwell. Hoped to see Shorelarks, but apparently there are only five around the beach at Holkham at the moment and even the hardiest of birders who spent all day waiting yesterday saw none. We did, however, see 60 or so Snow Buntings, Plectrophenax nivalis.

The Snow Bunting is a relatively chunky bunting and in winter has what can only be described as a snowy kind of winter camouflage plumage. It takes on a sandy/buff appearance with more mottling of the males’ upperparts than its black and white of summer.

The “Snow Bunt” breeds in the Arctic regions from Scandinavia to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland and heads south in winter. They are an Amber species in the UK as they are quite scarce here in terms of breeding. So, very nice to see a relatively large number of 60 or so picking over the scrub on Holkham Beach.

Sighted today: Black-headed Gull, Brent Goose, Common Buzzard, Common Gull, Common Scoter, Cormorant, Grey Heron, Greylag Goose, Herring Gull, Kestrel, Lapwing, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Linnet, Mallard, Meadow Pipit, Oystercatcher, Peregrine, Pied Wagtail, Red Kite, Redshank, Robin, Rock Pipit, Sanderling, Stock Dove, Stonechat, Velvet Scoter, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon, Snow Bunting…

Lots of Common Scoter out at sea. 400 or so in this flock alone

Black-headed Gulls at sunset at Hunstanton

Norfolk seal deaths

Just before Christmas 2019 there were news reports of two seal pup deaths at a popular tourist site along the Norfolk coast. One pup had been surrounded by visitors to the beach and their presence had so scared the mother that she abandoned the pup. The second death was caused by children chasing a seal pup into the sea. The fur of such young pups is not waterproof and the animal could not swim and drowned.

This is not acceptable. Too many people get too close to the seals, often to get a selfie. They let their dogs and children run amok among the basking animals. I assume that there are moves to make this region a protected zone and perhaps even to close the beaches when there are pups present. I must admit prior to our visit, I had thought that was the case and that the only way to see them was from a dune-top viewing platform rather than walking on the sands.

I hope we were responsible during our visit. We wanted to see them but kept well away. While we were there we saw groups of people walking within a couple of feet of the animals and worse two people with an Alsation attempting to get a selfie on the rocks next to a pup and its mother.

In related news, a total ban on parking on Beach Road, Winterton, came into force on 13th January. Just so you know if you were planning on visiting the seals.

Science, songs, snaps, stuff

UPDATE: The poll is still running today, “more science” has dropped to quite a bit less than 2/3 and “more snaps” has jumped up to well over 1/5, proportion of voters asking for “more silence has fallen a little too.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I please myself with what I post on this website and my various social media. I’ve been online since January 1989 and started my first website in December 1995. Sciencebase.com was created in July 1999 and I was on Facebook, Twitter, and the others within the first year of their public launches, if I remember rightly.

So, to iterate, I do what I do for my own entertainment, although I am always very happy if my creative output entertains, educates, or informs others.

Anyway, I initiated a twitter poll before the end of 2019 to test the water on what my 42000+ followers there wanted more of from me in 2020. Not with any intention of changing what I do, but just to see if feelings coincided with my inclinations tweetwise.

At first, the pollsters came back with a resounding “more science” call, that gradually dropped from most of them to about three-quarters and then closer to two-thirds. Very few people wanted “more songs” and a few wags wanted “more silence”. There is pleasingly a strong one-fifth of the respondents who want “more snaps”.

Like I say, I’m not adapting to suit other people, but I had felt that I wasn’t posting quite enough science stuff, given my origins and so there could be a few extra posts on the various topics in that realm that interest me. Where I can illustrate a science story with my own photography then I will do a little more of that too.

The songs will keep coming, even if it’s less than one in ten of voters who want more of them. Of course, everyone might just prefer the status quo…although I will not be doing any covers of that band, I hasten to add. As for more silence? Well, I’m in a choir called bigMouth, so how do you think that last option is going to pan out?

Meanwhile, for those who want even more snaps (photos) – check out the Sciencebase Instagram, at the time of writing I’d almost got to 500 followers. I’d hoped to have reached that landmark by 2020 but it wasn’t to be. 1000 by the end of the ’20s?

New Year’s Day 2020 at RSPB Titchwell 64 birdcount

Once again, we partied afternoon and early evening on New Year’s Eve 2019 and avoided the midnight shenanigans and so we were sufficiently compos mentis to drive to RSPB Titchwell in North Norfolk for the second year running. Last year, we ticked 54 bird species, although the rangers reported 103. This year we ticked 64, and the rangers saw 90-something.

Birders at RSPB T(w)itchwell, North Norfolk

Avocet, Blackbird, Black-headed Gull, Bar-tailed Godwit, Black-tailed Godwit, Blue Tit, Brent Goose, Buzzard, Chaffinch, Coal Tit, Collared Dove, Coot, Cormorant, Carrion Crow, Dunlin, Dunnock, Gadwall, Golden Plover, Great Black-backed Gull, Great Tit, Great-crested Grebe, Greenfinch, Greenshank, Grey Heron, Grey Plover, Greylag Goose, Herring Gull, Jackdaw, Kestrel, Knot, Lapwing, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Little Egret, Little Grebe, Long-tailed Tit, Magpie, Mallard, Marsh Harrier, Meadow Pipit, Moorhen, Mute Swan, Oystercatcher, Pheasant, Pink-footed Goose, Pintail, Redshank, Ringed Plover, Robin, Rook, Sanderling, Scoter, Shelduck, Shoveller, Sparrowhawk, Spotted Redshank, Starling, Stock Dove, Teal, Tufted Duck, Turnstone, Water Rail, Wigeon, Wood Pigeon, Wren.

What is Esketamine?

You may have seen that an antidepressant called “Esketamine” has been approved for use in the UK. Sounds a bit like ketamine you’re thinking, and you’d be right. It is a purified form of the more well-known drug, commonly thought of as a horse tranquiliser and often used as a drug of abuse.

Many drug molecules come in two forms, what you might refer to as a left-handed and a right-handed form. When they are manufactured, both the left (known as the S) and the right (labelled R) form are produced, usually in equal quantities. Often one form, R or S is more active than the other, as is the case with the painkiller ibuprofen.

Sometimes, one form is active and the other form causes side effects. This is the case with thalidomide, although the forms are interconverted in the body so it is impossible to make a safe form of that particular drug for women who are or might get pregnant.

Standard manufacture of ketamine produces the R and the S form, (R,S)-2-(2-chlorophenyl)-2-(methylamino)cyclohexanone. The R form, interacts with additional receptors in the body that are not the chosen target of the drug and so lead to side effects. Hence, the need to produce ketamine as the S form only for use in treating depression. The drug S-ketamine, thus becomes esketamine. The S form is twice as potent as the mixture of R and S. The R form is nominally arketamine, clever naming.

Esketamine is marketed as Ketanest and Spravato, commonly used as a general anesthetic (intravenous) and now for severe, treatment-resistant depression (nasal spray). The drug acts by blocking the NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptor in the nervous system and also acts as dopamine reuptake inhibitor. Dopamine release is associated with pleasure and feelings of reward, these feelings can, theory goes, be made to last longer if the dopamine remains active and is not “reuptaken” back into nerve cells too quickly.

Ketamine can be addictive and so can its S enantiomer, esketamine, which as mentioned has now been approved in the UK. Some physicians are concerned about its use. Addictive nature aside, there is the issue that esketamine increases glucose metabolism in the frontal cortex of the brain and this may be responsible for the more psychologically dissociative and hallucinogenic effects of esketamine. Arketamine decreases glucose metabolism in the brain and is thus reportedly more relaxing.

On balance, the ratio of benefits to risk is considered high enough that it can be safely used for some patients with severe and very debilitating forms of depression.

Footnote

The one thing I’ve not yet ascertained is whether or not the manufacture of esketamine begins with the 50:50 racemic mixture of the R and S forms and involves their separation prior to formulation of esketamine or whether the manufacturer has an enantioselective synthetic route that gives them a bigger proportion of the S form and less waste when they remove the R form prior to formulation. Luddchem pointed out a cyclodextrin paper published by Wiley here.