Geologists, the Coolest and Sexiest People Alive.

To many people a 'Geologist' is a bearded figure, dressed in an anorak and talking to a rock. Geologists themselves would love to dispel this myth but since we lick rocks, know Lagerstatten is more than a beer, and think anything under a few million years is 'recent' its not too far from the truth! Below I give you my top five references to Geologists in popular culture. Number 5 is my favourite, although I wish number 1 was true. Vote on your favourite below. (Come on Geologists- don't let the Bad ones win!)

The Good:

1) American Dad- Geologists, the smartest sexiest men alive. (Women too!)

2) Brad Pitt- GEOLOGIST. Not funny but it's Brad Pitt. As a geologist.

The Bad:

3) The Big Bang Theory- Erm...actually it is.

4) Friends- Geologists are the lowest of the dating barrel, shame some other Geologists don't realise this...

The Sadly Truthful:

5) Fresh Meat- actual geology bar games

Earth was frosted with gold

Like the glaze on a pastry, the Earth, after its inner structure was established, received a final icing of gold to it's crust. The abundance of gold ore make it an easily accessible economic resource. However, this incredibly heavy element, and other iron-loving elements like it, should have sunk 3 000 km deeper, into the Earth's core.

New research, published this month in Nature, lends support to the theory that without a late bombardment of meteorites being stirred in, there would be hardly any siderophile (iron-loving) elements in Earth’s mantle.

Willbold et al, from the Bristol Isotope Group, measured the variations of tungsten in rocks from the Isua Greenstone belt against an average found in modern day mantle. The Isua rocks are unique as they were unaffected by the late bombardment 500 million years ago, but were still formed after the Earth possessed it’s core. In theory, they should have slightly more tungsten compared to rocks that formed whilst the Earth was still accumulating material.

Other theories suggest that, when the Earth collided with large objects, such as the Mars-sized planet now widely accepted to have resulted in our Moon, it caused huge areas of melting. During this melting, iron and other metals seperated out and sank to the core. At the pressure and temperatures found beneath the huge magma ocean, it was thought that siderophiles might lose their affinity to iron and rise up through the mantle. Although, this would not have worked for all of the elements.

Experiments predicted that, to have the current proportion of gold in the crust, we would need 0.5-1% of primitive meteoritic material to have mixed into the mantle. Willbold et al measured tungsten more precisely than ever before, to show that the samples from the Isua Greenstone belt are slightly enriched, compared to average mantle. The magnitude of this small enrichment, 13 parts per million, is exactly that predicted if there had been 0.5-1% of primitive meteoritic material.

Dr Willbold commented that his "work shows that most of the precious metals on which our economies and many key industrial processes are based have been added to our planet by lucky coincidence when the Earth was hit by about 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroidal material.”

It is possible that the late mixing of material by convection occurred only in large patches of crust. Some areas of the Earth's mantle may not have mixed with late accreted material and so would have remained, and in fact still remain, isolated. The late bombardment might have given us more than just ore deposits, it may have given us the mantle dynamics we still see today.

George Stephenson (inventor of the steam locomotive) talks robots

Me and George Stephenson (credit: Elfy Chiang)

In starting my MSc Science Communication at Imperial College I didn't know quite what to expect. And when confronted by essays and critical analysis of articles, I was completely out of my depth. Thankfully, amongst the philosophy of science essays and semiotics there is a large amount of fun!
Our core practical involves making a TV interview and radio clip about a certain aspect of science. Our group got the surprisingly difficult task of explaining Artificial Intelligence.

 This week my core practical group and I (thanks guys!) went out with portable radio equipment to interview the public in the Science Museum. We asked them what they would like robots to be able to do for them ('housework' was the most popular answer) and in the process encountered a strange figure.

Dressed in a top-hat, tails and with mutton-chops to rival Wolverine, he looked like he'd stepped straight out of the 1800's. Turn's out, he had! It was George Stephenson speaking to us from 1840, desperate to share his knowledge of  the first steam locomotive, The Rocket. Listen to what he had to say here:

Much love to the rest of my core practical group who I did this with.

New dinosaur liked a fight

Talos Sampsoni - the new species discovered in Utah

Any kid who watched Jurassic Park through their fingers is aware of how terrifying the raptors were, and their claw-like 'toes' didn't help their menacing demeanour. Yet, up until now their function was a mystery. After the discovery of a new species in Utah, Scientists may have found their purpose, it seems they weren't all for show, or scaring children.

 

The claw is distinctive of dromeosaurs, the group which includes Velociraptor. The new species was discovered 3 years ago in the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, one of the last undamaged dinosaur graveyards in the US. The dinosaur was named Talos sampsoni after the winged god from Greek mythology which succumed to a wounded ankle. Weighing under 40kg (about the size of a 4yr old child), it hardly inflicts the terrorising image of the 7ft tall moviestar Raptors. But Lindsay Zanno, lead author of the study, believes they were still fearsome creatures and described little Talos as "a scrapper".

There have been many things learnt from imperfect fossils over the years, about the lifestyle and habits of the animal, (there is a pretty cool Pleiseosaur at the Natural History Museum which is either pregnant, or ate lots of miniature versions of itself), and this new fossil is no different. It's second toe, with the big claw, is deformed where Talos either took a fall and fractured it, or got in in a fight and had it bitten. Originally, the team put this deformation down to the differences in species, but the excitement grew as they realised it had a different story to tell.

Detailed CT scanning, like that used in hospitals, was used to see the full extent of the injury. It was deemed to have been made during a fight with another dinosaur for food, a theory which holds up against the fossils found in the 1980's of two raptors caught in combat. The team discovered that the dinosaur had lived for months with the injury, meaning it must have been capable of catching prey/defending itself/ shaking hands with just the right foot and both talons weren't necessary to survival.

Trackways found at other sites suggest the toe was raised when Talos walked and so the damage, which didn't reach the rest of the foot, wouldn't have affected it's movement. "Our data support the idea that the talon of raptor dinosaurs was not used for purposes as mundane as walking," Zanno commented. "It was an instrument meant for inflicting damage."

A Gem of a Discovery

Image of Pulsar and Planet in orbit (Image credit – Swinburne Astronomy Productions)

Like an oyster in the ocean, opening to reveal a pearl, new research has discovered stars can be stripped apart to reveal diamonds.

Nicknamed "The Dish", the Australian CSIRO Parkes telescope stumbled on the discovery whilst searching for pulsars, as part of the "High Time Resolution Universe" survey. Pulsar J1719-1438 had a peculiar signal and upon closer inspection they discovered it was being orbited by a dense planet, five times the size of Earth and made entirely of diamond.

Pulsars are stars with a diameter of around 12 miles, about half the size of the Isle of Wight. Astronomers at CSIRO use these pulsars to study some of the fundamental laws of the universe. About 2-3 of them are discovered every month, so it's hardly breaking news when they find one. However, only certain pulsars such as, J1719-1438, are classed as rarer milisecond pulsars. This means they spin much faster than others and are likely to have unique properties. In this case of this star, it's uniqueness was found in it’s companion, dubbed The Diamond Planet.

Even more unusual, CSIRO's Dr Michael Keith explained, is that "Although the composition of this "diamond planet" is not really similar to any planets in our solar system, it orbits the pulsar more like a planet than a star. Typically pulsars and their companions both move in similar sized orbits, however in this case the large difference in weights means the pulsar does a rather small wobble whilst the companion swings around in a wide, circular, orbit."

All stars, when they become white dwarves, find the carbon they are made from is put under such great pressures that it crystallises into diamond. Even our Sun, when it finally burns out, will find a diamond at its centre. This is how the universe's largest, trillion carat diamond 'Lucy' formed. However, the Diamond Planet, appears to have befallen a sadder fate and was stripped down by the pulsar to reveal the diamond core within. Now only the diamond core remains, orbiting the pulsar and providing it with the energy to spin faster.

When asked if it can really be called a planet, since it used to be a star Keith answered, "certainly the object began its life as something that is unquestionably a star, however it now is clearly "of planetary mass". It's not too hard to imagine a situation where a gassy planet similar to Jupiter accreted enough mass to start nuclear burning and become a star, so why not go the other way round and have a star lose enough mass to become a planet."

It seems that this discovery really is a diamond in the rough for astronomy.

Hear a quote from Dr Michael Keith here:

How it feels to discover a planet

The World's Smallest Etch-a-Sketch

Science-A-Sketch

Etch-a-sketch is a classic childhood toy. In fact, it's so well- known it even makes a cameo in Toy Story. Now, 50 years on, it's hard to see how you could re-invent this art pad, but some researchers at the London Centre for Nanotechnology may  have done just that, on an nano-scale at least.

The team have discovered they can use an X-ray beam to draw  shapes, by giving a material high superconductivity, (when a  material causes no energy to be lost as electricity flows through  it).

They use a 'pad' made of oxygen, copper and lanthanium, an element also used for hybrid car batteries. They then shine an X-ray 'pen' onto the pad to create areas where the electricity can flow un-opposed. This occurs as the oxygen atoms beneath the X-ray beam rearrange, to allow electricity to flow more easily through them. This leaves behind a trail, or drawing, which can then be wiped off using a heat treatment, in the same way you could erase a drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch by shaking it.

The scientists so far have used the method of changing a material's structure to draw very precise circuits, which can be altered in one simple step. This is a huge discovery for technology and will have an impact on everything which uses superconductors, from MRI scans to MAGLEV trains.

Prof Bianconi, the leader of the research team said, “It is amazing that in a few simple steps, we can now add superconducting ‘intelligence’ directly to a material consisting mainly of the common elements copper and oxygen.”

Dolphin Wisdom Revealed

According to a friend, people think we’ll be able to talk with dolphins within 5 years. After questioning his drinking habits (and a quick Google), it turns out he was right. Research has shown that once we get the basics of the ‘click click’ language of dolphin’s down, we’ll be able to hold full conversations with them in as little as five years time.

Will we be able to speak directly to this dolphin, and it its own language, soon?

Ten years ago, at the Dolphin Institute in Hawaii, Louis Herman found Dolphins could understand the difference between statements, questions, concepts like “zero” and that by changing the word order of a sentence you change its meaning. Then last year researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project in California, developed a method of communicating with dolphins via whistles and signals. The dolphins quickly learnt which signal stood for which object during half-hour sessions spent with the creatures. This meant humans could play fetch with the dolphins for specific toys.

Now, those same scientists have taken it a step further by creating a way for the dolphins to request the humans fetch them things back. They originally set up a huge keyboard with images on, which the dolphins could use to point out ‘requests’ such as seaweed to play with. This has progressed into advanced equipment divers wear around their necks which repeats a word coined to mean things like ‘seaweed’, until the dolphins repeat it back. The diver’s can’t do this themselves as dolphins clicks range to wavelengths far above those we are able to hear, and since they don’t turn their heads to look at who they’re speaking to, it’s hard to know which member of a school is speaking. Slowly, the team are building a new language which both dolphins and humans can understand.

The next step is to start listening out for specific pieces of language from the dolphins themselves so that they can start piecing together a dictionary of sorts, with which to translate the dolphins most intimate conversations. After that who knows what we could learn, the Dolphin Communication Research team, SpeakDolphin has come up with 20 suggestions they would like to ask dolphins first. ‘What name do you call yourselves?’ seems a bit mundane, but ‘are you in contact with life forms beyond this planet?’, seems much more like it.