Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Urpflanze and flower bombs

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A while ago Sarah and I decided to visit the tiny Essex University art gallery and inside we found what at first appeared to be a bizarre room full of dark corners, screens of looping film and weird grey sculptures. What was jarring at first grew on me, especially when we realised the biological nature of it all. The installation was the work of artist Melanie Jackson and, as I read later in an interview, was strongly influenced by nature and science. There were many aspects to the work; large-scale replicas of pollen grains and gold-plated nanoparticles alongside lights that looked like microscopes to hint at the world of the very small bought into view. Looping film of plants represented the endless cycles of nature and vast swollen gourd sculptures gave a nod to genetic modification and our involvement in nature.

Jackson named the collection after Goethe’s notion of the Urpflanze, an apparent link between Goethe’s Urpflanze, which contains within it the potential to create all possible future plants, and modern plant science with its ability (or assumed ability) to create new plants (This is Tomorrow, 2010). The exhibition itself may not have grabbed my attention so much if it wasn’t for the material handed out with it. Instead of a gallery leaflet or pricy exhibition coffee table book a newspaper was available. This was full of a random, and sometimes so-artsy-it’s-almost-unreadable, collection of facts, pictures, snippets and information relating to science, art, nature and the collaboration of them all in this work.

Finally getting round to reading it all fully this morning (it’s still the holidays, right?) I was struck by one section. That on ‘plant terror’ – a section on green guerrillas and making grenades from fruit and vegetable seeds to bomb disused land. Utterly intrigued I did a short internet search and the organisation is true, alive and thriving. A New York-based operation aiming to inject green life into the city through not only seed bombs but window boxes, urban farms and community gardens. And they’re not the only organisation, there’s plenty more websites encouraging guerrilla gardening. It’s the seed bombs that give me almost child-like delight though, the idea of mixing seeds, fertiliser and a bit of compost in a balloon, old bauble, egg shell or something similar and releasing it into the wild.

I might not be donning a balaclava and mounting a midnight green-fingered campaign any time soon but with spring coming a home-made seed bomb might make the perfect present, watch this space!

Originally exhibited at The Drawing Room the exhibition at the University of Essex was an extension of this work and was open until December 18th 2010 (link here). With (Part 1) in the title let’s hope there’s more to come. The top picture above was borrowed from This is tomorrow and remains © Melanie Jackson and Matt’s Gallery. The seed bomb picture is from the Urpflanze exhibition newspaper and remains (C) Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie. More information can be found at:
www.melaniejackson.net
www.greenguerillas.org
www.guerrillagardening.org

Why did the scientist hang a knocker on his front door?

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…he wanted to win the no-bell prize.

Yes, I even managed to get a scientific joke in my cracker this year! I should start with a couple of apologies. Firstly, for not updating last week – I had planned to upload some pictures of my shiny-up-and-running fish tank but managed to leave the pictures on a camera at work. I’ll hopefully post them here next week. Secondly, to everyone who read my last post before I managed to finish editing it sorry for the typos. Even after a year of blogging I somehow managed to press ‘post’ instead of ‘preview’!

Yes, I’ve been blogging for a year now so this is actually just a quick post to say thank you to everyone who’s been reading over the past twelve months. Looking back it wasn’t the greatest start to a blog. I knew even before I started my PhD that I wanted to write about it, but the initial reception from people I told was less than enthusiastic. Since the early days of blogging the utter volume of blogs out there has given bloggers a bad name and the blogosphere a reputation as somewhere where anyone with half an opinion (intelligent or otherwise) can rant their views to the world. So although I persevered and started this site it was often half hearted. I wanted to believe it was a good idea but half agreed with others that it could well be an exercise in vanity.

In the last couple of months a couple of things have changed my views. I started exploring the wider blogging community for one. And, yes, there is more material out there than I could ever hope to or want to read. Much of it didn’t interest me personally but the odd sites catches my attention and since I started following certain bloggers I’ve been constantly entertained, informed, amazed and encouraged to think about new topics and ideas. It’s a way of sharing views and information that fits perfectly with modern life and I’m now a fully converted member of the blogosphere. Secondly, I’ve triggered a small ripple (wave being too extreme for these small events) of other blogs; two PhD friends of mine (one in science and one in law) have started blogging, as has a co-worker of one of them. Their blogs can be found the links section on the left of this site. Maybe this blog will never be read by the masses or have a huge impact, but I’ve at least widened academic debate even slightly amongst people I know.

Perhaps it’s these facts, or perhaps it’s just the threat of new bloggers snapping at my ankles and promising to do a better job than I ever could (that Sarah-Jane’s a talented lady) but I’ve a renewed interest and love for this little site, and I hope it’s still going in another twelve months.

That’s quite enough writing for a Bank Holiday so all that remains is to thank you all for your support and comments made here, on Facebook and in person. I appreciate it all! Also wishing all of you a very merry, if belated, Christmas and a happy New Year.

For more great blogs and websites, including the ones mentioned in this post, please check out the links section in the sidebar. I update it when I find new sites to share with you all.

If at first you don’t succeed…you’re probably doing science

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WordPress, who host this blog and many others, produce a daily list of top blog posts they’ve found. Termed ‘Freshly Pressed’ and appearing on the homepage it is something I generally skim over without much further reading. But last week a post by Katie Bowell, Curator of Cultural Interpretation at The Fort Collins Museum and Discovery Science Centre caught my eye. Katie talks about the popular TV show Mythbusters and how it is a proponent of the important principle of ‘the scientific method’. This method, is what many people would term ‘trial and error’, or trial and improvement which was in fashion when I was at school, the technique of developing a question, testing and investigating it and improving tests when they do not work until an answer is reached. All tied in with using logical techniques (for example; never change two variables at once or you won’t be able to tell which once caused the effect!) as well as using objective, repeatable and reproducible methods.

This struck a chord with me as I was in the middle of running an experiment that wasn’t quite going the way I wanted. At the time I was disheartened, especially as the experiment takes about 12 hours of hands-on lab time to run and this was already my second attempt. But after reading the article I remembered that this is exactly how things happen in science. You test an idea with an experiment, it’s a complete failure, you improve your setup, you see slightly better results, you do more changes and retry…and in the end you get there. For the lucky few it may work first time, and for others it may never work or may disprove their hypothesis – but a negative result is still a result.

Scientific ideas today can travel fast. Today ideas can be discussed through emails in minutes, ideas travel from science to popular media and round the globe on news channels and newspapers within hours or days and even scientific journal articles are published online ahead of print issue as soon as the article is accepted. If I am frustrated today by the snail pace of research think of the patience held by scientists that came before us, the big names and the hundreds of ‘unknowns’ who also toiled to improve societies knowledge of the world around us. Some people give a lifetime to one small aspect of science; one bacteria, one compound, one law of physics.

The rigour and dedication which is required by the scientific method should be as an important a factor in school scientific education as the properties of the periodic table, Newton’s laws and the order of planets in the solar system. But, as Armstrong discussed in Science Magazine back in 1891, the teaching of scientific method by those who are not scientists may be difficult.&. He likened it to telling the teaching population that children must learn Chinese – what would they do? Ignore it? Teach themselves the basics and get by? Or invite in young scientists from a university? Years later, this final idea is being played out across the country through the national STEMNET programme. A nationwide initiative to encourage young people to take an interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths by creating STEM ambassadors out of current employees in these fields and sending them out to schools, clubs and other events involving young people. It is a scheme I have signed up for, and recently completed my short training session in, and I am greatly looking forwards to doing some STEM volunteering in the new year.

In a more recent paper, Karsai & Kampis (2010) discuss the involvement of the scientific method in biology. They look at how, for a long time, biology was not considered a science, partly due to the fact that universal laws were harder to find that for chemistry of physics. They remark on comments made in the early 20th century by D’Arcy Thompson that mathematics turns a field into a science and claimed he was wrong – it is not maths, they say, but the scientific method. And they make an important point; any knowledge, any subject or part of the natural world we study can be scientific if we use objective reasoned arguments, hypothesis and methods.  It is this that will carry science through the current turmoil and debate surrounding climate change, genetic modification and most recently ocean acidification (as shown by the controversial November 4th Times article ‘Who’s afraid of acid in the ocean by Matt Ridley which is available from Times Online) to name but a few issues.

Looking back over this post I can see that even if my science itself doesn’t always produce good results, the process has.  The descriptions of the scientific method here – determination, rigour, reasoning, objectivity, perseverance – these are all skills practices over and over during a PhD. And all these skills should look good on a future CV. That’s my hypothesis anyway…

References:

Armstrong, H.E. (1891) The teaching of scientific method.  Science vol. XVII (433) p.433

Karsai, I. & Kampis G. (2010) The crossroads between Biology and Mathematics: The Scientific Method as the Basics of Scientific Literacy. Bioscience vol. 60 (8) p. 632-638