Superconductors – The Two Steves and Mark

We were really looking forward to this talk as Ram is really interested in superconductors and we had read Stephen Blundell's book on the subject already. In fact we had make the suggestion of having him do a talk on superconductors last year!

Also on the stage were Steve Cowley and Mark Lythgoe. It is always a pleasure to see Mark in action; I really believe that neuroscientists are the most interesting people there are!

It started off with Stephen explaining what a superconductor (SC) is. Basically, it is something that can carry current with no resistance. They were discovered by accident after Onnes managed to liquify helium. He started measuring electrical conductivity of metals at low temperatures, and other scientists predicted what would happen.

Some thought that resistance would increase, some thought it would decrease, some thought it would stay the same, but it turned out that in some materials resistance disappeared! They tried with gold at first, which didn't work, then they thought that it would take a pure metal, so they purified mercury and found that there was no resistance when it was immersed in liquid helium. Then they decided to try it without purifying the mercury and found it also worked, so all the effort that went into purifying the mercury was a waste of time!

They also found that a SC displayed the Meissner effect. I will let Wikipedia explain that one.

Stephan makes a SC sound poetic. He said they have the “pure unbroken beauty of the atom.” Normally electrons are in a chaotic state, but in a SC electrons are paired in what are known as Cooper pairs, and it is because of this that electrons all end up going in the same direction even if they are not near each other.

It seems that experiment is better at finding SCs than studying theory, and there was a big jump in the number of discoveries in the 1980s with the use of copper oxides. Then they found ceramics and finally in the last few years iron based Scs with molecular layers in them have been found.

Mark then spoke of some of the applications. The main one that people think of is the MRI machines that can see inside things (not just bodies, check out the MRI scanner in the Discover Zone!)

The coil in the scanner creates a magnetic field, but that would always need a battery to keep it going. If they can cool the magnetic field then it can be self sustaining. This is where the Scs come in. They are cooled with helium, but if a wire breaks, it gets hot, and some of the helium can boil off, then it gets hotter, and then, Quench! Make sure you look for the venting pipe on the MRI machine before you get inside it!

Having SCs means that there are 80 million scans a year done. Some of them gives us insights into the brain, such as the work done at UCL on taxi drivers hypocampuses getting larger as they learn 'The Knowledge' Full paper here or BBC news report here.

However, the new machine they have that runs at 9.4 tesla has been able to image a mouse's heart actually beating, which can then be slowed down to the speed that a human heart beats so that they can study it better. Through this they have found new drugs for the heart. They can also use MRIs to target drugs to different areas by infusing them with nanomagenetic material which they can then use the MRI to not only see the drug but control its delivery to the right area.

Steve then talked about another application that many people don't think of immediately , the use of SCs in fusion. Without the SCs to keep the plasma in the tokamaks under control, they wouldn't be able to advance fusion power. More on that in another blog post on fusion.

As ever, the intelligence of the audience came across in the excellent questions asked. Some of the interesting things that came up were that all SCs are solids, and that they don't understand yet how the new types work. Scs are most useful in enclosed spaces and that they are not so useful over long distances such as in power lines, as the cost of refrigeration outweighs the savings in transmission of power.

Some of the higher temperature (we haven't yet found room temperature SCs) are harder to form as they are not a ductile. Niobium-tin is ductile, but ceramics aren't, so we need more innovative developments from the material scientists.

For the future Steve would like to see transmission lines to carry energy from solar instalations in sunny areas to other areas, and Stephen would like to see further development of trains using Scs. My favourite, which I think will be Mark's too, will always be the MRI scanners, and I will leave you with this song about them.

Dark Matters

Tuesday, June 12 was our first talk at the 2012 Cheltenham Science Festival. As usual, especially for talk early in the day, there were plenty of grey heads. There was a lovely couple in front of us; an elderly man, and his 8-year-old son. You could see how proud he was of his grandson and how much they were enjoying both the talk and being with each other. I hope that young lad grows up to understand how lucky he was to have such a wonderful granddad!

This talk will be quite hard to review, because it wasn't actually a talk like so many of the other lectures. It was given by Tom Whyntie and Andrew Pontzen, former Famelab alumni. It was more of comedy sketch show then a lecture!

Perhaps I should review that aspect first. Between the two of them they acted out scenes from the past developments in dark matter.They played the roles of astronomers and physicists both contradicting each other as well as agreeing each other. There were some particularly funny scenes.

For instance they sat facing each other going through all the possibilities of what dark matter could be, and then dismissing them. Gas? It would have to be cool and ionised and there wasn't enough that. Tiny stars? Really tiny? Too small to see? Yes, probably not that either. Black holes! Yes! They are invisible so they could be dark… No wait, they aren't invisible, we can see them through microlensing. Their concluding question was how do you find something that you can't see, touch, smell, taste, or hear!

They illustrated how excited people got about finding dark matter by incorporating the word darks matter into some famous advertising slogans: “I can't believe it's not dark matter!” There was also rather amusing parody of a researcher called Doctor X to protect the identity of the people involved.

Amusingly they played the parts of a scientist being interviewed by the press. All the names of the journalists were rather funny, my favourite being Betty de Kay from Cosmo.

Through their humour they manage to convey a clear understanding of why we think there is dark matter out there, why it is important to find it, and also the question of when do we stop looking.

The laughter aside we did manage to learn a lot. They answered questions at the end that filled in any of the gaps during their presentation. They touched on things such as the difficulty in finding funding for anything other than dark matter. Andrew suggested that it was easier to get funding for something mainstream and then do the blue sky thinking and fundamental research on the side in your own time.

They explored the other theories that could explain the missing matter in the universe including the modified Newtonian dynamics theory as betrayed by Doctor X but cracks were found in that theory due to the requirement of a change in scale to measure the gravity. They explained that something was found at Gran Sasso, the lab that found faster than light neutrinos. Although this was found 10 years ago no other lab has been able to replicate it, so people don't believe that this is dark matter. Crest, another lab, has found something recently to but again it contradicts the Italians and also hasn't been replicated.

Tom explained that he felt that rather than try to replicate dark matter at facilities such as CERN, it might be better to try to detect dark matter in the underground labs, which is what he is now doing, despite his former position at CERN and his PhD paper on it.

Tom pointed out That science is done by people and it takes courage to go against the main ideas. At the moment dark matter explains things better than any other theory, so until a new theory comes along its the best we have. Perhaps that young 8-year-old boy sitting in front of me will be the one to come up with a new and different theory if no dark matter is found either at CERN or in the direct detection labs.

One, Two, Three, Four, Five!

Once I caught a fish alive!

Summer is here once again and Ram is really struggling with so many things. He has struggled with the transition from winter hoodie to summer hoodie, and is struggling with footwear. He has worn big heavy police boots with zips up the sides for a few years ago for ankle support (his left ankle is particularly bad) as well as rigid insoles. However as he has pain on standing which means that he is reluctant to do any of his physio exercises which require standing, his orthotist has switched him to softer insoles, which help a little, but make his stability worse.

Around the house he wears big sheepskin slippers which we call bounce boots (we got them to wear on the trampoline in the winter) and he has been putting his insoles in them, but now with the hot weather they are not so comfortable. And they are no good for outside with our grass being liberally fertilised by the chickens. And the orthotist told him not to bother putting his new insoles in them as they wouldn't work.

For summer all they could suggest was trainers, so we bought Converse High Top canvas trainers. The laces defeated him. Not so much tying the knots, the OT has been very useful in getting him to tie knots although he is still slow. No, it is having to undo the laces all the way to get his feet in and out of them. So they have been worn just enough for him to decide that he doesn't want to wear them, but too much to be able to send them back!


So why am I having this moan? To give me the excuse to put some nice photos on the blog!

I was at the pond this afternoon fishing out some blanket weed with the net, when I managed to catch up a fish entangled with it! We have been trying to catch one of our 'wild' gold fish for a couple of years now to have a better look at them. We had three abandoned fish from one of the gardens that our Gardening Boys work in, and have never fed them or anything, but this year we have 8 fully grown and rather large fish. Six gold ones, and two white ones.

So, I catch a fish, but how to get hold of Ram. I yelled, but of course he can't hear me while wearing his noise cancelling head phones, so I ended up taking the fish in the net into the house with me to get him! Poor fish!

Ram came out, bounce boots and all, and held the net while I took some photos. So if you are hot and bothered this afternoon, and feeling miserable that you are stuck at home with your SEN or disabled child, or not able to have a holiday this year, just have a look at some lovely gold fish and that might cheer you up - I hope! It did me!

It was a feisty one

We were surprised at how deep it was, as we only usually see them from the top so can only see their length and width.

But don't worry, we let it have its freedom again and it swam happily off into the deep.




And if that doesn't cheer you up, how about the damsel fly orgy we witnessed yesterday!

Summer is Finally Here!

Finally after such a dismal summer we have some good weather. Good weather always seems to make home education easier, especially for natural sciences.




Although I do pine for those early days of HE where Ram was so eager and excited to get outside. Today he is not only displaying the usual grumpiness of being a teen, but he has the aches and pains and lack of energy of the hypermobility syndrome , so it is much harder to get him outside.




However yesterday our ivy which covers most of one side of our house was in bloom and we had an assortment of various bugs, flies, bees and wasps, not to mention a few butterflies. It was noisy and interesting enough to get him out there. We took some photos so that we could identify the different species later.














Then of course we had to observe the chickens. Sometimes you can get more out of just sitting and observing than you can get out of a text book.






Last night was also the first warm night with a clear sky since we bought the telescope so we managed to see Vega. That was exciting as Vega is the star that Ellie from the film Contact was sent to by the aliens.

We have just finished reading Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku and he mentions Contact and Carl Sagan who wrote the book that Contact was based on, so it was a good way of tying in physics, astronomy, and fiction, all in one fell swoop.

Today I suggested that we go out for a walk or a wheel I should say. Ram begrudgingly agreed. I am sure he would much rather stay by the computer but pushing his wheelchair gives me some needed exercise. However once we were out we managed to not only have a look at the ducks in on the village pond (the two females seem to have turned into males!) and a chat with a neighbour, but we also walked down to the old badger set where I hadn't been since I used to walk the dogs there 10 years ago.

Again, watching things on TV or reading them in a book is one thing, but actually seeing a whole set, looking at the different bits of it to see if it is active, and seeing it in the context of the wider countryside is very valuable. Ram suggested that if they wanted to get rid of these badgers all they would have to do is get the Autumn Watch http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/uk/ people out there to film them!





On the way back we saw some sheep and again watched them for a while. We managed to get a couple of the beauties to pose for us which was lucky. They were still a bit flighty as they had only just been put in that field.










So all in all we have had two good days of learning. It might not be as intense as it was when Ram was younger, but at least he is still learning in informal ways.

Minecraft Meets Fibre Craft

I needed something to do while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (complete DVD set, series one to seven as Ram wasn't old enough to watch it when it first came out) and decided to weave a tapestry of a Minecraft Creeper.

Then we realised that it was just the right size to replace the broken fabric on our book chair. I just hope it doesn't blow up our books!




Book rest Creeper: That's a very nice book rest you have there. It would be a shame if anything should happen to it!



Detail of the weaving, done with offcuts of rug wool from a carpet factory, on an old Spear's number 3 loom. All mistakes credited to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon.

The Code: BBC Does it Again

I have written before about how the hype surrounding science programmes on the BBC and beyond, are actually putting young people off science, and we have yet another example.

In the weeks before The Code was broadcast the BBC and Marcus Du Sautoy started Tweeting and referring to the website. It sounded fun and intriguing, so I applied for the postcard. It actually arrived while friends, including Ram's best friend, were staying and with a lot of effort I managed to get them interested in decoding the card.

What I couldn't do was get Ram interested. It was hard enough getting the other young people intersted, but Ram was impossible. I would tell him what was being tweeted, tried to show him the photos on the Facebook page, but to no avail. He wasn't just not interested, he actually started getting hostile. Eventually I had to back off a bit.

Never mind, I thought that maybe when the programmes were broadcast he would be more interested.

That was not to be either. I mean, he did watch them, but he refused to look for clues or go to the website and play the games. And I had to endure a high level of sarcastic comments throughout, far more than usual.

Eventually after the second programme, the truth finally came out. “It's the hype. I hate all the hype and it makes me want to have nothing to do with it.”

So there we are. Once again what was meant to get young people like Ram excited about maths and science is actually putting him off. Luckily he is actually watching the programme so hopefully something will be learned, but I am wondering how much longer it will be until he refuses to even watch science programmes on the BBC.

Who Said Computer Games Aren't Educational

Well, not a home educator, that's for sure! The current fascination is Minecraft.

I was a little dubious at first but another home educator told me it was definitely educational. Apparently it has something called red stone that makes use of logical components such as capacitors and logic gates as used in electronics. That sounded good as Dxh had been teaching Ram about logic gates.

We paid our money and off Ram went. Very quickly I realised that he was going to get a lot more out of it than just game play. Basically, it is a sandbox building game, where you can build a world, eat, sleep and get blown up! In no time he was building amazing castles with great detail. He even made guest bedrooms with chests (containing cake and explosives) for his friends. He has also built a library to die for, complete with three galleried floors, lighting and books.




The Minecraft world is based on cubes, which fascinated Ram, but it also means that he has to have a good understanding of how cubes work, as any other shape you want has to be made up from cubes.

Time management also has a part to play, which is something that doesn't come naturally to Ram. If you are not in a safe place by the time night falls, then bad things can happen!

But the biggest thing is the development of social skills, something that Ram needs a lot of work on. How? He joined up with two other home educated friends, and the Dxh set up a server for them so that they could all play in the same world together. This meant he had to communicate, and the easiest way to do that is via Skype.

My boy, the one who once, a long time ago, attacked someone with a Stanley knife because I was talking on the telephone, has started communicating via phone! Mind you, it isn't a phone call as most of us would recognise. They sit there for hours not talking to each other, and forget to say goodbye! But we are working on it.

The funniest thing though is when the monsters, called creepers, explode. He always uses noise cancelling headphones when on the computer so I can't hear what is going on. The first time he was playing he suddenly jumped a mile. I looked over at him and he had a look of shock on his face. A creeper had snuck up behind him and exploded, startling
him! Because he is so immersed in the world with his headphones on, it was a whole body experience!



There is more to playing a computer game than just the game itself. One lad (not home educated) has even written a song so that allowed us to talk about music. We have discussed architecture, geography (yes, water does flow to the lowest point!) electronics, and how to retrieve a deleted home directory! That actually happened when Ram was installing a mod in the terminal window, and accidentally deleted his home directory. He now knows what cd .. rm -rf means!