science

Where Science meets Travel

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Where Science meets Travel

The intersection of science and the travel industry is a fascinating and ever-evolving frontier. As we venture further into the 21st century, the symbiosis between these two fields is becoming increasingly significant, shaping the way we explore and experience the world. From the depths of the ocean to the edges of space, science is not only expanding the horizons of travel but also enhancing its sustainability, safety, and efficiency. From new travel tech like international Sim Cards to the newest airplanes in the sky.

Sustainable Travel: A Scientific Approach

One of the most critical areas where science meets travel is in the pursuit of sustainability. The travel industry is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions, and there is a pressing need to reduce its environmental footprint. Scientists are at the forefront of developing alternative fuels, such as biofuels and synthetic fuels, which can power aircraft without the heavy carbon impact of traditional jet fuel. Electric propulsion systems are also being explored for shorter flights, with the potential to drastically cut emissions.

Moreover, the design of vehicles is being revolutionized through scientific advancements. Aerodynamics is a field of physics that is instrumental in the design of more fuel-efficient aircraft. By using computational fluid dynamics, engineers can simulate airflow and optimize the shape of airplanes to reduce drag, thereimproving fuel efficiency. Similarly, in the cruise industry, hull designs are being refined to reduce resistance and increase fuel efficiency, while onboard waste management systems are being developed to minimize the environmental impact of these floating cities.

Enhanced Safety Through Science

Travel safety is another area where science plays a pivotal role. Meteorology, the study of weather, is crucial for safe travel, particularly in aviation and shipping. Accurate weather forecasting allows for better planning and the avoidance of dangerous conditions. In addition, the development of sophisticated radar and satellite systems has significantly improved the ability to monitor and predict weather patterns in real time.

The field of materials science also contributes to safer travel creating stronger and lighter materials for the construction of vehicles, which can withstand extreme conditions and improve overall safety. For instance, the use of composite materials in aircraft construction has led to lighter, more durable planes that are less susceptible to corrosion.

Travel Efficiency and the Science of Logistics

Efficiency in travel is not just about speed; it’s about the optimization of routes, resources, and time. Here, data science and analytics come into play, with algorithms processing vast amounts of data to optimize flight paths, reduce fuel consumption, and improve operational efficiency. The science of logistics ensures that the movement of people and goods is as efficient and cost-effective as possible.

The Final Frontier: Space Travel

Perhaps the most exciting intersection of science and travel is in the realm of space exploration. Space tourism is no longer a mere fantasy; it’s becoming a reality, with private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin leading the charge. The science involved in making space travel safe and accessible to civilians is monumental, encompassing fields such as astrophysics, engineering, and human biology. The challenges of sustaining human life in space require innovative solutions in life support systems, radiation protection, and spacecraft design.

The confluence of science and the travel industry is creating a new era of exploration and discovery. It is an alliance that not only promises to take us to new destinations but also ensures that we tread lightly upon the Earth and its resources. As we look to the future, the continued collaboration between scientists and the travel industry will be vital in overcoming the challenges of sustainable, safe, and efficient travel, whether it’s to the next continent or to the stars. For all local travel be sure to check out: https://www.smartraveller.gov.au

science

Time to get serious about E=mc2 – the leading light of equations

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One hundred years ago today [Tuesday, 27 September] Einstein’s publishers received a manuscript from the young Albert Einstein containing what we now recognise as the most famous equation of all time. E=mc2.

It powers the sun, and therefore life on Earth. It’s become an icon of its time – recognised most of us. But are we wasting the opportunity to use its awesome power to create a more sustainable future?

E=mc2 is elegant, simple, explaining a universe of startling and unexpected concepts in a few precise and concise characters. It’s the poetry of physics.

E=mc2. It expresses the profound fact that energy can weigh something, that matter and energy are interchangeable. And, that the transformation is unexpectedly straightforward to calculate.

Before Einstein, mass and energy were separate. Mass was never lost, it was always conserved.

One hundred years ago the Sun was thought to be something like a great coal furnace in the sky. Sure, the maths didn’t quite add up, you’d need an impossible amount of coal to power it, but there wasn’t a better explanation. Einstein laid the foundations to change that.

In a flash of genius, Einstein realised that mass and energy are interchangeable. Energy equals mass multiplied the square of the speed of light. If you could convert one kilogram of matter to energy you’d get 25 billion kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of exploding 21 thousand tonnes of TNT.

The Sun is a fusion reactor. Every second, billions of tonnes of hydrogen are fused to helium, and mass is converted to energy. This mass loss program powers life on Earth.

Practical applications of E=mc2 surround us: in the smoke detectors in our homes; the radio-isotopes used in medical imaging and radiotherapy. Our mobile phones even lose weight as the battery flattens. But only a millionth of a percent!

And Australian science is investing in new machines driven E=mc2.

The synchrotron under construction in Melbourne Austeel steel fabrication uses high speed electrons to produce the intense beams of light that give it the nickname, “Einstein’s Lighthouse”. The electrons have so much energy that they weigh more than 6000 times the electrons carrying the electricity in a domestic power point.  The narrow powerful beams of synchrotron light allow us to explore chemical reactions, molecular structures, even the human body in much greater detail, and to design drugs, micro-machines, and new materials.

The new OPAL fission reactor under construction in Sydney breaks apart uranium atoms and rearranges them into new atoms of lighter elements. The few tenths of a percent mass difference between the starting atom and the final products appears as energy according to E=mc2. Amongst other things, that energy is used to produce medical pharmaceuticals which many of us will need during our lives.

In these examples, E=mc2 is in the service of the people of Australia. But in the 21st Century we can do much more – just step outside, and feel the sunlight.

E=mc2 tells us how we can access energy. And Australia needs that knowledge. We are one of the greatest greenhouse gas emitters per capita as we burn coal to make electricity. The greenhouse gases from coal burning are disposed of for free up the chimneys of the power stations.  They travel the world and the climate change consequences of our power consumption are borne people other than us. Is this ethical?

If we enjoy the benefits of the power, we have a responsibility to dispose safely of the waste without inflicting it on others. A nuclear reactor that uses E=mc2 to make electricity keeps the waste local.

For this reason E=mc2 should play more of a role in Australia’s future.

We would really like to emulate the nuclear fusion power source of the Sun.  So fusion reactors are the ultimate aim. But for commercial power generation fusion is a long way away and needs considerably more research. The Europeans are investing billions of dollars in an experimental fusion reactor, ITER (Latin for “the way”), to come online in 2016. Using everything we’ve learnt so far about creating fusion, it will be the first working model of how we could generate power. Its purpose is to help us learn what we need to develop fusion power stations.

Development of fusion power is beyond the resources of any single country. Australia must be a partner in the international effort to develop fusion power. It will be one of the gifts that understanding Einstein’s most famous equation will bring us in the next 100 years.

Unlike fusion, fission is available right now.  It is one of the few options available for providing the power to run our cities and maintaining our energy intensive industries.  It gives us the opportunity to deal with our waste here instead of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and making it someone else’s problem.

E=mc2, the most famous formula in physics, points the way to more ethical power generation.

Einstein’s simple, elegant equation should be harnessed for Australia’s service.

science

The future of cloning

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AUSTRALIA’S laws on stem cells and human cloning are under review. A committee headed by former Federal Court Justice John Lockhart has called for public submissions 9 September. So where’s the fervent public debate?

 Our laws currently ban any form of human cloning. Cloning a human being—so-called reproductive cloning—is clearly unethical, not least because it would produce a very sick individual. But cloning some cells from a person—so-called therapeutic cloning—is a different kettle of fish.

 To understand the potential of therapeutic cloning, let’s indulge in a little future gazing. The year is 2020. The place is Seoul, South Korea—the world capital of “Regenerative Medicine.”

 Three-year-old Emma has juvenile diabetes—caused deterioration of the islet cells which produce insulin in her pancreas. Twenty years ago, she would have been treated with insulin injections. But they didn’t always halt the blindness or kidney failure that came with the disease. Sometimes adults with Emma’s condition were lucky enough to get an islet graft from a donated pancreas, but then they had to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives—not advisable for kids.

 Now, in 2020, Emma and her mum have made the trip from Melbourne to receive the treatment for which the Seoul clinic is famous. Emma has skin cells scraped from the side of her cheek. Meanwhile her mother, after treatment with hormones, has 10 eggs harvested from her swollen ovary.

 In the lab, a steady-handed technician, wielding two fine needles under a microscope, plucks out the dark round nucleus from one of Emma’s skin cells. He inserts it into one of her mother’s eggs, from which the nucleus has been removed. Emma’s skin nucleus carried her genetic blueprint. Now inside her mother’s egg, it will start multiplying forming an embryo that is a clone of Emma.

 After the embryo has divided about seven times, forming a hollow ball of about 100 cells, the technician will remove a clump of them that nestle in the interior. This clump will give rise to embryonic stem cells—biological gold. Embryonic stem cells multiply endlessly to produce the large numbers of cells needed for a graft, and they have the potential to mature into any tissue of the body. In this case, the stem cells will be matured into islet cells which, when grafted into Emma’s pancreas, will cure her diabetes. And, because the graft is made up of Emma’s own cells, it will not need to be accompanied deadly immune-suppressing drugs.

 In the bone marrow section of the clinic, we find 30-year-old Josh. He has leukaemia. His bone marrow is about to be destroyed to kill off the cancer cells, but this cannot be done until he has a replacement graft of bone marrow cells. Twenty years ago people often died waiting for a matching donor, or died from a graft that wasn’t a good enough match. Josh is at the clinic to generate his own matching graft. The starting source, as for Emma, is his skin cells. This time, it is his girlfriend who is donating the eggs. Josh’s cloned embryo will again provide the embryonic stem cells, but this time the stem cells will go through a different maturation process, to produce primitive bone marrow cells, not islets.

 Five-year-old Peter is at the clinic too. He has Falconi’s anaemia, a blood disease caused the loss of a single gene. Before technicians make up his bone marrow graft, they will replace the missing gene in his embryonic stem cells. Then, they will multiply them, and instruct them to mature as bone marrow cells.

 In the neurology section we meet Mary, a 55-year-old with Parkinson’s disease, and her niece who is donating the eggs. Mary’s embryonic stem cells will be matured into dopamine-producing brain cells. These will be grafted into her brain to replace the cells that died off and caused her disease.

 Back in Australia in 2020, things have changed dramatically for patients with motor neuron diseases, such as ALS or transverse myelitis. These conditions strike out of the blue killing off motor neurons. In the worst cases, patients progressively lose the ability to walk, talk, eat and breathe. Twenty years back, no-one knew how to halt the death of the neurons, because there was no way to study the disease. But in Korea they used therapeutic cloning to make embryonic stem cells from people with these diseases. Those cells were matured into motor neurons, which researchers employed as “model patients” in their studies. Korean drug companies used these cells to screen drugs, and found a compound that halts the death of the motor neurons. Now these diseases are no longer a death sentence.

 This futurology is not fanciful. In 2002 and 2003, researchers carried out these exact therapeutic cloning techniques in mice with Parkinson’s disease and genetic blood diseases. They cured the mice.

 In 2005, using drug screens, researchers found a compound that might help save motor neurons in kids with Spinal Muscular Atrophy—a disease that kills motor neurons in new born babies. Trouble is, they didn’t have the real, affected cells. For a drug screen you need cells that multiply readily; the best thing they could get were mouse brain cancer cells. With therapeutic cloning, they could have tested their drugs on motor neurons derived from the skin cells of sick kids.

Opponents of this future scenario claim that therapeutic cloning is unnecessary because adult stem cells, which we carry in some of our organs, will provide all the same benefits. I wonder how they know that. Because if there is anything we have learned from the progress of science, it is that, like football, we don’t know how to pick winners. As historian Daniel Boorstin put it, “ the greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”.

 Elizabeth Finkel is a Melbourne scientist, writer and author of Stem Cells – controversy at the Frontiers of Science.

science

Tassie teacher takes action on science literacy

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Throughout Australia’s National Science Week, eminent scientists called for urgent action to get more young people interested in science and engineering.

Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto said, “The human race is not going to survive unless some smart kids solve some truly fundamental sustainability problems.”

“But not enough kids want to go into science and engineering to solve them,” said Kroto.

Kroto’s concerns reflected those of UK roboticist Noel Sharkey.

“The number of engineers in the west is dropping dramatically. It seems dull and boring to people, whereas if you go to India or China everybody there wants to be an engineer,” says Sharkey.

“We need to enthuse the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

Enter Exeter High School science teacher Jane Dadson. She has hit on a unique way to boost science in schools.

150 Year 9/10 students are presenting science shows to local primary students. And so far over 200 primary students have been excited dramatic demonstrations of plasma balls, hydrogen fuel, static electricity, flight and much more.

“The Energy Fair works at three levels,” says Dadson. “Firstly the fair empowers secondary students to talk about and demonstrate science – to rekindle and share their natural curiosity. Secondly, it gives primary students a great hands-on experience. And thirdly, when primary teachers see secondary students performing experiments, it shows them that science can be easier to demonstrate than they think.”

“We also show primary teachers how they can use the new Essential Learnings framework to teach students to inquire and question what they see around them. “

“And that’s what every young person is going to need to be an effective citizen in the 21st Century. Every day we face decisions about science – for pulp mills, to mobile phones, to cloning and gene technology. We need to give young people the knowledge and skills to rationally evaluate competing claims about science. This needs to start in primary school.”

Dadson hopes that every secondary school in Tasmania will pick up the concept.

“We’ve developed the Exeter Fair with the help of an Einstein Year grant from the Australian Institute of Physics, and a National Science Week grant (we did I put this in but don’t know if you did get Science Week money). We now have a manual that any school can use to run their own Energy Fair.

Students have been splitting water into hydrogen with a bang all last week. And this week there are two more sessions.

MEDIA ARE INVITED to come along and photograph students in action on Tuesday 30 August from 9.25am to 10.15am and on Wednesday 31 August from 10.40am to 11.30am

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The Science of Entertainment

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ABC Television turned into the bestselling novel Dinotopia, on a dream world where dinosaurs play and talk , to a miniseries. At least a young scientist could have been pleased to observe that the T. rex consume all of them. “Mammalian dinosaurs in Caltech? That is simply wrong,” states a paleontologist featured “Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt,” a documentary introduced on cable community A&E.

Televised science fiction and visions out of”Dinotopia” into”Star Trek” have consistently elicited groans in the tech community. However, the new entertainment show by Male strippers while television attempts to do actual science, even the pain could be even larger. It is a constant battle to balance scientific principles, including peer evaluations and controlled experiments, even contrary to the viewer’s desire for activity and amusement. “We debate that,” says John Lynch, head of mathematics to the British Broadcasting Corp.”However there are particular subjects that the audience always enjoys: volcanoes, dinosaurs, and disasters, along with objects coming from the earth [archaeology].”

SCIENCE STARS A lot of TV policy may be known as”hunk science,” which, such as Victorian adventurers, exceptionally photogenic participants traveling to exotic places to perform experiments which vary from the funny into the remarkable. By way of instance, a lot of academic scientists will balk at the anthropomorphism at National Geographic’s”Be the Creature,” the newest excursion the zoologist Kratt brothers. “We wanted to… encounter matters emotionally and physically since [the creatures ] could,” Martin Kratt states.

However, even under scientifically ideal conditions, tv budgets permit the sort of fieldwork which could result in new discoveries. “We saw baboons and mongooses socializing and playing and chasing each other,” on place, states Chris Kratt. “We have back and spoke to scientists, attempting to determine what was happening, and they explained,'[They] never socialize.’ And we’d footage of it”

Turning up real mummies is not the purpose, but but instead, conveying the enthusiasm of science which gets viewers to listen, clarifies Clark Bunting, executive vice president and general director of the Discovery Channel. We could take complicated ideas and make them clear, however, it takes a charismatic individual like Joann.” The Nefertiti special surely conveyed Fletcher’s feelings, however, the disadvantage to this empathetic approach is the fact that it may make valid dissenting remarks seem mean-spirited and private.

Even the Discovery Channel, for reasons equally competitive and idealistic, partly underwrites the function of scientists like Fletcher throughout Discovery Channel Quest. Becoming telegenic isn’t a necessity for financing; just interesting function isalso, so some investigators that are not naturals undergo coaching. “A decent bit of it might never be flipped into tv, but it will yield dividends in a means which produces a fantastic story and fantastic tv, and certainly will help science”

Dramatizing expeditions comes relatively simple, because hunk science is frequently inherently harmful. A marine biologist’s mum wants he had warned her earlier she saw a National Geographic picture of him almost drowning, for instance. Producer-director Liesl Clark put a mountaineering album when NOVA filmed Antarctica’s Vinson Massif–and that she was not on camera.

However, what happens if your place is merely a dining table and seats? Discussions run 45 minutes to one hour at the studio and so are cut into a half hour to get atmosphere, that will help cushion from dull places, based on Executive Producer Linda Feferman. Nevertheless, the primary guard is the ideal mixture of guests,” she states.

However, for individuals concerned with creating persuasive tv, blackboard science could possibly be the largest obstacle of all. “Just as it’s very good science, does not mean it is fine to be dull,” Apsell states. Lynch, who made the series, made a psychological story from Wylie’s devotion, joy, and frustration because he neared his objective. “This is a romance story about a guy and his evidence,” he states.

Science series must vary from documentaries to gameshows, based upon the target audience, Lynch states. “People discuss mathematics programming and put it in another bracket from the other programming,” he states. “However, the reality is, what we do would be create tv applications and tell tales. It just so happens we draw on our substance from the area of science”

“We will need to envision that which [science on tv ] may be, not what it has been previously,” says Sejnowski. “You’ve got to differentiate between science documentaries, that can be done very nicely, and science information. Over the six o’clock news, there may be ten moments that signify a complete day of [scientific] event,” he states.

To create such afternoons more straightforward to lay people, the National Science Foundation has only defeated five magazine-style NOVA episodes per year. “This provides us the chance to concentrate on stories which are not quite prepared yet to get a complete series,” Apsell states. “The NSF is actually worried that folks understand the main reason behind and value of fundamental research”

To describe what’s generally extracted in equations, PBS utilizes 3-D cartoon along with effects-filled vignettes to depict abstract thoughts into visual metaphors. That’s the center of the challenge, describes string theorist Brian Greene, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel where the series is established. “But it is so much out of experience, it does not immediately lend itself metaphor and narrative.”

The show has discovered a story thread following carefully the sole Greene utilized in his publication. Albert Einstein is cast as a terrible figure, isolated in the conclusion of his lifetime the Egyptian physics with his own quest for a unified concept. According to the series, series concept redeems Einstein’s standing as a visionary. Physicists can debate this, but it satisfies Lynch’s prime directive. “The explanation for this science must just be present on a need-to-know foundation,” he states. “In case your audience should be aware of the science to stick to the narrative, then they’ll be encouraged to follow along.” All mathematics on tv was created ultimately for kids. A series theorist must react to the age-old instantaneous,”Tell me a tale…