We are excited to announce the launch of 2015's Access to Understanding science writing competition - a prestigious, international competition aimed at PhD students and early career post-doctoral researchers where the challenge is to summarise a cutting-edge research article for a non-specialist audience.

The winner will receive an iPad and have their entry published in eLife. Read on for more…

For more information: http://EuropePMC.org/ScienceWritingCompetition

Questions: [email protected]

The competition is developed by the British Library, eLife and Europe PMC for Access to Understanding. It is supported by the Europe PMC Funders.

Access to Understanding is a collaboration promoting wider understanding of biomedical research findings.

This week we share the final video from our Beautiful Science events season - the Access to Understanding science writing competition.

‘Access to Understanding’ is a science writing competition that challenges early career researchers to summarize a recent biomedical research article for a public audience.  The competition is delivered by the British Library in partnership with Europe PMC – the free life sciences information resource.  Although the move towards open access publishing means that scientific research is more easily accessible, access does not always equate to understanding as scientific papers often contain highly specific technical language. Access to Understanding aims to bridge this gap between access and understanding. 

Winning entrants were recognised at a prestigious awards ceremony, which included speeches by Sharmila Nebhrajani (Association of Medical Research Charities) and the Government Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Mark Walport on the importance of communicating science in an understandable way. As keynote speaker Sir Mark Walport said, “Science is for everyone - not just to be shared within a small closed community”.

First place went to Elizabeth Kirkham for her entry which explained research investigating the role of the brain in musical beat prediction and was published by eLife. 2014 also saw the launch of the People’s Choice award, which invited members of public to vote for their favourite shortlisted entry. You can read all the winning entries in the competition booklet

This year’s Access to Understanding competition launches later in November. We’ll be sharing more information on this blog very soon so stay tuned!

Katie Howe

This week we bring you the first blog post in a series about the science, technology and medicine that emerged from the First World War. Richard Wakeford investigates:

Amid all the attention given to the First World War, its impact on the years that followed is often overlooked. Science played a major role in the war and from 1919 many of the wartime developments in science and medicine came to have peaceful uses. This was no more keenly felt than in the field of civil aviation.

Britain, France and Germany had all entered the war with light reconnaissance aircraft weighing a few hundred pounds and flying for a hundred miles or so. But by the end of the war Britain had heavy bombers that could fly to Berlin with a one ton bomb load. Aeronautical engineering on a scientific basis had started at Farnborough and the National Physical Laboratory with research on aerodynamics in wind tunnels and the use of aluminium in lightweight airframe construction, but in many ways these heavy aircraft were no different from those that entered the war, they were just bigger. What did make the difference were the powerful new engines – and if one engine can be singled out it was the Rolls Royce Eagle.

A BE2 in France 1915 (Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain image)

Henry Royce, one of this country’s greatest engineers, was in the summer of 1914 building the Silver Ghost, the top of the range luxury car. But by October he had converted the Ghost’s straight-six engine to a V12 aero engine and laid down the groundplan for a generation of engines that culminated in the famous Merlin that powered the Spitfire, the Lancaster and the Mustang in the Second World War. Aircraft of the 1914 vintage such as the BE2 had an engine delivering only 80 horsepower, by 1918 the Vickers Vimy gave, what was for that time, a massive 720 horsepower.

Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith's Vickers Vimy after the flight to Australia in 1919 (Image: Wikimedia Commons, uploaded to Flickr by bidgee)

Once the Armistice was declared, firms like Vickers and Handley Page were left with cancelled government contracts and fleets of unused aircraft. They responded by inaugurating regular passenger services to the continent and by showing that their planes were reliable enough to fly long distance routes to the Empire. Before the war the Daily Mail and other newspapers had set up prizes for flying achievements. In 1909 Bleriot had flown 30 miles across the Channel to win the prizes but by 1919 the Atlantic was the new challenge. So on July 14 Alcock and Brown took off from Newfoundland and 16 hours later landed in Ireland, a non-stop flight of 1890 miles. (The original aircraft can still be seen at the Science Museum). The strength and reliability of the Vimy was further tested by brothers Ross and Keith Smith and two mechanics in their flight to Australia a few months later, flying 11,130 miles in stages from London to Darwin.

"Yesterday I was in America... and I am the first person in Europe to say that”
Captain John Alcock June 15 1919

The international scheduled flights that also started in 1919 did not attempt these heroic distances but provided a shuttle service between European cities. Flights from London to Paris started at Hounslow Heath (just a runway’s length from today’s Heathrow) and soon after operations moved to Croydon which became London’s international airport until the Second World War. All the paraphernalia of modern flying, with air traffic control, night flying, customs sheds, and dedicated weather reports were pioneered in the early years of  Croydon but in 1924 Cricklewood aerodrome, the home of Handley Page, became the scene of the world’s first fatal civil air accident. For a few years Britain led the world in aviation, introducing the world’s first purpose designed airliner, the Vimy Commercial in 1919, but its lead was soon overtaken by more advanced aircraft designs from USA and Germany. Croydon airport closed in 1959, Vickers and Handley Page disappeared within the British Aircraft Corporation (today’s BAE Systems), leaving Rolls Royce as the only name to survive from the early years of flight.

Richard Wakeford – Reference Specialist: Science Reading Room

Further reading: http://www.tinyurl.com/bombers-airliners

Rachel Huddart looks back on the last three months working with the British Library Science Team

I decided to apply for a BBSRC Science Policy internship on a whim while traveling to a conference in Hungary. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made so far. As competition for an increasingly small number of postdoctoral positions increases, having a chance to get out of the lab environment and discover what opportunities there are outside of academia is a fantastic boost to your future career. Turns out there are a lot.

While I’ve been here at the British Library, I’ve worked on two main projects. The first one was the TalkScience event ‘Biotech on the Farm: Food for Thought?’ which looked at the future of meat production and consumption. My PhD is about the genetic modification of livestock animals and organising TalkScience gave me a great opportunity to take a step back from my thesis and look at the bigger picture of food security and sustainability. Researching the topic was fascinating (you can read a brief summary of what I learned here), although staring at pictures of delicious food – which get used a lot in food security reports – did make me incredibly hungry!

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had four fantastic speakers who agreed to be on the panel and, despite my initial nerves, the debate was lively, interesting and informative. The audience seemed to enjoy it and posed lots of interesting questions, including asking whether we could get our pets to cut down on the amount of meat they eat. I definitely learnt a lot about where my work fits into the bigger picture as well as the myriad other factors which are at play in our struggle to have a secure, sustainable supply of meat. The video of the event is below, if you want to check it out for yourself.

 

My second task was to help the Science team with a project investigating how people working in science policy access information. This project is still in the early stages but it gave me the chance to visit other science policy organisations and learn about their work. It’s been really interesting to learn how much information, other than scientific articles, go into producing policy documents and how varied that information is as well as what barriers people working in science policy encounter when they look for information.

TalkScience audience (Copyright: British Library Board)

But that hasn’t been all. I’ve learned about so many other things from the life of Isaac Newton to the basics of writing computer code. By now, you’ve probably guessed that work here at the British Library is incredibly varied and always interesting. I’ve gained lots of new skills and brushed up on some older ones, like writing for non-academic audiences. I’m so pleased that I decided to do this internship (and even more pleased that the Science team agreed to take me on!) and now I can’t wait to see how I use everything I’ve learned in my future career

Rachel Huddart

Are you a NERC, BBSRC or AHRC- funded PhD student interested in science policy? Find out more about the Policy Internship scheme here.

Related articles

TalkScience @BL - Biotech on the Farm: Food for Thought?

My Internship with the British Library Science Team

Isaac Newton is calling you...

Today we bring you another video from our Beautiful Science events season.

For this event we joined forces with our colleagues in the BL’s Social Sciences team to explore the age-old nature vs nurture debate in the era of epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of how genes can be switched on or off by environmental factors such as nutrients, toxins and hormones. This relatively new field has revolutionized the nature vs nurture dichotomy as we now know that both our genes (‘nature’) and our environment (‘nurture’) can affect who we are. This panel debate and lively Q&A session explored the social, ethical and political implications of this new and exciting area of study.

The event was chaired by Professor Jane Elliot (Institute of Education and ESRC). Expert speakers were Professor George Davey Smith (University of Bristol) and Professor Nikolas Rose (King’s College London).

 

Note: For more about epigenetics check out this handy guide from Wikipedia.

Katie Howe

Rachel Huddart explores the future of meat production in advance of our upcoming TalkScience event on 30^th September. Tickets are available from the box office.

When was the last time you ate meat? Today? Last week? Never? For most people in the developed world, meat is a major part of their diet as well as their food culture. In 2009, the average Brit ate almost 85kg of meat a year - double the global average of 42kg¹. As a result of this, by 2050, the global demand for meat is expected to be 73% greater than levels in 2010². How are we going to meet this demand?

It’s not easy being green…

We use one quarter of the land on Earth to raise more than 70 billion livestock animals and one third of the total available arable land to feed them^3,4. Livestock rearing is the cause of about 80% of deforestation in the Amazon⁵. We know deforestation is a big driver of climate change and this is exacerbated by the fact that meat production accounts for 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions⁶. Is meat worth all this damage or is there any way for us to reduce its impact on the planet?

Health risks

Several studies in recent years have linked red meat in particular to an increase in a person’s risk from certain types of cancer, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes^7,8. On top of this, there are concerns that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture could lead to the evolution of more antibiotic-resistant bacteria, like MRSA. This could to lead to an increase in untreatable infections and deaths and make simple medical procedures potentially lethal.

So, what should we do? Studies suggest that reducing or completely cutting meat, or even just beef, out of your diet can drastically shrink your carbon footprint⁹. However, there are no signs that global meat consumption is going to start decreasing in the foreseeable future. Could technologies or alternative sources of food help to reduce the effects of meat production?

The burger - Environmental menace? Health risk? Or just delicious? (Copyright Macko Flower: Shutterstock)

Meat of the future?

Genetically modified livestock, like flu-resistant chickens, could reduce losses from disease and could also grow more efficiently, meaning less feed is required to get the animal to market weight. Others, like the Enviropig, could be engineered to be less polluting. GM technologies have come a long way since the 90’s and are now capable of making astonishingly precise  modifications to an animal’s DNA¹⁰. But would we ever be completely happy to eat a GM sausage or would we prefer in vitro meat, like the “stem cell burger”¹¹? Growing meat in a lab would massively reduce the number of animals we use as food (we’d still need some to provide the initial stem cells). However, that single burger cost £217,000 to produce and it’s unlikely that the process of growing cells will be easily scaled up any time soon. But how will we know that these technologies are safe and, even if they are, will we ever be happy to eat food produced in this way?

How about other sources of food? The idea of chowing down on a caterpillar might seem disgusting, but insects are high in protein, low in fat, and have a much lower environmental impact than livestock. Could we bypass the animal altogether and produce meat directly from plants¹²? Or give up plant and animal-based food altogether and eat synthetic food¹³? Is the only answer to go vegetarian?

What should we do?

How do we go about making changes? Should we, as consumers, vote with our wallets and just buy less meat? Can the food industry help by making meat-free alternatives more available and noticeable or should they price meat to reflect its true costs? Should the government, both at national and EU level, be more open to the use of new technologies or should they promote more sustainable farming methods? Whatever we decide to do, it’s clear that we need to make a decision soon to avoid any further damage to the environment and our own food supply.

Our 26^th TalkScience event on September 30^th will discuss the future of meat production with our expert panel of Professor Helen Sang(Roslin Institute, Edinburgh), Vicki Hird (Friends of the Earth) and Professor Richard Tiffin(University of Reading), chaired by Catherine de Lange(New Scientist). Tickets cost £5 and are available to book from the Box Office.

For those of you who can’t come along, we will be collecting questions before the event to ask during the debate. If you have a question for our speakers, send it to us by the 30^th of September through our Facebook or Twitter pages using the hashtag #BLTalkScience. We’ll be live-tweeting the event using the hashtag, so you can follow the conversation wherever you are.

More reading

1)      http://chartsbin.com/view/12730

2)      http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3437e/i3437e.pdf

3)      http://www.europarl.europa.eu/climatechange/doc/FAO%20report%20executive%20summary.pdf

4)      http://www.ciwf.org.uk/media/3640540/ciwf_strategic_plan_20132017.pdf

5)      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2373903/

6)      http://www.unep.org/pdf/unep-geas_oct_2012.pdf

7)      http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=414881

8)      http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1697785

9)      http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/21/giving-up-beef-reduce-carbon-footprint-more-than-cars

10)   http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pig-26-can-this-little-piggy-win-over-the-enemies-of-gm-8574119.html

11)   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23576143

12)   http://www.wired.com/2013/09/fakemeat/

13)   http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food

Our latest Beautiful Science video looks back a fantastic evening in which we welcomed Professor David Spiegelhalter and Dame Sally Davies to the Library for a discussion with Michael Blastland about the way in which public health messages are communicated.

In our recent Beautiful Science exhibition, we brought together some classics of data visualisation in the field of public health, showing the impact that powerful images can have in transforming the way we think about our own health and that of our society. But is John Snow's map of cholera deaths, or Florence Nightingale's rose diagram of deaths in the Crimean War really better than a table of numbers, like John Graunt’s Table of Casualities, based on his amalgamation of the data contained within the London Bills of Mortality? When it comes to our health, how and why do we make decisions to reform, or not reform our unhealthy behaviours?

Discussing this important question are:

Sir David Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor for the Public Communication of Risk at Cambridge University

Dr. Dame Sally Davies is the Chief Medical Officer for England

Michael Blastland, writer, broadcaster and author of the Tiger that Isn’t

 

 

Johanna Kieniewicz

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Counting Sheep: The Science of Sleep

Rachel Huddart takes a call from one of history’s most famous scientists.

Visitors to the British Library will have probably seen the statue of Isaac Newton crouched over the piazza. Newton has been part of the Library since we opened in St Pancras in 1997 but has always stayed pretty quiet, until now.

As part of the ‘Talking Statues’ project which is running in London and Manchester, Newton has finally been given a voice by the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker and the actor Simon Russell Beale. Anyone with a smartphone can scan the plaque on Newton’s plinth and receive a phone call from the great man himself, who talks about his early life, his scientific and mathematical discoveries and his work as Master of the Royal Mint.

 

Newton’s statue in the British Library piazza (Copyright: Rachel Huddart)

Within the Library’s collections, there are several documents from Newton’s adult life. Amongst his scientific papers, there are early editions of his famous book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, where Newton described his laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation, as well as the less well-known but impressively titled volume: A New and most Accurate Theory of the Moon's Motion; whereby All her Irregularities may be solved. The British Library’s collection also contains Arithmetica Universalis, which is based on Newton’s lecture notes from his time as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and his book The Method of Fluxions, which details Newton’s work in the development of calculus. As Newton himself points out, we still use his discoveries every day; from satellites orbiting the Earth (using his law of universal gravitation), to the smartphone you use to hear his statue speak (which relies on calculus).

 

Title page of The Method of Fluxions (Copyright: British Library Board)

When I started work at the Library, Newton’s statue struck me as a strange way to honour one of our greatest scientists. He doesn’t stand proudly over the piazza, gazing out at the visitors, but is bent over his compass, seemingly oblivious to everything around him. There isn’t even any sign of the famous apple. Surprisingly, the sculptor who created the statue, Eduardo Paolozzi, used a picture that criticises Newton as his inspiration. William Blake’s study of Newton, which is on display in Tate Britain, shows Newton sitting on a rock, absorbed in his work and ignorant of the colour and beauty on the rock that he sits on. The print is believed to show Blake’s disdain for Newton’s scientific thinking at the expense of nature and creativity. Paolozzi saw the work as a connection between the arts and science and between two great historical figures, despite their differences.

At the moment, Newton is the only statue at the British Library to be given a voice but it won’t be too long before he is joined by the statue of William Shakespeare which stands in the entrance hall of the Library. Talking Statues are running a competition to give members of the public the chance to write the script for Shakespeare and three other statues involved in the project. The winning monologues will be recorded by a famous actor and Shakespeare will be chatting to the public before Christmas.

Today we bring you another video from our Beautiful Science event series

Despite the fact that we spend a third of our lives asleep, the fundamental purpose of sleep is still poorly understood. Back in March we hosted an interactive evening event in collaboration with our friends over at UCL Neuroscience exploring the stuff that dreams are made of. Talks by Professor Russell Foster (University of Oxford) on the crucial role of our eyes in influencing sleep cycles, and from Professor Vince Walsh (UCL) on the benefits of sleep, were beautifully interspersed by a dream-inspired opera from Impropera. Audience members also explored how sleep is represented in art, took part in a myth-busting quiz about sleep, and listened to relaxing sleep sounds from the British Library’s audio collections.

If you missed it then you can now watch a highlights video here and find out more about the presenters and performers in the event programme.

 

Stay tuned for more videos of Beautiful Science events in the coming weeks.

Katie Howe

BBSRC policy intern Rachel Huddart introduces the next of our TalkScience debates taking place on 30^th September at 6pm

As a fairly committed meat eater, going vegetarian is quite low down on my ‘to do’ list. But researching the subject for our next TalkScience event might force me to have a rethink. Our love of meat is fast becoming a serious issue. As the need for us to switch sustainable agriculture becomes more apparent, the myriad effects of livestock on the environment and, consequently, on our future food supply, are becoming too big to ignore. It has been calculated that, if the entire population of the UK switched to a vegetarian diet, it would have the same effect on the environment as taking half of the nation’s cars off the road.

Cows in a field. A good source of food or an environmental menace? (Copyright stefbennett: Shutterstock)

Is this environmental damage too much to pay for access to cheap meat? Should we cut out all the burgers, roast dinners and kebabs from our diet for the sake of the planet? Can biotechnologies, like genetically modified livestock or the “stem cell burger”, help strike a balance between our desire for meat and our responsibility to look after the environment? Are these biotechnologies safe for us to eat and, even if they are, would we want to eat them?

Join us on 30^th September for our 26^th TalkScience event where we will discuss the future of meat production. Join Catherine de Lange(New Scientist) chairing our expert panel including Professor Helen Sang(Roslin Institute) and Vicki Hird (Friends of the Earth). Tickets cost £5 and are available to book from the Box Office.