Science blog

Page from Anne McLaren's notebook (shelfmark Add MS 83844) covering embryo transfer experiments in mice, 1950s. (Copyright estate of Anne McLaren)

Today is World Handwriting Day, and we thought we’d pay our respects to the most important role handwriting plays in science, one which you might not have heard of if you aren’t a practicing scientist. This is the “lab notebook”, a scientist’s daily diary of all their experiments, thoughts, and other scientific activities. Until relatively recently, these were always handwritten, as they were meant to record what, in detail, someone was doing as they did it. Waiting to create them until work was finished caused too much risk of forgetting or distorting something.

Lab notebooks grew out of the personal diaries and notebooks of individual researchers. Some notebooks by well-known scientists have become Library treasures in their own right. One of the most famous works in our Treasures of the British Library exhibition is the Codex Arundel, a collection of notes written by Leonardo da Vinci (although probably not in the order they were bound) in the sixteenth century. At the other extreme of history, the Treasures Gallery currently displays the biologist Anne McLaren's lab book on embryo transfer in mice. Outside the BL, most of the lifelong field and theoretical notebook collections of Charles Darwin are digitised and available online, as are some of Albert Einstein's most significant theoretical notebooks. At the other end of accessibility, some of the lab notebooks of Marie and Pierre Curie, held by the National Library of France, are reported to still be so radioactive that they are not safe to handle without protective clothing.

Laboratory notebooks later became an even more important record of exactly what was done, as lone researchers were replaced by academic and private-sector research groups, science and technology became ever-more important to society, and scientists were expected to describe their methods in detail so that they could be replicated and turned into innovative technologies, materials and treatments. Additionally, until quite recently, American patent law worked on a “first to invent” basis whereby the person who could prove that they had the idea for an invention first, or their employer, had the right to a patent. Laboratory notebooks were the main source of evidence for this. In recent years, scientific misconduct has become a higher-profile issue, as scientists worry about a “replicability crisis” where too many uncertain or exaggerated results have been published. Lab books help prove that the work was done as the researchers claim, or the detail expected in them make discrepancies easier to recognise. And the notebooks of eminent scientists are a rich source for scientific historians.

By the latter part of the twentieth century, some organisations had very detailed instructions for how laboratory notebooks should be completed and stored. Lab books had to be written exactly as the work was carried out, or as soon as possible – no jotting notes on scraps of paper and writing them up at the end of the day. Notebooks were considered the property of the employer or the university, and could not be removed from the lab. And they had to be clearly paginated with no chance of pages being removed or replaced.

Many laboratories still use paper notebooks, due to the ease of simply writing notes down as you go. In many types of science, electronic devices are at risk of being exposed to spillages or damaging electromagnetic conditions, or are simply unwieldy. Some researchers also like to keep their detailed records to themselves instead of sharing them with a group. Some research groups and organisations are now moving to electronic recording, but the lifetime of electronic data can be questionable due to failure to back up and the lifespan of media. Specifically-designed electronic laboratory data systems are more secure. They are more common in industry than academia, as academics are more independent and less likely to respond to top-down orders, and academic institutions can be less able to afford the necessary software and hardware. The advantages of electronic research notes systems are that you can save large amounts of original data directly into the system without retyping or printing it, clone records from earlier experiments to save time, search your records more easily, share data within the group easily, and track the history of records. Now data is often electronically recorded and can be directly copied into a laboratory system without a transcription stage. It is possible to use general project and collaboration software packages such as Evernote, SharePoint, or GoogleDrive but specifically-designed software is now available. 

In 2011, Gregory Lang and David Botstein published a scanned copy of the entire lab notebook covering the research leading to a paper on yeast genetics, as an attachment to their e-journal article.

Modern lab books rarely find their way into the British Library collection, but our most famous example is the collection of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin (also including records of earlier experiments by his mentor Sir Almroth Wright). As well as the material by Anne McLaren mentioned earlier, we also have some material from the photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, electrical inventor David Edward Hughes, and biologist Marilyn Monk.

Sources and further reading:
Barker, K, At the bench: a laboratory navigator, Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2005. pp. 89-99. Shelfmark YK.2005.b.1888
Baykoucheva, S. Managing scientific information and research data, Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2015. Available electronically in British Library reading rooms.
Bird, CL, Willoughby, C and Frey JG, "Laboratory notebooks in the digital era: the role of ELNs in record keeping for chemistry and other sciences", Chemical Society reviews, 2013, 42(20), pp. 8157-8175. Shelfmark (P) JB 00-E(105) or 3151.550000.
Elliott, CA, "Experimental data as a source for the history of science", The American archivist, 1974, 37(1), pp. 27-35. Shelfmark Ac. 1668 or 0810.390000, also available electronically in British Library reading rooms.
Holmes, FL, "Laboratory notebooks: can the daily record illuminate the broader picture", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1990, 134(4), pp.349-366. Shelfmark Ac. 1830 or 6630.500000, also available electronically in British Library reading rooms.
Stanley, JT and Lewandowski, HJ, "Lab notebooks as scientific communication: investigating development from undergraduate courses to graduate research", Physical review: physics education research, 2016, 12, 020129, freely available online at https://journals.aps.org/prper/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.020129.
Williams, M, Bozyczko-Coyne, D, Dorsey, B and Larsen, S, "Appendix 2: Laboratory notebooks and data storage", in Gallager, SR and Wiley, EA, Eds. Current protocols essential laboratory techniques, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Shelfmark YK.2008.b.6299 or m09/.30081

Image source: British Library Press Images

London is blessed with a rich seam of psychology research collections represented by the British Library and the London Psychology Librarians’ Group institutions.

Together curators, reference subject specialists and psychology librarians support students, researchers and professionals in advancing our understanding the the mind, brain and behavior.

You are warmly welcome to a free workshop on Monday 3 rd December at the British Library in the afternoon, focusing on psychology research resources in London.

Monday 3 December (14.00-17.00)

This workshop, for registered Readers (and those who would find it useful to register as readers for their research needs) takes place in the Eliot Training Room in the Library’s Knowledge Centre. The workshop programme is:

Part 1: Welcome to the Library and introduction to the London Psychology Librarians Group:

• Qualitative methods in psychology research; Christine Ozolins, Neuroscience researcher, Birkbeck College
• Psychology collections: the London Landscape; Mura Ghosh, Research Librarian, Senate House Library

14.50-15.30 Tea break (Tea provided)

Part 2 British Library Psychology Resources and Information Literacy:

• Information literacy for psychology research; James Soderman/Paula Funnell, Liaison Librarians, Queen Mary College
• The post graduate psychology student voice; Holly Walton, Psychology post graduate representative
• Psychology resources in the British Library; Paul Allchin, British Library, Reference specialist,

16.30-17.00: Question & answer session.

To find out more or to book a place, please email us at: [email protected] or speak to a member of staff at the Science Reference Desk.

The speakers will share their expertise on the what, where, and how of psychology research in London based libraries and the research needs of students and researchers generally.

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11004937825/

Posted by Paul Allchin - Reference Specialist, Science.

Starting today, users in the British Library Reading Rooms can use two new databases from Alexander Street, which are on trial until mid-January 2019. The usage figures in the next two months will determine whether we take the databases permanently.

Psychological Experiments Online has information on some of the most famous (or notorious, given the dark conclusions of some of them) experiments in psychology since 1900, with articles, archive material, sound or video interviews with researchers and participants, and even recordings of the experiments themselves when available.

The BBC Landmark Video Collection has complete episodes of some of the BBC's most significant nature documentary series from the last fifteen years. All of them have full subtitles and searchable transcripts.

Note that to use these databases you will have to use our desk PCs within the Reading Rooms. For the full effect of sound and video material, you will need to use a PC with headphones, although most of those in the Science reading rooms are now fitted with them.

Please can you give any feedback to the enquiry desk staff, or to [email protected]

Posted by Philip Eagle, Subject Librarian - STM

Philip represented the Library at the launch of Professor Stephen Hawking's last, posthumous, popular work, Brief Answers to the Big Questions. The book, which Hawking was writing at the time of his death, includes ten essays summarising his views on the ten questions which he was most frequently asked in interviews or at public events, such as "Is there a god?", "Is time travel possible?", and "Will we survive on Earth?".

Additionally, the launch saw discussion of Hawking's last published scholarly work, a paper dealing with the so-called "Information Paradox of Black Holes", the fact that Hawking's model of black holes, in which all information is lost when matter is sucked into a black hole contradicts a major principle of quantum mechanics, that information about a system cannot be permanently lost. Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger, two of Hawking's collaborators on the paper, also took part in the discussion.

A preprint of this paper is currently available on ARXIV at https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.01847, meaning that both extremes of Hawking's career are free to read online, his PhD thesis being available on the University of Cambridge's Apollo scholarly repository, at https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251038.

Posted by Philip Eagle, Subject Librarian - STM

Saturday is the 150th anniversary of a total eclipse of the Sun that was seen across a wide band of Asia on 18th August 1868. Any total eclipse is interesting, but this one is particularly historic for chemists, as it was during this eclipse that observations were made that, with hindsight, led to the discovery of helium, the first element to be discovered in space before it was found on Earth.

Image of total solar eclipse in 2017, photographed by Carla Thomas. Copyright NASA

However, the story often told in encyclopaedias, that Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer discovered helium by observing the 1868 eclipse, is far too simple. In fact, Janssen, who was in India and is often credited with the discovery, was interested in completely different things, and never claimed any credit during his lifetime, Norman Pogson, who was in India and was the first person to speculate that something unusual might be happening, was forgotten, and Norman Lockyer, who is often credited as the co-discoverer and made the biggest contribution, wasn’t in India and made his discoveries without needing the eclipse.

Helium is the second-most-common element in the universe after hydrogen, but is very rare on Earth, and odd in other ways. It is one of the so-called “noble gases”, that, because they have a particular number of electrons, are uniquely happy to exist as single atoms and reluctant to react with other elements. Helium only exists on Earth because it is given off when many radioactive elements naturally decay. Once produced, because it is so light and so non-reactive, it usually flies straight out of the atmosphere and vanishes into space. It only stays on Earth if it is produced deep underground and trapped within rocks. However, helium is very common in stars, including our Sun, because the energy of most stars comes from hydrogen atoms being fused into helium, and stars’ greater gravity than the Earth keeps it in.

So how was it possible to find helium in the Sun by looking at eclipse light?

For reasons too complicated to explain here, electrons in atoms and molecules can only have certain precise amounts of energy. They can climb from one amount to a higher one by absorbing a photon of light, or drop to a lower one by emitting a photon of light. The amount of energy contained in a photon varies according to the wavelength of the light, and so this means that atoms or molecules can only absorb or emit light of very specific wavelengths. As a result, if you shine a light through a particular substance, the light that comes out will have certain wavelengths and colours of light reduced or missing (an absorption spectrum), and if you heat up a substance to the point that it starts glowing, the light produced will be mainly or only of the same specific wavelengths and colours (an emission spectrum). By studying the light absorbed or emitted by a substance, we can derive a lot of information about what it is and what its structure might be.

The first step in the story of the discovery of helium happened in 1814, when the lens-maker turned physicist Joseph Fraunhofer split sunlight using a telescope, prism, and diffraction slit to create a spectrum broad enough to notice that there were dark lines, so-called "Fraunhofer" lines, where particular wavelengths of light were simply not present. In 1834, David Brewster suggested that the Fraunhofer lines were due to light of specific wavelength being absorbed by gas either within the Sun or in the Earth's atmosphere. James D Forbes suggested that the dark lines could be proved to originate from the Sun rather than the Earth's atmosphere by observing light from the edge of the Sun's disc during an eclipse - as this passes through more of the Sun's atmosphere on its path to the observer, the lines will be stronger if they are produced by the solar atmosphere.

Physicists and chemists began studying the absorption and emission spectra of known substances and found that their characteristic lines were constant. In 1857 William Swan showed that particularly strong dark lines in the yellow region of the Sun's spectrum, known as the D lines, corresponded to the emission spectrum of sodium - something we are all familiar with now given the yellow tinge of sodium-vapour streetlights.

In 1859, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen (of gas burner fame), at the University of Heidelberg, were among the scientists who were making systematic studies of the spectra of different elements. When a major fire broke out in the city of Mannheim, across the valley, they playfully turned their spectroscope on the light from the flames, and were able to identify the characteristic emission spectra of strontium and barium. This experience made them realise that, if they could discover trace elements in a burning building, the Fraunhofer lines might be the key to discovering the elements present in the Sun.

The following year, the two were studying the spectrum of mineral water from a major local spa, Bad Dürkheim. They spotted two blue lines that were found in the spectrum of no known substance, and guided by this managed to prepare and purify compounds of a previously unknown element, caesium. This was the first new element to be discovered using spectroscopic methods. Within the next few years, Kirchhoff and Bunsen would discover rubidium by a similar route, and William Crookes would discover thallium.

In 1868, a total eclipse of the Sun was predicted to occur in India. The eclipse ws expected to have six minutes of totality, an extremely long time by the usual standards in which to perform observations. Spectroscopists were particularly interested in the eclipse, as with the main part of the Sun obscured from the Earth it would be possible to study the light from the Sun's outer atmosphere, potentially helping to investigate both the Sun's chemical composition and its internal structure.

The French astronomer Pierre Janssen had already made his name in the field of the solar spectrum. He had invented a much-improved astronomical spectroscope with the instrument maker Ignazio Hofmann, although the two men quickly fell out bitterly about whose contribution was greatest. In 1866 he had captured the absorption spectrum of water vapour, by a logistically challenging experiment in which he viewed the light given off by sixteen gas burners through long iron pipes filled with high-pressure steam, and verified which of the Fraunhofer lines were produced by it as sunlight passed through the Earth's atmosphere. He was selected by the French Bureau of Longitude to make a government-funded trip to India.

1880 automatic spectroscope by John Browning. Image by Science Museum, released under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence

Meanwhile, the government of the British Empire, rulers of India at the time, were making their own plans for scientific observations of the eclipse. The main expedition, led by Major James F Tennant, headed for the town of Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, in Southeastern India. Meanwhile, Norman Pogson, director of the Madras Observatory, headed to Machilipatnam (then known to English-speakers as Masulipatam), closer to the coast. When Janssen arrived in India, he also considered Machilipatnam, but decided that on the coast there was too much risk of fog and cloud. He decided to go to Guntur as well, possibly because it had at one time been ruled by the French and there were still some wealthy French merchants living there. Tennant's team moved into the British government compound, while Janssen set up at the home of one Jules Lefaucheur. Janssen generously helped Tennant to set up his spectroscope and telescope.

When the eclipse occurred, all the investigators paid attention to the spectrum. Janssen did not mention anything unexpected. Tennant saw an orange line which he thought was the normal sodium D line. Only Pogson saw something unusual - a third line close to the sodium D line, but not identical with it.

Pogson's eclipse observations, from his printed report.

It was not until the following days that Janssen made the realisation that would be his real breakthrough of the event, and the one that popular history would later confuse with the discovery of helium. He realised that the emission spectrum of the solar atmosphere and prominences was so strong that, if one could focus the spectroscope on the precise edge of the Sun, they might be visible even without an eclipse. He experimented and found that it was entirely possible, but was easiest if you moved the spectroscope to try to find the spectrum, rather than trying to focus visually on the edge of the Sun. He excitedly wrote to his wife in a letter, "They sent me to observe the eclipse for five minutes, and I am bringing back a perpetual eclipse from India." Finally, he sent a letter to the Academy of Sciences, announcing his discoveries for the first time.

Back in London, Norman Lockyer, a civil servant and prominent amateur astronomer, with a great interest in studying the Sun, was independently realising that the spectrum of the outer atmosphere of the Sun could be viewed by accurately focussing a spectroscope, without any need for an eclipse. He also seems to have somehow got a copy of Pogson's report with its reference to a previously unidentified line in the spectrum. In October, he received a new spectroscope and managed to focus on the solar atmosphere and obtain its emission spectrum. He also noticed a new line near the D line. Among the organisations he sent preliminary reports to was the French Academy of Sciences, his letter arriving within a few days of Janssen's report from India, both being read out at the same meeting on 26th October. In 1872, to avoid a potentially ugly interpersonal and international row, the French government issued a medal featuring both Janssen and Lockyer to commemorate their solar discoveries.

By the end of the year, both Janssen and Lockyer were convinced that the yellow line near the sodium D line was new. Lockyer and the chemist Edward Frankland spent some time experimenting with the spectrum of hydrogen under different conditions, and by the end of it were convinced that the Sun consisted mostly of hydrogen, but the the yellow line could not be produced by that element. By 1871 Lockyer was convinced that the yellow line was produced by a new element never found on Earth which he named "helium", but did not make such an extreme speculation in public, only in private communications with other scientists. The first public statement of it is believed to have been in Sir William Thompson's presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1871. This concluded the series of events that led, in later years, to Janssen and Lockyer wrongly being jointly credited with the discovery of helium in 1868.

Why was Pogson forgotten, even though Lockyer credited him in his own brief memoir of the discovery of helium, in Nature in 1896? Although he is now remembered for his development, earlier in his career, of a scale for the apparent magnitude, or brightness of astronomical objects, his career in India was not a success. He seems to have suffered from social snobbery due to his middle-class background and lack of a university degree, but he was also a somewhat abrasive personality, as can be seen from the negative comments in his report on the "needless and lavish expenditure" on the various expeditions to view the eclipse, and the even more offensive remarks about the local Indian people in general, which I will not quote in detail here. Another item in the India Office records shows his conflict with the government and the Dutch astronomer Jean Oudemans over longitude measurements that he did not consider particularly important and delayed in analysing. Pogson's report on the eclipse was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a low-profile government publication - Pogson himself complained in a letter in 1882 that it had been treated as "waste paper".

Helium was subsequently shown not just to exist in the Sun, when in 1876 the French astronmer Alfred Cornu observed it in the spectrum of a star in the Cygnus constellation. In the meantime, however, speculation on new elements in the stars had become somewhat wild and uncontrolled, developing a bad name due to multiple announcements of "new elements" that proved too frequent to be credible. (One of the most notorious was "coronium", assigned to a spectral line from sunlight at 5303 angstroms wavelength, which was eventually discovered to come from very highly-ionised iron atoms.)

In 1887, William Hillebrand discovered a mysterious gas while treating uranium ore with acid, that he suspected to be nitrogen. He noticed that its spectrum did not match that known for nitrogen, but did not realise that it was a new element, as at the time it was known that the spectrum of nitrogen could vary considerably with the conditions. In 1895, Baron Rayleigh found that nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere had a different molecular weight to chemically-produced pure nitrogen, and suspected that another element was present. He investigated further, and managed to purify a completely new element, which he named argon. William Ramsey, who was working with Rayleigh on argon, was shown Hillebrand's paper by another colleague who thought Hillebrand's gas might have been argon as well. He repeated Hillebrand's experiment with a different type of uranium ore, and discovered that the gas he produced was much lighter than argon, and had a spectrum that included the D3 line of the mysterious solar element helium. Helium had finally been discovered on Earth.

But scientific research on the Sun continues - this week NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe, to become the first human-created object to enter the Sun's outer atmosphere and observe it.

Sources and further reading:

Janssen, P J, The total solar eclipse of August 1868. Part I, Astronomical Register, 1869, 7(77), pp. 107–110. Shelfmark PP.1556 or 1755.800000
Janssen, P J, The total solar eclipse of August 1868. Part II, Astronomical Register, 1869, 7(78), pp. 131-133 Shelfmark PP.1556 or 1755.800000
Lockyer, J. N. The story of helium, Nature, 1896, 53(1371), pp.319-22. Shelfmark P.P.2011c or (P) BX 80-E(3). Also available online in BL Reading Rooms
Nath, B B. The story of helium and the birth of astrophysics. New York City: Springer, 2013. Available online in British Library Reading Rooms.
Pogson, N R. Report of the Government Astronomer upon the proceedings of the Observatory in connexion with the total eclipse of the Sun on August 18th, 1868, as observed at Masulipatam, Vunpurthy, Madras and other stations in Southern India. Madras: Madras Observatory, 1875. Shelfmark IOR/V/27/430/8.
Pogson, N. R. Letter to Captain Awdry, 10th June 1882, in Grant Duff Collection, Miscellaneous English Correspondence, pp. 96-98. Shelfmark Mss Eur F/234/67
Ramsay, W. Helium, a gaseous constituent of certain minerals, Part I Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1895, 58 pp. 80-89. Shelfmark Ac.3025/21 or (P) JA 00-E(12). Also available free online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/115763
Reddy, V., Snedegar, K.. Balasubramanian, R. K. Scaling the magnitude: the fall and rise of N. R. Pogson, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 2007, 117(5), pp. 237-245. Shelfmark Ac.4176, (P) OT 00-E(34), or 4713.000000

Posted by Philip Eagle. Thanks to Margaret Makepeace for help in researching India Office records.

Ultrasound image by mylissa, CC-BY-SA

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the publication in The Lancet of the first scholarly article on medical ultrasound by the obstetricians Ian Donald and John MacVicar, and the engineer Tom Brown. While earlier groups had experimented with ultrasound, it was Donald and Brown who achieved real diagnostic success with it, and popularised it in the medical profession. They initially applied it to distinguish uterine cysts from solid tumours such as fibroids, and later developed it for other important tasks, such as diagnosing placenta praevia (a potentially lethal condition during pregnancy in which the placenta attaches too low down in the womb) and directly observing foetuses. It is thanks to their work that ultrasound has become routine in pregnancy and many peoples' first view of their children. 

Donald had become interested in the potential of ultrasound for medicine thanks to his experience with both radar and sonar while serving in the RAF during World War II. Much of his success was because he happened to work for the University of Glasgow, in a city with a large-scale shipbuilding industry which used ultrasonic techniques to test for flaws in metal parts. It was also the home of Kelvin and Hughes, one of the main manufacturers of ultrasonic testing equipment, for which company Brown worked.

There was also a particular perceived need at the time for a safer method of examining foetuses in the womb, as epidemiological studies had discovered that X-ray examinations during pregnancy led to a higher risk of leukaemia and other cancers in the early lives of the children.

Donald subsequently became a celebrity not just for his scientific and medical skills, but as a prominent medical campaigner against abortion. He frequently stated that his observations of foetuses in the womb had confirmed him in his belief that they qualified as human beings from conception, although unlike some religious pro-life campaigners he morally accepted abortion when the foetus was clearly unlikely to survive childbirth or where the child would be very severely disabled. Brown's career effectively ended with the failure of an attempt to start a business producing medical ultrasound equipment, and he felt later in life that much of the media neglected his vital technological contributions to the development of the idea, although Donald always acknowledged them in public.

Further reading:

Brown, T G. Personal recollections. 1999. Available free online at http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/brown-on-ultrasound.html
Craig, M. Craig's Essentials of Sonography and patient care, Baltimore: Saunders, 2018. Available as an ebook in the British Library reading rooms.
Donald, I, MacVicar, J, and Brown, T G. Investigation of abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound, The Lancet, 1958, 271(7032), pp. 1188-1195. Available at (P) GP 00 - E(14) and also electronically in the British Library reading rooms.
Nicholson, M and Fleming, J E E. Imaging and imagining the foetus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Available at YK.2014.a.7586.
Norton, M E. Callen's Ultrasonography in obstetrics and gynecology, Elsevier, 2016. Available as an ebook in the British Library reading rooms.

The most recent GREATforImagination post covered an augmented reality app created by Nexus Studios for the US Presidential administration in 2016. Augmented reality is a halfway point towards the more famous virtual reality, in which CGI elements are added to a real-time image of the user's surroundings, using either a mobile device screen or virtual reality goggles. The most well-known applications at the moment are for entertainment, such as the famous game Pokemon Go, or our own use of it in our Harry Potter exhibition.

However, there are some more practical uses for augmented reality in the worlds of science and engineering.

The construction industry still largely uses 2-D documents to indicate what should be built. However, why not create augmented reality images of objects in situ for people to copy? Or why not help utilities workers "see" underground pipes before they start digging holes?

An obvious application is in the world of chemistry, where physical 3-D models of large molecules have been familiar for decades, but can take a long time to build. Digital models can be created much more quickly, and AR equipment allows scientists to interact with them with increasing realism. There's a freeware program to try it yourself, if you have some chemistry and computing knowledge.

AR can also be used in surgery, either for training purposes or to allow surgeons to "see" what they are doing during minimally invasive surgery.

(All the articles linked are open access, so you don't have to come to the Library to read them)

Today on International Digital Preservation Day we present a guest-post by Claire Mosier, Museum Librarian and Historian at American Museum of Western Art: The Anschutz Collection, concerning the digital files in the Anne McLaren Supplementary Papers (Add MS 89202) which have just been made available to researchers. As an MA student Claire worked as an intern at the British Library in 2015 helping to process digital material.

Dame Anne McLaren. Copyright James Brabazon

 
The developmental biologist Dame Anne McLaren was a great proponent of scientists sharing their work with the general public, and gave many presentations to scientists as well as the general public. Some of the notes, drafts, and finished products of these presentations are on paper, and others are in digital formats. The digital files of the Anne McLaren Supplementary Papers are comprised mostly of PowerPoint presentations and images. Digital records are more of a challenge to access, and give readers access to, as they are not always readily readable in their native format. This leads to unique challenges in determining and making available the content. 
 

‘HongKong2003Ethics.ppt’ Page from the presentation ‘Ethical, Legal and Social Considerations of Stem Cell Research’, 2003, (Add MS 89202/12/16). Copyright the estate of Anne McLaren.

 Throughout her career, McLaren gave presentations not only for educating others about her own work, but also on the social and ethical issues of scientific research. Many of her PowerPoint files are from presentations between 2002 and 2006 and cover the ethical, legal, moral, and social implications around stem cell therapy. These topics are addressed in the 2003 presentation ‘Ethical, Legal, and Social Considerations of Stem Cell Research’ (Add MS 89202/12/16), which briefly covers the historic and current stem cell research and legislation affecting it in different countries. A presentation from 2006 ‘Ethics and Science
of Stem Cell Research’ (Add MS 89202/12/160) goes into more detail, breaking ethical concerns into categories of personal, research, and social ethics. As seen in these presentations and others, Anne McLaren tried to present material in a way that would make sense to her audience, some of the presentations being introductions to a concept for the more general public, and others being very detailed on a narrower subject for those in scientific professions. 

‘Pugwash 2006’ Page from the presentation ‘When is an Embryo not an Embryo’, 2006, (Add MS 89202/12/163). Copyright the estate of Anne McLaren.

 From looking at her PowerPoint documents it seems McLaren’s goals were to educate her audience on scientific ideas and encourage them to think critically, whether they were scientists themselves or not. However, this is hard to confirm, as the PowerPoints are only partial artefacts of her presentations, and what she said during those presentations is not captured in the collection. While she did sometimes present her own views in the slides, she presented other viewpoints as well. This is seen in the presentation for the 2006 Pugwash Conference (Add MS 89202/12/163) titled ‘When is an Embryo not an Embryo’ which presents semantic, legislative, and scientific definitions of the term embryo before a slide reveals McLaren’s own views, then goes back to legislative definitions before the slideshow ends. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were created to ensure the peaceful application of scientific advances, and McLaren was a council member for many years.

***

Both the newly released Anne McLaren Supplementary Papers (Add MS 89202), along with the first tranche of McLaren’s papers (Add MS 83830-83981) are available to researchers via the British Library Explore Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue. Additionally one of Anne McLaren’s notebooks containing material from 1965 to 1968 (Add MS 83845) is on long-term display in the British Library’s Treasures Gallery.

Today, on World Science Day for Peace and Development, scientists and policymakers attending the World Science Forum in Jordan are discussing the role science can play in nurturing diplomatic relations.

Science diplomacy is an umbrella term for a wide range of activities in which science and technology are leveraged to foster ties between nations. Governments are aware that collaborating with international partners to achieve scientific goals can further their national interests. Consequently they are paying increasing attention to the idea of science as a diplomatic tool.

How is it practised? On a bilateral level diplomats co-ordinate scientific agreements which commit signatories to pooling resources by sharing knowledge and collaborating on research projects. Such agreements can open up opportunities for product development and trade deals, and are becoming an important part of the UK’s strategy to expand its research and innovation horizons post-Brexit.

Jo Johnson (UK Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation) and Judith G. Garber (U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs) signed the first U.S.-UK Science and Technology Agreement on 20 September 2017 in Washington, D.C. The UK is putting £65 million into the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Photo credit: STFC/FCO

Science is a global enterprise in which international collaboration is the norm. In particular multinational teams are needed to run large experimental facilities such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) which are beyond the scope of individual countries. One of the by-products of these neutral working environments is science diplomacy. Scientists can develop long-lasting, cross-cultural relationships that sometimes help to bridge difficult political situations from the bottom up. Proposals for these huge infrastructure projects are often driven by an incentive to stimulate co-operation as much as for a need to build scientific capacity.

This was the case for the SESAME synchrotron which opened earlier this year in Jordan. The synchrotron’s powerful light source can be used to study the properties of a range of different materials, attracting researchers from across the Middle East, including Iranians, Israelis and Palestinians.

Countries from across the Middle East have come together to build SESAME. Photo credit: SESAME

Science diplomacy also comes into play in resolving sensitive international disputes. When negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear programme stalled, credit for their successful conclusion went to the two physicists, one Iranian and one US, who worked out the scientific details of the 2015 deal.

The scientists and Ministers who negotiated the Iran deal: US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, US Secretary of State John Kerry, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and Vice President of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Dr Ali Akbar Salehi. Photo credit: U.S. Mission Photo/Eric Bridiers

Scientists and diplomats also work together in addressing global issues such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance or cross-border public health crises. Using scientific evidence is fundamental when negotiating coherent responses to shared challenges, and government science advisers are seen as a key mechanism in getting science into policymaking. Gradually foreign ministries around the world are appointing their own science advisers to channel scientific research into the work of their departments.

Various strategic funding programmes, some of which focus on meeting the UN’s sustainable development goals, support the aims of science diplomacy. These international collaborative projects generate the necessary evidence to inform policymaking while also stimulating partnerships that foster trust between nations.

The Newton Fund project ‘Climate Ready Rice’ is being conducted by scientists from Sheffield University in the UK, Kasetsart University in Thailand and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.Photo credit: IRRI

It is unclear how to evaluate the impact of science diplomacy activities, but participants agree that they only work when based around excellent science that generates mutual benefits.

Emmeline Ledgerwood is an AHRC collaborative student with the British Library Oral History department and the University of Leicester. She is preparing a policy briefing on science diplomacy as part of an AHRC-funded policy fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology (POST). The briefing will be published by POST in December 2017.

POST runs several fellowship schemes with Research Councils, learned societies and charities, through which PhD students are sponsored to spend (usually) three months working at POST. Some fellowships are also open to postdoctoral researchers in academia and industry.  

You can follow @EmmeLedgerwood and @POST_UK on Twitter.

The statements and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author alone, not of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

A NASA Scout rocket of the type used to launch Ariel 3. Used under the NASA copyright policy.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Ariel 3, the first satellite to be designed and constructed in the UK. The two previous Ariel satellites had been designed in Britain but constructed by NASA. It was launched by NASA in the USA on 5^th May 1967, carrying five scientific experiments in the fields of astronomy and atmospheric studies. It was shut down in September 1969 and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on 14^th December 1970.

The international collaboration took place under COSPAR, the Committee on Space Research. Its experiments were:

An investigation of the electron density and temperature in the ionosphere (the portion of the upper atmosphere where air molecules are ionised by solar radiation) using a Langmuir probe, and a second experiment using a parallel-plate capacitor, both led by Professor James Sayers of the University of Birmingham.

A mapping of large-scape radio noise sources in the Milky Way, led by Professor F Graham Smith of the University of Cambridge.

Measuring the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere at heights of 150-300 km, led by Dr. Kenneth H Stewart of the Meteorological Office.

Measuring radio emissions from thunderstorms and other natural terrestrial sources at six key frequencies, led by John A Murphy of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

A worldwide survey of VLF radio signals, and an investigation of the effects of the propagation path on a 16kHz ground-based radio transmitter, led by Professor Thomas R Kaiser of the University of Sheffield.

For more information on the satellite, see the NASA catalog entry on it. Contemporary descriptions of the satellite and the results of the experiments were contained in two special journal issues:

Radio and Electronic Engineer, 1968, 35 (1). British Library shelfmark STM (P) RT 40-E(7) and DSC 7229.400000, also available online in our Reading Rooms through our subscription to IEEE Xplore.

Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1969, 311 (1507). British Library shelfmark (P) JA 00-E(12), also available online in our Reading Rooms through JSTOR.