Into The Void Science - MAY 2018 - Issue #1

MAY 2018

INTO THE VOID

SCIENCE

Interview with Dr Jim Al-Khalili

The story of Artificial Intelligence

Science + Thrash Metal Science inspires music?

Cover Image

On November 9, 1967, the uncrewed Apollo 4 test flight made a great ellipse around Earth as a test of the translunar motors and of the high-speed entry required of a crewed flight returning from the Moon. A 70mm camera was programmed to look out a window toward Earth, and take a series of photographs from “high apogee.” Seen looking west are coastal Brazil, the Atlantic Ocean, West Africa and Antarctica.

Image Credit: NASA

Into the void

Science

May 2018 / Issue

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Managing Director Cameron Costigan Editorial Contributors Alayna Hansen Aaron Dingle Elizabeth Lam James Kolacz Jesse Crowe Saskia Scott Business Sponsors BC Marketing Imperial College London Brainbee University of Cambridge

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About Us Science is all around us in the modern world but too many of us take it for granted. Our mission is to ‘Inspire the World with Science’ and to help people think of science as more than just another subject at school.

Foreword - Cameron Costigan This is our first issue and has been a long time coming. I would like to dedicate this issue to all the scientists and science communicators out there that are fighting the good fight for humanities future, I salute you.

Advertising Inquiries We offer competitive advertising rates for select proscience businesses. Contact us today to see how we can boost your exposure to key demographics in your industry.

Send us your inquiry to marketing@itvscience.com

RandomMag JANUARY 2012

New Milky Way Star Map The European Space Agencies Gaia spacecraft’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies. This newly released star map shows nearly 1.7 billion stars and is already rewriting what we know about our own galaxy. The map is a composite of images taken from July 2014 to May 2016. Gaia’s data includes starlight as far as 8,000 light years away, with a precision 100 times more accurate than previous studies.

This isn’t even the full image!!

Check out the full image here - Credit: (ESA/Gaia/DPAC)

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RandomMag JANUARY 2012

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ud o l c nic a l l e Mag

The story of artificial intelligence

By Elizabeth Lam

O

ur imagination has no boundaries.

When we have learned more about the world, our imaginations become wilder. Could we eventually create machines that can think and behave like us?

The question had long been fascinating to not only scientists but almost everyone.

The thought of human-like machines has been exhilarating to filmmakers as well. In fact, there have been many dazzling films about what would happen if machines behave like us. In particular, movies featuring battles between machines and humans have broken many box office records. In 1970, the film, Colossus: The Forbin Project, portrayed a superintelligence taking logical steps to rule humans for their own good. The Terminator pictured a war between humans and the superintelligence ‘Skynet’ which wanted to destroy the human race. The Matrix in 1999, I, Robot in 2004, Her in 2013, Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015 are all movies about intelligent machines that have captured our imaginations. Just as people were fascinated by what would happen if there exists other intelligent life like us, scientists have been exploring ways to bring the fantasy to reality.

The early approach Dating back to 1950’s, a British mathematician, Alan Turing, tried to address the question “Can machines think?” in his seminal paper. He first proposed a game involving initially no machines but a man and a woman in a room separated from the player. The player could not see the man and woman and could only ask questions other than their gender. The player had to guess their gender from their answers, yet one of them was to trick the player with wrong answers while the other assisted the player.

To test whether machines could act like a human, the person who tricked the player was then replaced by a machine. If the player could not distinguish the machine from the replaced real person, the machine won. The machine is said to have passed the Turing Test if it is able to act like a human being.

The Turing Test not only set a monumental finish line for computer scientists but also induced vast interests in exploring how machines could replicate the reasoning process and learning ability of humans. For instance, two computer scientists, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon had developed Logic Theorist, a computer program demonstrating proofs for more than half of the theorems in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. It was therefore regarded as the first ever program that showed machines could mimic the problem-solving skills of a human being. An American pioneer, John McCarthy invented a programming language, Lisp, specifically for AI.

In generalizing the early successful AI systems to tackle complex problems, these early machines failed miserably. It was perhaps the high hopes of AI that propelled its development, however, it was also the failures to meet the expectations that had stalled its advancement as demonstrated by the following two stories.

Can Machines Think?

It was later incorporated into a program that could solve calculus problems at a college level. The early advancements had fulfilled some of the public’s fantasies and stirred up immense interest. The promising performance of AI in simple tasks boosted confidence in the scientific community and many of them were so optimistic that they made bold claims. Simon had publically stated that the ability of machines would increase rapidly that they could handle problems like the human mind in a visible future.

Minsky also made the claim that the problems in creating “artificial intelligence” would be substantially solved within a generation.

Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park museum

The American story

In the 1950s, Georgetown IBM had created a system that could translate Russian to English with six rules and 250 vocabularies specialized in organic chemistry. Yet, its success was overstated by the media.

The headline in New York Times, “Russian is turned into English by a fast electronic translator” captured the people’s attention. The US government had high expectations towards the potential power

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British views of machine translation in winning their political tensions with Russians and invested a great deal in machine translation. The leader of the experiment, Leon Dostert, was so optimistic about the project that had claimed they could accomplish interlingual conversion in three to five years.

Yet, the road to design machine translation systems that are suitable for general use was full of roadblocks. The inputs from the general public were hard to predict, and this resulted in misleading and senseless outputs.

Correcting for the spurious outputs often required so much human intervention that people would rather translate manually”. This failure rang the alarm bell of the US government and they called the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to assess the progress of AI research.

The ALAPC published a report drawing doubts on its real economic return, and eventually cut down funding to the research.

In 1973, The British Science Research Council asked James Lighthill from Cambridge University to evaluate the progress in AI research. He thought that the research on advancement in automation and central nervous systems were useful, but the research on their connection was only worthwhile if it could facilitate either research field. In his opinions, AI contributed little to both fields and therefore was not worth proceeding with. In addressing specific problems, he stated that conventional techniques could be more successful than AI methods. He also claimed there was a “combinatorial problem” with the development of AI at the time.

The computation involving more than one variables take enormous time and he thought it was impractical to have a machine that could tackle complex problems that involve multiple variables. Therefore, he concluded that existing AI techniques could work well only in small tasks, but were not scalable to tackle real problems.

Everyone wanted to see the impact of AI research, or at least as a foreseeable prospect. Yet, under-delivering the extravagant promises brought great disappointment to the government, companies and even scientific community.

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The frustration in realizing the big dream caused retrenchment and brought AI into a dark cold winter.

Bringing AI back to life Instead of aiming for AI research, scientists shifted their focus to other disciplines. Yet, AI benefited indirectly from the achievements in other subdisciplines of computational science. This was the era where computational fields such as neural network, machine learning, had brought unprecedented surprises.

In particular, a physicist, John Hopfield analyzed the storage and optimization properties of neural networks with statistical mechanical concepts from physics, which brought life to neural network development again. The artificial neural network was inspired by the human brain. It consists of interconnected nits for computation, like the neurons in the human brain that are responsible for signal transmission. The strength of the transmitted signal was calibrated by the weights associated with the connections of the processing unit.

These weights were adjusted from past inputs. The network could adjust its weights in the connections of processing units, therefore teaching itself.

Neural Networks

Computational scientists in the field of machine learning have also brought immense excitement to the public.

Machines are now able to identify visual images and videos that were once considered one of the greatest obstacles in AI. The many advancements in different subdisciplines have indirectly brought AI back to life.

New Optical Data Transfer Capable Microchip Scientists have discovered a new method to make silicon chips that communicate via light. Current chip technology faces a bottleneck in data speed transfers and this new technology could reduce energy consumption by orders of magnitude. The traditional ‘wired’ connection of current technology also has a heat problem due to the high-performance demands we place on our technology: think Samsung Note 7 failures. But this new development is showing promise in solving both of these issues.

“Instead of a single wire carrying around 10 gigabits per second, you can have a single optical fiber carrying 10 to 20 terabits per second, so a thousand times more in the same footprint,” says Milos Popovic, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, one of the principal investigators of the study, whose team was previously at the University of Colorado Boulder where part of the work was done.

“If you replace a wire with an optical fiber, there are two ways you win,” he says.

“First, with light, you can send data at much higher frequencies without significant loss of energy as there is with copper wiring. Second, with optics, you can use many different colors of light in one fiber and each one can carry a data channel. The fibers can also be packed more closely together than copper wires can without crosstalk.”

The researcher’s revolutionary techniques will soon be implemented into bulk silicon manufacturing and will mean faster and more energy efficient devices and communication. The applications go far beyond just making your smartphone faster like accelerating the training of deep-learning artificial neural networks used in image and speech recognition tasks, and low-cost Three-dimensional electron microscope image of infrared LIDAR sensors for self-driving cars, smartphone face identification, and electronic-photonic chip augmented reality technology.

Optically enabled microchips could also enable new kinds of security authentication and be used as components for quantum information processing and computing.

Photo Credit: CNSE Albany

Source: Boston University

Photograph of the bulk silicon electronic-photonic chip designed by the Boston University, MIT, and UC Berkeley team.

Photo Credit: Amir Atabaki

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Diagnose crop disease with your smartphone Fancy yourself a botanist but don’t know plant diseases from your own big toe? New technology coming out of Iowa State University will soon let you diagnose crop disease like a pro!

The AI program created by the team can identify a range of common stresses in soybeans and help improve plant health for farmers, all from a smartphone. The program runs off 25,000 images of soybeans suffering from various stressors like diseases, nutrient loss, herbicide infection and more. Farmers usually have to monitor their crops manually and can waste a lot of their time but this new technology could put efficiencies back into the supply chain.

“We want this technology to allow machines to see with the eyes of an experienced plant breeder,” Singh says. “This is a prime example of how artificial intelligence can be applied to agriculture, It can provide more automation and more efficiency than the traditional way of diagnosing these stresses.”

We hope this technology can be implemented for end users too because if you are anything like me, killing off plants is way too easy.

Source: Iowa State University

SPECIAL

FEATURE

The 2018 FameLab National Final is back!

The British Council in Australia has been scouring the

nation searching for bright up-and-coming researchers.

After four competitions in four states, the judges have uncovered some truly inspiring new talent. Now it is time to narrow the field even further and to find our National winner.

Join us at the Octagon Theatre, University of Western Australia in Perth on the 10th of May as these bright young minds tell their stories to a panel of amazing judges including the ABC’s The Science Show host Robyn Williams, Former Chief Scientist of Western Australia, Lyn Beazley AO, and Director of the British Council in Australia, Helen Salmon.

Date: Thursday 10th May 2018 Time: 6.30 - 8.30pm.

Doors open at 6.00pm for a 6.15pm start Location: Octagon Theatre, University of WA

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Here’s your 2018 finalists Taryn Laubenstein - James Cook University

Muthu Vignesh Vellayappan - Monash Uni

The world’s oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic due to the burning of fossil fuels. This creates an environment that is harmful to fish, affecting both their behaviour and physical condition. We know that fish, like other animals, have the potential to adapt to new environmental conditions. However, the climate is changing very quickly, so the question ariseswill fish be able to keep up with climate change?

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Australia killing one Australian every 12 minutes. After a heart attack, 2 to 3 million heart cells are dead. During the recovery process, the skin cells will grow more quickly than the heart cells at the damaged location leading to scar formation, which further limits the contractility activity of the heart. Scientists have tried injecting heart cells to the damaged location, but they don’t stay there.

Zane Stromberga - Bond University

Vanessa Pirotta - Macquarie University

Around 17% of the world population suffers from overactive bladder, and yet the underlying causes of this disease are poorly understood. Overactive bladder has a significant effect on sufferers’ quality of life, including having a direct social, physical and psychological effect. Many of the sufferers feel too embarrassed to seek out treatment options. Without treatment, symptoms of this disease make it hard to get through the day without many trips to the bathroom.

My research project investigated the use of emerging technologies such as drones to collect health information from free swimming whales. This involved the collection of whale blow/snot (the visible plume of spray) via a custom-built drone.

Whale snot is a juicy organic mixture of DNA, hormones, lipids and microbiota. We wanted to collect baseline information via this method to assess its potential as a new standard for health assessments from whales.

Toby Hendy - Australian National University

James Wong - University of WA

I poke plants with tiny needles in order to understand how plants defend themselves from disease. Hopefully we can use this knowledge to create more resistant crops and decrease world food shortages. My needles mimic the way that a pathogen would pierce through a plant cell to spread disease.

So far I have helped to find a new minimum pressure that can trigger a defence response in the plant, such as stiffening of the cell wall.

My research project aims to understand how the lungs and airways work in kangaroos that have a hopping-mediated breathing mechanism. This unique breathing mechanism in macropods was previously studied in wallabies (small kangaroos), but not kangaroos. A key question in my research is to investigate if the large body mass of kangaroos (up to 90kg) will adversely affect their breathing.

Richard Charlesworth - Uni of New England

Khandis Blake - University of NSW

The major focus of my research has been to improve the diagnosis of coeliac disease (CD). Currently the most conclusive form of testing for CD is based on an examination of tissue through a microscope. This form of testing is reliant solely on the skill of the observing pathologist however and there is the potential for subtle changes to be missed or misinterpreted. My current research involves the development and implementation of a novel genetic test.

Worldwide, Google reports we upload 24 billion selfies a year, a phenomenal shift in the way women and men present themselves online. For women more so than men, these selfies often intend to present an alluring version of the self, leading scholars to see sexy selfies as just another manifestation of sexual objectification and gender oppression. Yet is it the case that women posting sexy selfies are succumbing to the patriarchy?

Pegah Maasoumi - ARC Centre

Ben McAllister - ARC Centre

In the last decade, energy has been stated as the single most important crisis in the world. The leading economies rely mainly on burning fossil fuels, which is not only a limited resource, but in the shorter term is causing global warming.

Solar energy is a promising solution to meet this energy challenge as well as providing sustainability to our planet. It seems pretty easy to install couple of solar cells on the roof to access cheap energy, however, not everyone has their own private roof.

What is the nature of the dark matter that surrounds us? Is it composed of axions, a theoretical particle? How might we detect it, and what can it be used for? We have known for decades that the regular matter that we understand composes less than 1/6th of all matter in the universe, and that we are surrounded at all time by mysterious “dark” matter of unknown composition.

Many believe it is composed of a particle known as the “axion”, although this particle is yet to be conclusively observed.

Mortaza Rezae - Curtin University

Anisa Rowhani-Farid - QUT

Transportation is a critical obstacle for individuals with autism spectrum. These persons are characterised by difficulties in communication and social abilities, repetitive behaviour, and the inability to self-regulate. It is a common problem for people with autism spectrum to be trapped at home, unable to engage in community activities including employment and education, due to restricted transportation accessibility.

Scientists collect data and they don’t have a habit of sharing it.

Science is a body of knowledge that allows humanity to understand the laws of the universe and to surpass them.

Science is fundamentally open in its nature. Practicing open science commits researchers to revealing and sharing the entirety of their results, methodologies, code, and data.

Science Inspires Music?

By Cameron Costigan is all around us, the S cience technology we use, the products

we buy and the food we eat today all have some form of science behind it.

Science has given us so much that it is easy to take it for granted, but you only have to look up to the stars in the night sky to feel inspired and full of wonder again or if you love death metal, put on Facegrinder’s latest album Cosmic Background. We sat down with this Perth band to see how science has influenced their face blistering tunes.

above there are so many elements to it.

Space exploration has always been an interest of mine as well as history, etc.

Q: Almost every element on the periodic table which constitutes all known matter in the observable universe is created when a sun goes supernova and spreads its enriched guts over large distances.

This is how solar systems form and eventually congeal to create planets and life. Any thoughts?

Ewza - Its a strange concept to get a grasp of, Mind blowing really. Just the thought of that process makes you feel exceptionally small compared to the construction of the universe.

Dayle - Yeah, that’s a pretty mindblowing theory there, not quite sure on how I can actually answer that one.

Q: So just reading the track list of your latest album, we can see some pretty strong science influences. Where you always fans of Science?

Ewza - Definitely always a fan of science, although not exactly one myself. Scientists should be the leaders of the world.

Dayle - Science is incredible, there are so many elements to it.

Q: So when you were in high school did you love science, or did you feel a disconnect at that age, like many others do?

Ewza - I loved science in school/high school, it was much more fun doing the practical lessons though. The only time I really enjoyed theory/studying was when space was involved. The most I have to do with science now is sci-fi movies or Facegrinder.

Dayle - Yeah, science was great as I said

Listen Now, Click or Scan

Q: One of your songs, Hawking Radiation is clearly a nod to Stephen Hawking and his contributions to space science. How did you feel hearing about his recent passing?

Ewza - I’m not really sure what to say I guess. Its a great loss in the world of science. I have one of his books but I haven’t given it a read yet, I honestly probably wouldn’t understand all of it but I’ll try one of these days. We did, however, incorporate his computer generated voice for a sample we use before our song, Pluto.

Dayle - It was a great loss to our world of science as said above, his research will never be forgotten nor will his legacy.

Q: Considering your clear fandom of space, was there any scientist, science communicators, books, movies, TV shows (etc) that inspired your love of space?

Ewza - I grew up watching Star Trek and always thought Spock (Leonard Nimoy) was awesome. But I loved Sci-fi movies like Dune, Event Horizon, Interstellar, Gravity, Total Recall, and Stargate. There’s also some Sci-Fi themed Death Metal bands that help inspire our own music, like - Wormed, Rings of Saturn, Wormhole, Abnormal Inhumane, Artificial Brain.

Dayle - Space is everywhere! & I’d say, Stephen Hawking!

Ewza - Oh there has to be life out there but considering the vast distances in between galaxies, its hard to imagine we’ll be in contact with anyone anytime soon (if not already!?). Who knows whether life is as advanced or better or worse, or simply just microorganisms not bothered by the concept of intelligent/other beings.

Dayle - I think we are just experiments created for a far more superior futuristic regeneration of beings, Haha!

Keep an eye on the sky, August 2018, for our 2nd album - KUGELBLITZ.

Q: Favourite planet, dwarf planet or object in the solar system?

If you want to listen to our previous releases you can check us out over at www.facegrinder.bandcamp.com or look for us on Spotify.

Ewza - Gold (AU).

Ewza - Out of principal, Pluto. But in all honesty, Jupiter.

Or you can buy our CDs and/or merch at these sites -

Dayle - Plutonium (Pu)

Dayle - Saturn.

Q: Do you have any advice for young kids on pursuing their dreams, whether metal based or science based?

Q: Considering the sheer vastness of space and the fact that there are over 1.7 billion solar systems in our Galaxy and billions of galaxies beyond ours, do you think there is other life out there? If so what kind of life do you think we will find?

www.merchr.net/collections/facegrinder and www.ungratefuldead.bigcartel.com

Q: What is your favourite element on the periodic table?

Ewza - Don’t ever give up, even when times are tough or things seem too hard.

Keep pushing yourself and you can progress.

Dayle - You just got to pursue and be ambitious to make what you want to happen, happen!

Not a metal fan? he Spark’ ‘T g n so ’s ZA G h it w d We got you covere

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JIM AL-KHALILI

Putting the Shock and Awe in Science Jim Al-Khalili is a British scientist, author, and a professor of Physics at the University of Surrey where he also holds a chair in the Public Engagement in Science. Some of you may know him from his documentaries or possibly from his weekly podcast ‘The Life Scientific’. We sat down with this titan of science for a quick chinwag on inspiration and how we can make science better, Cameron: (ITV Science) What do you see as your greatest achievement in your career thus far?

Jim Al-Khalili: There have been many goals in my career that I have felt proud to have achieved, from getting tenure to my chair in physics to seeing my first book on the shelves, to winning various prizes, but number one spot is probably winning the inaugural Stephen Hawking medal for science communication two years ago and being presented it by Stephen himself.

Cameron: What advise do you have for young people who are interested in a career in science?

Jim Al-Khalili: A no-brainer really. There aren’t many careers that can be constantly fascinating as well as intellectually (and financially) rewarding. But overall, I would say: how can any human being with a curiosity about the world not want to find answers to the questions we have all had ever since our earliest childhood? A scientist is like a child who has never stopped asking ‘why?’.

Cameron: We feel that Science has become more popular (mainstream acceptance) in western culture over the past 20-30 years. Do you see POP culture (TV, Media, Comics etc.) as playing a role in inspiring science for younger generations?

Jim Al-Khalili: Absolutely. And there are many drivers here: more science on TV and in movies, more access to it through social media, YouTube and popular science writing, a respectability given to science communicators that wasn’t always there. Take one example: Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, is still quoted by many students who apply to my university (I read their applications and personal statements) as the reason they want to study physics. So, yes, inspiring the young by popularising science is undoubtedly vital.

Cameron: If you could change one things about the science world, what would it be? Ours would be to remove paywalls for journal papers.

Jim Al-Khalili: I would change the way we judge the worth of a young scientist by the number of papers they publish (the ridiculous ‘publish or perish’ attitude) which results in an endless drive to churn out papers at the expense of the freedom to explore avenues and ask questions that may not be seen as so fruitful in terms of leading to a publication.

Cameron: In your opinion do you think that there is a shortage of study replications in the industry.

Jim Al-Khalili: In some areas of science, yes. So it really does depend on the field. The social sciences and medicine suffer more from this I think. In the physical sciences, results don’t survive if not reproduced.

Cameron: What’s your favourite element in the periodic table?

Jim Al-Khalili: I would say element #3 (Lithium) because I built my research career to a large extent on studies of the nucleus of this element. I was the first to calculate the size of the nucleus of a particularly exotic isotope of lithium (Li-11) which has what is called a neutron halo around it.

We would like to personally thank Jim for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk to us and if you haven’t seen his documentary ‘Shock & Awe’ we highly recommend it.

Shock and Awe : The Story of Electricity

Light and Dark

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MAY 2018

Aliens: Science Asks: Is There Anyone Out There?

It’s the biggest question we’ve ever faced, one that has fascinated generations of humans: do aliens exist? If they did, what would they look like? How would they think? And what would it mean for us if we found them?

Image Credit: NASA/MESSENGER

Crust Mystery

Mercury R

esearchers from the University of Arizona are using advanced mathematical formulas to more accurately measure Mercury’s crust thickness. Mercury’s crust was thought to be around 35 Kilometres thick but this new data put the figure more around the 25 Kilometre mark.

So why do scientist care about the thickness of the crust on a planet that’s uninhabitable, for now anyway? Well, there is a mystery to be solved and it all starts with Mercury’s core. Earth’s core accounts for around 15% of its volume but Mercury’s takes up a whopping 60% of the planet’s volume!

“Of the terrestrial planets, Mercury has the biggest core relative to its size,” the lead researcher says.

“Maybe it formed closer to a normal planet and maybe a lot of the crust and mantle got stripped away by giant impacts. Another idea is that maybe, when you’re forming so close to the sun, the solar winds blow away a lot of the rock and you get a large core size very early on. There’s not an answer that everyone agrees to yet.”

The new study is already shedding light on the mystery, especially regarding the rocks in Mercury’s crust. When the planets and Earth’s moon formed, their crusts were born from their mantles, the layer between a planet’s core and crust that oozes and flows over the course of millions of years. The volume of a planet’s crust represents the percentage of the mantle that was turned into rocks.

The moon’s crust formed when less dense minerals floated to the surface of the liquid rock that became the mantle. The moon’s minerals cooled and hardened into a “floatation crust’ where mercury’s volcanic eruptions caused its “magmatic crust”. This new research solves the apparent discrepancy in the amount of rock that formed between these two similar sized astrological bodies by showing that both Mercury & the moon have roughly 7%.

Researchers used the data from Messenger to create a topographic map but until now a density map had not been made. “We know what minerals usually form rocks, and we know what elements each of these minerals contain. We can intelligently divide all the chemical abundances into a list of minerals. We know the densities of each of these minerals. We add them all up, and we get a map of density.”

Messenger collected much more data on the northern hemisphere than the southern, and Sori predicts the average density of the planet’s surface will change when density data is collected over the entire planet. He already sees the need for a follow-up study in the future.

The next mission to Mercury will arrive at the planet in 2025.

Source: University of Arizona

Our moon is about the closest object in our solar system size wise to Mercury and the amount of mantle that turned into crust was about 7%.

Mercury’s mantle to crust conversion rate is much higher at around 11%. “The two bodies formed their crusts in very different ways, so it wasn’t necessarily alarming that they didn’t have the exact same percentage of rocks in their crust,”

Mercury’s core takes up a whopping 60% of the planet’s volume!

Growing Gold Nanoparticles Researchers from Stanford University have discovered a new process that creates gold nanoparticles and nanowires using water droplets, whilst not even trying. Their findings are the latest in the burgeoning field of ‘on-droplet’ chemistry and could be key to producing more than just gold.

Richard Zare, Professor of Natural Science at Stanford University says “Being able to do reactions in water means you don’t have to worry about contamination. It’s green chemistry.” Gold is a fairly unreactive metal at a macro scale but at a nanoscale, it becomes very chemically reactive, making a great catalyst.

So why should you care about gold at a nanoscale? Well, the applications are varied but work is already being done towards drug delivery, bio-imaging, gas detection and biosensors.

From previous experiments, scientists knew that some chemical reactions proceed much faster in microdroplets than in larger reducing agent solution volumes. Gold nanoparticles, in particular, grew at a rate 100,000 times faster in microdroplets compared to traditional methods.

The real surprise came when the researchers substituted the reducing agent with microdroplets of water. “Much to our bewilderment, we found that gold nanostructures could be made without any added reducing agents,” says research associate Jae Kyoo Lee. Viewed under an electron microscope, the gold nanoparticles and nanowires appear fused together like berry clusters on a branch.

The surprise finding means that pure water microdroplets can serve as microreactors for the production of gold nanostructures.

“This is yet more evidence that reactions in water droplets can be fundamentally different from those in bulk water,” says coauthor Devleena Samanta, a former graduate student in Zare’s lab.

“If the process can be scaled up, it could eliminate the need for potentially toxic reducing agents that have harmful health side effects or that can pollute waterways”, Zare says.

Source: Stanford University

Art & Science

Science doesn’t always have to be cold hard facts and data, art is a big part of communicating science and the magic in the natural world!

Help Us

Inspire the world with science We are more than just a magazine: we are a collective of like-minded science enthusiasts, scientists and all around good guys working toward a better future. We don’t just report science, we do science!

Currently, we are midway through our study of women working in STEM. The purpose of this study is to try and identify hurdles that women face when working within the STEM fields but also what drove them into their careers in the first place.

The study is not finalized yet but the figure to the right represents a small data set of respondents on what inspired them in regards to STEM below the ages of 12.

We hope our findings will further compliment current studies and help guide policymakers to inspire more young girls and women into careers within the Science, Technology, Engineering & Math Fields.

It’s not all datasets and studies either, we are working hard to bring you entertaining science articles, more video content, and even some science-inspired art!

Project Fiona Fox Our mission with this project is to create a series of books explaining and inspiring various different STEM topics to age groups around 6 to 10. The difference being is that the main character, ‘Fiona Fox’ will be a positive female role model. Now, this is not to say that our series will be excluding any gender, but it will focus on Fiona being a strong, smart and fun female role model. Using the data collected from our study and partnering with women working in STEM to help author the series we hope to engage more young girl with STEM.

We have hundreds of ideas to inspire science around the world, support us today!

This magazine was produced with our passion, Just Imagine what we could do with some funding WWW.ITVSCIENCE.COM