Physicist Serge Haroche describes his work on the manipulation of quantum systems, which won him a share of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics.
Suggested posts
The era of big data is coming: Scientists need to step out of their comfort zone
As every area of research becomes data-intensive, emphasis is shifting from data generation to data analysis, bringing new challenges to researchers, says Réka Nagy.
On my first day as a new PhD student, freshly awarded molecular genetics degree in hand, I was sat down at a laptop with an unfamiliar operating system and was encouraged to explore some data using arr. What sounded like pirate speak turned out to be R, a statistical programming language. Yep – for my PhD I swapped pipettes for programming, dilutions for data and spectrophotometers for statistics. Others experienced the opposite, entering the world of biology from a computer science background.
Réka Nagy
Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia, in Arabic
Scientists from Qatar and the United States have managed to validate an Arabic version of the Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS) among patients with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics commonly show both depressive and negative symptoms that can affect the prognosis and course of their treatment. Negative symptoms are disabling symptoms that have a major impact on the quality of life of patients, more so than positive symptoms, which are thought patterns and behaviors that patients acquire after they become ill.
Tests such as CDSS are designed to distinguish between depression, and negative symptoms that are distinctive of schizophrenia.
These tests are not diagnostic per se, “but they are mainly there to asses the severity of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia and the possible associated depressive symptoms (using CDSS),” explains Hassen Al-Amin, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and corresponding author of the study that validated the psychiatric test.
“They are significant because they can help us know how sick these patients are and also to monitor how they are responding to treatment with time,” he says.
These types of tests have been used worldwide and their validity is established.
In order to make them work for Arab populations, experts and researchers had to translate the material thoroughly and decide the appropriate cultural equivalents in Arabic. “We then test the Arabic versions with Arab patients with schizophrenia and compare them with those obtained internationally to make sure that we have a valid scale that is culturally acceptable also,” says Al-Amin.
Preparing researchers to manage traumatic research
Studying traumatic events comes with its own risks – the scientific establishment needs to be doing more to protect researchers, says Dale Dominey-Howes and Danielle Drozdzewski.
One of the authors interviews survivors a few days after the September 2009 South Pacific tsunami in the rubble of their communities in Samoa, as part of the UNESCO post-tsunami survey team reporting into the Prime Minister and King of Samoa. “It was a hard day for all of us,” says Dale Dominey-Howes.
What’s the issue and why is it important?
Earth is destabilizing rapidly. Terrorism, conflict, genocide, human displacement, socio-economic disruption, rapid global environmental change, slow emergencies and natural disasters are more common than at any point in history. Consequently, opportunities exist for researchers to investigate the causes, consequences and potential management solutions arising from this instability. For this to happen, we need a well-trained workforce equipped with the skills and capabilities to work with ‘traumatic’ research content, people and places. Read more
Reactions: Javier Pérez-Ramírez
Javier Pérez-Ramírez is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich, and works on the design of catalytic materials and reactor concepts for the production of chemicals and fuels, with emphasis on sustainability and resource efficiency. His group published “Catalyst design for natural-gas upgrading through oxybromination chemistry” in Nature Chemistry earlier this year.
1. What made you want to be a chemical engineer?
My passion throughout my youth was playing tennis, which I hoped to make a career. This did not work for various reasons, prompting a change in direction to attend university. The choice of chemical engineering was somewhat improvised, since I hadn’t considered an academic path, but after the first semester I was really attracted to chemical processes, a flame which still burns today.
2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?
I could commit to any activity driven by a strong dose of creativity, like any expression of art.
3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?
We are interested in the discovery, understanding, and implementation of catalytic processes devoted to sustainable technologies. The latter secure the efficient utilization of natural resources, the transition to renewable feedstocks, reduced energy consumption and waste, and minimized environmental impact. More specifically, we target the design of practically relevant catalysts for natural gas functionalization, carbon dioxide valorization, the conversion of biomass to chemicals and fuels, and novel manufacturing approaches to specialty chemicals.
4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?
I would meet with John Hutchinson, John McClelland, William Gossage, Holbrook Gaskell, and Henry Deacon at the time they conceived the modern chemical industry in Widnes, England.
5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?
I am still experimentally active and master the process of coffee making every day; this is done in a highly reproducible way.
6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?
Given the remote setting, I would take a thick notebook to write and draw. As for a music album, if Spotify is out of the question I would face the dilemma between The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 or The Ties that Bind: The River Collection. I need more time to think…
7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?
I would be curious to read the answers of my colleague and friend Núria López.
On the move
Moving lab is a challenge. Moving country is an undertaking of vast proportions that often requires months of logistical planning for everything from finagling visas and finalizing funding to transporting delicate cultures and mastering a new language.
First Rounders: Nancy J Kelley
Nancy J. Kelley
Click here for the First Rounders podcast with Nancy Kelley. For more on her consultancy, go here. A Frontline interview with Nancy’s college friend (and Black Panther Party member) Kathleen Cleaver can be read here. A New York Times blog post on the East River Science Park’s first tenant is here. We published an article on the New York Genome Center, and Nancy, here. And here is a BuzzFeed article on the Genome Project-Write (side note: the author of that article, Nidhi Subbaraman, was once a Nature Biotech intern). The Science paper on Genome Project-Write is here.
UAE’s green city grabs the attention of international researchers
Masdar city, in the heart of the Gulf desert, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, has no light switches or water taps. In Masdar, movement sensors control lighting and water in order to cut down electricity and water consumption by nearly half. The city is touted by the UAE as possibly “one of the world’s most sustainable eco-cities.”
And now University of Birmingham researchers are presenting it as a model to teach the UK and the world about saving energy and resources, contrasting it with energy systems in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
They analyzed the differences and similarities between Masdar, founded very recently in 2008 against an urban environment, and Birmingham, a well-established post-industrial city that has evolved over 400 years. “Masdar City benefits from starting from a blank slate, whereas Birmingham has existing processes, procedures and an ageing infrastructure to negotiate,” according to the researchers.
Masdar is primarily powered by Shams 1, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants in the Middle East, and it houses the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, which carries out renewable energy research.
“We compared two very different cities – both aspiring to be ‘low-carbon’. Masdar has started well by building low-rise, energy-efficient buildings with smart metering,” says lead author Susan Lee, from the department of civil engineering. “Data from such buildings can help to change people’s behaviour and help develop more energy-efficient new and retrofitted UK buildings. The UAE is a hot and arid place; experience gained in Masdar will help us plan here in the UK for projected hotter summers, with more frequent heatwaves, particularly in cities, as the climate changes.”
Birmingham, says the researcher, has a few things to teach Masdar as well, including how the city adapted to new energy requirements. Lee believes that Masdar can also benefit from her university’s research into hydrogen fuel-cell cars.
Peer review: Nature’s variations
By Heike Langenberg, Chief Editor, Nature Geoscience
The week from 19 to 25 September 2016 marks the second round of Peer Review Week with the theme of “Recognition for Review”. The topic is obviously close to our hearts at Nature Research: after all, peer review is much of what we do.
We greatly appreciate the role our reviewers play in the publication process, and we try to help them to convert the time and effort they spend on scrutinising and often improving our authors’ papers into professional recognition.
For their personal use—for example in job applications or career negotiations—reviewers have been able to download a certified record of all their reviewing activities across the Nature-branded titles for several years now. We hope that this information is helpful in our reviewers’ career development.
We also offer a free online subscription to a Nature-branded journal for one year to those who have either reviewed three or more manuscripts across all Nature-branded titles in a year, or to referees who have been nominated by our editors for the outstanding quality of their reviews.
But we are always looking into making peer review better, and offering more choice. In response to popular demand in reader surveys, we have introduced the option of double-blind peer review. Initiated at Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change in June 2013, authors are now able to opt to be anonymous to referees—just as referees are usually anonymous to authors—at all the Nature-branded journals since February 2015. Providing this option is now part of our routine workflow.
Uptake has been essentially stable since this option was extended to all Nature-branded journals. It seems that ignorance of the double-blind option is not the reason that the proportion of authors who choose it for their own manuscript is substantially lower than those who support the idea in reader surveys. In the social sciences, double-blind peer review is more widespread, and we note that in journals with a significant social science component, such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy and Nature Human Behaviour, acceptance is higher than in most journals.
The next step in this particular direction could be triple-blind peer review: in this version, editors, too, do not know the authors’ identities when they record their initial impression of a paper. This offering is but a glimpse in our eye at this stage, largely for administrative reasons, but we are thinking about it. Unconscious biases may lurk in everyone’s brain, even in the most conscientious editors, and they shouldn’t make a difference. We would like to make sure that papers submitted to the Nature-branded journals are judged by their scientific content only. Nothing else.
The rise and fall of the UFO
Posted on behalf of Daniel Cressey
It seems amazing that anyone ever believed in them. In the mid-twentieth-century heyday of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), grainy pictures of flying saucers hovering in the sky were a staple even in respectable magazines such as Time and Life. Volumes were written earnestly detailing the visits of aliens. This novel form of cold war paranoia seemed to seep into the collective psyche on both sides of the Atlantic.
For believe they did. A sizeable section of the public ate up cheap books on saucers and devoured tales of visitors from beyond our planet, whether their intent was good or ill. Fortunately for anyone enamoured of American subcultures in all their garish glory, the speculative-fiction writer Jack Womack has amassed a huge collection of these books, from sex-obsessed adult novels to earnest pseudo-academic treatises. He reproduces many of these gems in his lavishly illustrated menagerie of the tracts, Flying Saucers Are Real.
A 1955 title.
They range from what Womack calls the “finest science fiction cover to ever appear on a non-science fiction book” (The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe) to the mundane (Richard S. Shaver’s 1948 I Remember Lemuria).
While Womack is deeply invested in these books, he doesn’t spare them. UFO Photographs Around the World Vols 1 and 2, he notes, “offers the most complete compilation of lens flares, camera smudges, film imperfections, blurs and jiggled shots ever published”. Womack points out that British linguist Gavin Gibbons (author of The Coming of the Space Ships (1956) and They Rode In Space Ships (1957)), and others from the UK brought “a wide-eyed if not overly creative spirit to the field”. Gibbons rewrote other people’s UFO encounters, “managing to make their accounts far less interesting”.
This is no attempt to deconstruct the reasons behind the rise and fall of the UFO. Instead, Womack seems to be attempting to understand a bizarre lost cult by collecting the artefacts they left.
We learn of George Adamski, born in Poland in 1891, who ended up founding the “Royal Order of Tibet” in California (and co-writing the 1953 Flying Saucers Have Landed) before setting up an eatery. Adamski’s ‘close encounters’ include a man who claimed to be from Venus — evidenced by the fact that his “trousers were not like mine”. In Britain, Leonard G. Cramp’s 1966 UFOs and Anti-Gravity purported to lay bare the engineering of the flying saucer, complete with detailed blueprints, which he apparently thought revealed an anti-gravity system “similar to one of his own devising”.
Womack describes another book, Flying Saucer from Mars (1954), as written by “Cedric Allingham” — a hoax said to have been perpetrated by a now-deceased British astronomer and his friend. This friend apparently admitted pretending to be Allingham to give a talk to a flying saucer club, during which he wore a false moustache.
Harold T. Wilkins’s 1954 text.
Womack’s book can be as confusing to follow as the arguments of his UFO proponents. The typefaces switch to signal passages from source materials, and covers, photos and drawings abound. Following the huge numbers of authors mentioned and whether they are believers, hoaxers or fictional becomes something of a task. There is no clear logic to this collection of what science-fiction luminary William Gibson calls “testimonials to certain human needs” in the introduction.
Some of the notes accompanying the awesome images are brief and baffling. We read on page 10: “When John C. Sherwood was seventeen, Gray Barker published his book, Flying Saucers are Watching You (1967), a dry account of events during the 1966 Michigan Flap. Barker’s congratulation, post-publication, ‘Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.’” Who Sherwood and Barker are, and what the “Michigan Flap” was, we can only guess.
Womack’s collection is heading to Georgetown University Library in Washington DC, to be preserved among its special collections. It may stand as a monument to collective lunacy, a testament to how easily people can be led down the garden path, or simply a collection of egregious publishing mistakes. Whichever it is, Womack has preserved a record of something that felt very real to a great many people. These books began emerging, after all, around a decade after the filmmaker and theatre impresario Orson Welles inadvertently frightened an estimated 1.2 million US listeners during his famous 1938 radio broadcast of an adaption of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
Today, the ubiquitous advanced cameras mean the lack of convincing photographs is more and more of a problem for believers. The evidence collected here is as ‘real’ as flying saucers will ever get.
Daniel Cressey is a senior reporter for Nature in London. He tweets at @dpcressey. Flying Saucers Are Real is the first book release of New York City publisher Anthology Editions, a partnership between Boo-Hooray Gallery and Anthology Recordings.
For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.
