12/9 Gregory's First Law ~ Blog of Asad Mirjat

Gregory's First Law

Magic results from MERLIN

December 7, 2010 at 10:49 PM

This is an image that shows how the light from a quasar billions of light years away being bent around a foreground galaxy by the curvature of space. This light has been travelling for 9 billion years before it reached the Earth.

There are two things the small village of Knockin in Shropshire is supposed to be famous for. The local store supposedly labelled the "Knockin Shop"* and the radio telescope on the outskirts of the village.

I can't vouch for the name of the shop (although Wikipedia insists it's true, hmmmm) but I have stood in the dish of the radio telescope. It's part of a network of 6 dishes controlled from Joderell Bank. These form the MERLIN radio telescope which stands for Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network.

You join up all these different smaller telescopes and effectively create one much larger one with all the benefits that brings for astronomers.

MERLIN has had some noticeable successes. With the Hubble Space Telescope it was responsible for spotting the first "Einstein Ring" in 1998. Phenomena where the gravity of a really massive object such as a galaxy bends the light coming from behind it so that from earth it forms a ring.

But MERLIN did have its downside. Not least the problem of a network of dishes spread over hundreds of miles. The amount of data that could be gathered and sent back was limited and sometimes engineers would have to be sent out to each dish before certain measurements could be taken.

So the whole network has been upgraded and renamed from MERLIN to e-MERLIN. Faster data links mean the researchers can collect much more data than ever before and that will improve their results. And the picture at the top of this post is the first image from the new e-MERLIN telescope.

Diagram showing double image of quasar and jet of matter.

Although this is called a "double quasar" in fact there's only one. But as with the "Einstein Ring" the light is bent by a galaxy. In this case in such a way that you don't get a ring, but instead we see two images of the quasar itself. In the second picture the researchers have labelled everything in the picture so you can see what's going on.

You can also see a jet of matter leaving the quasar which is moving at the speed of light. Here the bending caused by the galaxy has given the jet a distorted curved look. And the quasar itself is actually a galaxy powered by a super-massive black hole. Which may be the coolest thing I've ever written on this blog.

Now the team will be testing e-MERLIN and using it to examine everything from planets orbiting nearby stars to black holes and galaxies. More here.

There's a long list of people who have got e-MERLIN to this stage; The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Northwest Development Agency, The University of Manchester, The University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University. The telescope is being operated by STFC and the University of Manchester.

*My producer says; "As a Shropshire lad, I can vouch for the name of the shop."

Combating the office milk snatcher - an experiment

December 7, 2010 at 5:29 PM

This past few months I have been conducting an experiment on my colleagues and I hope you'll find the results useful.

It is the bugbear of any modern workplace, stopping people "borrowing" your milk from the office fridge leaving you nothing for your tea or coffee. And in the name of science I decided to do something about it. After all, science is the answer.

Fortunately the BBC has an Editorial Policy department to help me navigate any potential difficulties in conducting experiments that could directly impact the health of my co-workers. It was agreed as long as I didn't add anything harmful to my milk I could go ahead.

This meant of course that this would be a psychological experiment and I would have to rely on altering the physical appearance of bottles and the milk itself to deter light-fingered caffeine addicts. Other measures that were suggested such as using silver nitrate to chemically brand a thief were not allowed.

So with a bit of help from posters at the Bad Science forums and Bang Goes the Theory's Dr. Yan Wong I drew up a list of potential milk-modifications and testing got underway.

I kept things simple, leaving an unmarked control bottle of milk alongside the altered one. At the end of a week I compared one with the other to give a league table of the most effective ideas. So without further ado here are the results from five weeks of concentrated testing over the last year from worst to best deterrent;

In last place and so therefore the least effective modification was a bottle of milk with my boss's name on it which actually vanished completely from the fridge. Fourth a milk bottle with my name on it. Third place went to a bottle which I added some staring eyes to the label designed to trigger feelings of being watched in potential milk snatchers. In second place a bottle where I used food colouring and coloured the milk green. And the bottle that lost the least amount of milk to theft? One labelled "breast milk".

Now these are of course absolute measurements of the amount of milk liberated by my colleagues each week. It's possible that in any particular week the more morally ambiguous or caffeine-addicted members of staff might have been on holiday or not in the office that much. So that's where the control comes in.

We can compare how the control faired each week and use that to create a "fudge factor" in a fine scientific tradition. When we apply the fudge factor we get the same order for our experiment except the most effective carton-modifications are reversed with green milk coming out on top and breast milk slipping to second.

So what does this tell us? That a few drops of green food dye and writing "breast milk" in biro on the label of your carton will encourage most people to leave your milk alone.

But the most effective solution I found after more than a month of experimentation? Learn to like your coffee black.

For those that want them the numbers are here [20.0 KB].

"Boring Science No Fun Anymore"

November 23, 2010 at 9:39 PM

At least according to David Hardman, Head of Birmingham Aston Science Park. He was talking to a Birmingham City Council scrutiny committee and according to the Birmingham Mail

"(Mr Hardman) Hit out at teachers for "making science lessons boring", but added that their hands were tied by safety legislation."

Now this is actually something we've covered on Midlands Today and it turns out there is still plenty of stuff you can blow up in a lab in the name of schools science. Don't believe me? Watch this!

So I do hope I can reassure Mr Hardman and the council that you can still set fire to a child in the name of chemistry.

For teachers looking for more information about how to conduct explosive or otherwise exciting experiments in the classroom both the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Practical Chemistry websites have lots of useful resources.