Retirement in less than three week’s time!  What shall I sing?  How about this?

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain

Well, that’s my second most hated song, suited either to a dictator facing trial at the International Criminal Court or a drunkard expiring in a ditch.  Even the melody was stolen from a much superior (in my opinion) French song “Comme d'habitude”[1,2].

Not that I could justifiably sing it, anyway:

Regrets I’ve had a few
But then again too few to mention

On the contrary, my career in science is littered with them.  One of the most poignant is the memory of the many students we have had whose work has not reached publication to the extent that it should have.

In almost everything, size matters.  And usually, being bigger helps.   I don't know anyone who couldn't use a larger refrigerator but University of Bristol physicists have done the unthinkable and made the smallest refrigerator ever.

Is there a pill that might inoculate us from smog?

Is there a gene we can target that would make us resistant to resurgent infectious diseases?

And is there a way to use genetic data to insulate new immigrants from some of the metabolic challenges of living in a new land of plenty?

Welcome to the slowly emerging world of environmental medicine and its inevitable outgrowth, environmental pharmaceuticals: compounds specifically suited for mitigating the physiological challenges of mega-city life in the 21st century.

The inchoate drive for such pills — disparate, proceeding in entrepreneurial fits and starts — is fueled by twin facts:

When nerve cells communicate with each other, they do so through electrical pulses.  Most everything in our bodies comes down to induction when you think about it.   

Since the early days of neuroscience, the accepted idea was that nerve cells simply sum up tiny action potentials generated by the incoming pulses and emit an action potential themselves when a threshold is reached but Moritz Helias and Markus Diesmann from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan) and Moritz Deger and Stefan Rotter from the Bernstein Center Freiburg (Germany) say they have figured out exactly what happens right before a nerve cell emits a pulse

Petermann Ice Island - Now There Are two

Petermann Ice Island (2010) has now broken into two parts.   The smaller island is about 80 km2.  It is the thinner of the two and is likely to melt away first.  Based on the labels already in use in comments¹, I shall designate the larger island as Petermann 2010-A and the smaller one as Petermann 2010-B.


Petermann Ice Islands A and B
image source: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/images/MODIS/Kennedy/201009091609.ASAR.jpg

In Australia this week a crucial battle begins to combat every Australian farmer’s nightmare, the worst locust plague in 40 years.

There is a $100 million national campaign in Australia to prevent a locust plague from wiping billions of dollars from the value of the Australian rural sector.

The public are being asked to help to pinpoint the locations of the young locusts or ‘hoppers’ because the "strike time" for spraying is limited to one month before they start flying in plagues, and devastating orchards, vineyards and pastures. See locust plague clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8STQStqUzE&feature=related