Glasgow
Glasgow is famous for its great audiences, and this week’s were every bit as lively and demonstrative as any of us could have hoped for. This was made even more astonishing given the temperature level in the King’s Theatre. Those high up in the gallery, and, it must be said, those on stage under the lights, had to contend with almost unbearable heat: the weather outside and the lack of air-conditioning (which they say is on its way: fingers crossed for next year) in this beautiful theatre made for a sweltering experience for many. At least on stage I was focussed on performing the show: those fanning themselves upstairs could only sit and sweat. So a double thank you to all those who came, and triple thankings if you sat upstairs. For me, my dressing room was no respite either. Ugh. I entered it at each interval and after each show, absolutely sodden, to get changed in a similar temperature. The very lovely staff found me a couple of fans (the air-cooling kind, not devotees of the show) which did help a bit.
On top of this, I was suffering from that run-down, coldy, coughy, fatigue which teachers get at the end of terms and performers on tour get when they know they have a break coming up. It’s as if the body senses it can stop holding everything together for a bit and let go. So during the days I was like a zombie: slumped in my hotel room, staring at the wall, trying to sleep, devoid of energy, eating brains. Although there were moments during the day when I doubted if I could manage the show, there is something (camply referred to as Doctor Theatre) hugely restoring about performing, and in fact I looked forward to the show in the way one might look forward to the company of a friend when one feels low. It’s pure adrenalin: once on stage with a show to do, the mind is distracted and the body given new fuel: aside from a shortness of breath and a concomitant light-headeness, I did fine and the shows were all good ones.
I did, however, have to refrain from coming out to sign. Apologies to any of you who were hoping to see me. And again, if someone comes to the stage door and says I’m unable to come out and sign, please don’t waste your time waiting around.
I am now home, to rest and paint a little and then head off to Italy if the airlines allow it. Speak to you in two weeks or so, when it’s back up to Carlisle. And hopefully this time the weather will be cold and miserable.
Child abuse inside the Church of Scientology
The daughter of the president of the Church of Scientology speaks about the horrific conditions that children are raised under. The claims have been denied by the CoS.
Babies Learn Quickly While Sleeping
“Babies can apparently learn even while asleep, a new study reveals.
As newborns spend most of their time asleep, this newfound ability might be crucial to rapidly adapt to the world around them and help to ensure their survival, researchers said.
In experiments with 26 sleeping infants, each just one to two days old, scientists played a musical tone followed by a puff of air to their eyes 200 times over the course of a half-hour. A network of 124 electrodes stuck on the scalp and face of each baby also recorded brain activity during the experiments.
The babies rapidly learned that they could expect a puff of air upon hearing the tone, showing a four-fold increase on average in the chances of tightening their eyelids in response to the sound by the end of each session.
“It’s surprising how quickly they learned — the study took 30 minutes, but I think they actually learned this in half that time,” said researcher William Fifer, a developmental neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York. “We knew that a baby’s job is to be an information gatherer, a data sponge, but I don’t think we realized this also happens when they’re sound asleep.”"
Read more at Live Science (Thanks @soulmate02)
Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space
“Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.
As we’ve explained before, “quantum teleportation” is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work. Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, so their states are dependent on one another and each can be affected by the measurement of the other’s state.
When one of the items is sent a distance away, entanglement ensures that changing the state of one causes the other to change as well, allowing the teleportation of quantum information, if not matter. However, the distance particles can be from each other has been limited so far to a number of meters.
Teleportation over distances of a few hundred meters has previously only been accomplished with the photons traveling in fiber channels to help preserve their state. In this particular experiment, researchers maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and sent the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance.”
Read more at Ars technica
Chinese Girl Gets ‘Kiss Of Deaf’
“A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend.
The 20-something from Zhuhai in Guangdong province arrived at hospital having completely lost the hearing in her left ear, said local reports.
The incident prompted a series of articles in the local media warning of the dangers of excessive kissing.
‘While kissing is normally very safe, doctors advise people to proceed with caution,’ wrote the China Daily.
The doctor who treated the girl in hospital was quoted in the paper explaining what had happened.
‘The kiss reduced the pressure in the mouth, pulled the eardrum out and caused the breakdown of the ear.’
The chorus of warnings was echoed by the Shanghai Daily, which wrote: ‘A strong kiss may cause an imbalance in the air pressure between two inner ears and lead to a broken ear drum.’”
Read more at The BBC
Stoke-On-Trent and into Glasgow
A move this year from the Victoria Halls to the Kings Theatre, and it has to be said that the latter is a more suitable theatrical venue for the show. The Regent – an odd, huge, plain, orange cube in the middle of an unhappy part of town – is glorious inside, and boasts a delightful in-house crew (many of whom we knew from the Victoria Halls). The shows were good fun, Tuesday’s being probably the best; audiences were lively and delightful. Repeated disruption on one night from some strange and intoxicated character in the stalls, but he eventually stopped after a telling-off. Wednesday brought a wonderful respite: I spent the day sat in the lovely grounds of our hotel, reading and relaxing. Bliss.
Thursday morning was an early start to Glasgow. Somehow that early start, the drive, Glasgow’s beautiful but sweltering Kings Theatre, last night’s show and concomitant late night have left me with a bad throat this morning. This is always a worry: I have taken the appropriate medication but will have to bow out of signings again until it gets better. I hope any of you coming will understand. Luckily, I have a little sunny break coming up which will, I hope, sort me out.
For any of you wondering, the final DB Investigates doc does not indeed air not this Monday as you might have had every reason to expect, but in fact the following Monday, due, I understand, to a clash with the football on the other side and a live Davina extravaganza being aired on 4. This is not a bad thing: it extends an otherwise very short series, and might fool you into thinking that there were more than three episodes. (The docs have been made in my ‘spare’ time over the last eighteen months, hence there only being three. Hopefully, I will do more, and we’ll schedule time for a full series of six. Or ‘a thousand’ has a nice ring to it).
Ah, Jeff Buckley’s recording of Allelujah has just started playing in this bar. A great version. As is Rufus Wainwright’s, sadly only available on the Shrek album, but whaddyagonnado.
Last night here was a terrific Glasgow crowd, always a huge treat. It’s VERY hot in there. Hotter than the sweat-box in the Pasedena County Women’s Prison. Backstage too: my dressing room is as roasting and airless as the auditorium. Of course, it’s twice as hot on stage under the lights, though I don’t get a chance to notice it. But be warned: dress skimpily.
Tatty-bye.
x
Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Life
“Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time.
In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally.
‘We all had a very good feeling that it was going to work this time,’ said Venter Institute synthetic biologist Daniel Gibson, co-author of the study published May 20 in Science. ‘But we were cautiously optimistic because we had so many letdowns following the previous experiments.’
On a Friday in March, scientists inserted over 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA into Mycoplasma capricolum cells before leaving for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, their cells had bloomed into colonies.
‘When we look at life forms, we see fixed entities,’ said J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute, in a recent podcast. ‘But this shows in fact how dynamic they are. They change from second to second. And that life is basically the result of an information process. Our genetic code is our software.’
Coaxing the software to power a cell proved harder than expected.
After the Venter Institute announced in early 2008 that it had assembled a synthetic Mycoplasma genitalium genome, the assumption was that it would be running cells in no time. But this particular cell type, despite its minimal size, was not an ideal research partner. One problem was speed.”
Read more at Wired (thanks, DG)
Campaign For Solar Yacht To Carry Our Messages
“KAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) is a solar sail which gathers sunlight as propulsion by means of a large sail. This spacecraft will be launched in 2010 together with the Venus Climate Orbiter, “AKATSUKI”(PLANET-C), using the H-IIA launch vehicle. This will be the world’s first solar power sail craft employing both photon propulsion and thin film solar power generation during its interplanetary cruise.
IKAROS’s membrane is square, with a diagonal distance of 20m. The destination of the IKAROS is not specific but will be flown toward the Venus.
TPS is developing a spacecraft which is called as “LightSail-1” that will sail on the earth revolving orbit by the end of 2010. They, TPS, are one of the biggest organizations in the world to promote space exploration’s project, outreach activity and public information.
LightSail-1 is an ultra-light spacecraft with a mass of less than 5 kilograms. With a sail area of approximately 32 square meters, its goal is to fly in Earth orbit to demonstrate control the attitude and orbit and increase the velocity under sunlight pressure.
In this campaign, we will accept your names and messages both from Japan and overseas and carry them on IKAROS and LightSail-1.”
Post your message for the Solar Sail here.
Genetic Light Switches Show That fMRI = Brain Activity
“By switching neurons on and off with beams of light, brain scientists have attempted to settle a question that has long dogged their field: are functional-MRI brain scans, which measure blood flow, really a snapshot of firing neurons?
The answer seems to be “yes”. “It places the fMRI field on a sound footing,” says Karl Deisseroth, a neurologist at Stanford University in California who led the latest study. However, others say fMRI signals can occur when neurons do not fire.
Since the technique was first developed in the early 1990s, research with fMRI scanners has spawned tens of thousands of papers that rely on the assumption that signals captured in the scanners are the result of activity in so-called excitatory neurons, which underlie communication between brain cells, both near and far.
But as fMRI measures only the flow of oxygenated blood, not electrical or molecular changes in the brain, some have suggested that other processes aside from, or as well as, neural excitation might cause fMRI signals.”
Continue reading at New Scientist
Largest-Ever Study On Cancer and Cellphones Finds ‘No Increase In Risk’
“When I was reporting my March 2010 PopSci feature story on the possible health effects of cell phone radiation, I was particularly interested in learning about the Interphone project, a collection of 13 different national studies coordinated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization.
Interphone is the largest completed analysis to date of brain tumor (glioma and meningioma) risk in relation to mobile phone use. When I was writing my piece, none of the scientists I interviewed could or would say much about the study, since it had yet to be published. So not much about Interphone ended up in my story. But when I asked one source familiar with the study’s progress what we would learn once the results appeared, this person said: ‘We’ll learn how to do better studies.’
Well, the Interphone study has finally appeared and, unfortunately, my source was right.
The paper, published this week in the International Journal of Epidemiology, concludes: ‘Overall, no increase in risk of either glioma or meningioma was observed in association with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma, and much less so meningioma, at the highest exposure levels … However, biases and errors limit the strength of the conclusions we can draw from these analyses and prevent a causal interpretation.’”
Read more at Popsci.com (thanks, SuZi)
