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LEADING EDGE
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Leading Edge brings you the latest news from the world of science. Geoff Watts celebrates discoveries as soon as they're being talked about - on the internet, in coffee rooms and bars; often before they're published in journals. And he gets to grips with not just the science, but with the controversies and conversation that surround it.
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LISTEN AGAIN Ìý30 min |
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"If what interests you are new and exciting ideas, it's science you should be turning to. And whether it's the Human Genome Project or the origins of the Universe, Leading Edge is the place to hear about them."
Geoff Watts |
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| Caulobacter crescentus,Ìýnature's strongest glue (credit: Yves Brun)Ìý |
Super Sticky Bacterium
The Caulobacter bacterium has given up its secret of being able to produce possibly the strongest glue in nature. It lives in either salty or fresh water and needs its glue to withstand huge forces from waves lapping over the stones and rocks it rests on.
Yves Brun and Jay Tang have published their work in this week's journal PNAS and show they have been able to genetically engineer the bacteria to release the glue. The next step is to try and release the glue from the surface. Considering it'sÌýfour to five times stronger than any super-glue commercially available, this is proving slightly problematic!
Cracking Carbon Chains
Chemist Professor Alan Goldman of Rutgers University in New Jersey USA and his team have worked out a way of making the less useful by-products of the petroleum industry more helpful to us.
By using the Nobel Prize-winning chemical process of Olefin Metathesis, they have managed to re-arrange chains of carbon atoms to produce useful short chain molecules of around two carbons and longer chains of ten carbon atoms. These chains are useful because the shorter ones can be used as natural gas fuel and the longer ones make a good diesel. Although this work is still in its initial stages, it could provide an intermediate answer to our fuel shortage problems.
San Francisco Earthquake Anniversary
On the morning of April 18th 1906, an earthquake reported to be force 7.8 or 7.9 on the RichterÌýscale hit San Francisco killing over 3000 people and making over half of the city'sÌý650,000 residents homeless. One hundred years on, they still live in fear of another, similar earthquake rupturing the San Andreas Fault, or other the fault lines in the area. Have they managed to protect the city from devastation or will the next earthquake prove too much?Ìý
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SciTalk
Novelists are writers, gifted at making up stories and characters that, with any luck, have us glued to the book to find out their fate. Scientists write sometimes impenetrable research papers that require vast knowledge of the subject to even understand the new concepts discovered. When the two come together, however, a wonderful thing happens.
Geoff is joined by earth scientist Daniela Schmidt from Bristol University and novelist Liz Jensen (author of The Ninth Life of Louis Drax) to talk about their collaboration to provide Liz with a more scientifically factual basis for her next novel that's all about a huge climatic event.
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