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An ongoing partnership between the Open University and the BBC, the series aims to deliver informative and challenging content that appeals to all ages, explaining the scientific principles that shape the world with energy, scale and spectacle.

In the first episode, the team investigates why petrol costs so much, and whether we can use science to make fuel for free. 

Liz experiences life on an oil rig, Jem and Dallas compete to make their own DIY fuel alternatives, and Jem discovers the link between fossil fuels and a recent earthquake in Lancashire.

The Open University continues to support Bang Goes the Theory via our OpenLearn pages. Viewers can order a free ‘Matrix of Modern Life’ poster that explores the colourful connections between different parts of science, engineering and technology, and each week we will be highlighting OpenLearn articles and interactive tools that complement the programme content.

My post about ‘climate dyspeptics’ has won a bit of attention here and there from the ‘sceptic’ blogosphere. That’s what I hoped for. But it seems that for some readers I may not have laid out clearly enough that my suggestion that we use the term climate dyspeptic in place of climate sceptic was intended as a joke (admittedly a weak one), and part of my point was to push right over the end the idea of constructing clumsy binaries of ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’. If you’ve arrived here for the first time there are a couple of other posts elsewhere on my blog on why I think climate change is a distinctive cultural and political problem. But here I just want to ask for an end to name-calling.

‘Warmists are either stupid or dishonest.’

‘Of course climate deniers are not merely stupid, ignorant… They are also dishonest, manipulative, and arrogant.’

These are two sample quotes picked out in a few seconds of Googling. It’s not good is it? Climate change science and policy has risen in prominence in parallel with social media, where distance and anonymity can erode the kind of good manners almost all of us manage to muster in real public places. Sociologists exploring racism or other kinds of discrimination talk of processes of ‘othering’ that make it possible for one group of people to dehumanise another.

Terms like climate sceptic, denier and contrarian have served to cluster anyone with some good questions about climate change science and policy into a discrete group. This has solidified into an identity. ‘We’re climate deniers you know’ said a professional couple to me during a good-natured and intelligent conversation in a bar. Neither were stupid or dishonest, and I don’t think they would have thought that of me, although we disagreed on some significant points. None of those disagreements were really about science – at root they were all about how we thought about economics, politics, risk and the future. I got the sense that they felt that their thoughts about these sides of the question were not just being ignored but being buried under the edifice of ‘climate science’.

'I’ve worked with researchers from quite a range of disciplines that contribute in one way or another to climate science research. It is hilarious to consider any of them stupid or professionally dishonest'

But isn’t it patently absurd to suggest that anyone is ‘against climate science’. Similarly it is odd to my mind that some social researchers and commentators talk of climate change science ‘beliefs’. Very few people have beliefs as such about numeracy or grammar, and climate science describes researchers’ attempts to make the best sense possible of a complex set of interactions. It is like saying you are against mathematics or English language: it's a nonsense to oppose an area of inquiry. But this research area has sketched out potential hazards that most involved in it suggest hold potentially great significance for society, policy and politics. That’s where things hot up, and the name calling starts.

I’ve worked with researchers from quite a range of disciplines that contribute in one way or another to climate science research. It is hilarious to consider any of them stupid or professionally dishonest. They’ve all chosen to work in academia when their skills set could have provided them with vastly greater salaries. They work (almost all remunerated at fixed pay scales) on questions that interest them. A small number have behaved defensively – even badly  – in the face of some very nasty treatment, much of it in the form of (often anonymous) ad hominems.

I suggest we should let the numerous and varied projects that add up to climate science ‘run in the background’ and ask them to keep coming out and telling us about the new things they’ve found now and again (the IPCC would do this a whole lot more effectively if they spent a good chunk more on communications. I hope the blogosphere will support them in that…). Digital and social media make it easier for that work to be more transparent in process, and indeed for more people who aren’t engaged in science professionally to comment and participate.

But the real action in terms of citizen and political debate should be around how we think about risk and the future. Everyone should feel free to express an opinion around what we should do about the difficult knowledge around climate change without being called one sort of name or another.

(PS: I’m assuming, hoping, the bit about beheading me was metaphoric?)

(PPS: Realise I’ve rather gone on about these themes recently but its now out of my system for a while I hope. I expect to post something about a new book I’ve co-edited in the next couple of weeks

For more posts from Joe Smith, see his Citizen Joe Smith blog.

Open University researchers have developed a three-dimensional (3D) model of human tissue that could one day help us to treat spinal cord injuries.

The 3D cell culture system mimics the way injured and non-injured cells interact following damage to the spinal cord. 

The research is led by Open University lecturer in health sciences, Dr James Phillips.

A research paper entitled Engineering an integrated cellular interface in 3-dimensional hydrogel cultures permits monitoring of reciprocal astrocyte and neuronal responses on the OU's research database and is available online and will be published in the journal Tissue Engineering in August.

Further information

Media release

About biofuels
“A biofuel is a source of energy that is derived from material that was once living. This sounds simple enough, but there are so many ways of generating biofuels that things quickly get complicated.

“In its simplest form, burning wood on a fire for warmth is using a biofuel. The wood was once alive and part of a living tree and it became ‘energyrich’ through the process of photosynthesis. This, as many of us know, is where the plant uses the energy from sunlight to allow it to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into sugars, and ultimately into all the carbon containing structures within the tree. These structures contain energy that has been converted from the sunlight.

“Burning the wood allows this ‘trapped energy’ to be liberated as heat and also light. Indeed, any plant material that can be burnt can be used in a similar way. “You may not be aware that some of the electricity you use is produced by burning biomass. The largest power station in the UK, Drax in North Yorkshire, produces around seven per cent of the UK’s electricity and burns around 300,000 tonnes of biomass a year. It is looking to increase the amount of biofuel it uses to around 1.5 million tonnes, at the expense of the fossil fuel coal that it normally uses.

Advantages of biofuel over fossil fuel
“There are advantages to using biofuels compared with fossil fuels such as coal that are derived from plants that were alive millions of years ago. To produce a fossil fuel, plants died, became buried and subsequently compressed and ultimately produced fossil fuels such as coal and oil, which are energy-rich in the same way as living plant material is.

“Burning fossil fuels, however, releases both the energy and the carbon dioxide which was trapped millions of years before. The energy is useful, but the carbon dioxide is widely accepted to be a cause of global warming. “Burning a biofuel, however, releases carbon dioxide that was trapped only a few years prior. It is therefore classed as ‘carbon neutral’ and won’t cause an increase in global warming. “We have already seen that wood can be used as biofuel but there is a lot of interest in using certain types of grasses such as Miscanthus which can grow rapidly, using minimal inputs of fertiliser, and can be grown on land that is not used for growing agricultural crops.

These last two points are important, as producing fertiliser requires energy and so it is nonsensical to use energy-requiring fertiliser to produce something that is going to be used as an energy source. Also, using land for growing biofuel that could be used for producing agricultural crops is hard to justify in a time of increasing food shortage.

“Indeed, the increases in the global cost of wheat in 2008/09 were partly caused by poor worldwide harvests, but also by the USA using around 25 per cent of its harvest to produce biofuel for transport purposes.

Using other fuels
“The transport fuels petrol and diesel can both be substituted by liquid biofuels. Both the sugars and starches that are found in plants’ stems and seeds can be fermented to produce alcohol such as ethanol. This is what happens when beer is produced – barley seeds rich in starch have the starch converted to sugar and then yeasts break the sugar down to produce ethanol. In the case of beer, we drink the ethanol but it can be used to produce bioethanol and used as a replacement for petrol. “Biodiesel is produced in a slightly different way: the oils found in many seeds and nuts of plants such as sunflowers, oil seed rape or palm oil can be “The problem with using seeds and nuts as a biofuel is that you are using a potential food source for fuel purposes”

The problem with using seeds and nuts is that you are using a potential food source for fuel purposes. Additionally, growing huge areas of plants such as palm oil, some of which is used for biofuel, has caused large tracts of biodiverse rainforest habitat
to be cut down, threatening such species as the orangutan.

“Scientists have found solutions to such problems. Some transport biofuels such as the biodiesel produced from the fruit of the Jatropha tree do not have such disadvantages. Jatropha fruit is inedible and, also importantly, the tree can tolerate drought conditions and grow on land unsuitable for agricultural crops. One example where Jatropha has been used successfully is in India where the diesel train that runs from Delhi to Mumbai uses 15 per cent biodiesel derived from Jatropha. “Biofuels, though, are not a full answer to our energy needs.

Many experts believe that biofuels have an increasing and significant role to play in the generation of our fuels, but in the UK particularly there is extensive pressure on our land resource from population growth and the requirements for both housing and for food production. Biofuels are part of the answer, alongside other renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar power.

“In some countries with greater land reserves than the UK, biofuels could be even more useful. In Brazil, for instance, 40 per cent of cars run on bioethanol and there are plans to increase this percentage. “The overall answer to our fuel issues is to use less fuel in the first instance, to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, increase our reliance on biofuels and to work for a solution that requires global initiatives to maximise the use of non-agricultural land for producing biofuel crops.”
 

Find out more:

• S173 Plants and people
• Photo by: Matt Murf

Every astronomer's dream came true for Open University astronomy student Stefan Holmes, when a rare and dramatic star explosion happened on the night he was observing the skies.

Stefan, a PhD student, captured an image of the 'Type 1a'  supernova as it appeared only four hours after the explosion, using the Open University's robotic astronomical telescope, PIRATE. 

The supernova,  which occurred 20 million light-years away in the spiral galaxy M101, (see PIRATE image below) was the closest  explosion of its type observed for decades, and the first to be available for detailed investigations with modern-day astronomical detectors.

“This is a great advancement," said Dr Ulrich Kolb, OU Senior Lecturer and Director of the PIRATE facility."The spectral appearance of type Ia supernovae have long suggested exploding white dwarfs as the culprits responsible for the explosion, but this new research is effectively proof of their white dwarf nature.

“It demonstrates the capabilities of small- to medium-aperture telescopes to contribute to world-leading research.”

Stefan, who is among the team conducting the PIRATE research programme, said: “It was great to have been able to capture this image and be part of such an exciting outcome. It was a case of being at the right place at the right time."

The international team's finding is the subject of an article in the January 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters series (2012, ApJ, Issue 744, L17) and has been presented this week at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

For more information see OU news release. 

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