Science - OU Community Online

Dr Basiro Davey from the Open University's Faculty of Science has been made an MBE in the New Year's Honours list for services to health and higher education.

Basiro joined the OU in 1976 after completing a Doctorate in Tumour Immunology. She pioneered the development of the Health Sciences curriculum at the OU, including the multidisciplinary U205 Health and disease, S320 Infectious disease and most recently, SDK125 Introducing health sciences.

She was Health Sciences Awards Director for several years until 2009, leading the development of the OU’s undergraduate and postgraduate modules and awards in this interdisciplinary area.

In her long OU career she has produced hundreds of multi-media educational materials for distance-learning modules in many areas of public health, including immunology, epidemiology, communicable diseases, sexually transmitted infections and cancers.

Basiro is an expert in distance learning pedagogy, recognised by an OU Teaching Award in 2010. From 2009 to 2011, she was seconded to the OU’s Health Education and Training (HEAT) programme for Africa, as its Deputy Director (Ethiopia), developing training materials and leading intensive curriculum design and writing workshops with 57 Ethiopian health experts and around a dozen OU colleagues.

Together they produced 13 HEAT modules, which are already being studied by over 1,000 of Ethiopia’s rural Health Extension Workers, on key areas of health promotion and disease prevention, including antenatal care, labour and delivery, environmental health, family planning, nutrition, immunization, communicable and non-communicable diseases and mental health. In 2012 another 5,000 Ethiopian students will study these modules, with further cohorts of 3,000 expected annually thereafter.

Find out more:
Dr Basiro Davey
 

A self-study course aimed at improving the care of patients with inflammatory arthritis is being launched by The Open University in February 2012.

Inflammatory Arthritis – a multidisciplinary approach has been funded by a curriculum development grant from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, and has been developed with the direction and advice of specialist rheumatology nurses. 

The course aims to provide healthcare professionals with specialist knowledge to improve services for patients with inflammatory arthritis, and is also relevant to patients and carers who want to have a deeper understanding of their condition and its treatments. 

It aims to support a person-centred and multidisciplinary approach to caring for people with this long-term condition.

It will give students knowledge of how to identify and monitor inflammatory arthritis using history, disease scores and blood tests, and ensures they are aware of the standards and guidelines that govern the care of patients with the condition.

The course is aimed at a wide range of health and social care professionals including nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, health assistants, community pharmacists, GPs, junior doctors, radiologists, podiatrists, social workers and alternative therapy practitioners.

It is delivered online over a period of up to 18 months, with flexible modules that amount to 50 hours of learning.

 

 

 

Scientists believe they have found an explanation for how toads can apparently predict earthquakes.

Research led by the Open University's Dr Rachel Grant, and Dr Friedemann Freund of NASA, suggests that animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater when an earthquake is about to strike.

The research comes out of Dr Grant's observations in 2009, when she was studying breeding toads in the region outside the Italian city of L'Aquila as part of her OU PhD project. She noticed almost all the toads left the site several days  before a devastating earthquake struck on 6 April. 

“One day there were no toads,” she said. “I was actually very annoyed. I thought my research was all going down the drain. And the earthquake happened, and then they all started coming back the day after.”

When Dr Grant and OU amphibian specialist Professor Tim Halliday published a report in the Journal of Zoology they were contacted by scientists at the US space agency NASA who were studying chemical changes in rocks under extreme stress.   

This led to further research  published this month in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

It says laboratory-based tests have now shown that the Earth's crust could have directly affected the chemistry of the water that the toads were living and breeding in.  

When rocks  are under very high levels of stress they release charged particles, starting a chemical chain of events which can lead to a build up of toxins in groundwater.

Charged particles in the air – known as ions – are known to cause headaches and nausea in humans.

The scientists say their theory needs testing, but they hope it will eventually contribute to more accurate forecasting of earthquakes. 

The science of climate change has been much in the headlines again over the last few weeks. COP17 in Durban, climate sceptics questioning the science of global warming and the release of 5,000 further ‘Climategate’ emails have kept the arguments blazing.

Platform asked Dr Mark Brandon, Polar Oceanographer and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, to explain what scientists have observed about temperature changes and how it affects the Polar Regions.

Satellite observations show the extent of Arctic sea ice has declined over the last 30 years, but that overall Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period. Is there a problem then?

The changes in the Arctic sea ice are not balanced by the changes in the Antarctic sea ice.

It is the volume of Arctic sea ice that is critical. We have extremely good records of the ice thickness and ice extent. It is a fact that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is decreasing in both thickness and extent - so the volume of Arctic ice is decreasing – and these changes in the Arctic are huge.

In the Antarctic it is true that the extent of ice has increased – but by a relatively small amount and we don’t know enough about the thickness to derive the volume.

If you combine the Arctic sea ice and the Antarctic sea ice changes to create a record of the total global ice then you get this picture

The global trend of sea ice downwards and about 36,000 km2 per year.

There has been a net loss of over a million square kilometres of global sea ice extent since satellite records began

The mean volume of arctic sea ice has decreased by something around 50% since the start of the satellite record.



Only this week a publication in Nature described the loss of Arctic sea as:
"The duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years"

Is it true that polar bear populations are rising, and not falling as reported?

Many bear populations are dropping, as we say.

Longer summers with no ice are probably the main reason why many polar bear populations are dropping. So what is happening to the bears? Different things in different parts of the Arctic, but here is what the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission say about it:

In 2009, of the 19 recognised subpopulations of polar bears, 8 are in decline, 1 is increasing, 3 are stable and 7 don’t have enough data to draw any conclusions. Figure 1 below compares the data for 2005 and 2009.

It is clear that the area of red (bear population trend decreasing) has significantly increased from 2005 to 2009 and the area of green (bear population trend increasing).

 

 

Recent research findings show that the increased evaporation from the Arctic ocean, as a result of warming, will cause more cloud cover, thus counteracting its adverse effect, so isn’t that good news?

Cloud feedback is not thought to be as strongly negative feedback, so this argument is outdated and fundamentally wrong.

The idea is that clouds reflect the solar radiation from the planet which would mean there would be less reaching the ground to warm up. It is a nice simple idea but this view is outdated and very likely completely wrong.

It depends on where the clouds form. Low altitude clouds will reflect more heat (what he is saying) whereas high altitude ones trap it (which he doesn’t mention). Overall there is an increasing amount of evidence that increasing the overall cloud cover will actually increase the warming.

There have been reports of a modest increase in mean global temperature (about half a degree Centigrade) during the last quarter of the 20th century. For this century, the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Office said there has been no further global warming. Have we stopped the trend?

Global mean temperature is not polar mean temperatures and it is inaccurate to quote the former when referring to the latter

The global mean temperature is derived from averaging data from all over the planet. Some parts are warming and some are cooling. Overall the global trend is relentlessly upwards.

Focussing on a very short timescale, e.g. 10 years, would not be an accurate reflection of the global trend which is relentlessly upwards. So let's look at the Arctic. This is the trend of annual average Arctic temperature for a meteorological data set from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the range 80-90N over the last 60 years.

The trend is approximately -32C in 1950 to approximately -25C by 2010.

The winter temperature of the Arctic has warmed by a huge amount since 195.

 

OU astronomy students will have more opportunities to view the heavens from home, thanks to a second remotely-controlled telescope installed at the OU's partner observatory in Majorca.

The original remote telescope, PIRATE, (pictured left and below) based at Majorca's Observatori Astronomic (OAM), allows students and researchers to observe the Majorcan sky while sitting at their computers in the UK.

PIRATE is a serious research telescope which is used to hunt for exo-planets– planets which are orbiting around distant stars. Students on S382 Astrophysics   and SXP288 Practical Science:physics and astronomy also get to operate it so they can learn to make research-grade measurements of the night sky. 

They connect to PIRATE from home via a web interface and submit commands to remotely open or close the dome, point the telescope, and get images of the night sky on their computer screens.

As well as having access to the power of a professional 17 inch telescope, they also benefit from the clearer skies of Majorca which give better viewing conditions than in the UK.

Now the University of Hamburg has funded a second remote telescope at OAM which is modelled on PIRATE, and set up using OU expertise.

The OU and OAM will share the facility with Hamburg University, as well as collaborating on research and teaching projects on the PIRATE telescope.

Dr Ulrich Kolb from CEPSAR, the OU's Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research, says PIRATE is also being upgraded with new software so it can be programmed to make observations automatically overnight, and the results can be viewed next day.

But this facility will be for researchers only, he says. "Students will still be asked to supervise the telescope in person because they need to learn about the issues involved in observing, and that is best done by live control."

He added: "I think the facilities we have built up at OAM are really leading the way, both in terms of how they are operated, and in terms of giving access to students."

Find out more

• Inauguration ceremony for new telescope 

 

A device developed by The Open University that can turn the motorway traffic roar or inner-city bustle into ‘music’ has won a Noise ‘Oscar’.

The Organ of Corti recycles sound from the environment, enhancing or reducing the frequencies to create a new soundscape for the listener.

Conceived by composer David Prior and architect Frances Crow as sound artists Liminal Ltd, the Organ is a series of cylinders arranged to focus or diffuse sound waves.

Keith Attenborough OU Professor of Acoustics described it as: “A meeting of physics and art”.

His expertise in the field of acoustic crystals led the pair to create the organ, or rather two – named after parts of the inner ear.
 
Each was designed to react with different soundscapes.

One, called Cochlea Unwound, is a permanent installation recycling the sounds of water at a weir in Worcester.

The Organ of Corti itself was employed as a travelling version to be ‘parked’ by a motorway, on a busy street or at a festival with members of the public immersing themselves in the sound it shapes.

Last year the Organ won a £50,000 new music prize and, in November 2011 the Noise Abatement Society John Connell Award for Innovation was jointly made to Liminal Ltd and Keith Attenborough.

At a reception at the House of Commons the NAS judges said: “This unique and beautiful experimental instrument recycles noise from the environment.

“It does not make any sound of its own, but rather uses sounds already present by framing them in a new way.

“By recycling surplus sounds from our environment, it offers new and pleasurable ways of listening to what is already there.”

Keith said the organ’s arrangement of four metre tall acrylic poles “does interesting things to sound.”

They enhance or reduce certain characteristics of the sound and, he said: “They get people to listen to sound a bit more and invent their own kind of music as they move through the sculpture.”

He said he was pleased the Organ had been recognised again - particularly as he had worked with Noise Abatement Society founder the late John Connell in the 1970s.

"I was working on the first OU Technology Foundation Course and we had 4,000 students with noise meters.

"We were able to create the first noise maps," he said. 

• See more about The Organ of Corti or play the video. here: