As a biologist, I know that a scientist has to work hard; there is a lot to remember, but the physicists’ workload has just been chopped back a little with the re-classification of Pluto. They only have to memorise the names of eight planets now, instead of the weighty nine they once had to contend with.

On August 24 2006, a vote by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) at their 2006 General Assembly saw Pluto stripped of its planet status. For fans of Pluto, it was a sad occasion. But it came about because astronomers have never really formalised what a planet actually is – until now.

The debate started after the recent discovery of new objects in our solar system that were larger than Pluto. A Planet Definition Committee, comprised of historians, writers and astronomers met in July to draft a new planetary definition. The much-publicised proposal to add three new planets to our solar system failed to gain approval by astronomers.

A celestial body in our solar system must now meet three conditions to be a planet: It must be in orbit around the sun; have sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces and assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and have enough mass to clear the neighbourhood around its orbit.

Pluto does not have enough mass to satisfy the third condition, but it does fit into a new category of ‘dwarf planet’, which describes a non-satellite object without enough mass to clear its orbit. Of the three new planet contenders – Ceres, Eris and Charon – Ceres and Eris have also been placed in this category and Charon simply remains Pluto’s moon.

It has long been clear that Pluto is different from other planets. Not only is it much smaller – about 1600 miles in diameter – but its elongated orbit is tilted in relation to other planets, causing it to be nearer to the sun than Neptune for part of its 248-year journey.

The discovery of an object nicknamed ‘Xena’ (but now officially named ‘Eris’) put Pluto under pressure. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, they showed that this icy Kuiper Belt object, 10 billion miles from the sun, was slightly larger than Pluto. Astronomers reasoned that if Pluto is a planet, so is Eris. But what if, using ever-improving instruments, they make further discoveries in the Kuiper Belt? To avoid a large and confusing number of planets, many of which might not merit the title, the committee chose a more restrictive definition.

By declaring Pluto the first in a special subcategory, astronomers may have hoped to console Pluto fans, but online petitions indicate that they have failed. At the meeting, disagreements were also evident, most notably between dynamicists and geologists.
The meeting failed in a close vote to approve the name ‘Plutonians’ for the dwarf planets orbiting beyond Neptune, which was an alternative to the original suggestion, ‘Plutons’, to which geologists objected. Owen Gingerich, chair of the committee, said that the process of arriving at a workable resolution was like diplomacy in the Middle East. Of 10,000 astronomers, only 428 were present for the vote, a minority voted on the last day to add the third clarifying criterion.

For 100 hours after the decision was made, a petition circulated amongst planetary scientists and astronomers as evidence of the strength of feeling. It said,”We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU’s definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.” The petition was signed by 300 prominent planetary science experts.

Even Gingerich is not satisfied with the new category of ‘dwarf’ planets, describing the term as linguistically preposterous. Likewise, Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, describes the decision as a ‘terrible mess’ and dislikes the unscientific idea of limiting the number of planets. Although the third criterion is intended to cover objects orbiting in the Asteroid or Kuiper Belts, Stern claims that other planets have also failed to absorb or knock away their orbital debris.

But coming up with a new definition was no easy matter. The committee was specifically charged with considering social and historical context when coming up with defining criteria. The choice of ’roundness’ as a criterion for planetary status reflects the committee’s sensitivity to the broad cultural significance and use of the term. Likewise, moons were maintained as distinct entities from planets.

Robin Catchpole of Cambridge University Institute of Astronomy believes that the new definition is the lesser of two evils. Although he would have preferred to keep Pluto on historical grounds, he had been unhappy about the original proposal to allow 12 planets. He would have preferred the term ‘minor planet’ to the term ‘dwarf planet’, but believes that the names given to objects are not too important.

Perhaps the IAU’s task was an impossible one. As far as the public was concerned, the scientists were in the familiar position of being unable to provide the certain and watertight definition required of them. Conversely, some astronomers feel that they accommodated cultural context at the expense of good science.

With the IAU currently considering a dozen candidate dwarf planets, the argument about how to categorise them may have only just begun, and where does this leave Pluto? Probably just in a cold dark place somewhere teetering only just on the edge of our defined universe!

To look at it, you wouldn’t suspect a blob of cells of being on the world’s most-wanted-list of-viruses-to-find-a-cure-for. In an age where, let’s face it, size really does matter, this one only has nine genes in its arsenal, after all.

Yet Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, is one of the most dangerous organisms on the planet. It takes hundreds of thousands of victims, allowing killer cancers and other fatal infections to invade their systems. With antiviral treatments it can be warded off – but never stopped. But why is it such a natural-born killer? And if the HIV virus is really the best of the molecular best, will we ever be good – or smart – enough to stop it?

‘The gay disease.’ Not only is this a homophobic categorisation of HIV but, today more than ever, it’s an ignorant one. HIV is now more prevalent in the heterosexual community than ever before. If we’re going to get statistical – and in health debates, that’s near impossible to avoid – 75 per cent of HIV sufferers are not gay; the only label we can assign most of them is that of living in sub-Saharan Africa.

Delving further into the statistical well, then: by the end of 2005, according to the World Health Organisation, 25 million people had died from HIV/ AIDS-related illnesses. A further 2.9 million died this year (and we’re still counting) – 0.38 million of these were children. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of infected individuals jumped from 38.5 million to 39.5 million – close to the total population of Argentina.

If we zoom in on individual countries, our view becomes even bleaker. When two-fifths of any sub-Saharan nation are carriers of HIV, ‘crisis’ seems a reasonable label. What is a reasonable response? The support of the international community? Yet it’s not a simple hand-into-pocket job. Although modest resources can yield valuable returns – if targeted effectively – combating HIV on a global scale will not be cheap. The Copenhagen Consensus of 2004 estimates that $27 billion is needed to prevent 28 million cases of HIV. Investing in HIV prevention, however, makes sense, in both warm humanitarian and cold, hard financial terms. Experts predict that economic benefits outweigh investment by a factor of 40. The billion dollar question, then: can the world afford not to make this investment?

Philanthropy, an evermore popular choice for the benevolent celebrity, may provide part of the solution. The “fondest dream” of Bill Gates’s wife Melinda is the discovery of an HIV vaccine. The couple have pumped $32 billion into their Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, lending serious financial muscle to this search.

The hunt is an increasingly difficult one, however. HIV/AIDS is accelerating, with the rate of new infections flying from 4 million in 2005 to 4.3 million in 2006. Most worryingly, 95 per cent of new infections are in regions unlikely to have the resources to respond. Consider Lesotho, in which over a quarter of the adult population carries HIV. In 1995, life expectancy was nearly 60 years. AIDS-related mortality has slashed predictions of life expectancy in 2015 from 69 to a disastrous 34 years. AIDS primarily strikes young adults, unlike other threats more likely to kill the very young or old. Half of new infections are in the 15-24 age group, with 6000 new cases every day.

Economies, denied their most active workers, will suffer too. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, slowed growth in agricultural output will lead to food insecurity in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia by 2010. Weakened economies will have fewer resources to invest in the education, health and nutrition of the young.

6.8 million people in developing nations are in immediate need of life-saving drugs, but only 1.65 million will receive them. Antiretroviral drugs are simply too expensive. James Cochrane, director of Glaxo’s international division states, “Even at 10 cents a day, many African governments can’t afford it, so at $2 a day, there’s no way.”

One prevention strategy backed by the current American administration is the “ABC” approach. It seeks to replace risky behaviour among young people with safer alternatives: “A” stands for abstinence; “B” stands for being faithful; “C” stands for condom use. This approach has shown some success – in Uganda, for example, although this resulted from a combination of factors, including behaviour change, post-war social stabilisation, strong Government leadership and emphasis on voluntary testing and counselling.

Nevertheless, there are influential dissenting voices. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa sparked controversy with his belief that poverty, rather than HIV, is the cause of AIDS. Pope Benedict XVI believes, “The traditional teaching of the church has proven the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS”. Archbishop Raphael Ndingi Nzeki goes further, opining “AIDS… has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms”. It is difficult to conceive of any rational mindset in which condoms, which reduce the risk of HIV infection by 90%, could represent a greater evil than the global HIV epidemic. A divided message is dangerous. Who should we believe?

So is it bleak news for future generations, or can we counter what has become the plague of the 21st Century? There are hopes. The ideal strategy is to vaccinate against HIV infection, and many believe this to be achievable, but the reality of it is not an easy one. The way HIV replicates means that it can induce massive changes in its genome known as mutations. Its mutation rate is so high that in several generations of viral replication the new viruses are almost entirely different from the original viral infection. Anti-viral drugs are also being developed to prevent those who are infected with HIV from going on and developing AIDS.

Again, with such a variable virus, this will be tough. There are, however, parts of the virus that remain the same, and current research suggests that it may be possible to make a universal vaccine. There is currently no viable cure for HIV. But, with continual investment and research, the likelihood of one being discovered is higher now than ever.

I’m all for science fiction, (I have indeed been known to read the New Scientist from time to time), so imagine my surprise a couple of nights ago when I found myself wincing horribly and wishing that my broken sofa would eat me. I had, for the first time in my life, experienced the film Contact. The general gist is: human scientist contacts alien race, alien race tells us how to make machine and along with some flashy CGI Jodie Foster ends up a few million light years from home. I hope that from this brief but acute description I can enlighten you to my turmoil and for all the people out there who are still mistaking War of the Worlds for a real political broadcast, the next 1000 words or so should, I hope, give a sense of perspective.

Firstly I must make it clear that I do believe that there is some form of life other than ours; it is far more implausible that our planet alone is occupied than the converse. However I do have concerns as to whether the massively evolved brains and feeble bodies stereotypical of extraterrestrials are credible. Having said this, we may soon find those elusive beings. In our search for life, and in an attempt to isolate the beginnings of the universe, new radio telescopes are being commissioned. These shiny new receptacles are designed to pick up radio waves emitted by neutral hydrogen molecules in the early, primordial universe. In times past (billions of years ago in fact) the wavelength of these signals was 21cm, but as a result of universe expansion this wavelength has stretched to several meters, corresponding to a frequency of a few thousand megahertz. It is a lucky coincidence then that the signals constantly being pumped out by us in the form of TV signals, radio and radar fall in a similar range, meaning if an alien culture is listening out for the local weather or watching alien Family Guy then we are increasingly likely to find them. Telescopes such as these should also be able to discern the tilt and revolution of a planet, as well as speculate whether there is surface water present, just in case there aren’t any inhabitants.

One of the more reassuring points made recently is that alien life (no matter how basic) can exist throughout the universe; Life’s little building blocks seem to lurk even in the darkest corners. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are readily abundant in space, seem to have more in common with Earthly molecules than originally thought. In late October 2005, Douglas Hudgins and colleagues at the NASA-run Ames Research Centre in California showed that many of these compounds contain nitrogen, one of the principle components in proteins and DNA, both necessary for the perpetuation of life, but also required in chloroplasts and haemoglobin, both of which are indicative of higher life – so the potential is there, even if it hasn’t been realised in the immediate vicinity of Earth.

Once you have PAHs scattered all over the place, all you really need is a star to give light and heat and coax molecules to rearrange, combine and break down. There has often been some question about stars and their actual importance in the formation of life. After all, a lot of stars are binary (i.e. two stars per solar system), they can be too hot, too cold, and the way they were thought to form was generally seen as not conducive to the formation of planets. Stellar nurseries are where stars form; massive gas giants about three light years across churn out clusters of stars, often in sibling pairs. However, research submitted earlier this year to the Astrophysical Journal suggests that red dwarfs, which are suns with a lower energy, are born singularly, meaning there is a greater chance that an extra planetary system, such as our solar system, could occur, without the worry of a jealous sister star ripping us to shreds.

Having said this I realise I haven’t really discussed the likelihood of finding ET on a planet near Earth. That could be because we have been looking in totally the wrong place; for years we have been looking at stars, picking out the wobbling silhouette of a terrestrial planet and mapping it down just in case. Ultimately though the future of alien life may not be on these shadows at all, they could be on our moon.

Ian Crawford, a researcher from Birkbeck College, London told SETI researchers earlier this year that if in the next 20-30 years we land on the moon again, we should sift through a portion of its surface looking for elusive alien artefacts. It is not actually as ridiculous as it seems; both Voyager 1 and 2 carry gold plaques containing information as pictures and sounds, which are meant to give any alien civilisation an accurate representation of what we, the human race, is about. In 2004 it was suggested in Nature that this transient “message in a bottle” approach may be the best way of telling other intelligent races what we as humans are about, but we are talking interstellar distances, so if you were waiting for a reply, you may be holding out for a while. Far-fetched, I appreciate, and scientists seem to back this up. After all ,some 382Kg of lunar material was brought back to earth by astronauts, and they’ve been through it and found nothing of interest, in fact rocks from Earth and Mars show more evidence of impact than that of our majestic satellite.

So the jury is still out on whether we are likely to find extra terrestrial life soon: we can plough the moon for clues; look at distant planets and dream; attempt to listen in on ET’s evening news, or we can down a bottle of Sprite, stick a note in and send it into space… failing that I can always find a film with Jodie Foster and no aliens!

Welcome to the University of York! A phrase which by now you will no doubt be familiar with and more than likely a little tired of hearing. First I must ask you to calm down; breathe deeply and continue to read. I do appreciate that as a fresher you have perhaps just looked at the front page of Vision, realised that it is poorly laid out and has content to rival an NHS finance leaflet, and sworn never to approach campus news again. That is why this column is dedicated to the science of being a fresher: why you will inevitably wake up feeling a bit groggy and why alcohol affects you so much. I will also attempt to answer the ultimate question: can you live on beer?

So what does alcohol do to you? Well, you have fought your way to the bar and you have your tall, glistening pint. The main alcohol in drinks is known as ethanol. As you drink, the alcohol is absorbed in your stomach: about 20% of total alcohol absorption occurs here, the other 80% is absorbed in the small intestine. From this point the alcohol is dissolved in the blood and carried into the tissues. All tissues are affected, from your muscles to your brain. The only exempt tissue is fat, so it is a myth that fatter people have a higher alcohol tolerance; it’s more likely due to the increase in muscle required to move larger people. Blood alcohol levels increase significantly within 20 minutes. At this point the tissues become progressively more saturated and the ‘tipsy’ feeling kicks in. Obviously, lots of factors affect the rate of alcohol absorption: whether you have eaten; concentration of alcohol and whether the drink is carbonated.

There are actually defined physiological states which alcohol induces: with a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of less than 0.12% you are in the phase known as euphoria; the following stages are excitement, confusion, stupor, coma and death, the latter occurring if the BAC level hits more than 50% of total blood volume.

So you’ve been out drinking. You’ve managed to get home, asked the porter for your forgotten door code, and collapsed semi-clothed on your bed. Wishing the room would stop moving, you fall asleep. Your body works tirelessly through the night and most of the morning removing the alcohol from your body, at approximately 1 unit per hour. When you wake up you are more than likely to have removed most of the alcohol from your body, but you feel awful. Two factors are involved in the great student hangover. The first is dehydration: alcohol inhibits anti-diuretic hormone, so your kidneys don’t reabsorb as much water as they filter through your blood, thus you have a full bladder and very low blood water level. Also, the drinks we have don’t just contain alcohol and water; they contain other compounds known as congeners. These can give flavour, but also give a wretched hangover as they are toxins and effectively poison the body. There are more of these in less purified beverages such as red wine and bourbons; drinking white wine and vodka-mixers is generally better, and research has shown that 33% of people who drank ‘dark’ drinks were hungover compared to only 3% of people who stuck to ‘white’ drinks.

So what can be done to help with these self inflicted student maladies? Hair of the Dog, despite being popular, doesn’t work; it puts off the inevitable, and puts more pressure on the liver to remove toxins, making the final hangover worse. Coffee and burnt toast may help; the carbon found on burnt toast could act in a similar way to activated charcoal used to filter poisons through the body. Coffee is a stimulant, but also a diuretic, so perhaps not the best thing to rehydrate your body with.

The best cure seems to be bananas and eggs. Bananas contain a lot of potassium, a crucial neural electrolyte lost during dehydration, so bananas can alleviate the headache commonly found with a hangover. Eggs contain cysteine which breaks down the hangover-causing toxin acetaldehyde. Fruit juice though seems to be the friend of the student; it contains fructose to give you an energy boost and has been shown to speed up the loss of toxins. It also contains vitamins to replace those which were lost when drinking.

If you fancy something a bit special and don’t think fruit juice is for you, Ergopharma have come up with the ‘beer neutralizer,’ which its creators claim can remove congeners – so no hangovers! It also prevents the break-down of starches and complex carbohydrates, eliminating the worry of those beer belly-producing carbs!

As for the ultimate question (to which I hope to give an answer more useful than 42): can you live on beer? This question was posed to the best of the best when New Scientist published it in its ‘Last Word’ section. One contributor showed that one pint alone can offer more than 5% RDA of vitamins B2, B6 and B9. However, essential vitamins such as vitamins D, C and A are lacking. Truth be told no one really knows; it’s too unethical an experiment (although I know at least a few of you would disagree). The closest anyone has come was during the 1756-63 seven years war. The physician to the British Naval Fleet took three crews on three ships, each of which had a spirits allowance. He gave one ship, the Grampus, large amounts of beer as well as the spirits allowance. The Daedalus and the Tortoise were just allowed spirits; at the end of the war the spirit based ships had 112 and 62 men needing hospitalisation respectively, the Grampus however only needed 13.

I’m not sure what this says for early medical research, but it’s bottoms up to beer, the most medicinal drink of all!

This week it surfaced in the news that a letter written by Charles Darwin – one of the original proponents in the theory of evolution – is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s. The letter was written in October 1980 in the aftermath of his landmark work Origin of Species, and shows Darwin’s modest view on what he had proposed and his lack of shock that his peers were dubious about this ‘new’ idea.

Natural selection and the theory of evolution is still seen as one of the most revolutionary pieces of scientific thinking, and is classically marked as the point where human creation found a viable scientific footing. Human evolution is a subject which is often not greatly considered, but one which is critically important. It gives us a glimpse of where we have come from, who we are and ultimately where we may, or indeed may not, end up. Human evolution is also a contentious subject not only for the obvious religious implications, but also for being shrouded in arrogance, lies and treachery.

Before I begin the story of human evolution, I apologise for some of the scientific names used, and for the unscientific nature of the information, but when compiling information such as this the majority of it is speculative. As far as we know, humans began as a four legged ape-like creature, that to be honest is wholly unremarkable, known as Proconsul. This creature wandered across the increasingly arid regions of what is now Africa. The original and best Proconsul fossils were found in the 1930s and still reside in London’s Natural History museum. Proconsul is similar in both form and characteristics to modern day monkeys, as it has a long slim body, rather than the broad chest of humans and other apes. There were many species of Proconsul living about 20 million years ago, so the fossil record for these creatures is vast.

It is believed that a group of creatures known as the Dryopithecines were the next link in our evolution. Members of this group were effectively Apes with reduced teeth, indeed this is the first point in our evolution where we see a vertical face, with no muzzle, – something that we take for granted. There were many Dryopithecines, but only one is really relevant to our story: Kenyapithecus, the first real ancestor of humans.

Australopithecus seems to be the next in the path to humanity. This ape like creature has similar jaw to ours, and there is significant evidence to suggest that Australopithecus walked upright, since it has similar feet to us.

So, thus far, we have a flat-faced ape-like creature that can walk upright. Okay, I know I’m asking a lot, but stretch your imagination a bit and you can almost see how it only takes a few simple steps from Australopithecus to a recognisable modern day human.

When I say ‘simple’, all we have to do is increase our brain size. The best analogy I can think of is to imagine a single measure of whisky: it has a volume of 25ml, so it would take 60 measures to fill the volume of our brain, but it would only take about 20 to fill the volume of Australopithecus. We have therefore actually managed to increase our brain volume by 3 times in the space of 2.5 million years.

Our most famous ancestor is perhaps Homo erectus. Unlike its name suggests, it was not the first of the upright hominids, but is a very close relative of us, having a similar brain size and utilising relatively complex stone tools.

Homo erectus is the first case where archaeological evidence has been found to suggest a global population… The hominids, at last, after 19 million years, had ventured out of Africa!
The most exciting race of human evolution has only really lasted a few hundred thousand years. This is the race between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis.

The Neanderthals, as they are more commonly known, were our most abundant contemporaries (our other contemporary being Homo floresiensis, which was discovered, confined to the island Flores in 2003). The Neanderthals were remarkably similar to us, and, in many cases, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis are classed as mere subsets of the same species. Modern reconstructions of the Neanderthals suggest that they would look like a thickly set modern human. They would have slightly more prominent ridges above the eye, but if you dressed them in clothes then there would be very little difference between them and us. Genetic evidence also shows that Neanderthals are very close relations, diverging from us only half a million years ago.

It is not just in the physical appearance that Neanderthals were like us; there is evidence of a musical flute, and fire, both of which are indicative of a complex society. There is also evidence that the Neanderthals buried their dead, which has no practical significance except that the deceased is not left to be eaten. This, coupled with sites where flowers have been thrown onto the corpse, suggests that there is a complex social ritual and, without stressing the point too strongly, there may even be evidence of belief.

So then, why is it us who grace this earth rather than the Neanderthals or another species? Well, to begin with, we are intelligent – disproportionally so, in fact: our brains are too big for our bodies and that gave us an advantage. We were lighter than the Neanderthals, so when the time came that fighting was no longer an option, we could flee with more ease.
The most convincing argument for our survival, though, is our willingness to adapt. Homo sapiens are wanderers, we migrate even now, and always have. When food is scarce or the climate takes a turn for the worse we move. The Neanderthals, or so it is believed, were much more homely, fighting it out whenever times and resources changed.

Ultimately, though, I’d like to suggest that is was just old fashioned luck; somewhere, each of our ancestors was in the right place at the right time, with the right amount of fur. From an evolutionary standpoint we are nothing more than naked apes, but naked apes that have made a population of over 6 billion from an original stock of 100,000 or so.

In July 1945 the US tested a bomb with an explosive impact equivalent to 200,000 tonnes of TNT: the bomb named Trinity was the first (not so small) step in nuclear technology. Now several hundred thousand tonnes of plutonium and enriched uranium are available, and 27,000 atomic bombs are stored away. Having said this, 16% of the world’s energy supply comes from nuclear power. It is of massive benefit to people; the question is, at what cost?

In the last fortnight the World Wildlife Federation-UK (WWF-UK) has produced a report which states in no uncertain terms that the UK can meet its energy demands and reduce CO2 emissions in line with the Kyoto protocols without the need to use nuclear technology. With some small tweaks to current government policy it would be feasible to reduce 1990 carbon emissions levels by 40% by 2010, and to further reduce these levels to 55% by 2025. Great, you might think, and this is true: the notion of replacing our carbon based energy sources with nuclear and renewable fuels is a positive one. However, there are some unavoidable issues concerning the use of unstable fuels to power our country.

The most compelling argument against the widespread use of nuclear power for energy is not one of safety; it is the longevity of radioactive isotopes that the main problem. The decomposition of an isotope (nuclear fission) is measured in half-lives, that is, the amount of time it takes for a sample of material to reach half its activity. Uranium-235, the Uranium isotope that is used in nuclear fission, has a half-life of 760 million years, and upon decomposition Uranium becomes plutonium.

In 1995 it was reported that Japan, one of the world’s key proponents in nuclear fuels (40% of the country’s energy comes from nuclear reactors) had a surplus of 4.7 tonnes of plutonium. It is these stockpiles of nuclear waste that are causing massive concern in nuclear countries. This issue is so pertinent that many governments have set up councils to deal with the situation that is looming on a none-too-distant horizon.

Even with these advisory bodies on nuclear disposal at hand there is still much confusion and some confrontation as to what should be done with the waste from our energy production. The UK’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) has taken three years to come to one conclusion: that nuclear waste from the UK should be buried, an idea that has been proposed three times in the last 30 years and has been rejected each time.

The proposal is simple: bury the UK’s 400,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste between 300m and 2km below the earth’s surface in stable geological formations. This may sound extreme, depending on your point of view, but there are massive implications for the countryside if we do bury our nuclear litter.

The area in Ukraine where Chernobyl nuclear reactor number 4 once stood remains to this day extremely radioactive and entirely uninhabitable, and the long-term implications of that one explosion are still uncertain 20 years on, with a predicted 60,000 deaths from the after effects of radiation. The depth that the UK wishes to bury its nuclear waste is sensible, but for how long can this problem have a layer of earth neatly placed atop it? How about one thousand years?

In practice these wastes are no more dangerous than any others: they are, if deactivated and shielded, perfectly safe. In fact, for a sample of Uranium to reach one thousandth of its activity takes less than 100 years, and after a few thousand years its radioactivity has reduced to levels similar to that when it is mined. However, there is a horribly ironic twist to the story. The UK Environment Agency has suggested that rising sea levels, a consequence of global warming, will jeopardise many of the nuclear waste sites around the world within the next 500 years, making them impossible to use for storing nuclear waste.

So, what are the alternatives to Uranium, if we decide that this is too much of a long term comittment for a short term advantage? There are the obvious options to expore: an increase in wind farms and hydro- and solar- based energies. The success of these types of energies can be seen in Canada, which supplies more than 50% of its energy requirement in this way.

Another option is to use nuclear fusion. Up until now nuclear power has resulted from the decay of isotopes, but in 2005 France won an exciting bid to build a fusion reactor and attempt to make the world’s first source of clean, safe and almost infinite energy. The process relies on the fusion of two hydrogen atoms to produce helium; this mechanism expels a lot of energy without creating a lasting nuclear legacy. The only problem facing this plan is that the research has lasted half a century and cost $20 billion, no small bill. It is disheartening, then, that no massive advancements have been made, as this method requires a massive magnetic field, and plasma hitting temperatures that have never been achieved before.

This nuclear dream could become reality over the next half a century, but living in the here and now there is no effective energy source which will not, in some way, affect us or the environment. Carbon-based emissions must be reduced, but whether a progressive takeover by nuclear is a good idea, only time and environmental security will tell.

For the last half a century, marijuana has faced a tormented battle in the public eye: still today it is associated with the ever fading ideals of the ‘free-love’ sixties, or more commonly with the red-eyed ‘stoner’ of our decade. However, in the smoke of this heated battle over the rights and wrongs of drug use, has the benefit of marijuana been lost, is it salvageable, or are those who endorse its benefits clinging on to the hope of legalisation?

Last week medical use of marijuana was vetoed by The US Food and Drug Administration (The FDA). Marijuana, it is claimed, is not a legitimate medicine because there is no hard evidence to show its safety or effectiveness. Marijuana researchers argue political obstacles are making it almost impossible to conduct research and, as a result, are asking for looser restrictions on marijuana as a medication. The FDA’s statement contradicts a 1999 report by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) suggesting that marijuana had the potential to treat pain, nausea and anorexia. Since then, 11 US states have legalised the medicinal use of marijuana.

Evidence, however, does seem to be more than anecdotal; there have been long and intensive studies that have yielded a plethora of results, some condoning, others deploring the use of marijuana as a medical agent.

Marijuana plants, like all others, have chemical pathways which result in the production of compounds known as secondary metabolites. These metabolites do not generally serve any intrinsic purpose, that is the plant can operate quite happily without them. However, by producing these compounds, the plant in question infers an advantage over its neighbour, (e.g. it is less attractive to caterpillars, thus it is more likely to survive and thrive.) The active compound in marijuana that we can exploit is Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), it is this compound that gives the ‘high’ sensation. Coincidentally, TCH is a very close relation to nicotine, caffeine and morphine (known as canabinoids), all legally used in medicine or recreation.

There is an increasingly large body of evidence suggesting that those who smoke a lot of marijuana can develop symptoms commonly associated with acute mental illness, and even light, or occasional smokers exhibit signs of minor psychosis and paranoia, as well as mild memory loss. It is these concerns that are forcing the UK government to reconsider the down grading of marijuana to Class C – a piece of legislation that is still only a couple of years old. Lambros Messinis of the University Hospital of Patras in Greece believes it “definitely fogs your brain.” Messinis conducted a series of experiments that showed that those who have been smoking marijuana for 15 years can only recall seven of fifteen words in a memory exercise, those who have smoked the drug for 7 years can on average remember nine words and those who have never smoked marijuana could recall thirteen words of the fifteen they were given to memorise.

The results of this experiment are contested, however; Nadia Solowij suggests that the memory loss is an immediate result of the drug, but she admits that the degree to which memory returns after a prolonged abstention is at best under-researched.
There is a glimmer of light for medical marijuana, it appears that like some of its sister compounds it can be used as a medication. Eating low doses of THC, helps prevent arteries clogging up, at least in mice, great news in a nation where coronary heart disease is one of the biggest killers.

François Mach at University Hospital in Geneva manipulated the way a cell naturally recognises THC and reduces the risks of atherosclerosis (clogging of the arteries). Sure enough, when fed 1 milligram of THC per kilogram of bodyweight – a low dose that should not have any psychotropic effects – to mice susceptible to atherosclerosis, it greatly slowed its progress. Ideally, using THC as a basis, the drug can be chemically manipulated to bind only to the required cell types, this way there would be reduced clogging of the arteries, and without the psychotic side effects that seem to blight such medical advances.

A new weight loss drug that works by blocking a cannabinoid receptor in the brain has had “modest” success at helping people both lose weight and keep it off, researchers say. The patients on the drug also showed improvement in risk factors for cardiovascular disease beyond what would be expected from shedding on average 3lbs alone. The researchers found that patients taking the larger dose were able to lose significantly more weight than those on placebo.

The pill also appears to help in maintaining a new, lower weight. In the second part of the study, patients who had received the active drug were offered it for a second year. A 20mg dose in the second year seemed to be ample in allowing people to maintain their low body weights; those taking the lower dose or the placebo put some weight back on.

The researchers suggest that sustained weight loss may require “continuous long-term treatment”. That may be good news for drug manufacturers, but a concern to people who may spend decades on a pill whose long-term effects are unknown.

Each drug that is tested goes through a stringent set of tests, but, despite this, marijuana-based therapies seem to have been shackled by their association with the ‘high life.’ I am not suggesting that recreational use of marijuana is right or wrong, but if we want to manipulate it to the benefit of our increasingly weighty world then the stigma that is associated with this drug must be shed.

It’s easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom of man’s folly with nature; the increasing risks and freak weather patterns from global warming, the destruction of natural habitats, pollution of the natural world and the extremes of desperate poverty. However, rather than wading through swathes of pessimism, a few minor changes could be all that’s needed to change the world (albeit in a small way, one step at a time).

Small changes in the amount of electricity and gas we use, for example, could have an enormous collective impact. By turning down the thermostat one degree and turning off lights when they’re not needed, we can all live a more energy efficient lifestyle. Turning appliances off from standby is also a good idea. Domestic appliances as a whole account for more than 30% of energy consumption and 12% of greenhouse emissions – an estimated 5% of which is caused by so-called ‘vampire appliances’ being left on standby. A television on standby, for example, still uses 85% of the energy that it would use if it were fully switched on.

It has been calculated that 50 litres of water can be saved if you shower rather than bath, with an additional 24 litres being saved by turning off the tap when you brush your teeth. You can also prevent 33% of water from being unnecessarily flushed down the toilet by putting a brick in the cistern. Saving water is particularly eco-friendly; water is probably the planet’s most precious resource and all our water, including what we flush down the toilet, is fit to drink. Therefore, it is especially wasteful to over-use.

When buying food, the best option is to buy local and organic produce and thereby boycott intensive agriculture. Intensive agriculture, among other things, destroys natural biodiversity in its use of pesticides and pollutes river systems with fertilisers. However, the ultimate benefit of organic food is debatable, since intensive methods are probably needed to provide all the world’s food. Nevertheless, the West vastly over-produces and so a reduction in intensive methods is still beneficial. Organic is an expensive option, so it may be best to buy one or two organic products, by way of protest. Buying organic sugar, for example, won’t break the bank and will help reduce the amount of intensively farmed sugar beet, which is one of the most intensively sprayed crops on the market.

Otherwise, simply buying local produce can make a huge difference; it cuts down on air miles (and thus pollution) and also puts money into local economies. The regular farmers’ market, local greengrocer’s or York’s permanent market are all good places to buy locally sourced food. Supermarkets, on the other hand, sell fruit and vegetables which often come from far afield and even their local produce may have been transported many miles to be cleaned and packaged.

The veggie option might seem a bit extreme, so why not just cut down? Cut out meat from your usual campus eatery lunch, for instance. The Eat Less Meat campaign, run by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF.org.uk), points out that rearing cattle for a kilo of beef requires around 100,000 litres of water, whereas only 900 litres of water are needed to produce a kilo of wheat. By becoming a ‘meat-reducer’ you can help prevent the situation where, by 2050, global livestock will require the equivalent amount of land and water as 4 billion humans. Going veggie for a day can save money and present a culinary challenge for the more adventurous amongst us. It is a good excuse to try new vegetables too, though remember to try and buy vegetables in season to avoid those food miles!

Vegetarian is best of course, and the ecological footprint (that is the amount of land required to sustain all our needs) of vegetarians who eat fish (‘piscerians’) is not much lower than that for meat eaters. The world requires 2.3 hectares per person to support current trends but only 1.5 hectares per person of productive land is available for consumption, resulting in habitat destruction and agricultural degradation.

Most of the resources being consumed are, of course, consumed by the West (the wealthiest 20% consume 83% of the world’s resources) so it makes sense for us in the United Kingdom to cut back. There are also plenty of fairtrade items sold on campus now that York has achieved its official ‘fairtrade university’ status, and Tesco is encroaching on the market that the Co-op has held for some time. If you want to carry on with the local shopping theme (keeping money within local businesses rather than out to large multi-corporate businesses) then there are plenty of local fairtrade sellers as well as Oxfam shops which provide a wide range of fairtrade products. Not only are they often of a superior quality, but also the amount going to farmers is set at a fair price which doesn’t fluctuate with market prices.

Do you take the lazy option to travel? As we all know, cycling or walking is a healthier option than driving and reduces car emissions. You might justify a quick car journey or bus ride in York by saying that it’s not far, but even fairly short distances in York are often jammed full of congestion problems, with constant stopping and starting leading to a greater amount of emissions.

Wasting time on the campus computers instead of doing work? Why not use that time by giving to charity, but for free! There’s a multitude of one click sites which automatically give money to charity in return for viewing the sponsors’ ads. In the space of any 20 minutes you could save 73 feet of rainforest habitat, donate money to act against cancer or even to improve child literacy. www.ecologyfund.com is a good start for various environmental donations, and care2 and thehungersite.com for various other beneficiaries.

If you’re getting enthusiastic by now and really want to push the charity boat out, your enthusiasm may happen to coincide with one of various organisations’ volunteer days. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, Conservation Volunteers, Millennium Volunteers and Student Action all have such schemes.

If you’re thinking of making a more long term environmental impact, though, rather than participating in a one-off scheme, why not buy clothes which are made to last? The textile industry has a huge impact; although cotton is not the world’s largest crop, it uses 25% of all the world’s agrochemicals, and 100 litres of water per kilo of textile. Man-made chemicals are not much better, with poisonous azo-dyes finding their way into water systems and dioxins escaping into the atmosphere. With this in mind, the old-fashioned concepts of ‘make do and mend’ and ‘Sunday best’ are very green. If you are a slave to fashion this prospect may seem daunting, if not impossible. However, try trawling through charity shops for vintage bargains and customising old clothes. Not only will this support charities, but it will save you a lot of money too.

The opportunities for ethical living are endless, both in number and in scope. If you start small now, you may want to aim bigger in a few years time – an allotment, perhaps, with homemade compost and your own seasonal vegetables, or maybe even a green career, such as recycling officer, environmental consultant, or fairtrade/organic buyer? But that’s quite a leap from turning the occasional light off.

Useful web-links

www.sustainweb.org (seasonality)

www.allotment.uk.com

www.soilassociation.org

In 1996 a farmed goose in the Guangdong province of China was isolated as the first death from the highly pathogenic Avian Flu virus H5N1 strain. Now this has become synonymous with death, but at the time it was just another virus to be monitored. One year on, the same viral strain infected 18 humans in Hong Kong, 6 of these cases proved to be fatal. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly the virus stopped and for 5 years the H5N1 lay dormant. It is unlikely that it totally died out; rather it probably continued to be transmitted through bird populations. February 2003 showed the re-emergence of H5N1 (commonly known as avian flu type A) when two members of a Hong Kong family contracted the H5N1 strain during a recent stay in China.

This was the start of the first H5N1 wave. The World Heath Organisation (WHO) suggests that between mid-2003 and 8 January 2004 there were regular outbreaks of avian flu throughout Asia. This climaxed with reports of sporadic human infections in Vietnam and Thailand – it was shown that in most cases, the H5N1 virus was contracted from those who work alongside poultry. However there was some evidence to suggest that limited human-to-human contact could result in the transmission of the deadly H5N1 virus. Of the few cases that were recorded, about half of them were fatal.

Viruses can quite happily lie within a host without killing it; an animal acting as a host is known as a reservoir. The normal reservoir for H5N1 was wild waterfowl, however in April 2005 thousands of migratory waterfowl (the natural reservoirs for H5N1) died due to the virus. This suggested that the virus had changed to become more virulent, killing the host in which it can normally hide

Over the proceeding months the virus swept west and in July 2005 was shown to be in both Kazakhstan and some provinces of Siberia. In these regions, large numbers of dead migratory birds were found, confirming the worst fears of global health organisations that the H5N1 virus could be carried along routes of migration. In October 2005 Turkey reported the presence of H5N1 in poultry. January 2006 saw Turkey confirm two human deaths due to H5N1 and another 14 cases of infection. These were the first reports of human fatalities in Europe.

So what is H5N1? It is a virus which consists of a genome (in this case of RNA), which is housed in a shell known as the capsid. It has a membrane coat with about 500 protein spikes sticking out of its surface. About 400 of these are known as Hemagglutinin (HA) and the other 100 are known as Neuraminidase (NA). It is these two molecules which allow the virus to link with cells and hijack the cell machinery in order to recreate themselves. HA and NA change quite rapidly from one viral generation to the next, thanks to mutations in the RNA. This is also due to two different viruses mixing sections of their genetic material – (this is what the numbers proceeding the H and N correspond to; they have type 1 NA and type 5HA). It is because of these rapid changes that a vaccine against flu may not always be successful.

There is a Flu pandemic every few decades. The last one, in 1918, was known as “Spanish Flu” and reconstructions of this virus have shown a remarkable similarity to the H5N1 strain. Spanish Flu killed between 40 and 50 million people (3 per cent of all those infected) before it was contained, with most deaths occuring in slightly more than a year. H5N1 has been around for a while now and recorded cases only total about 150 humans, with only about 60 fatalities. Whilst this suggests that H5N1 has about a 50% fatality, there could be thousands of people not showing symptoms, meaning the actual rate of fatality is considerably lower. To put these numbers onto a scale: 36,000 Americans die from normal human flu each year. In the grand scheme of things, H5N1 is a relatively small killer – it is the future virulence that is to be feared.

There is evidence to show that H5N1 will be less deadly than people presently fear. Scientists in Vietnam, one of the key places infected with the avian virus believe that if the virus begins to spread throughout the population at a slow rate, then the death toll will not be as high as initially predicted. However if it infects large numbers of people who fail to display symptoms, then H5N1 is given a chance to mutate, thus becoming more harmful. There are now reported instances where people who have come into close contact with H5N1 sufferers or those culling poultry are producing antibodies to attack the H5N1 virus.

So, if there was a pandemic of H5N1, what would our options be? Well, initially there are antiviral drugs such as zanamivir, which would prevent the virus from spreading through a population. However, there are reports of antiviral resistant H5N1 strains, which means that this option may not be wholly feasible. If the infection was brought to the UK, some bodies suggest enforced quarantine for those who refuse to take medication or those who fail to respond to treatment. This method has been used with great success in the containment of antibiotic resistant TB in various parts of America. It does, however, result in the removal of choice and invasion of individual human rights.

Ultimately, with $1.9 billion worth of money being put into containment there is little chance that this Flu will strike in the same way the Spanish Flu did in the early 1900s. If all else fails, it has been shown that Sauerkraut and Kinchi (effectively fermented cabbage) can treat H5N1 flu in birds… who knows, maybe it will work for humans too?

In the last decade very few natural occurrences have shaken the world in the way Hurricane Katrina has. In a matter of hours it reduced an affluent and popular city to nothing more than a quivering shanty town. We saw first hand the power of nature and the panic it can instil even in the wealthiest of countries.

America is currently in the midst of their hurricane season and, despite the most advanced predications, it is never certain whether a hurricane will devastate a coast line, or just fizzle out as it edges towards land, as we saw with Hurricaine Rita two weeks ago. Storms give no clue to what they are doing or where their final end will lie – But America is bracing itself non the less.

The most troubling issue however is not where or when a storm will climax, it is the force in which they do so. Since the 1970s category four and five storms have nearly doubled; Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, suggests that this global trend has occurred over the last couple of decades and is directly tied with an increase in global sea temperatures. “We can say with confidence that the trends in sea surface temperatures and hurricane intensity are connected to climate change”, says Judy Curry, also of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their team looked at the incidence of intense tropical storms with the results showing the strongest affirmation yet that Katrina-level hurricanes are becoming more frequent in our ever warming world. The study shows there has been no general increase in the total number of hurricanes but the proportion of hurricanes reaching categories four or five – with wind speeds above 56 metres per second has risen from 20 per cent in the ’70s to 35 per cent in the past decade.

Hurricanes form when ocean temperatures rise above 26 degrees centigrade. The fuel for hurricanes is water vapour evaporating from the ocean surface; it condenses in the air and releases heat, driving the hurricane. It has been suggested that without an increase in sea surface temperature, Hurricane Katrina would have only reached a category two to three size and would have been incapable of causing the destruction it did.

With the ever increasing death toll from Katrina, people at risk are demanding intervention. Global warming has caused the weather to become increasingly dramatic: if it is too late to prevent these storms, what can be done to halt their destruction? Ultimately can humanity thwart nature?

Enter the scientists: Hurricanes become most devastating when they hit land, so it is suggested that if we prevent them doing this or change where they hit then we can remove the mass devastation that results. This may take some time however, we would be tampering directly with a weather system and that has never been done before.

In April 2005, Moshe Alamaro at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outlined a plan to use an array of floating jet engines to trigger miniature cyclones in the atmosphere ahead of a hurricane. The idea is to drain the ocean and atmosphere of energy before the hurricane arrives. Critics point out however that even a large array of jet engines probably cannot inject enough energy into the atmosphere to trigger even a tiny storm. Another strategy is to cover the ocean ahead of the hurricane with a thin layer of fish oil that disrupts the flow of energy into the atmosphere. But experiments in 2002 by Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert also at MIT, suggest that high winds would break up the oil layer and prevent it from having any effect.

Then there is the idea of triggering storms with soot providing a nucleus for moisture in a cloud to form. In 1973, William Gray, a hurricane expert at Colorado State University, suggested that the extra energy absorbed by soot could trigger smaller storms. In 1958, the US Naval Research Laboratory carried out a series of experiments to monitor clouds seeded with soot but the results were inconclusive.

So, as yet, preventing the hurricane is a no-go – Emanuel has another suggestion however. His idea is to exploit the chaotic features of weather systems, steering them away from populated centres, an idea put forward by Ross Hoffman, a researcher from Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Massachusetts. The idea is based on the so-called butterfly effect. If a chaotic system such as a hurricane is given a small nudge, the nudge is amplified and could end up having enough influence to knock a hurricane off course, almost steering the hurricane clear of heavily populated areas.

Meteorologists first need better hurricane measurements and models to forecast the effect of any ‘nudge’. They also need a way to do the nudging, possibly with space-based reflectors to heat up the atmosphere, something that Hoffman believes is a long way off.
But nudge a hurricane and the danger is that scientists may get blamed and sued wherever it goes. Kerry Emanuel observes “Choosing between a Category three hitting Pensacola and a Category five hitting New Orleans is easy. But the people of Pensacola may have something to say about it.”

Either way, if the people of Pensacola are going to sue, they have a while to complete their closing statements, all of these ideas are theories, and nobody is close to putting them in practice. The question that does face us though is more pertinent now then ever before: are these hurricanes anomalies, or was Katrina the harbinger of a global warming weather system?