The Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Humanity at its best

One of the great achievements of the 21st century, and one of the greatest human constructions of all time - the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has the power to save the world - In a very real sense. It has representation of every crop and plant and fruit they can get their hands on. Frozen in a vault that is embedded in permafrost. It only takes a flood, or a tornadoes or even just a little war to wipe out crop varieties. And now we have a back up.

Here's 60minutes having a look around the place:

Send your name to the moon!

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the proposed first step in the plan to return humans to the moon, and you can put your name on it. You can read more about it here though the PDF fact sheet is probably a quicker source of info. Most interestingly the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) will look in far-UV to search for frost and ice - to help any future moon colony.

If you go here you can add your name to a database they'll put on microchip and stick on board. It takes 30 seconds. You would be a fool not to.

I'm a sucker for stuff like that. Some 0s and 1s that I typed will be sent to orbit the moon. It's trivial - but awesome.

Time-lapse Vid of Dissolving an Oyster Card in acetone (aka nail varnish)

Disclaimer: Just to cover my back, be aware that TFL probably won't like you doing this. So get permission first etc.

I'm pretty certain that ever since BoingBoing featured Chris Woebken dissolving an oyster card to get at its juicy inner workings (a RFID chip stuck to a loop of wire, fact fans) geeks across London have been attempting it.

As such I'm rather late to the party on this one. The rather splendid SciencePunk beat me too it with this grand attempt codenamed Operation Ladybird. Nevertheless I knew I must attempt this epic journey too.

What you will need

Click to biggify

If you want to play along this is your shopping list:

1) ~ 400ml of Nail Varnish Remover - I bought 2 bottles of Boots own brand at 99p each. I could probably have got by with one.
2) An oyster card - I bought a prepay one for £3, though I got a funny look when I didn't want to top it up there and then.
3) A jar big enough to contain the oyster card - I bought a jar of beetroot (urgh) for 72p.

Total Cost: £5.70

It's simple enough process, fill the jar with the nail varnish remover, dump the oyster card in it. Put the top back on and wait for a few hours. Brilliantly, I picked up bunch of PS2 eyetoy cameras on clearance (£1.99 each from Gamestation) which means I now own a webcam! (Aside: they can be turned into pretty good webcams once you've installed macam, and they appear to be quite easy to break apart so I'm turning one into an infrared camera next). So I'm proud to present Skeptobot's first ever youtube video. Time-lapse footage of my Oyster Card dissolving.

Notes on the vid: I've never used a webcam/youtube/imovie before so sorry for the quality. The smudge on the card that appears about half way in is from when I poked it with a pencil, and the paint on the pencil stripped off. It's best to keep checking the card, first it will get soft, then after about 90 mins it folded over and I was able to peel off the first layer of the card, exposing one side of the chip. Then I cut the centre of the card out with scissors (so there was less plastic for the acetone to work on). I put these pieces next to the jar, and I was quite suprisied when the time-lapse showed them wobbling about.

Then after another half hour or so, the other side of the plastic loosened enough to peel that away exposing the intact chip and antenna. Nail Varnish Remover takes longer that SciencePunks miltary grade stuff but I think a more dilute source of acetone is more effective than SciencePunks military grade stuff.

The chip itself

The chip still attached to the loop of wire acting as it's antenna

So tomorrow morning I'll attempt to use this naked oyster card to journey to work. If I'm successful (and not arrested for terrorism) I'll have to decide what my new oyster card will be. So far I'm thinking either stitching it into my watch, or wrapping it around a magic wand (though that might kill the signal).

UPDATE - It still works!
This is how the oyster card currently looks (I've put it back inside it's wallet to keep it safe and so I don't look too weird):

And this is how it still works!

The magic wand draws closer...

CERN has impeccable comedic taste: Chris Morris, Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnary

So the people at CERN have been inviting the best comedians in the UK to come and have a look around. The ingenious bastards. How did I miss this? I always get a little giddy when I see my interests collide (geddit?).

You can listen to Chris "Brass Eye" Morris talking about THE HIGGS FUCKING BOSON here. Look I've a picture for your unbelieving eyes:

How awesome is that? Answer: very awesome.

But there's more! They've also had the excellent Simon Munnary and Kevin Eldon round too. Listen to the podcast here and watch them potter around below:


There is a lot to be said for this kind of public outreach especially when it's via such excellent, excellent people. I would go as far as to say that there is a strong and unexplored link between alternative British comedy  and the appreciation of science. A link that has yet to be utilised...

And if by some ridiculous chance you don't know who these comedians I'm talking about are, then you sicken me. Make me like you again by buying Chris Morris' Brass Eye - a massively important satire on TV news. But not until you've got the wonderful Simon Munnary's 'Hello' an indie produced Stand Up DVD of outstanding quality from the absolute legends that are Go Faster Stripe. I love GFS, they are doing a massively important job at preserving Stand Up thats too important and intelligent and niche to be picked up by mainstream media. And whilst I'm sure you recognise The Actor Kevin Eldon from every good comedy show of the last two decades (Jam, Spaced, Fist of Fun, This Morning With Richard Not Judy & Brass Eye are but a tiny selection of his work) I'm doubting you will have listened to his brilliant audio monologues SPEAKERS. Available to download free from Resonance FM.

So did the boomerang work in space?

Remember this? Takao Doi wanted to know if boomerangs work in zero g. Because wanting to know stuff like that is what makes humanity great. So he went and got Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion, to teach him how to throw a paper boomerang. Then he went into space and tested it.

So did it work? Watch and find out.



I'm a little disappointed it was a three-pronged boomerang, but that can't be helped as they turn tighter, and you're not exactly kicking it for space up there (geddit?). Truly awesome stuff.

TED Sunday #001: Larry Lessig on "How creativity is being strangled by the law"

I've just discovered that the truly excellent TED conference talks can now be embedded off site, and I can't think of a better way to spend a lazy Sunday than getting some fresh ideas eloquently explained by an excellent mind. So, if you want to join me, each Sunday I'll cherry pick a superb TED talk that we can watch and digest, before putting up with another week of idiocy stinking up The News Fart.

The first talk had to go to one of my favourite speakers Larry Lessig. He's a Professor of Law at Stanford, and for every public figure who doesn't understand this interweb future we live in we've got we him to stick up for us. If you don't know him, then I'm sure you've consumed or even created media licensed under his Creative Commons copyrights.

And even if the future of IP doesn't interest you his style of presenting, nick named the Lessig method, makes this talk worth watching (and stealing). Proof, if ever it was needed, that Powerpoint doesn't have to be the bullet point riddled, thought diluting, brain clamp it often seems to be.



I don't want to get all political, but the fact that Obama turned to Lessig to work out where he stands on all these damn Internets fills me with a flicker of hope.

Who owns the Copyright on the Papers you publish?

When you publish a Scientific Paper who owns the copyright? I know most of us, naively, still consider our work to be our own. But according to New Scientist the American Physical Society will not publish two papers in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia. Normally you transfer the copyright to APS before publishing and hence your figures can't be used on Wikipedia and the like.

Change is happening in the scientific community. We are starting to really think about how we publish our science. But being scientists we put practical solutions (such as the brilliant ArXiv) above the true solutions. Science thrives on the free sharing of ideas and we should be at the forefront of movements like Creative Commons not playing catch up. Free sharing of ideas can't just be within an ivory tower of scientists, especially when creationists and their ilk are banging on the gate. We need our work to be in the public domain more than ever. With Wikipedia a bare minimum.

I often think we need a figure head to galvanise us on this. We need our own Larry Lessig.