Science Editor Roger Highfield announces the winners of the
1996 Young Science Writer Awards
The Winners
Reaping a harvest of young talent
W HEN it comes to being humbled, there is nothing like judging the most prestigious science writing competition for young people, the results of which are here. An eminent panel gathered in Canary Wharf to sift the entries prompted by an appeal launched by the distinguished populariser of science and mathematics Prof John Barrow and backed by National Power and The Daily Telegraph, with the support of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Chairing a panel of the great and the good for the ninth year should have been easier than ever. But no sooner had I made my first nomination when developmental biologist Prof Lewis Wolpert muttered: "I did not even rate her in my top 23." He greeted my second choice with: "Ooo, I loathed it," though I was comforted - albeit slightly - when my third nomination prompted Dr Peter Alberry, National Power's director of engineering, to reveal: "I have those three - in my top 11."
And that sums up our difficulty. The strength of the panel - its diversity - is a weakness when attempting to deploy the kind of intellectual rigour found in a doctoral viva to compare the merits of an epic on consciousness with another on, say, algae-driven power plants. Discussion ranged widely, examining whether originality is - unfairly - stressed more than style, or an issue at the heart of journalism: should a reporter be blamed for accurately reporting lurid claims?
The effort to sift the list of entries, shortlisted from a field of 400, saw the kind of bargaining a Brussels bureaucrat would relish.
A great deal was at stake. The best candidates in the 16-19 and 20-28 categories, as well as having their entries published and winning pounds 500 each, will visit America, expenses paid, to attend a conference in Seattle.
With the two runners-up, they will also be guests at the British Association's
annual meeting next month. And 18 other runners-up each receive pounds
100, certificates of merit and subscriptions to the leading science magazine
and journal, New Scientist and Nature.
VERDICTS ON THE OLDER ENTRANTS
THE panel's divergent views became clear when the eight judges nominated 15 winners in the first round.
The bad news was that we needed only 11, but the good was that some names came up again and again. One was Laura Spinney, who described brain scan experiments that show how mental rehearsal can hone sporting skill. "She put it across very well," said Dr Peter Alberry. Another was a discussion of how dinner plates relate to armour plating by Sarah Howlett of the Defence Research Agency in Chertsey. "Everything about it I liked," said Prof Lewis Wolpert, for once in agreement with Prof Heinz Wolff, microgravity expert.
Jenny Gristock initially did well, given her "distinctive voice", as Nature's Dr Laura Garwin put it, though was to fall by the wayside for submitting several good entries rather than a single great one.
We admired those who tackled tough subjects. David Harrison of Oxford University entranced solar power expert Dr Mary Archer with his account of how bacteria swim with little propellers.
Jenny Croft of the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, impressed with her description of the ultimate packing problem: how two yards of DNA is crammed into each cell of your body. "A nicely written account of a subject not many people would think about," said Dr David Concar.
When it came to second place, we plumped for Jon Copley, one of a lucky few to descend to the sea floor in a submersible. "If I had to pick the one that would appeal to Joe public, that is the one,' said Dr Alberry.
After much heartache, we settled on Tom Wakeford as the overall winner. "Anyone who can make fungi interesting deserves enormous credit," said Prof Wolpert.
When I rang Tom at York University to deliver the news, he admitted he had forgotten his entry, based on an interview with a scientist, in the effort to write up his doctorate on underground bacteria that fix nitrogen.
. . . AND THE YOUNGER
HERE, it was easier to find consensus. Of several shortlisted junior entries describing planet hunts, one by Jaime Dawson was liked best. A piece on crab dung and its potential to repair broken bones, by Robert Leeming of Harrow School, was widely admired for its no-frills journalistic approach. And Dominique Tobbell, of New Hall School in Chelmsford, impressed with her account of genetically engineered blood.
Alas, the claims made for crab dung were questioned by Prof Wolff and Dr Archer, and a likeable piece on vacuum cleaners was rejected for being company propaganda. As others fell by the wayside, we settled on a piece on the science of juggling by Sophie Tatham, 16, of The Abbey School, Reading. She was placed second in the category. Sophie can indeed juggle ("I can't do any tricks") but also drew on insights from her brother, president of the juggling club at Cambridge. "No way," she protested at news of her award.
The top prize went to Matthew Wesley, who had written his entry while obtaining experience at Ove Arup, the engineering consultancy, before going up to Cambridge. "It is physics, and he pulled it off," said Laura, praising him for tackling a hard subject with flair. "A very nice piece."
OVERALL VERDICT
"I WAS staggered by the quality and diversity of entries," said Dr Alberry, summing up our impressions.
We were struck by how more than half the entries came from the older group, those traditionally most reluctant to have a go. The downside was that their entries were more densely written: older entrants seem to lose the ability to look at complex subjects through the eyes of the non-specialist.
More enthusiasm was detected in the younger age group by Dr Concar, and Dr Archer was impressed by "some very interesting quirky pieces".
The judges found the effort rewarding. "My judgment is highly coloured
by the number I found genuinely interesting," said Prof Wolff.
Fungi are incredible networkers, says Tom Wakeford
BENEATH your lawn there is an energy network more powerful than the National Grid, yet made of filaments far smaller than fibre-optic threads. While the human world wires itself up to the Internet, fungi are being recognised as the original networkers of nature.
A conceptual breakthrough has allowed microbiologists on both sides of the Atlantic to make a series of remarkable discoveries about the mushroom and its relatives. "Looking underground," says researcher Alan Rayner, "we are uncovering a new vocabulary of evolution."
With their mania for mergers and potential immortality, fungi pose a challenge to the notion of biological individuality.
Think of a whale in the ocean. We see its huge bulk only when it comes up for air. Most of the time, it swims hidden from view, scouring the seas for food.
Now think of a toadstool under a tree in your local wood. Its real body is underneath the soil's surface, a huge cotton-wool mass of branching tubes that can spread for tens of yards. in every direction. This mound of mould can be as large as a whale but is usually invisible to our above-ground eye.
Every mushroom and toadstool is a signal that a fungus has come up for air. It needs the air, not to breathe like a whale, but rather to take its offspring to new sources of food. Masquerading as an independent entity, a mushroom is merely a spore-dispersing device for the sleeping giant below.
Myron Smith at Toronto University has discovered one mammoth fungus that spreads its tentacles under 15 hectares of virgin forest in Montana, weighs 100 tons, and is more than 1,000 years old. Such monstrosities may be more the rule than the exception, he suggests. At around half a ton, fairy-rings are a little more weighty than their name and appearance suggest.
Computer models of fungal growth have turned out to be far more challenging to construct than are similar models of insect or bird populations. Unlike butterflies or sparrows, fungi are so interconnected that it is often hard to know when one ends and another begins.
And unlike a human or a modern motor car, both "born to die" within a fairly predictable time span, fungi have the potential immortality of a electricity or telephone network that is continuously updated. Akin to the Internet, the mass of intercommunicating fungal tubes also has no single centre of command. Now, a team of biologists at Bath University, led by Dr Rayner, has devised a method of modelling a growing fungus that draws on the properties of moving fluids. Like drops on a window pane, fungal growth tubes are continually dividing and merging. The patterns foraging fungi produce are forged partly by their genes, and partly by the environment that they encounter.
A good analogy is a meandering countryside river. "The form of a river is defined by its banks," says Dr Rayner, "but the position of these banks is produced not just by the flow of the river, but by the landscape through which it flows. You cannot separate the two." The same balance between internal and external factors exists in his biological model of fungal growth.
PRESENTED with an obstacle, fungi can draw on this self-plumbing and, like flood-water at a dam, surge through at the blockage's weakest point. When branching, the fungal filaments show two distinct patterns. One is dense like a conifer branch, the other more sparse like an oak.
Dr Rayner believes that the different patterns reflect what resources surround the foraging fungus. The conifer pattern explores food-patches more exhaustively, whereas the sparse branching allows faster progress across a barren area.
Even their sex is a fluid concept. While most organisms must find the right time and place, underground fungal filaments can mate using any part of their body at almost any time. Not confined to just two sexes, fungal species can couple with thousands of possible "mating types".
Fungi are the biological kingdom's alliance-makers. The fungal condition allows them to thrive - not because they necessarily excel at
any single survival skill,
but because they can draw
on a diverse network of expertise.
All this might make one wonder, as we switch on the kettle, pick up the phone, or log-on to the Internet, whether humans really are the first species to have a worldwide web.
Tom Wakeford, 25, is finishing his doctorate on molecular ecology at the Department of Biology, University of York. He is using molecular biology to study rhizobia, bacteria that appear in the root nodules of plants that are able to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. In particular, he wants to find out whether bacteria near the root are genetically the same as or different from those in the soil
Antihydrogen creation opened up a new front in science. Matthew Wesley reports
I N THESE days of "Big Science" (and especially "Big Physics", where the smallest peep into the bowels of the universe seems to need another billion-pound particle accelerator), it is nice to reflect that arguably the hottest topic in modem physics started life, 70 years ago, on a Cambridge academic's desk.
Paul Dirac, a young physicist, was thinking about the electron, which (recalling the dronings of your physics teacher) is a sub-microscopic, negatively charged matter particle. Together with the proton (much heavier, with a positive electric charge) and neutron (no charge at all), it completes a trio of fundamental particles, out of which the atoms and molecules of everyday substances are made.
Many scientists had tried but failed to explain the electron, or indeed any other particle, in terms of Max Planck's quantum theory, that sublime unity of particles, waves and energy. Dirac came to the bizarre conclusion that the electron's very existence required the existence also of an opposing "antielectron" - an opposite number positively charged and apparently made of different stuff: antimatter.
Picturing such a beast is a little like trying to read this page in a mirror: not easy. To Dirac's ordered, logical mind, it was too much like science fiction. And to have "summoned up" such a thing simply by scribbling down equations smacked of witchcraft, which as a scientist he found even worse.
Nevertheless, Dirac overcame his misgivings and published, causing a scientific storm. When Carl Anderson, a University of California doctoral student, later detected such an antielectron (he got his doctorate - and the Nobel Prize), doubts were removed and the new particle - the positron - confirmed.
Doubts then gave way to questions - and some answers - as physicists rushed down this new avenue of research. Extending Dirac's reasoning, protons and neutrons (and, in fact, any particles you care to name) were found to have their own antimatter counterparts. When two such counterparts collide, they annihilate each other and their combined mass vanishes in a thrill of pure energy.
As everything on Earth is made of matter, this explains why the few antiparticles that are created when cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere (or made in particle accelerators) seldom reach a ripe age - about 0.000000001 second is old! Hence the difficulty involved in studying them, (even with the sophisticated hardware of CERN, the European laboratory for nuclear research), and the atmosphere of triumph following each new advance.
For Walter Oelert's CERN team, last September turned out to be an especially jubilant month. Just as protons and electrons can be fused to form dull, ordinary hydrogen, he and his colleagues were able to go through the looking glass and fuse antiprotons and positrons into just nine atoms of antihydrogen: the first "antielement" to be made.
His atoms, alas, enjoyed but brief lives before hurtling towards the apparatus and consequent annihilation. But, just by showing that it could be done, the CERN team pointed the way to a new era in particle research - and gathered considerable knowledge in the process.
The team is now devoting its new-found expertise to amassing a more plentiful stock of antihydrogen, and keeping this away from matter for long enough to study it. The favoured scheme will use a strong magnetic field to contain antihydrogen within a vacuum more stringent, even, than that of outer space.
Antihydrogen, thus shielded from contact with matter, could be studied at leisure, hopefully answering a few questions. Is it, for example, affected by gravity and electromagnetic fields in the same way as conventional hydrogen?
Then we may know why, of the equal amounts of matter and antimatter thrown up by the Big Bang, matter triumphed and now predominates in the universe; and why mutual antagonism here failed to obliterate all in one cataclysmic energy flash.
Good heavens,' said Matthew Wesley, 18, when told he had won the award in the younger category. When he entered, Matthew was working at Ove Arup & Partners, London, doing varied tasks such as electrical and mechanical engineering. This year he will go up to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, to study electrical engineering - `a little more mundane' than the subject of his entry, particle physics
WINNER
Tom Wakeford - University of York
SECOND PRIZE
Jon Copley - Southampton University
RUNNERS-UP
Nadeem Ali - Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge
Matthieu Barrett - University of Edinburgh
Sarah Blakemore - St John's College, Oxford
Jenny Croft - MRC Human Genetics Unit, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh
Helen Frier - University of Sussex
Aaron Gee-Clough - University College London
David Harrison - Oxford University
Sarah Howlett - Defence Research Agency, Chertsey
Laura Spinney - freelance journalist
WINNER
Matthew Wesley - Ove Arup, London
SECOND PRIZE
Sophie Tatham - The Abbey School, Reading
RUNNERS-UP
Annabel Crossman - Altrincham Grammar School for Girls
Lisa Daniels - Rosebery School, Surrey
Jaime Dawson - University College London
Caroline Evers - Sevenoaks School
Derrick Farnell - St Andrews University
Vicky Hoyle - Talbot Heath School, Bournemouth
Robert Leeming - Harrow School
Emma Shears - King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls, Birmingham
Dominique Tobbell - New Hall School, Chelmsford
Dr Peter Alberry; Dr Mary Archer; Dr David Concar; Dr Laura Garwin;
Dr Roger Highfield; Dr Peter Briggs; Prof Heinz Wolff; Prof Lewis Wolpert
