New Darwin Centre unveiled to the public

Planning a scientific expedition, identifying a mystery species and watching spiders getting it on were among the many interactive experiences on offer at the Natural History Museum’s new Darwin Centre, which opened to the public today.

Video: Inside the Cocoon



The new £78 million centre is home to the eight-storey Cocoon, which enables visitors to question scientists as they work by providing microphone links to the glass-fronted laboratories.

As well as the labs, the structure houses 20 million insect and plant specimens as well as a plethora of interactive activities. Just behind the gigantic building lies the Attenborough Studio, where daily Nature Live talks thrive on audience participation. The aim of these talks is to introduce audiences to some of the 250 scientists working at the Darwin Centre while engaging visitors directly with the exhibits.

Today, Jan Beccaloni, Curator of Arachnida and Myriapoda at the museum, discussed with a packed studio the finer points of spider speed-dating.

After first showing us a jar of preserved spider specimens collected by Charles Darwin himself, she then delved into the art of spider romance.

“More often than not, the female is the larger of the sexes. The male needs to demonstrate that he isn’t dinner. He also need to show that he’s the correct species. So courtship is a game the males have to play really carefully.”

According to Beccaloni, one of the strategies the males of some species of spider employ to woo their potentially deadly lovers is giving presents.

“The male spider will catch a fly and wrap it in silk, and while the female is eating it, he can mate with her, and hopefully won’t be eaten too,” she explained. “The longer she feeds, the longer he can mate with her and the more eggs he can fertilise.”

But it turns out these male spiders aren't exactly the most chivalric kind - no satisfying encounter, no gift.

As Beccaloni said, “It was discovered that some males, if they are interrupted during mating, will take the gift back!” So much for romance.

After the talk, I went for my pre-booked entry to the Cocoon. Inside the dimly lit edifice were some fantastic touchscreen visual displays, including one which tested my ability to identify an unnamed flea-like species. Green-blue shifting images were projected on the walls and ceiling of the cave-like interior, creating glowing backdrops for the exhibitions.

And for those who'd like to revisit what they learnt at the museum, visitors can pick up a free NaturePlus card, which allows them to save content from selected exhibits to view later online by scanning the card’s barcode at the relevant points – handy for backing up your memory if information-overload takes hold.


Video and images taken by myself at the Natural History Museum's Darwin Centre.

Peer reviewing: should it detect fraud?

What is the future of peer review, and should it detect fraud and misconduct were just a few of the questions tackled at a talk at the British Science Festival on Tuesday. At the session Science Fact or Science Fiction: Should Peer Review Stop Plagiarism, Bias or Fraud?, Sense About Science’s Tracey Brown revealed for the first time the preliminary results of their 2009 Peer Review Study. On hand to offer their opinions on the findings were panellists Peter Hayward from the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases and The Guardian’s environment correspondent David Adam.

Video: Tracey Brown, Peter Hayward and David Adam offer up their views on the role of peer review



More than 4,000 researchers took part in the online survey from July to August, with a full report of the findings due to be published this November. Peer review now results in 1.3 million learned articles published every year. According to Sense About Science, peer review is the front line in critical review of research, enabling other researchers to analyse or use findings, and, in turn, society at large to sift research claims.

Brown likened peer review to the jury trial system in responding to fears voiced by some critics over whether peer review is effective in detecting fraudulent research claims.

“In practice, there are miscarriages of justice and there are delays in the jury system,” she said. “But we have to be careful that we don’t jettison trial by jury just because these things sometimes happen. Likewise with peer reviewing, fraud may slip through the net from time to time, but that's no reason to do away with the whole system. In that sense, I don't feel that peer review is in crisis.”

According to the findings, more researchers want to improve, rather than replace, peer review. Around 84 per cent believe that without peer review, there would be no control in scientific communication, with 68 per cent agreeing that formal training for peer reviewers would improve the quality of reviews.

“It’s surprising that many people thought there should be a high degree of training,” said Brown. “It seems that people don’t necessarily know how to pitch a review. They can be too nice sometimes and don’t realise it would be more helpful to the editor if you give an honest review. So what’s the best way to help reviewers improve? Maybe the answer is if lecturers taught their post doctorate students on how to peer review.”

Brown also touched on anonymity in peer reviewing, and how it can be crucial in encouraging researchers to review. Over three quarters favoured the double blind system, where only the editor knows who the reviewers are.

“If you force someone to sign their review, you would get a massive drop off, particularly with younger researchers reviewing older colleagues. There’s obviously a discomfort there.”

So should peer review actively detect fraud? The survey revealed that 79 per cent of authors and reviewers say yes, but only 33 per cent think it is actually capable of doing so.

“What I find interesting is that there is a huge gap between people who think peer review should detect plagiarism and fraud, and those who think it actually does. People do feel there needs to be something to check fraud, but that peer review is not the way to do it. On the one hand, it seems to run counter to the idea of a community of collaboration by having an editor telling the peer reviewer to be very suspicious of any findings. But overall, around three quarters of people think peer review is doing what is sets out to do.”

Hayward, who is tasked with organising peer reviews at the Lancet, underlined the importance of reviewing to journal editors, saying: “The comments we get back from peer reviewers tell us so much about the paper in question. They tell us whether a topic is current and so on. What peer reviewers do for me as an editor is they look at the papers and then offer suggestions on how to improve it, which in turn also benefits the author.

“Obviously we face a challenge in that we don’t always know who are the best reviewers to approach. Bias is a problem. You don’t always know the relationships between peer reviewers and the author of the paper. Sometime you only find it out once the peer review has come back.

“Obviously time is an element in peer review. People want to get their papers published as soon as possible. For example in the summer, many people are away on holiday and it’s hard to find people to peer review papers.”

Adam commented on how journalists are often in the firing line when an article featuring a fraudulent claim in published.

“It’s very convenient just to say, ‘Well if it was published in Nature, if it was published in Science, it’s been peer reviewed, I’ll just use it, and if it’s wrong, you can just blame the journal,’” he said. “I think in a sense it’s a blessing and a curse for the journalist because you assume it’s been scrutinised by the journal, but yet you will also be held accountable if it’s wrong.

“There's also commercial pressure to cover big stories which others are reporting on, even if you're sceptical about them. So maybe PA will receive a press release and they will publish and then it’s seen by the editor and they’ll ask you to cover it too. As a journalist, you wouldn’t last very long if you replied, 'I won’t report on that' all the time.”


More detailed coverage of the preliminary study can be found on the Sense About Science website, where the results can also be downloaded.
Video filmed by myself at the event.

Gaia v Goldilocks: the theory giants go head to head

Two rival models of how life on Earth continues to exist thrashed it out on Saturday at Royal Holloway University as part of the British Science Festival. In the red corner was Dr David Wilkinson of John Moores University with the Gaia concept, the theory that, once established on our planet, life actively regulates the conditions that enable us to remain here. And in the blue corner was Royal Holloway’s Dr Dave Waltham defending the Goldilocks hypothesis, which suggests that life is only able to remain on Earth by chance alone.

Both speakers initially had 20 minutes to make their case before taking turns to reply to eachother’s arguments. Then, the audience was invited to vote on which theory they found most convincing.

I personally came to the talk a Goldilocks follower. Surely given the sheer number of happy accidents, from asteroids wiping out the dinosaurs to how the balance of gases was tipped in our favour, the fact that life had continued to exist on this planet up until now was down to luck, pure and simple.

Audio: Dave Waltham and David Wilkinson argue their cases



To a certain extent, the Gaia hypothesis doesn’t contest this. According to Wilkinson, Gaia acknowledges that a large amount of luck was necessary for life getting started in the first place. Both theories start from the point where life is already established and abundant on Earth. But that is where the agreements tend to end. Gaia suggests that life helps keep those conditions suitable for life within fairly limited parameters, whereas Goldilocks says that this too is down to luck, and that a “self-regulating” planet is a myth.

It was a tightly-fought contest between two highly convincing proposals. Wilkinson went first, and reminded the audience of the Black Swan theory and related it to Gaia by saying how difficult it is to come to a sound conclusion about life on Earth when we only have one piece of evidence to go on: our planet.

Waltham then set out his argument by showing an image called the Hubble Deep Space Field, which is the most distant image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“If I’m right, there is no complex life out there in the Hubble Deep Space Field shot,” said Waltham. “According to the Gaia argument, there should be billions. But there are so many factors necessary to get conditions just right to have a stable climate, one of them being orbit. The probability is that there will be one planet in 10 million galaxies in the visible universe that will have all the nine basic properties necessary for life to start.”

He went on to the crux of his argument, that regulation plays no part in maintaining life.

“Neither of us disagrees that evolution is very important for the endurance of life,” said Waltham. “But my point is, does life only do good things for the planet? Sometimes it does destructive things.

“Take the oxygen crisis two to three billion years ago. Oxygen levels took off, and that had a terrible effect on the Earth. Not only did it cause a bad climate effect, but it poisoned most life on Earth, which at that time couldn’t handle oxygen.

“I don’t disagree that the oxygen levels worked out well in the long term. But where I get queasy is the notion that life regulates conditions on the planet to continue its existence.”

Wilkinson responded to the oxygen argument, answering: “That oxygen poisoned life is overplayed and oversimplified. When oxygen levels went high, there would have been a lot of life that those conditions were fine for.

“The case for Gaia is that the Earth regulates itself. The parameters within which life can exist on Earth are rather small. But life may be intimately involved in keeping the conditions of life on Earth stable. Once you make life important in the system, it’s more likely to stay within life-friendly conditions. That’s not to say that once we have life, the planet will always stay within those favourable limits, but it biases the dice in favour of it.”

He cited as an example the fact that the sun has got much bigger throughout its existence but the temperature on Earth has stayed the same, and the water has not boiled away. But he added that self-regulation can’t work for ever.

"When you say regulation to someone, they expect it to stay completely constant. But it actually oscillates between boundaries. You can't attain a stable regulation forever.

“When it fails, you get a big jump in temperature. Finally the system can no longer keep it all level. But if it failed, then it might then swap to another system of regulation.

“And you can still use Gaia theory in a purely chance world. Gaia defines life in terms of its persistence rather its amount. But diversity of life is important because it gives you a wider range of options and so if conditions change, there is more chance that some life will survive.”

As I listened, I found myself being won over by whatever argument was being put forward by the time (fickle I), testament surely to the power of each theory, but I eventually opted for Gaia. In the end, the audience vote was right down to the wire, with Gaia clinching it by a mere two votes.

But thanks to a lively debate, a central and ongoing clash of ideas was brought to life, which was ultimately a success for both sides.

Earth image courtesy of NASA
Hubble Deep Space Field image courtesy of hubblesite.org
Audio recorded by myself at the talk.

Why journalists are suckers for stupid algebra

Why do journalists love stupid equations? That’s the question popular science writer Simon Singh posed on Sunday to a packed lecture theatre at the British Science Festival.

The author of the best-selling maths novel Fermat’s Last Theorem discussed the tenuously contrived equations dreamt up by PR companies and worked through by paid mathematicians to work out such illusive mysteries as the secret of the perfect sitcom, how to pour gravy or a nifty formula on how to work out if your boobline is too low. As Singh said, “The equation’s primary goal is promotion, not science.”

Here is the link to a Guardian article Singh wrote recently which essentially sums up what he covered in his talk. But underlying equations such as the happiest day of the year (June 20, if you want to know), there was a serious message. Although on the surface they can be seen as just a bit of fun, albeit pointless and wrong, maths, ultimately these equations undermine how scientists and mathematicians are seen by the public.

Audio: Singh at his talk Why Do Journalists Love Stupid Equations on how it works

“Bad equations increase the perception that mathematicians and scientists are bonkers,” said Singh. He added that they also perpetuate the idea that money is being wasted on pointless maths at the expense of more worthwhile projects.

On being asked by an audience member whether he wasn’t patronising the public by assuming they would be taken in by these equations, Singh replied: “People tend to believe what the journalists tell them about science. It’s our job to try and keep the journalists honest. Most are honest but those who stretch the truth make it harder for the rest of us and means we have to go even further and exaggerate to make the story stand out. So no, I don’t think that this is patronising the public.”

On another, even more serious note, came the issue of libel in science journalism. Singh spoke of the chilling effect that libel is having on science journalism by stifling scrutiny of research.

Singh, who is currently being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, knows first hand what being on the other end of a law suit is like.

“It’s bad for science if we don't have a frank, fair debate on practises and research,” he said. “When journalists hold back and gut their articles for fear of libel, or when articles don’t even get published at all, this has a serious effect on science.”

He added: “Our UK libel laws are seen by other countries as so ridiculous that they have brought in legislation to block them to make up for our shortcomings.”

He urged people to sign the petition run by Sense About Science campaigning for a change in libel laws. Here’s the link to give your signature, which I also encourage you to do. Otherwise, it’s not just science journalism that suffers, but science itself.

Audio recorded by myself at the talk.