Dry January: Fad or genuine benefit to health?

In recent years the trend of giving your body a break after Christmas excess by abstaining from alcohol has really taken off. Fuelled most likely by guilt over the bottles of mulled wine, numerous beers, celebratory champagne flutes and odd glass of sherry (which only ever is drunk at Christmas?!), many choose to have a zero drinking policy for the 31 days of January.

People entering this pact with themselves often cite 'giving their body a rest and chance to recover' as their reasoning. Yet how accurate is this claim? Well the New Scientist teamed up with Rajiv Jalan of the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health at UCL Medical School to get an answer.

Let me firstly state this was a very small scale study: 14 people were involved, 10 of whom gave up alcohol for five weeks and four who carried on drinking as normal. All participants rated themselves as normal, moderate drinkers. Despite its small size the study's results are very exciting and I can not wait for a full scale investigation to be carried out in the future to validate the findings!

Graph credit: New Scientist No2950

Above are the results for the 10 participants that abstained from alcohol (illustrated by the thick black lines). Whilst there were no significant changes in the above parameters in the control group (the thin dotted lines), you can see there were huge physiological differences in the non-drinking group.

Liver fat decreased by 15% on average, cholesterol dropped by 5%, blood glucose levels lowered by a whopping 23% and there was even a little weight decrease. So it seems that 'giving your body a rest' really does do it good!

The benefits don't stop there. Other areas of the participants lives (notably sleep quality, concentration, work performance and general wakefulness) increased by as much as 18% on average. In fact the only negative reported by the non-drinking group was a reported drop in social contact.

Questions still left unanswered include how long do the benefits last for? Especially if people continue drinking as before in February, or even drink more to reward themselves for January. There is much research still to do but the above findings are enough for me to contemplate whether I really want that glass of wine or not...

CaSE Debate: STEM skills gap

Science, technology, engineering and maths. These are the disciplines covered within 'STEM' and in the UK we need more people skilled at them and employed within them. At the recent cross-party CaSE debate at the Royal Society, UK politicians gave a not too cheery outlook for the near future.

All agreed that to fill the gap it is imperative that effort is put into schools in order to equip teachers with the knowledge and resources to make science fun! Textbooks are not the answer here. Informal teaching is needed via school trips to museums and events and practical class exercises must be pushed for. It is still famously either space or dinosaurs that hook children into science, so these need to be pushed even further as the entry point into science for youngsters.

Moving on to secondary school, particularly GCSE age, and the careers service is in dire need of improvement. Many people do not feel helped by their careers service and are unaware of the options in STEM disciplines available to them. By pushing these courses at universities we will have more degrees held within STEM and hopefully retain many of these people in the sector for work and research.

However, our skills gap is current and the above plan will take over a decade to trickle through. Despite Government efforts to get the working ages into STEM via part time Masters courses the number of people enrolling on them has dropped. This is troublesome seeing as Career Development Loans are fairly readily available.

So must we look further afield to fill the STEM skills gap? Giving overseas researchers and workers an incentive to come to the UK may be a wise move. We have many of the world's most brilliant universities yet immigration laws and a general perception of immigration being a negative thing is hindering the process.

So for the moment the gap looks set to stay….

CaSE Debate: G8 Funding Comparison

Spending a relatively meagre 1.7% (May 2013) of GDP on science research places the UK as the second lowest investor into science in the G8. As this is the case how do we remain competitive? This was discussed at the CaSE debate a couple of weeks ago, along with justification that our spending is worthwhile. 

An ideal figure of 3% is often thrown around when discussing GDP spend on science. UK science ministers at the event explained that the UK meeting this number is highly unlikely at current time. The key to making our 1.7% count, they explained, is to create incentives to keep large R&D companies interested in us and not just the emerging economies. This can be achieved by creating long term contracts with the companies which entices them with security that perhaps smaller economies cannot offer.

Another promising point is how the UK are spending broadly and with a fairly stable cash figure. This is allowing continual funding into many different aspects of science and technology. Compare this with Germany, who at first glance put a formidable percentage of GDP into science, but in actual fact are investing a massive chunk of this into energy. Their shift away from nuclear is draining their science budget, allowing other areas of research to perhaps slip through the net. If Aesop is to be believed, the UK with our slow and steady approach may be doing just fine.

CaSE Debate: Women in Science

I learnt a shocking fact about women in UK science at the CaSE debate. Half of state schools send not a single female student to A-level physics. Perhaps this may not be so shocking to some – physics is still thought of as a predominantly male discipline. However, after coming from an all girls grammar school I forgot these stereotypes are still so engrained in society. In my school year roughly a quarter of girls took A-level physics.

Along with physics, both biology and chemistry were well received at school – I myself took A-level biology. In this respect I represent the far greater proportion of girls in the UK. Biology is seen as the ‘girls’ science, with dreams of one day become a doctor being at the root of this. However, unlike other degrees the number of places for medicine are set by the government each year as advised by the NHS. Therefore when leaving physics and chemistry behind if girls do not make the cut for medicine they may find it hard to find roles in other science and engineering sectors, leading to our female deficit.

How can we inspire females to follow predominantly male-based areas of science? On this all parties agreed. Ambition needs to be fostered in school and from an early age. Female role models are required – for example Roma Agrawel, a female structural engineer who worked on The Shard. And stereotypes need breaking down. I myself am guilty of replying “thank you” when someone tells me “you don’t look like a geologist”. We should be dismissing that a geologist or physicist has a certain look. Not just in gender but in age and ethnicity as well. Diversity can only help science. The more minds and viewpoints that are shared and contrasted, the more likely scientific discoveries are likely to occur.

CaSE Debate 2013

CaSE (Campaign for Science and Engineering) are a self described 'plucky' independent group resolved to increasing the political profile of science in the UK. On 30th October 2013 the Royal Society hosted a CaSE debate for which the science ministers for the three main UK political parties were invited to share their views on science funding. Strangely for UK politics science does not induce the normal cross-party knock about and subsequently views on funding were fairly uniform. The event therefore gave a fairly clear glimpse into the way science will be financed and promoted in the UK in the near future.

With a 'Question Time' style set up and excellent chairing from BBC's Pallab Ghosh the debate was informative, at times humorous and, most importantly, it made sense to me - a scientist sitting in the audience.

L-R David Willetts, Liam Payne, Dr Julian Huppert and Pallab Ghosh

As I enjoyed the event so much and feel a lot of wisdom was communicated to the audience, I am going to do a short series of posts highlighting some of the key topics discussed. They will be broken down as follows:

• the STEM skills gap
• where funding should go within science and engineering 
• how UK science funding compares to that of other nations
• women in science

Check back soon for the first round up.

New Australian Beasties

The majority of my posts so far have been a tad doom and gloom; either about the loss of resources or about new technologies created to get round these losses. So today I am happy to share a pleasant news story about some "new" biotic resources. 

Cape Melville leaf-tailed gecko (Saltuarius eximius)

Blink and you might miss it but hiding in the above picture is the recently discovered Cape Melville leaf-tailed gecko. No guesses for how it was named! This gecko is just one of three new vertebrate species found in a remote region of northern Queensland in Australia. I remember being fascinated by the BBC series 'Land of the Lost Volcano' in which scientists were dropped into the New Guinea jungle and found many new invertebrate and vertebrate species, including a giant rat. However, I am even more in awe that three new vertebrates have been found in a single expedition in Australia - a relatively well explored country!

Golden-coloured Cape Melville shade skink (Saproscincus saltus) 

Blotched boulder-frog (Cophixalus petrophilus)

This just goes to show that by cutting down our rainforests we could be destroying wonderful species, such as the Cape Melville leaf-tail gecko, that we don't even know exist. More on rainforest depletion coming soon as I am going to be exploring palm oil use in UK products.

For more information on the Cape Melville discoveries head over to the Guardian site.

Just me again

Hi there! So a fair bit of time has passed since my last post. In that time quite a lot has happened. I graduated (with a first!) from UCL and have completed a four month internship with Deloitte in their Petroleum Services Group. Whilst that experience was wonderful, now that I have finished I am itching to learn about Earth Sciences as a whole again! To help me get back into the habit of checking the news and scientific journals I am going to be writing posts on here once more.

So watch this space...