Can a flood barrier save New York?

As though I wasn't geeky enough for you already, among the day trips I remember most fondly from my childhood is one to the Thames Barrier in London. If you've never seen it in person, it is a mammoth piece of engineering. Its genesis lies in a huge flood that hit the North Sea in 1953, killing hundreds of people. At the time, flood barriers weren't particularly common, and the Thames Barrier was so big that it took around thirty years to be built. But we're all entering an age now in which climate change and associated sea level rises have become more of a concern, and the idea of flood protection is soaring up the agenda.

I didn't know this until recently, but New York is amongst the most at-risk cities in the world. And of course nothing highlighted this fact more than last year's devastating Hurricane Sandy. Now, unsurprisingly, scientists and politicians there are concerned that if they don't build a barrier or some other kind of protection around the city soon, parts of it may not survive the next century. About a month ago, I travelled to New York to meet the people working to solve this problem.... and my journalistic gatherings from there have now been turned into a documentary for the BBC World Service, which you can hear this week on radio, or online.

Why does human childbirth hurt?

I'm eight months into my pregnancy, so naturally my thoughts are drifting towards my baby's big, painful birthday. I'd like to think that it's no big deal (after all, if horses and cows can do it without complaining, then why can't I?). But the truth is, human childbirth is particularly painful when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. I learned this fascinating fact at this year's AAAS meeting in Boston, from paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg, who works at the University of Delaware.

The reason is that human brains have evolved to be large in relation to body size, while women's pelvises haven't really kept up in the size stakes. The average human baby is about six per cent the mass of its mother, which is unusually heavy. This means that it's much tougher to get a human baby's head out of a human female's body. The big question for scientists is why. It doesn't make sense that we women wouldn't have evolved pelvises that could match up to the task of childbirth, as other mammals seem to have done.

Rosenberg's explanation is that we haven't needed to evolve these features because we give birth socially. Every country shares the same tradition of never expecting a woman to give birth alone... there are always people to help, which lowers the risks to both the mother and the child. This social adaptation has effectively counteracted the need for us to evolve larger pelvises. If her hypothesis is right, it's a beautiful example of culture changing the outcome of the evolutionary process. And it's a reminder that it doesn't just take a village to raise a child, but also to bring one into the world.

Molecular gastronomy

I'm no great foodie, but over the years I've been captivated by 'scientific' chefs like Heston Blumenthal and, more recently, Nathan Myrhvold (a former Microsoft bigwig turned modernist chef). I'm sure that many millions of other people have been similarly fascinated at seeing the process of cooking broken down and explained. But I've always had the niggling feeling at the back of my mind that this all seems a little too new. Why is the world of cheffery only now learning the very basic chemistry and physics behind food? What on earth took them so long?

It was at an MIT talk a few weeks ago by a chef from the famous show America's Test Kitchen  and the programme's science editor (and Harvard associate professor) Guy Crosby, that it finally dawned on me that they haven't learned anything new at all (the moment actually came when they were explaining why certain combinations of liquids form good emulsions and others don't)... because the processed food industry did it all first. The millions of scientific calculations that needed to be carried out when figuring out how to make a perfectly creamy emulsion, the tenderest chunk of meat and the crispiest snacks were all done decades ago by lab-coated food scientists working for such companies as Nestle, Kraft and Walkers. Without them, we wouldn't have margarine or squeezy cheese. We certainly wouldn't have Pot Noodles. These foods, while cheap, are the height of tastiness. And their tastiness was painstakingly perfected over years in a laboratory. In fact, Guy Crosby confirmed this. He himself worked in food processing before going upmarket.

So, what molecular chefs have basically done is to take science lessons from the dirty underbelly of the food industry, and apply them in such a way that they all seem fresher, glossier and posher. With their seemingly innovative brand of 'scientific cooking' they are pretty much selling us Dairylea Lunchables dressed up as gastronomic cuisine. Now, go watch a Heston cookery show, and tell me, isn't sous vide really just boil in the bag?

Goodbye, Boston

My wonderful fellowship year at MIT concluded this week, and in fairly dramatic style. I was in Boston when the bombings happened at the marathon and I managed to get back home to London just before the suspects were caught. It has been incredibly sad to see a city as beautiful and generally peaceful as Boston become the scene of so much violence, especially since my experience there has been nothing but lovely (save the odd taxi driver!). In fact, it's where my first baby was conceived last summer. I'm due to give birth in about a month, and amidst the terrible events of this week, I'd like to thank my wonderful friends in Cambridge and MIT for wrapping me up in happiness over the past year. If a city is a product of its people, then Boston should count itself one of the best in the world.

Why aren't science films like other films?

I'm at my first AAAS Annual Meeting this week, and it's been great so far. One of the highlights was on Wednesday night, when the recent winners of the Jackson Hole Science Media Awards were showcased at the Harvard Natural History Museum. In the UK, almost all science films are made by the BBC, so it was fascinating to see what American ones are like.

My verdict? I was impressed, especially with Hidden Beauty, a film by former time-lapse photographer Louie Schwartzberg (in the photo above). But what did strike me was that nearly every documentary shown was narrated by a disembodied voice (to be fair to Schwartzberg, at least his voice was supplied by Meryl Streep), or threw loads of CGI onto the screen to compensate for the fact that certain sciences are difficult to communicate without big-budget trickery (especially true of Fabric of the Cosmos, which looked like it was entirely green-screened). In an age in which documentaries have come such a long way, with some amazing, character-driven and narrative storytelling, like in Spellbound and Touching the Void, I couldn't help wondering why science filmmaking seems to be stuck in a rut.

Where are the fly-on-the-wall science documentaries, or the simple character-led films? Why aren't maverick young filmmakers turning to science for inspiration? It's not as though great stories aren't there. It feels sometimes as though the public's fear of science has infected television and film. Surely the stories of scientists and engineers can be just as compelling as those of explorers and adventurers?

That said, I'm sure there are are examples of simple, powerful science films out there that I don't know about. Drop a comment if you can point me in their direction!

New website is online!

 

For all you Angela Saini fans (surely there's one out there somewhere?), you may be pleased to know that my new website has gone online. I've stripped down a lot from the old site, which was getting a bit cluttered, to make navigation simpler. And I've based the design around these beautiful blue tiles I photographed in Lisbon a few years ago. Hope you like it.