bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Medicine
Authors: Gupta Pawan
Published: November 2020

This chapter encompasses questions on acute and subacute clinical situations spread over the various branches of general medicine, which include cardiology, gastroenterology, respiratory system, etc. The questions cover common presentations and anyone who starts practising emergency medicine will encounter such cases right from the beginning. Some of these may be brought by blue light ambulance in an acute stage (acute hypoxia, acute asthma, acute exacerbation of COPD, GI haemorrhage, myocardial infarction, arrhythmias, and many others). Therefore, it is important to have a good grasp of the fundamentals of common ailments so that timely intervention can avoid development of life-threatening complications. A variety of ECGs and chest X-rays have been included in this chapter to cover the common emergencies encountered in regular practice, both in the resuscitation room and in the trolley area. The aim is not necessarily to make you an expert in these areas, but to be able to recognize the patterns of important diseases in their acute stages, to expand your horizons further through seeing and treating more cases, by means of which vital confidence can be gained. There is always an inclination that any patient presenting with chest pain has to have an ACS and the aim is to prove or disprove that it is so. Even after admission to a ward and further tests, the patient is often discharged without the reason of the chest pain being found out. So it is important to consider several other causes of chest pain. Once ACS becomes unlikely, pulmonary embolism should also be considered as an important differential. With regard to the respiratory system, a severe or life-threatening asthma attack can be a daunting experience for the new doctor. Ask for help if you find the presentation is beyond your competence. In such a situation, you would need help from other specialties anyway. Timely intervention by an intensivist may save a young life. Anticipating airway obstruction in smoke inhalation is difficult most of the time, particularly when the patient appears to be talking normally, so it is important to recognize the importance of asking for senior help for further assessment.
Psychiatry
Authors: Gupta Pawan
Published: November 2020

It is estimated that 1 in 4 people in a year will have some kind of mental health problem, and that mixed anxiety and depression is the most common disorder in the UK. There is an increasing number of mental health patients attending the ED, and a new FY doctor in the ED will encounter such patients from their first shift onwards. The approach to a mental health patient is only marginally different from the approach to those presenting under other specialties. The assessment largely depends on careful history taking and attentively listening to the patient’s narrative. There are only a few situations in psychiatry in which a physical examination and investigations are required in the ED to make a diagnosis. As it would not be possible to cover all the areas of psychiatry which come through the doors of the ED in one chapter, only a few questions have been included here to provide a flavour of the common psychiatric situations that FY1/2s may come across in their early training period. The UK has the highest rate of self-harm in Europe and so one of the most important points is to recognize suicidal patients who can harm themselves seriously and manage them appropriately. If such patients are discharged following an inadequate assessment, they may go on to commit suicide and the attending doctors would have missed the opportunity to support and save them. In this category of patients, when they present to the ED, no matter how minimal is the level of their self-mutilation, it is a serious ‘cry’ for help. Our job is to listen to the patient and support them with the maximum help we can provide. As it may be difficult to occasionally get to the bottom of the problem, particularly within the time constraints in the ED, a low level of suspicion should be kept to ask for the assistance of the mental health expert. Self-harm and depression go almost hand in hand. The suicidal rate is higher in depressed patients than in the general population.
Paediatric Emergencies
Authors: Gupta Pawan
Published: November 2020

It is normal in the early days of one’s medical career to feel apprehensive on seeing a seriously ill child in the resuscitation room. The effect is compounded by the fact that children of different age groups have different normal clinical parameters and require different drug dosages, volumes of fluids to be transfused, equipment of variable sizes, etc. To deal with the situation safely, various formulae have been developed to calculate the approximate weight of the child, size of the endotracheal tube, etc. The BNF for Children should be consulted when there is time to address it; otherwise, use the standard chart of common drug dosages according to the child’s body weight, which is freely available in almost every ED in the UK. It should cover most of your concerns when seeing and treating the acutely sick child. Children compensate well with any underlying serious illness, but there are some subtle symptoms and signs they will usually have in such circumstances. If these are missed, and appropriate management is not given or delayed, a child can suddenly decompensate and go into cardiorespiratory arrest unlike adults, who show gradual deterioration before an arrest. The success rate of return of spontaneous circulation from this situation is poor in children in comparison with adults. Therefore, for clinicians treating children, it is highly rewarding to identify those subtle symptoms and signs and institute the required treatment early on to avoid a catastrophe or a poorer outcome. There are high-quality videos available at the website www.spottingthesickchild.com for junior doctors on how to diagnose a sick child. ‘Be gentle with the young’ (Juvenal, Roman poet) is a well-known saying. Yet, for various socioeconomic or personal reasons, children sometimes become victims of adults trying to find an outlet for their anger. The ED is the place where such children are then brought to, with complaints that may raise suspicion of abuse. It is our primary duty to safeguard vulnerable young children and provide them the opportunity and support they require to grow up like every other child. A few questions in this chapter aim to stimulate the thinking of the reader in this area.
Eugene Strandness and the development of Doppler ultrasound in vascular disease
Authors: Sumner David S. , Beach Kirk w.
Published: November 2020

This is the story of how a young surgeon, Donald Eugene Strandness Jr (Gene) was instrumental in the development of the Doppler ultrasonic flow meter, which evolved into the duplex scanner — perhaps the most versatile instrument in the modern vascular lab. He was born in Bowman, North Dakota, in 1928, and attended high school in Olympia, washington, where he was a football player and a star gymnast. He graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 1946, studied medicine at the University of washington (Uw), and in 1950 entered the general surgical residency programme. At the time of the Korean war, Gene was drafted out of his residency; met his 2-year service obligation to the United States Air Force; and in 1959 returned to Seattle, where he hoped to join in the extensive research underway on the gastrointestinal system under the direction of Professor Henry Harkins. Instead, Dr Harkins urged him to change directions and join a small group at the Seattle VA Hospital who were investigating arterial disease. This group included John Bell, Hub Radke, and J.E. Jesseph. Strandness, swallowing his initial disappointment at having to give up gastrointestinal research, quickly embraced the vascular challenge. The 1950s were a particularly exciting time in the history of vascular surgery. Improved sutures, grafts, and anaesthesia made it possible for the first time to perform major arterial surgery, such as resection of abdominal aortic aneurysms, endarterectomy of the carotid bifurcation, and bypass of iliac, femoral, and popliteal arteries. In preparation for major arterial surgery, the need for imaging was keenly felt. Physiological studies to select patients for surgery took a backseat to arteriograms and physical examination — in part because pulse palpation and patient testimony were the only methods readily available for measuring preoperative functional impairment or postoperative success. Invasive methods for studying blood flow were limited to electromagnetic flowmetry, which was performed in the operating room with the patient anaesthetized. No effort was made to duplicate normal physiological conditions. Prior to the 1960s, a few surgeons and internists maintained rudimentary vascular labs where systolic blood pressure and blood flow were measured plethysmographically.
The development of ultrasound in otorhinolaryngology
Authors: Johnson Pernilla Sahlstrand , Jannert Magnus
Published: November 2020

The use of ultrasound in the field of otorhinolaryngology goes back almost 40 years. Ultrasonography with simple A-mode has proved to be successful for identifying diseased maxillary and frontal sinuses. It is generally accepted that ultrasonography is of value in diagnosing acute rhinosinusitis; in cases of chronic rhinosinusitis both A- and B-mode ultrasound have limited value. B-mode ultrasound is mainly used for soft tissue examination of the neck and has not developed to the extent that was expected for the paranasal sinuses. Computed tomography (CT) is still the gold standard for investigation in chronic rhinosinusitis when grading the severity of the disease and when the patient will be subject to surgical intervention. Ultrasound-guided fine-needle biopsy of the neck and Doppler ultrasound for evaluation of the blood vessels of the neck will also be of great value in the future. Doppler ultrasound of the paranasal sinus shows promising results in identifying the characteristics of sinus secretion, and there is ongoing research on this application. The first clinical evaluation in patients with sinusitis, examined with ultrasound Doppler, will be performed in 2011. Ultrasound examination of the neck and ultrasound-guided fine-needle biopsy are well established methods in the field of otorhinolaryngology. The ultrasound technique is of great value when identifying lymph nodes, cysts, and abscesses of the neck. Furthermore, ultrasound can be used to differentiate diffuse changes in the thyroid and salivary glands from solitary lumps and cysts. Ultrasound is also of importance when examining the parathyroid glands. Additionally, Doppler ultrasound is a very successful method to diagnose stenosis of the arteries of the neck. However, these examinations are mainly executed by physicians skilled in ultrasound outside the departments of otorhinolaryngology. Another field of application is the development of user-friendly ultrasound equipment, which can be used by physicians in primary care or by otolaryngologists in order to improve the diagnostics of rhinosinusitis. This is an important diagnostic tool, since it has been known for more than 40 years that diagnoses of acute rhinosinusitis (ARS) based on clinical examination alone, is correct in only 50 % of cases.
Turning to Stone
Authors: Bradley Richard
Published: November 2020

The starting point for this chapter is a work by the German artist Joseph Beuys. ‘7000 oaks’ is an installation which he inaugurated at Kassel, a city that had been damaged during the Second World War (Scholz 1986). Each tree was paired with a basalt stele which was quarried locally. In Beuys’s conception, the installation would change its character over time. For the first few years the standing stones would be the dominant feature, but they would become less conspicuous as the oaks grew to maturity. After that, there might be two very different outcomes. Either new trees would be planted as the old ones died— that was the artist’s plan—or a setting of monoliths would be all that remained with the stones themselves marking the positions of oaks that had disappeared. Beuys was concerned with regeneration in a way that was entirely appropriate in a war-damaged city where the oak trees would gradually replace a setting of rocks. His work was informed by his interest in ecology and played on a contrast between wood and stone which is equally relevant to archaeology. They are very different materials from one another, but both were used in prehistoric structures and employed in distinctive ways. Wood is an organic substance and eventually decays. Stone, on the other hand, is inorganic and for that reason it lasts a long time. The distinction is important in considering ancient architecture (Parker Pearson and Ramilsonina 1998). Of course, there were places in which only one of these materials was available, but there were others where the distinctive ways in which stone and wood were used are especially informative. Two examples illustrate the point. Neolithic houses in Northern Europe were timber constructions, but most of the tombs that accompanied them were made of local stone. In this case, the choice of building material suggests that these dwellings were thought to have a finite lifespan, whilst the tombs of their occupants would have a longer history. Similarly, the Neolithic longhouse at La Haute Mée in north-west France was built of wood but was accompanied by a granite menhir (Cassen et al. 1998).
Significant Forms
Authors: Bradley Richard
Published: November 2020

Most of the problems investigated by prehistorians involve material that has been known for a long time. Thus, artefacts, settlements, and monuments have been placed in chronological order and their distributions have been mapped. Taken together, the results of this work constitute an ‘archaeological record’ which can be analyzed and interpreted with the aid of different theories. Only occasionally is the nature of that record entirely transformed. It has happened in some regions where large-scale excavations are necessitated by commercial development, but it is in Central and south-eastern Europe that the transformation has been especially dramatic. This has happened for two reasons. The first is a consequence of political changes which have allowed archaeologists to employ aerial photography for the first time. The second has been the use of large-scale geophysical survey which has often been inspired by the discoveries made from the air. Taken together, these new methods have identified largely new classes of prehistoric monument and have shed fresh light on those that were already known. An unexpected result of these developments has been the discovery of enclosures dating from the Neolithic period. Until twenty years ago their distribution was largely confined to West Germany and Austria. Now that restrictions on flying have been lifted, it has been possible to undertake aerial reconnaissance in other areas and similar monuments have been found in considerable numbers in East Germany, Slovakia and Hungary (Andersen 1997: Chapter 5). At the same time, the rapid development of geophysical survey has had dramatic consequences. It has shown that some of the prominent tells that were already recorded were bounded by considerable earthworks. The reason that these discoveries were so surprising is that the enclosures were circular, while the houses of the same date were rectangular. The same situation arises in other regions and periods. What was the significance of curvilinear structures in a right-angled world? Part Three of this book investigates this relationship. The oldest circular enclosures probably originated during the earlier fifth millennium BC. There are some striking contrasts between them.
Methods of Crystallization
Authors: Ducruix A. , Giegé R.
Published: November 2020

There are many methods to crystallize biological macromolecules (for reviews see refs 1-3), all of which aim at bringing the solution of macromolecules to a supersaturation state (see Chapters 10 and 11). Although vapour phase equilibrium and dialysis techniques are the two most favoured by crystallographers and biochemists, batch and interface diffusion methods will also be described. Many chemical and physical parameters influence nucleation and crystal growth of macromolecules (see Chapter 1, Table 1). Nucleation and crystal growth will in addition be affected by the method used. Thus it may be wise to try different methods, keeping in mind that protocols should be adapted (see Chapter 4). As solubility is dependent on temperature (it could increase or decrease depending on the protein), it is strongly recommended to work at constant temperature (unless temperature variation is part of the experiment), using commercially thermoregulated incubators. Refrigerators can be used, but if the door is often open, temperature will vary, impeding reproducibility. Also, vibrations due to the refrigerating compressor can interfere with crystal growth. This drawback can be overcome by dissociating the refrigerator from the compressor. In this chapter, crystallization will be described and correlated with solubility diagrams as described in Chapter 10. Observation is an important step during a crystallization experiment. If you have a large number of samples to examine, then this will be time-consuming, and a zoom lens would be an asset. The use of a binocular generally means the presence of a lamp; use of a cold lamp avoids warming the crystals (which could dissolve them). If crystals are made at 4°C and observation is made at room temperature, observation time should be minimized. Preparation of the solutions of all chemicals used for the crystallization of biological macromolecules should follow some common rules: • when possible, use a hood (such as laminar flux hood) to avoid dust • all chemicals must be of purest chemical grade (ACS grade) • stock solutions are prepared as concentrated as possible with double distilled water. Solubility of most chemicals are given in Merck Index. Filter solutions with 0.22 μm minifilter.
Manual multiple synthesis methods
Authors: Ostresh J M , Houghten R A
Published: November 2020

Simultaneous multiple peptide synthesis enables the parallel synthesis of large numbers of peptides. The T-bag (tea-bag) method was developed along with other methods, e.g. pin synthesis, synthesis on paper plates, synthesis on parallel columns, and synthesis on cellulose, as technology to facilitate simultaneous multiple synthesis. Large numbers of peptides, peptidomimetics, and small organic molecules have been prepared using the T-bag method to address different research fields, such as conformational analysis, structure activity analysis, synthesis methodologies, and antibody-antigen interaction studies. Using the T-bag method, more than 150 peptides can be prepared in parallel in flexible amounts, with easily enough material for biological tests and analytical studies. The synthesis of peptides of length of up to 26 amino acid residues has been reported. Moreover, the T-bag technology is easy to apply in practice and requires very little special equipment. T-bags are prepared by containing solid phase resins within polypropylene mesh material. Polypropylene is rather chemically inert as well as fairly thermally stable (to 150°C), allowing a wide range of chemical reactions to be used for solid phase synthesis without affecting the bag material. Polystyrene cross-linked with 1% divinylbenzene, 100-200 mesh, is mainly used as the solid support, but other types of base resin can be used as well, e.g. TentaGel. The size of the resin beads must exceed the size of the pores of the polypropylene mesh material of the T-bags to avoid resin loss during synthesis. Syntheses are carried out manually, using semi automation, or within a multiple peptide synthesizer. The preparation of T-bags for solid phase synthesis, starting with 100 mg resin per bag, is described in Protocol 1. Synthesis using the T-bag method can be performed using either Boc or Fmoc synthetic strategies. For all manipulations, enough solvent should be used to cover the T-bags (about 3-4 ml per bag containing 100 mg of resin). To enable efficient washings and reactions, the reaction vessels (polyethylene bottles) should be shaken vigorously, preferably through the use of a reciprocating shaker.
Use of optical spectroscopic methods to study the thermodynamic stability of proteins
Authors: Eftink Maurice R. , Maity Haripada
Published: November 2020

The biophysical characterization of globular proteins will almost always include some type of study of the unfolding of protein to obtain thermodynamic parameters. The basic idea is that a transition between a native and unfolded state, induced by temperature, pH, or denaturant concentration, can serve as a standard reaction for obtaining a thermodynamic measure of the stability of the native state. For example, the free energy change for the unfolding reaction can be used to compare the stability of a set of mutant forms of a protein (1-4). This type of analysis is based both on assumptions of the thermodynamic model for the unfolding process and on assumptions in the way the data are analysed; some of these assumptions and their limitations will be discussed below. There are a variety of methods that can be used to monitor an unfolding process. A common method is differential scanning calorimetry, DSC, which measures the variation in the specific heat of a protein-containing solution as a protein is thermally unfolded (5-7). DSC is a popular method for this purpose, but optical methods can also provide suitable information for tracking the unfolding of a protein The spectroscopic signals for the native and unfolded states of a protein can give some insight regarding the structure of the states, and often can provide advantages of economy, ease of measurement and amenability to a wide range of sample concentration. The optical spectroscopic methods that have been used most often for this purpose are absorption spectroscopy, circular dichroism and fluorescence, which will be discussed in this chapter. A key to each of these methods and their use in protein unfolding studies is that the signal is a mole fraction weighted average of the signals of each thermodynamic state. That is, the observed signal, S, can be expressed as . . . S = ∑XiSi . . . . . . 1 . . . where Xi is the mole fraction of species i and si is the intrinsic signal of species i. In order for a particular spectroscopic signal to be useful for tracking a N ↔ U transition of a protein, the signal must be sufficiently different for the N and U states.
Principles of Decision Making
Authors: Holland Karen , Roberts Deborah
Published: November 2020

The focus of this book is decision-making skills for practice and, as such, it will become apparent not only that it is essential for student nurses to learn about what these skills are, but also that it is equally important that they learn to become competent in making the decisions that are an essential part of becoming a qualified nurse. As individuals, we make decisions of one form or another on a daily basis. We have to make basic decisions such as what time to get up in the morning, what to wear that day, who is going to take the children to school, or what to have for breakfast. These decisions do not appear, on their surface, to require major consideration when it comes to decision making, but for some people even these seemingly basic decision-making situations can cause immense stress, resulting either from the act of decision making itself or from having to take into account the context, or impact on others, of any decision taken. Some of you will come across patients or clients in whom this has developed into a health-related problem and we will be considering these issues in later chapters. Your ability to become a confident decision maker in practice will, however, be dependent on the decisions that you make as a student in the university and as a person. Some of the situations in which making decisions impacts on all aspects of your learning to become a nurse will be discussed in Chapter 2 . This chapter is initially concerned with the underlying principles of decision making as a student nurse. It explores why it is important and necessary to learn about decision making, and how to make decisions; it will also focus on what has been shown in the literature about decision making as both a student nurse and a qualified nurse, and most importantly what you need to achieve to meet the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) competencies. Later chapters will focus on the application of some of this learning to specific practice contexts and situations.
Making Decisions as A Student: Decision-Making Opportunities
Authors: Roberts Deborah
Published: November 2020

This chapter introduces the underlying principles of decision making. You will be encouraged to consider decision making as a student in university together with decision making as a student nurse (see Chapter 1 ). In 2010, following a review of pre-registration nursing education, the professional body for nursing in the United Kingdom, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), published new Standards for Pre-Registration Nursing Education , including competencies that all students must achieve to qualify as a registered nurse. These competencies have to be met in four broad areas known as ‘domains’. 1. Professional values 2. Communication and interpersonal skills 3. Nursing practice and decision making 4. Leadership, management, and team working You will find reference to these domains throughout the book, and there will be an opportunity to learn how the competencies in each of these that relate to decision making can be linked to your clinical and university-based learning. There are a number of terms that can be found in the literature that are often used interchangeably; you may see terms such as ‘decision making’, ‘problem solving’, ‘clinical reasoning’ or ‘clinical judgement’, and others used when writers are discussing how and why nurses respond to clinical situations in a particular way (see Chapter 1 for more detail). For example, Levett-Jones et al. (2010: 515) provide a helpful definition of clinical reasoning as ‘the process by which nurses collect cues, process the information, come to an understanding of a patient problem or situation, plan and implement interventions, evaluate outcomes, and reflect on and learn from the process’. They also emphasize that a nurse’s ability to develop these clinical reasoning skills depends on what they term as ‘five rights’—that is, the nurse’s ability ‘to collect the right cues and to take the right action for the right patient at the right time and for the right reason’. In the context of ensuring that any patient receives the best possible care, these ‘five rights’ are very appropriate, and indeed if one were to fail to pick up on the right cues and to take the appropriate actions in many clinical situations, the outcome may have serious repercussions for the nurse and the patient.
Look
Authors: Shroff Gautam
Published: November 2020

In ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ the legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes deduces that his companion Watson had got very wet lately, as well as that he had ‘a most clumsy and careless servant girl’. When Watson, in amazement, asks how Holmes knows this, Holmes answers: . . . ‘It is simplicity itself . . . My eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someonewho has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavery.’ Most of us do not share the inductive prowess of the legendary detective. Nevertheless, we all continuously look at the the world around us and, in our small way, draw inferences so as to make sense of what is going on. Even the simplest of observations, such as whether Watson’s shoe is in fact dirty, requires us to first look at his shoe. Our skill and intent drive what we look at, and look for. Those of us that may share some of Holmes’s skill look for far greater detail than the rest of us. Further, more information is better: ‘Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay’, says Holmes in another episode. No inference is possible in the absence of input data, and, more importantly, the right data for the task at hand. How does Holmes connect the observation of ‘leather . . . scored by six almost parallel cuts’ to the cause of ‘someone . . . very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it’? Perhaps, somewhere deep in the Holmesian brain lies a memory of a similar boot having been so damaged by another ‘specimen of the London slavery’?Or, more likely,many different ‘facts’, such as the potential causes of damage to boots, including clumsy scraping; that scraping is often prompted by boots having been dirtied by mud; that cleaning boots is usually the job of a servant; as well as the knowledge that bad weather results in mud.
Connect
Authors: Shroff Gautam
Published: November 2020

On 14 October 2011, the Apple Computer Corporation launched the latest generation of the iPhone 4S mobile phone. The iPhone 4S included Siri, a speech interface that allows users to ‘talk to their phone’. As we look closer though, we begin to suspect that Siri is possibly more than ‘merely’ a great speech-to-text conversion tool. Apart from being able to use one’s phone via voice commands instead of one’s fingers, we are also able to interact with other web-based services. We can search the web, for instance, and if we are looking for a restaurant, those nearest our current location are retrieved, unless, of course, we indicated otherwise. Last but not least, Siri talks back, and that too in a surprisingly human fashion. ‘Voice-enabled location-based search—Google has it already, so what?’, we might say. But there is more. Every voice interaction is processed by Apple’s web-based servers; thus Siri runs on the ‘cloud’ rather than directly on one’s phone. So, as Siri interacts with us, it is also continuously storing data about each interaction on the cloud; whether we repeated words while conversing with it, which words, from which country we were speaking, and whether it ‘understands’ us or not in that interaction. As a result, we are told, Siri will, over time, learn from all this data, improve its speech-recognition abilities, and adapt itself to each individual’s needs. We have seen the power of machine learning in Chapter 3. So, regardless of what Siri does or does not do today, let us for the moment imagine what is possible. After all, Siri’s cloud-based back-end will very soon have millions of voice conversations to learn from. Thus, if we ask Siri to ‘call my wife Jane’ often enough, it should soon learn to ‘call my wife’, and fill in her name automatically. Further, since storage is cheap, Siri can remember all our actions, for every one of us: ‘call the same restaurant I used last week’, should figure out where I ate last week, and in case I eat out often, it might choose the one I used on the same day last week.
Correct
Authors: Shroff Gautam
Published: November 2020

Last summer I took my family on a driving holiday in the American south-western desert covering many national parks. While driving along some of the long tracts of razor-straight highways, such as between Las Vegas and St George, Utah, I often fought drowsiness, not because of lack of sleep, but from the sheer monotony. A familiar experience for many, no doubt. Hardly any conscious thought is needed during such drives. It must be one’s ‘System’, as per Kahneman, which is most certainly doing what ever work is needed. Nevertheless, sleep is not an option. In spite of all the marvellous features embedded in the modern car, the ability to drive itself is, sadly, still missing. The cruise control button helps a bit, allowing one’s feet torelax as the car’s speed remains on an even keel. But the eyes and mind must remain awake and alert. When, if ever, one wonders, will cars with a ‘drive’ button become as common as those with an automatic transmission? Is driving along a perfectly straight stretch of highway really that difficult? After all, we all know that a modern jetliner can fly on autopilot, allowing even a single pilot to read a novel while ‘flying’ the aircraft on a long transcontinental flight. In fact, the jetliner would fly itself perfectly even if the pilot dozed off for many minutes or even hours. We insist that at least one pilot be awake and alert only for our own peace of mind, so as to be able to adequately respond to any emergency situation that might arise. First of all, the ubiquitous autopilot is itself quite a complex piece of equipment. Even to get a plane to fly perfectly straight along a desired heading at a fixed altitude takes a lot of work. The reason, as you must have guessed, is that nature, in the guise of the air on which our jetliner rides, can be quite unpredictable. Wind speeds and directions change continuously, even ever so slightly, requiring constant adjustments to the plane’s engine power, ailerons, flaps, and rudder. In the absence of such adjustments, our jetliner would most certainly veer off course, or lose or gain speed, even dangerously enough to trigger a powered dive or a stall.
Heavenly Bodies
Authors: Wothers Peter
Published: November 2020

We don’t know for sure where the names of the longest-known elements come from, but a connection was made early on between the most ancient metals and bodies visible in the heavens. Figure 1 shows an engraving from a seventeenth-century text with the title ‘The Seven Metals’ (translated from the Latin). It isn’t immediately obvious how the image is meant to depict seven metals until we explore the connections between alchemy and astronomy. However strange such associations seem to us now, we shall see that new elements named in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have had astronomical origins. We can’t properly understand why some of the more recent elements were named as they were without first understanding these earlier historical connections. As we look into the night sky, the distant stars remain in their same relative positions and seem to move gracefully together through the heavens. Of course, we now know that it is the spinning Earth that gives this illusion of movement. The imaginations of our ancestors joined the bright dots to pick out fanciful patterns such as the Dragon, the Dolphin, or the Great Bear—the latter being more often known today (with rather less imagination) as the Big Dipper, the Plough, or even the Big Saucepan. But, while these patterns, the constellations, remained unchanging over time, there were seven objects, or ‘heavenly bodies’, that seemed to move across the skies with a life of their own. They were given the name ‘planet’, which derives from the Greek word for ‘wanderer’ (‘planetes asteres’, ‘πλάνητες ἀστέρες’, meaning ‘wandering stars’). These seven bodies were the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, all of which were documented by the Babylonians over three thousand years ago. Until the sixteenth century, the most commonly held view was that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe and that the seven bodies revolved around the Earth, with the relative orbits shown schematically in Figure 2.
Of Ashes and Alkalis
Authors: Wothers Peter
Published: November 2020

The name azote, proposed by Lavoisier and his colleagues, did not gain wide acceptance; nitrogen, meaning ‘nitre-former’, is the name now familiar to us. Modern chemists understand ‘nitre’ to mean ‘potassium nitrate’, one of the key ingredients of gunpowder, containing the elements potassium, oxygen, and nitrogen. However, although it dates back to antiquity, the name nitre initially referred to a completely different compound containing no nitrogen at all. It is the Latinized name, natrium, derived from this original use, that gives us the modern chemical symbol Na, for the element Humphry Davy named sodium. Travellers to modern-day northern Egypt may find themselves in a region known as the Nitrian Desert, or the Natron Valley—Wadi El Natrun. Here, ancient Egyptians would collect crude salt mixtures from certain lakes and use them for a variety of purposes, such as cleaning, making glass, embalming, and the preparation of medicines. The Egyptian word for the salt may be written ‘nṭry’ or ‘ntr’ (‘neter’), and it has survived for over three thousand years through variations including ‘neter’ (Hebrew), ‘nitron’ (Greek), ‘nitrum’(Latin), and more modern modifications ‘nether’, ‘niter’, ‘nitre’, ‘natrun’, and ‘natron’. Bartholomeus Anglicus, the thirteenth-century monk and author of De proprietatibus rerum (‘On the Properties of Things’), quotes Isidore of Seville from five hundred years earlier saying: ‘Nitrum hath ye name of the countrey of Nitria that is in Aegypt. Thereof is medicine made, & there with bodies and clothes be cleansed and washed.’ Whether the salt was actually named after the region or vice versa is not clear. Although its composition varied enormously, what distinguished nitre from common salt was the presence of significant proportions of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate (sodium hydrogen carbonate). In addition to these carbonates, analyses of ancient samples, including that used in the embalming of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died in 1352 BC, also reveal large proportions of common salt (sodium chloride), sodium sulfate, and silica (silicon dioxide), with smaller proportions of calcium and magnesium carbonates and other minor impurities.
From under the Nose
Authors: Wothers Peter
Published: November 2020

This chapter looks at the elements in the final group of the periodic table—those elements known as the rare or noble gases. We shall see how their discovery in the atmosphere in the 1890s dates back to an observation first made by the meticulous Henry Cavendish over one hundred years earlier. This led to the unexpected discovery of an entire group of elements that needed to be added to the earliest periodic tables; and remarkably, one man was to dominate all these discoveries. One of Isaac Newton’s classic experiments was using a glass prism to split a beam of sunlight into a spectrum to show that white light is actually a mixture of all the colours of the rainbow. In 1802, William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828), discoverer of the elements palladium and rhodium, modified the experiment by using a thin slit to admit the sunlight instead of the circular hole that Newton used. He subsequently discovered that the solar spectrum was not completely seamless, but actually contained a number of fine dark lines, now known as Fraunhofer lines. They get their name from Joseph Fraunhofer (1787–1826), who became the most skilled worker of glass and producer of lenses of the time. Using his highest-quality optical lenses, Fraunhofer observed that the solar spectrum had many dark lines; he mapped out over five hundred of these and designated the most distinct ones with the capitals letters A to H, with A and B being in the red region of the spectrum, and G and H in the violet. He used these as calibration lines in the development of better glasses for his optical instruments, and to demonstrate the superiority of his products compared with those of his competitors. The nature of the dark lines was not properly understood until the work of the German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff (1824–1997), who, in a beautiful collaboration with his colleague the chemist Robert Bunsen (1811–99), developed one of the most important analytical techniques still used in chemistry. It was with this technique that they discovered two new elements, and paved the way for others to discover many more.
The Day the Earth Shook: The Sumatra–Andaman Earthquake 2004
Authors: Searle Mike
Published: November 2020

At 00.58 GMT (7.58 local time) on Sunday, 26 December 2004 a massive earthquake occurred off the north-west coast of Sumatra. The earthquake measured between magnitude 9.0 and 9.3 on the Richter scale with its epicentre at 3.32oN, 95.85oE, and occurred at a depth of approximately 30 kilometres. It was the second largest earthquake recorded since instrumental records began and was the deadliest natural disaster in recorded history. The earthquake and the resulting tsunami are estimated to have killed at least 228,000 people across fifteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The worst affected countries were Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Burma, the Maldives, and Somalia. The earthquake occurred on the subduction zone interface between the down-going Indian Ocean plate and the overriding Burma–Andaman–Sumatra plate. It ruptured approximately 1600 kilometres’ length of the plate boundary from Sumatra all the way north to the Burmese coast, travelling at 2–3 kilometres per second. Aftershocks continued unrelentingly for over four months after the earthquake, several reaching magnitude 7.5 as far north as the northern Andaman Islands. The seismic waves indicated a thrust fault earthquake that tilted the surface up to the south-west and down to the north-east. The ground surface was elevated as much as 11 metres at the epicentre, with the tilted surface sinking up to one metre further to the north-east, offshore Sumatra. During the rupture, the Burma plate slipped as much as 15 metres horizontally as the Indian Ocean plate slipped beneath. The force of the quake perceptibly shifted the Earth’s axis, raised sea level globally and speeded Earth’s rotation. It has been suggested that the earthquake shortened the length of the day by 2.68 microseconds, because of the decrease in oblateness of the Earth. The earthquake caused the Earth to wobble on its axis by up to 2.5 cm in the direction of 145o east longitude. The natural ‘Chandler wobble’, a small motion in the Earth’s axis of rotation (the motion that occurs when the spinning object is not a perfect sphere) can be up to 9 metres over 433 days, so this eventually offsets the comparatively minor wobble produced by the earthquake.
Actions that Promise and Practices that Fall Short
Authors: Dryzek John S. , Norgaard Richard B. , Schlosberg David
Published: November 2020

Almost all national governments now recognize the reality of climate change, and the need to respond. As should be clear from the previous chapter, the costs of inaction eventually become prohibitive. The repertoire of actions available to governments (and others) is substantial, and in this chapter we take a look at what can be done. Many actions ought to make a difference. Yet there prove to be formidable reasons why governments often do not adopt them; and when they do, policies that ought to work on paper are crafted and implemented in ways that render them less effective or even counterproductive. The reasons have a lot to do with the way powerful interests, dominant discourses, and political-economic systems are configured in today’s world. They have still more to do with the profound and novel challenge that climate change presents—driving home the need to contemplate bigger questions about how societies are organized, not just what governments and others should do. These larger questions receive our attention in subsequent chapters, but it is important to examine the repertoire of available actions, still needed in any reconfigured systems. Policy discussions often focus on major actions like a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme that would increase the cost of burning fossil fuel and so provide incentives to reduce its use, develop renewable technologies and, eventually, change lifestyles. But before rushing to design some optimal single instrument like this, we should think about all the other established practices and policies that make a difference, and that could be changed for the better. For example, coal mining is typically taxed lightly, but could be taxed more. In the US, homeowners can deduct mortgage interest from their taxable income, encouraging construction of large homes spaced further apart; that deduction could be focused on more efficient housing. Zoning laws could be changed to make urban landscapes more energy efficient and pedestrian friendly. Governments could redirect existing spending on research and development to cleaner energy. Further action possibilities include sequestration and long-term storage of carbon in forests and other biomass, and discouraging the release of carbon from plants resulting from land clearing.
From Bitterfeld with Love
Authors: Öhrström Lars
Published: November 2020

In September 1961 Henry Lowenhaupt threw his last pieces of East German calcium metal into the Potomac River, and watched the violent reaction that made the water boil as the metal released two of its electrons to the H2O molecules, producing hydrogen gas and large amounts of heat in the process. Spelling out chemical reactions may seem scary, but it is really quite simple and I will not hesitate to show one or two equations as we proceed. Just remember that no atoms or electrons ever disappear and you will be fine. What I just stated above would translate into: . . . Ca+2H2O → Ca2++H2+2OH− . . . This may look somewhat similar to the reaction of sodium metal with water that many of us has seen demonstrated in school, and that is certainly true. The calcium reaction is a bit slower however, and somewhat less energy is released, because two electrons are removed from the atom, not just one as for sodium. (Removing electrons is what we call an oxidation, and calcium has changed from oxidation state zero to oxidation state, or number, +II.) Mr Lowenhaupt would have known all this. He was a Yale University graduate who had worked for the Manhattan Project making the first atomic bomb, and spent the rest of his career with the CIA, from its inception in 1947 until his retirement in 1991. The calcium metal that went into the Potomac was the last remains of a project that could have saved the CIA from its first major embarrassment, and that was part of one of the most sophisticated sabotage operations ever conceived: Operation Spanner . 20 As we saw in Chapter 1, the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 came as a surprise to both the CIA and MI6. But to their credit—for the Americans at least—one should perhaps point out that it also came as a surprise to the Russians that they were immediately found out. (The setup of this detection system is in itself quite an interesting story.)