One reads a lot (in the right kinds of newspapers and magazines) about how fewer and fewer children/young adults are studying science related subjects in schools and universities; physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and the like. Speaking from personal experience (because I didn't and couldn't), one of the reasons that this may be so is not that people are not interested in the subjects but that it is seldom possible to combine arts subjects like history or languages with science subjects like physics or chemistry in UK schools at the 'pre-university' stage, ie AS and A level. Of course, there is one very good practical reason for this; most pupils have a tendency to excel in either arts subjects OR science subjects, a good English scholar has, on the whole , different interests and skills than someone with a bent for quantum mechanics and set theory. The difficulty of timetabling lessons to accomodate those few pupils who have more wide ranging interests and aptitudes in a school of 2,000 is just too great.
For this reason, you may have noticed that the Penguin and I share a deep interest in science, I gobble up anything and everything that I can about science's investigation of the physical world. I was therefore intrigued by 'POP! The science of bubbles', presented by Helen Czerski, a researcher into bubbles. Ms Czerski is one of that new breed of science presenters on TV; someone who actually knows what they are talking about and has the qualifications to prove it. Think 'female Brian Cox', PhD, tenure at a university, good speaker, photogenic and comes from Manchester, altthough she is now based at Southampton.
I have spent much of my life doing my own research into bubbles, mostly the bubbles generated by Guinness and Krug or Bollinger (for an explanation of why bubbles in Guinness appear to travel downwards go to the July 2010 post here) and so I was more than a little curious to learn more about champagne glasses and nucleation sites (the small imperfections in the glass, often deliberately made, which provide a place for bubbles to form).
I do not intend to bore you with the entire contents of the documentary (champagne did indeed feature and I hope that the researcher drunk the champagne after every experiment; seems such a waste not to) but a little snippet caught my eye because it was almost too bizarre to be true; research into delivering drugs to cancer tumours using bubbles and ultrasound and thus avoidung unwelcome side effects to the rest of the body.
One of the remarkable things about bubbles is that they have a tendency to carry additional baggage outside of the expected gas encased in liquid. Some liquid-hating molecules have an inclination, when in solution, to seek out the driest place that they can find; in a liquid this just happens to be on the surface of a bubble. (This was rather neatly demonstrated by having bubbles in water flow through a small pile of 'glitter', the stuff that children put on their faces; you could quite clearly see the grains of glitter sticking to the underside of the bubble.)
So far, all well and good; design your drug so that it is attracted to the surface of bubbles and you have a mechanism to transport the drug. The next tricky part is to get your bubble to the tumour site. The researchers simply bound each bubble to some iron, it was not clear whether the iron is bound to the drug or whether it is separate and gets bound to the bubble in similar fashion to the glitter above, and then used magnets around the site of the tumour to make sure that the bubbles were attracted to only that site.
The pièce de résistance? They used ultrasound over the site to burst the bubble and so release the drug which was being carried along with it. The ultrasound effectively heats up the gas in the bubble by imparting energy to it, making it vibrate more vigourously and move about much faster, and the resulting pressure of the gas molecules eventually punctures the skin of the bubble causing loss of bubbelicity.
Now this may seem not to have much connection with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Brian Cox's particular field of interest, but actually, in one way at least, it does. People often bemoan science for science's sake and worry about the vast sums spent on basic research which appears to have little or no practical application and, while one may see perhaps the excitement of uncovering the innermost secrets of the universe in a bound pair of quarks and the Higgs boson, who would want to undertake, or fund, fundamental research into the behaviour of bubbles?
Me, for one!
Postscript
While doing my (fundamental) research on said Ms Czerski, I came across a little site which is here which, at the moment, appears to be a reaction to the EU's infamous 'movie trailer' which was intended to promote women in science; the site however may offer more encouragement or advice in the future.
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