We can now see bugs trapped in amber, read parchment scrolls through their surfaces, and learn how bacteria are winning the 'arms race', a top meeting of scientists in Chicago heard this week, writes DICK AHLSTROM.
SCIENTISTS can now read the contents of covered documents without having to open them. And origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding, has been dragged right into the 21st century, providing a method for squeezing a large space telescope mirror into a satellite.
These are just two of the many dozens of stories that emerged during the week-long annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which closed last Monday in Chicago.
Ranked as the largest public science meeting of its kind in the world, it attracts hundreds of scientists and thousands of people who come to hear the latest in scientific discoveries. The mix includes the weird, the wonderful and sometimes the amazing.
For example, it seems pretty amazing to be able to read a rolled-up scroll without having to open it, but this is what is being done by researchers at Stanford University in California.
On Sunday, Uwe Bergmann described using synchrotron radiation, a kind of super X-ray, to read words written onto a tattered parchment from the 10th century containing works by the Greek genius Archimedes of Syracuse.
It means the front and back of the scroll surface can be read through each of the layers of parchment. Then computers separate the letters, even though obscured by paint, to deliver an image of the scroll as if flattened out.
A similar technique was used to discover what Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble believes is the world’s first image of a fish brain. The claim is remarkable given the fossil fish swam the oceans 350 million years ago.
He has also used the method to “see” bugs trapped inside opaque amber. Once stored in the computer system, perfectly proportioned models can be created inside blocks of glass – which also reveals internal bug organs.
A group of scientists and origami enthusiasts met the public last Saturday to talk about how paper-folding can be used both as a maths teaching tool for primary and secondary school students, and also in medicine and space.
Robert Lang, an origami expert and consultant, said the techniques had been used to find ways to fold up telescope mirrors for stuffing on board satellites and to of fold up electricity-producing solar arrays.
It was also helping surgeons, for example, showing how best to fold up a stent into a narrow tube for later unfurling and placement inside the patient’s blood vessels. In keyhole surgery it was utilised to get large components reduced into tiny packages for delivery through the smallest surgical hole possible.
THEN THERE WAS the presentation on how climate was changing more than the weather. An AAAS session heard how global warming was increasing the incidence of malaria in highland areas of Africa.
It is not that warmer temperatures are increasing mosquito numbers. Rather, it is warming the air to allow them migrate further up the sides of mountains, moving into wider areas to infect larger populations.
Even as they move higher up the mountain sides, the disease-delivering mosquitoes are also becoming resistant to the anti-malaria drug chloroquine, making a bad story worse.
Resistance, this time exhibited by bacteria was also discussed at the meeting. A session on Friday heard how bacteria were winning the “arms race”by developing resistance against our antibiotics.
One of the most surprising findings, described by Lisa Plano of the University of Miami, was that swimming in the ocean can expose bathers to the dangerous hospital superbug, MRSA. Those carrying the bug can shed it into the water where it survives just long enough to infect someone nearby.