Science: What does a head of beer have in common with the Beijing Olympics? The answer lies in the physics of foam, and an elegant piece of Irish science called the Weaire-Phelan structure.
Discovered by TCD physicist Prof Denis Weaire and his then student Robert Phelan, this solved a 100-year-old problem: how to divide a space into equal volumes with a minimum surface area. Their solution, which mixes pentagonal and hexagonal bubbles, has now found practical application in the eye-catching design for the 2008 Olympic swimming centre.
Their "flash of brilliance" is just one of more than 60 featured in this collection of reports by The Irish Times's science editor, Dick Ahlstrom, and selected from his weekly Science Today page over the last four years. Ahlstrom's readable and engaging style brings them alive, and the result is a vibrant picture of enthusiastic scientists tackling a diverse range of questions and problems.
This is very different to the "dark days of the mid-1980s" when he began covering Irish science. Back then even the medical research budget was slashed, and many of our best and brightest researchers emigrated. Back then, science was also a foreign place - news reports from journals such as Nature would appear on The Irish Times's foreign pages.
All that changed over the past decade. Science and technology, especially biotechnology and information technology, were singled out as crucial to our future industrial and economic success. State funding of scientific research and development quadrupled last year. Talented native and non-native researchers began flocking back to Irish laboratories. And science got its own page under Dick Ahlstrom's careful editorship (where I must own up to having contributed over the years).
This collection provides an overview of the richness of current Irish science, and how researchers are spending your hard-earned taxpayer's money. Everything from pulsars to antimatter, from thoroughbred bloodlines to muscular dystrophy, from a packaging that can tell if your food is fresh, to technology that might reverse progressive blindness. There are stories from North and South, from home and from Irish people working abroad, from established professors and even the next generation - the last entry features 14-year-old Aisling Judge who won this year's Young Scientist competition.
Initially, I was sceptical about the merit of re-publishing reports that are still available online. But the eye-catching images and elegant design, and the useful pointers to websites and references - strangely absent from the online editions - mean that the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. You also get a DVD of the recent RTÉ TV documentary showcasing several of the featured scientists. And there is an index, especially handy as the reports appear chronologically rather than thematically.
That said, I'm not sure what the intended audience is. Schools possibly (and hopefully Leaving Cert students can follow the science here), but then it's a real shame that women (and girls) are the main researchers in just 20 per cent of the stories. More likely the IDA, which sponsored the publication, can use this as a brochure. In which case it's the perfect antidote to the usual cliched images, with its portrait of a very modern, 21st-century scientific Ireland.
Flashes of Brilliance - The Cutting Edge of Irish Science, By Dick Ahlstrom, Royal Irish Academy, 176pp. €16.99
Mary Mulvihill is a science writer and broadcaster, and author of the award-winning guidebook Ingenious Ireland