Christmas tree in Weinplatz, Zurich
Best wishes during the holiday season to all my readers. I’m in digital detox over the Christmas and New Year holidays. So no post today. If you’re having withdrawal symptoms or want to know more about digital detox then read ‘Digital detox with a deep vacation‘ posted on August 10th, 2016. Otherwise ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ [see my post on December 23rd, 2015].
Detail from stained glass window by Marc Chagall in Fraumunster Zurich from http://www.fraumuenster.ch
I was in Zürich last weekend. We visited the Fraumünster with its magnificent stained glass windows by Marc Chagall [see my post entitled ‘I and the village‘ on August 14th, 2013] and by Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947). The Kunsthaus Zürich has a large collection of sculptures by another Giacometti, Alberto (1901-1966), a Swiss sculptor, who is famous for his slender statues of people which portray individuals alone in the world. He was part of the existentialist movement in modern art that examined ideas about self-consciousness and our relationship to other people. For me, this echoed a lecture that I contributed last week to a module on Scientific Impact and Reputation as part of our CPD programme [see my post entitled ‘WOW projects, TED talks and indirect reciprocity‘ on August 31st, 2016. In the lecture, I talked about our relationship with other professional people and the development of our technical reputation in their eyes as a result of altruistic sharing of knowledge. This involves communicating with others, building relationships and understanding our place in the community. The post-course assignment is to write a reflective essay on leadership and technical quality; and we know, from past experience, that our delegates will find it difficult to reflect on their experiences and the impact of those experiences on their life and behaviour. Maybe we should help them by including a viewing of existential art in one of the Liverpool art galleries as part of our CPD programme on Science and Technology Leadership?
Falling Man, 1950 by Alberto Giacometti [Image from https://i1.wp.com/thesefantasticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/giacometti-homme-qui-chavire1.jpg?ssl=1]
Random track of a nanoparticle superimposed on its image generated in the microscope using a pin-hole and narrowband filter.
A couple of weeks ago I bragged about research from my group being included in a press release from the Royal Society [see post entitled ‘Press Release!‘ on November 15th, 2017]. I hate to be boring but it’s happened again. Some research that we have been performing with the European Union’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra [see my post entitled ‘Toxic nanoparticles‘ on November 13th, 2013] has been published this morning by the Royal Society Open Science.
Our experimental measurements of the free motion of small nanoparticles in a fluid have shown that they move slower than expected. At low concentrations, unexpectedly large groups of molecules in the form of nanoparticles up to 150-300nm in diameter behave more like an individual molecule than a particle. Our experiments support predictions from computer simulations by other researchers, which suggest that at low concentrations the motion of small nanoparticles in a fluid might be dominated by van der Waals forces rather the thermal motion of the surrounding molecules. At the nanoscale there is still much that we do not understand and so these findings will have potential implications for predicting nanoparticle transport, for instance in drug delivery [e.g., via the nasal passage to the central nervous system], and for understanding enhanced heat transfer in nanofluids, which is important in designing systems such as cooling for electronics, solar collectors and nuclear reactors.
Our article’s title is ‘Transition from fractional to classical Stokes-Einstein behaviour in simple fluids‘ which does not reveal much unless you are familiar with the behaviour of particles and molecules. So, here’s a quick explanation: Robert Brown gave his name to the motion of particles suspended in a fluid after reporting the random motion or diffusion of pollen particles in water in 1828. In 1906, Einstein postulated that the motion of a suspended particle is generated by the thermal motion of the surrounding fluid molecules. While Stokes law relates the drag force on the particle to its size and fluid viscosity. Hence, the Brownian motion of a particle can be described by the combined Stokes-Einstein relationship. However, at the molecular scale, the motion of individual molecules in a fluid is dominated by van der Waals forces, which results in the size of the molecule being unimportant and the diffusion of the molecule being inversely proportional to a fractional power of the fluid viscosity; hence the term fractional Stokes-Einstein behaviour. Nanoparticles that approach the size of large molecules are not visible in an optical microscope and so we have tracked them using a special technique based on imaging their shadow [see my post ‘Seeing the invisible‘ on October 29th, 2014].
Source:
Coglitore D, Edwardson SP, Macko P, Patterson EA, Whelan MP, Transition from fractional to classical Stokes-Einstein behaviour in simple fluids, Royal Society Open Science, 4:170507, 2017. doi:
By National Institutes of Health [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The conventional understanding of human intellectual capacity is that it is constant during our life. However, the authors of this article have shown that the statistics, upon which this understanding is based, hide a variation in our teenage years; because some teenagers experience a reduction and some an increase in intellectual capacity, which leaves the population’s average unchanged.
In addition, using structural and functional imaging, they were able to correlate changes in verbal IQ with changes in grey matter density in a region of the brain activated by speech (the left motor cortex), and changes in non-verbal IQ with changes in grey matter density in regions activated by finger movements (the anterior cerebellum).
The timeline of the reported research does not extend far enough to establish whether or not the changes seen in teenagers is temporary; however, my anecdotal evidence suggests that might be the case. I would conclude that the effort used to apply psychological pressure on teenagers to ace examinations might be better expended on piano lessons and piano practice to enhance sensorimotor skills which are strongly correlated to cognitive intelligence – but I suspect many parents have already worked that one out!
Source:
Realize Engineering 
