Monthly Archives: March 2011

Insider trading on physics secrets

Posted on by
Reply

The press releases I receive every Thursday from Nature include the following warning, which, lest a reporter overlook it, is always displayed in bold type:

This document, and the Nature papers to which it refers, may contain information that is price sensitive (as legally defined, for example, in the UK Criminal Justice Act 1993 Part V) with respect to publicly quoted companies. Anyone dealing in securities using information contained in this document, or in advance copies of a Nature Journals content, may be guilty of insider trading under the US Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

I must have glanced at that paragraph hundreds of times in my 14-year career at Physics Today, but I never gave it much thought until this past Tuesday. That’s when I read a news story in the New York Times about the arrest on charges of insider trading of Cheng Yi Liang and his son Andrew Liang.

The elder Liang worked as a chemist at the Food and Drug Administration. Times reporter Diana Henriques wrote

The criminal complaint accused him of using that database to get an early look at F.D.A. decisions on companies developing drugs and then working with his son to trade on that knowledge, buying stock ahead of good news and selling it before bad news was announced.

The complaints assert that the defendants made just under $2.3 million in direct profits and avoided an additional $1.3 million in losses.

Nature‘s press releases go out a full week before the papers they tout are published. With the above warning about insider trading in mind, I asked myself if I could have profited illegally from any of the Nature papers I’ve written about over the years. The answer is, probably not—for two reasons.

First, physics research is typically so basic and so far from commercialization that it can be difficult to identify which companies will eventually benefit. Scientists at Bell Labs invented the CCD, but AT&T, the labs’ corporate parent at the time, didn’t make as much money from the invention as did Fairchild Semiconductor, which brought the first CCD cameras to market, or Sony, which succeeded first in mass-producing them.

Second, even if a company does commercialize its own invention, the payoff is likely to lie far enough in the future that publication of the underlying research won’t influence the company’s share price for some time, if ever.

Looking over my Physics Today bibliography, I found these three stories that covered research published in Nature and conducted in industrial labs:

  1. “Light-Emitting Diodes Reach the Far Ultraviolet,” Physics Today, July 2006, page 15.
  2. “Novel Medical Imaging Method Shows Promise,” Physics Today, September 2005, page 21.
  3. “New Silicon-Based Device Modulates Light at 1 GHz,” Physics Today, April 2004, page 24.

The industrial labs were those of, respectively, NTT in Atsugi, Japan; Philips Research in Hamburg, Germany; and Intel Corp in Santa Clara, California.

Thanks to Intel’s NASDAQ listing, I could check the company’s past performance. On the day the Nature paper appeared, 12 February 2004, Intel’s share price was $30.74. The next day it fell to $30.16. Now, as I type these words, it’s $20.09.

Charles Day

How much nuclear physics will be in the next James Bond movie?

Posted on by
1

The 23rd official James Bond movie has a release date: 9 November 2012. Daniel Craig will play Bond; Sam Mendes, who won an Oscar in 2000 for American Beauty, will direct the as-yet-untitled movie; Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan will write the screenplay. As far as I know, no Bond villains or Bond girls have been cast.

Launched in 1962 with Dr No, the Bond movies constitute the most financially successful series in history. One estimate put its total box-office gross in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars at $11.7 billion, which is about the same as Armenia’s GDP. Some of that success arises from the series’ reflection of contemporary geopolitical tensions and technological threats, including one of the scariest threats of all: nuclear energy.

JB.jpg

Along with space-based weaponry, nuclear energy has been one of the most frequently occurring plot elements. The eponymous villain in Dr No ran a nuclear reactor in his lair on Crab Key, a small island off the Jamaican coast. He used the nuclear-generated electricity to power transmitters that interfered with the guidance systems of US rockets launched from Cape Canaveral.

Nuclear energy was also the energy source of the space weapon in GoldenEye (1995). But for Bond’s—literally—last-minute intervention, the weapon would have zapped London with a data-destroying electromagnetic pulse and sent the UK back into an information Stone Age.

In Thunderball (1965), the international crime syndicate SPECTRE captured two nuclear warheads from an RAF bomber and threatened to detonate them in the waters off Miami. A captured nuclear warhead also featured in Octopussy (1983). Nuclear submarines were hijacked in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and in The World Is Not Enough (1999), which also featured Bond pretending to be a nuclear inspector and Denise Richards, who played one of the Bond girls, pretending to be a nuclear physicist.

Auric Goldfinger’s use of nuclear energy was perhaps the most imaginative. In Goldfinger (1964), the villain planned to irradiate, and therefore render useless, the US gold reserves in Fort Knox by detonating a dirty bomb inside the fort’s vault.

A nuclear Bond 23?

Nukes haven’t appeared in a Bond movie since 1999. Given the both the current nuclear crisis at the Fukushima I power station in northeastern Japan and the continuing fear that terrorists might acquire a nuclear warhead, is the time ripe for a nuclear revival in the Bond oeuvre?

Possibly. But my hunch is that the screenwriters have opted to scare us with a new and different threat: rampaging nanobots. Although the tiny machines would be challenging to depict on the big screen with dramatic menace, they could cause a graphically disfiguring disease.

And if nanobots are the new nukes, the villain could well be a physicist.

Charles Day

For my take on the role of computers in the James Bond movies, see the column I wrote for Computing in Science and Engineering entitled “Compute? No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You To Die.”

In praise of longer papers

Posted on by
1

In today’s New York Times, the newspaper’s media columnist David Carr described a new online media outlet called the Atavist. Defying the trend to publish ever shorter, catchier items, the Atavist publishes (to quote from its website)

original nonfiction and narrative journalism for digital devices like the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook. Our stories are longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books, written by experienced reporters and authors and designed digitally from the start. Each story has extensive free text and audio excerpts here at the site, with links to where you can buy and read them in full.

Carr’s article got me thinking about physics papers. If you have a hot result and want to publish it in Physical Review Letters, Nature, or Science, then make sure your write-up is short—no more than four pages for PRL, and no more than five pages for the longest format in Nature and Science.

Some papers really don’t need to be especially long. Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous paper of May 1953, “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” occupied just over two pages of Nature. In December 1962 Nick Holonyak and S. F. Bevacqua spent just under two pages of Applied Physics Letters in describing the world’s first LED.

But other papers, like the narrative journalism that the Atavist publishes, need plenty of space for their authors to properly introduce and describe their findings. Although Albert Einstein’s most cited paper, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” (which he wrote in 1935 with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen) is about three pages long, arguably his most important paper, “The Foundation of General Relativity” of 1916, filled 53 pages of Annalen der Physik.

The cost of producing an additional “page” of an online journal is far lower than it is for a print journal. Given that physicists nowadays browse, search for, and even read papers online, I wonder if the time has come to revisit the short-is-best presumption.

Like other modern consumers of information, physicists must be judicious in choosing what to read. Short papers might seem to bring some relief, but do they? If, to understand a short paper, you have to consult its references or—a pet peeve of mine—have to read online appendices, have you saved any time?

And even if a short paper, its appendices, and its key antecedents, don’t take longer to read than a longer, self-contained paper, a longer paper could be clearer and easier to digest thanks to its single, coherent narrative.

Anthony Leggett shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the superfluid phases of helium-3. He published his original research in PRL and other physics journals, but the paper that is cited the most—and the only paper of his mentioned by the Nobel committee in its background material—is his 1975 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics. It’s 83 pages long.

Charles Day

Let’s play buzzword bingo – with a physics press release!

Posted on by
1

Popularized by a 1994 Dilbert cartoon, buzzword bingo is a satirical game that exposes the lazy, fatuous use of clichés in the corporate world.

To play, each person fills out a bingo card by writing in each of the squares a different hackneyed word or phrase, such as “set the expectation moving forward,” “open the kimono,” or “reach out to stakeholders.” Then, cards in hand, the players listen to an executive’s speech, attend a business meeting, or read an annual report. When they encounter a word or phrase on their card, they cross it off. The goal is to check off all the squares in a single row or column. Whoever finishes first says—or, given the likely setting, whispers—”Bingo!” and wins.

Last month, media consultant and blogger Adam Sherk ran 3000 corporate press releases through a text filter that had been primed to pull out buzzwords. He reported his results in a blog entry.

Although not as elaborate as “socialize the concept” or “operationalize the process,” Sherk’s buzzwords have lost their impact through overuse. The top nine, listed below, each occurred more than 200 times.

  1. leading
  2. solution
  3. best
  4. innovate/innovative/innovator
  5. leader
  6. top
  7. unique
  8. great
  9. extensive

By coincidence, the e-mail that drew my attention to Sherk’s list arrived in my inbox just before a press release from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Entitled “Closing in on the Pseudogap,” the press release describes three experiments aimed at elucidating an enigmatic state of electronic matter in a high-temperature superconductor, lead bismuth strontium lanthanum copper oxide.

I’ve written news stories for Physics Today about superconductivity. The topic is difficult to get across to the magazine’s readers who don’t work in the field. It’s even harder to get across to the science journalists who read press releases. The author of the Lawrence Berkeley press release, Paul Preuss, did a great job.

Now I expect you’re wondering whether Preuss used any of Sherk’s buzzwords. The answer is no and yes.

In the 1632 words that Preuss wrote to describe and explain the experiments, not one of Sherk’s buzzwords appears. But in the 83-word paragraph that, I presume, Preuss and other authors of Lawrence Berkeley press releases are obliged to append, three of them appear:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides solutions to the world’s most urgent scientific challenges including clean energy, climate change, human health, novel materials, and a better understanding of matter and force in the universe. It is a world leader in improving our lives and knowledge of the world around us through innovative science, advanced computing, and technology that makes a difference. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science.

So my advice to the Lawrence Berkeley press office amounts to a challenge: Try to rewrite your one-paragraph description of the lab so that it sounds fresher and less corporate. From an end-user perspective, it would be a win–win solution!

Charles Day

Meeting the readers of AIP and APS journals

Posted on by
Reply
MarchMeeting129logo.jpg

I spent yesterday afternoon at a reception called Meet the Editors of AIP and APS. The event is a regular feature of the March meeting of the American Physical Society, which is being held this year in Dallas, Texas.

The physicists who came to the reception enjoyed free drinks and hors d’oeuvres and had the chance to talk to the editors of Applied Physics Letters, Biomicrofluidics, Chaos, Physical Review Letters, Reviews of Modern Physics, and many of the other journals and magazines—nearly 40 in all—that the two societies publish. Making its March meeting debut was AIP’s newest journal, AIP Advances.

As Physics Today‘s online editor, I was especially keen to learn how physicists use the web. Listening to guests at the reception, I obtained a fairly consistent picture. Regardless of age or country of origin, the physicists I met use Google Scholar or Web of Science to find relevant papers. Once they find a paper, they may or may not read it online.

Although the search engine might be the first thing physicists turn to when they’re trawling scientific literature, where the search results abide still matters. A condensed-matter physicist from Colorado told me that she appreciates a well-designed journal webpage. “I like to move back and forward, to follow a paper’s references and its citations,” she said.

AA.jpg

A condensed-matter physicist, from Germany, told me he uses RSS feeds to create personal tables of relevant papers. But to avoid missing relevant papers and to give himself the chance to stumble across interesting papers, he still visits the homepages of his favorite journals.

I didn’t find any evidence that younger physicists, whose generation is reputedly accustomed to surf across many and diverse sources of information without lingering, are any less likely to read papers in detail than their older colleagues. The internet makes it easier to find and skim papers, but when a paper is directly relevant to your work—or, in my case, when it’s the subject of a story—you still have to read it carefully.

I was a bit disappointed to find out that not many of the guests at the reception, young or old, visit Physics Today‘s website. They like the print issue. Maybe at next year’s March meeting I should hold my own reception.

Charles Day

Getting the most out of science conferences

Posted on by
1
MarchMeeting129logo.jpg

I’ll be spending this week at the American Physical Society’s March meeting, which is being held this year in Dallas, Texas. The meeting is huge, not only in the number of attendees but also in the number of talks. Each day is divided into four three-hour time slots; each time slot contains 45 simultaneous sessions; and each session features 5–11 talks!

Even if I were still a researcher whose work was confined to one or two subfields, I’d have difficulty choosing which talks to attend and which to forgo. Now that I work for a physics magazine whose mission is to inform all kinds of physicists about all kinds of physics, the challenge of devising a personal March-meeting program is even greater.

What’s more, if, through writing a few stories about a particular topic—say, the various quantum Hall effects—I’ve become familiar with it, I should resist the temptation to attend sessions devoted to that topic. Rather, I should seek instead unfamiliar topics, which could prove to be just as interesting to me and to Physics Today‘s readers.

Having been to about half a dozen March APS meetings, I’ve devised a set of tips to help me get the most out of big science conferences. Although they’re more relevant to science journalists than to researchers, I list them here because you might find them helpful.

 

  • Attend sessions made up of invited talks.

 

    At least at the March APS meeting, invited-only sessions offer the best prospect of understanding, albeit partially, the science content of the talks. Invited talks tend to be longer, which gives the speakers the chance to properly introduce their topics to nonspecialists. Short, contributed talks, by contrast, have to jump right to the results, leaving nonspecialists in a state of puzzlement.

 

  • Don’t spend all your time in talks.

Thanks to the arXiv preprint server, it’s possible to be au courantwith many fields of physics without leaving your lab, office, or home. When we go to meetings, it should be to meet people, as well as to learn about new work.

 

 

  • Introduce yourself to people.

Accosting strangers can be daunting and isn’t perhaps a priority if you’re not a science journalist. But you can expand your network of acquaintances and potential collaborators by introducing yourself to what I call near strangers. These are people whose papers you’ve read and admired or who collaborate with your collaborators but not yet with you.

 

 

  • Visit the exhibit hall.

Even if you’re a theorist who isn’t ever going to buy any of the spectrometers, lasers, cryostats, and other shiny new tools on display in the exhibit hall, you’ll find strolling through the hall’s aisles a worthwhile diversion. For one thing, people tend to visit the hall alone, which makes them easier to approach than if they’re outside a session, talking with their friends and collaborators.

 

If you have additional tips about getting the most out of big meetings, please leave a comment here. And if you see me at a meeting, please say hello!

Charles Day

Are money and faith enough to build a world-class research institute?

Posted on by
2

My title comes from the first line of a story that my colleague Toni Feder wrote two years ago about the opening of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Saudi Arabia can’t at present fill all KAUST’s faculty slots with homegrown professors. But even if it could, the university is determined to be international in its outlook, faculty, and student body. Thanks to ample funding, KAUST boasts Asia’s fastest supercomputer and modern, well-equipped labs.

And if the facilities aren’t sufficiently enticing to foreign professors, KAUST also offers palatial houses, free health insurance, tax-free salaries, and free travel to two conferences or other professional meetings a year. Gasoline in the oil-rich country is $0.40 a gallon.

News of those inducements reached me last Friday in the form of a forwarded e-mail from a physicist who had recently visited KAUST. Days later, I read of a demonstration outside Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Two hundred Saudis had gathered to protest against the continued detention without trial of their fellow citizens. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia sent soldiers to Bahrain to prop up that country’s unpopular monarchy.

I’ve lived and worked in two countries—Japan and the US—outside my native Britain. During my two years in Japan and my first nine years in the US, I couldn’t vote in either country, yet I never felt my freedom and my pursuit of happiness were threatened or curtailed.

I haven’t visited KAUST or Saudi Arabia, but I doubt I’d be happy there. I enjoy drinking wine too much to give it up. Even though I’m not a woman, the restrictions on what women in Saudia Arabia can wear and the ban on their driving cars would gnaw at my conscience constantly.

But several non-Saudi researchers evidently don’t share my qualms and have joined KAUST’s faculty. I wish them well. I’m skeptical, though, that KAUST will, in the words of King Abdullah himself, “become a house of wisdom to all its peers around the world, a beacon of tolerance.”

Whereas science flourished in the Soviet Union and is flourishing in China, neither country restricted the rights of its female population to the extent that Saudi Arabia does. In fact, according a 2010 United Nations report on gender gaps, Saudi Arabia’s women have the world’s lowest level of political empowerment.

KAUST is a technical university. Its success should perhaps be measured in its scientific output. So far, its researchers have written or cowritten eight papers in Applied Physics Letters and three papers in Physical Review Letters. A creditable score, but as far as I could tell, none of the KAUST authors is a woman.

Charles Day

A killer astrophysicist

Posted on by
1

My wife and I have just finished watching the first season of Luther, a police drama on BBC America. Despite its overburden of clichés (the main character, Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, has marital problems, a rookie partner, and a hot temper), the show is compelling to watch, thanks to Idris Elba’s performance as Luther and Ruth Wilson’s performance as Alice Morgan, his amoral antagonist.

In the first episode, Morgan (shown here) murders her parents and gets away with it because she has committed a flawless crime: The police unwittingly destroy incriminating evidence, just as she planned. Luther figures out Morgan’s method, but can’t convict her. For the remaining episodes, Luther and Morgan develop an uneasy relationship of mutual fascination.

alice_morgan.jpg

Interestingly, the show’s creator, Neil Cross, made Morgan an astrophysicist. Here’s how her character is described on the show’s website:

Alice Morgan went to Oxford University aged 13, a celebrated child genius. She completed her PhD in astrophysics at the age of 18. Now working at a London university as a research fellow, she has spent her life feeling different, special and freakish. For Alice, human existence is insignificant compared to the universe, with its vast galaxies and black holes. Life is futile and senseless but still the alternative, death in all its emptiness, is even worse.

Why did Cross choose astrophysics and not some other, equally demanding pursuit for Morgan? I can think of several answers. First, of all the fields of science, astronomy is the best reported in popular media. People know just enough to be familiar and impressed by Morgan’s thesis topic: the distribution of dark matter in spiral galaxies. Spin-mediated pairing in pnictide superconductors, a hot topic in condensed-matter physics, is perhaps more intimidating as an area of study, but it’s also more obscure.

The second reason is hinted at in the description quoted above. The objects that she studies, supermassive black holes, are utterly inhuman in size, remoteness, and violence. Metabolic networks in a yeast cell are just as daunting to understand, but lack the black holes’ resonance with Morgan’s character.

As a former astrophysicist, I admit a perverse sense of pride that a show’s evil genius reads the same textbooks, publishes in the same journals, and habituates the same conferences as I used to.

Her wickedness doesn’t trouble me. I went to Cambridge, not Oxford.

Charles Day

Contributions of network theory to biology

Posted on by
Reply

Metabolic cycles, gene expression, and other biochemical pathways are natural fodder for the network theorist. Like the internet, airlines’ route systems, and power grids, biochemical pathways contain branches and nodes. And like those manmade networks, biochemical pathways are complex, especially when you include their myriad regulatory checks and balances.

Despite that affinity, the application of network theory to biochemical pathways is relatively recent. Yesterday at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, Hawoong Jeong of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology noted that in 2000 only a handful of “network biology” papers appeared. Last year, he said, the number was around 1800.

Jeong made his observation at a session entitled “Contributions of Network Theory to Biology.” The first speaker and chair of the session was Sergei Maslov of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Maslov’s talk nicely exemplified one of those contributions: to make sense of the pathways’ daunting complexity.

Maslov and his collaborators look at, among other things, protein–protein interactions. In yeast cells, there are around 2000 different kinds of proteins. Those proteins interact with each other and with other molecules, including DNA and RNA.

Fully 80% of yeast proteins are connected in one giant network, whose scale-free topology resembles those of human social networks. Indeed, the median degree of separation of one yeast protein from any other protein in the network is the same as Kevin Bacon’s from any other actor: six.

Kevin_Bacon.jpg

The internet’s scale-free topology ensures myriad paths for information to flow from one node to another. But, noted Maslov, being scale-free is not obviously an unalloyed benefit to biochemical pathways. Unlike the internet, a biochemical pathway lacks the means to redirect traffic if one node malfunctions. Undesirable perturbations and interactions can spread.

One kind of interaction that may be harmless or undesirable is that between a protein and other proteins that don’t belong to its habitual pathway. In a cell containing N proteins, the rate of specific, pathway interactions is proportional to N, whereas the rate of nonspecific, off-pathway interactions is proportional to N2.

In general, cells need N to be high enough to ensure their proteins can carry out their specific jobs efficiently but not so high that proteins waste too much of their time in nonspecific interactions. In a series of papers, the latest of which appeared last month, Maslov and his collaborators have applied network theory to analyze protein–protein interactions.

Among their conclusions: The abundance and concentration of proteins in cells and in two kinds of cellular compartment, mitochondria and nuclei, are more than high enough to ensure efficiency. In fact, according to Maslov and his colleagues’ calculations, proteins spend about 80% of their time interacting with proteins that belong to their pathways.

The remaining 20% of the time that proteins spend in the company of off-pathway partners might not be a complete waste. Just as Kevin Bacon and other humans benefit from meeting new people, nonspecific protein–protein interactions might promote evolutionary adaptation.

Charles Day

Cell motility, tissue stiffness, and cancer

Posted on by
Reply

If you open a biology textbook, you’ll probably encounter microscope images of single cells, stained and stuck to glass slides. Imaging—and more generally, studying—cells in two dimensions is much easier than in three, not least because a microscope’s focus doesn’t have to be continually adjusted.

But that convenience is not without cost. At the Biophysical Society’s annual meeting in Baltimore, I learned yesterday that some cells behave differently in 3D than they do in 3D. As Denis Wirtz of the Johns Hopkins University pointed out in his talk, the cells that participate in wound healing or metastatic cancer follow 3D paths through 3D tissue. Understanding that behavior is medically important.

bps.jpg

Wirtz and his collaborators study focal adhesions (FAs), the dynamic bundles of fibrous proteins that mediate a cell’s mobility and adhesion. In 2D—that is, on a flat surface in a shallow medium—cells spread out like fried eggs and large FAs form on the cell’s bottom surface.

In a fully 3D medium, however, Wirtz and his group discovered that cells adopt fluid, less flattened shapes and occasionally sprout appendages that resemble an amoeba’s pseudopodia. What’s more, Wirtz couldn’t see any FAs in his 3D-dwelling cells. The various proteins that make up FAs in 2D-dwelling cells still mediate mobility, but they’re spread more or less evenly inside the cell.

Tumor stiffness

In the talk that followed Wirtz’s, Valerie Weaver of the University of California, San Francisco, described her group’s research into the dynamic interplay between tumor cells and their microenvironment. Weaver noted that tumors are stiffer than the healthy tissue that surrounds them. Could stiffness be a prerequisite of tumor growth in addition to being a property of tumors themselves?

Weaver’s group found in 2005 that cancer cells are indeed more malignant in stiff environments. Her group’s more recent work shows why that’s the case.

In general, a cell’s attachment to the extracellular matrix (ECM) is mediated by transmembrane proteins called integrins. Weaver and her team stiffened the ECM by promoting crosslinkng among the ECM’s collagen fibers. Cancer cells responded by invading the stiffened ECM. Significantly, the invasion could be stopped or accelerated by, respectively, inhibiting or promoting integrin’s activity. Weaver speculates that integrin, which is a signaling protein, somehow communicates with cancer genes.

It’s not clear whether integrin or another molecule that mediates a cell’s mechanical properties could become a “drugable target,” to use a pharmacological term. However, cell and tissue stiffness could become reliable predictors of risk and disease progression.

Charles Day