Category: Leonie Schittenhelm

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Forgotten your password yet again? Jamming the keys harder and harder with every try even though you have tried this one three times already? Only to finally (your keyboard breathes a sigh of relief) give in and request a new password. If you have been there, don’t worry – it might just be how tired you were last Thursday.

Researchers at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University are interested in finding out how a user’s personality traits and other factors influence how they choose passwords as well as the likelihood of successfully remembering them. To do this they asked 100 non-computer science students to create a password, which they had to recall to access a login one week later. The catch? Half of the students had to complete a cognitively exhausting task immediately before thinking up a password. The results were clear: the more mentally exhausted a participant was at time of password creation, the less likely they were to remember it the following week.

But the study, cheekily called ‘Why Johnny Cannot Remember His Password – An Empirical Investigation’, didn’t stop there. They also tested participants for common personally traits, and assessed password strength as well as if this particular password had been used by the student in another context before. Interestingly people who scored high in terms of agreeableness – a personal trait associated with kindness towards other people and compliance with rules – were the most likely to choose a completely new password. This could suggest that the nagging e-mails about cyber security do work, but possibly only on the people already receptive to these kinds of messages.  Male participants were four times more likely to choose a completely new password, but this came at the cost of remembering it the following week, which was only at about 50%. Another surprise? There does not actually seem to be very much difference between the difficulty to remember a weak or a strong password.

So when you choose your next password, remember to do it when well-rested and don’t be afraid to choose something quite long. I personally might keep a little note of it in a safe place – at least until the following week…

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Hello and welcome back to another instalment of ‘Wacky scientific papers with Leonie’! With the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize for Improbable Research 2017 announced just over two weeks ago, it is not surprising that the internet is abuzz with the surprising, mind-blowing and just plain old weird contestants honoured this year. Each year these prestigious prizes are given to research that – in their own words – first makes people laugh and then makes them think. Here we collect some of this year’s winners and mix in some old favourites for good measure. Let us know your favourite funny paper in the comments!

1. ‘On the rheology of cats’ or can a cat be both a solid and a liquid?

 Rheology is a field that is primarily concerned with the flow of matter, both in liquid and solid state. The author of this paper, M.A. Fardin, charmingly argues that cats can behave in different ways depending on the surface they are lying on and the space they are trying to manoeuvre themselves into. His methodology? ‘1. Bring an empty box. 2. Wait.’

2. ‘Equations of the End: Teaching Mathematical Modeling Using the Zombie Apocalypse’

Modelling how quickly and widely infectious diseases can be transmitted is a complex mathematical undertaking but immensely valuable for disease management. But how can you teach these complex mathematical skills to students without scaring them off? Simple answer: Zombies!

3. ‘Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children’

A classic in the world of scientific questions no one has even thought of asking before. This study first asked adults to label children’s paintings as either ‘bad/ugly’ or ‘good/beautiful’ and then tried to teach the distinction to pigeons – with surprising successes! Pigeons can apparently learn what is considered beautiful to human eyes and use both colour and pattern of the paintings to come to their assessment.

4. ‘Shit happens (to be useful)! Use of Elephant Dung as Habitat by Amphibians’

While clearly important research, the title of this paper is more than cheeky! Even more admirable however is the type of experiments undertaken to yield this data: Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz examined no less than 290 (!) elephant dung piles to see if any amphibians had made their home in them. That’s research dedication right there.

5. ‘What happens if we don’t defend academic freedom’

More serious in tone, this paper was published to protest the increased legal pressures on international universities in general, and the Central European University in particular, that are pushed by an increasingly volatile Hungarian government. The paper itself is short, because what happens if we don’t defend academic freedom? ‘No abstract 1. No introduction 2. No argument and contribution 3. No analysis 4. No conclusion and avenues for future research 5. No more questions asked’.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

The amount of common diseases we have yet to cure can seem overwhelming sometimes: no week without a looming ‘Alzheimer’s epidemic’ headline or an advert on the bus warning about the 1 in 3 chances of having a stroke. Surely all energy and research funds should be channeled into treating and healing these wide-spread diseases? Yes and no. While learning more about these diseases is incredibly important to help the people affected by them, researching less common diseases should not be forgotten.

A disease is considered rare if less than 5 people in 10,000 are affected by it. While relatively few other people will share the same disease, the amount of rare diseases ranges between 6,000 and 8,000. This means that over 30 million people in the European Union alone are estimated to suffer from these rare conditions, often without relevant therapeutic options and frequently misdiagnosed for years. To make matters worse, significant research results are difficult to obtain due to inherently small sample sizes and experts in a specific rare disease being equally scarce.

However, with the advances of genetic diagnostics, diagnosing rare diseases correctly and research to find better treatments is finally in reach. And while the problem of small local sample sizes persists, the European Union has pledged to fund collaborative projects tackling this problem as part of the Horizon 2020 programme. One such example is the RD-Connect network that is being built by Professor Hanns Lochmüller and his team at Newcastle University. The online platform collects a range of clinical and genomic data on rare diseases, while encouraging the researchers to use their resources to upload their own, building a huge database on rare diseases.

Understanding these diseases better does not only help the people affected by them, it can also increase our understanding of biochemical pathways in the general population. Because the majority of rare diseases are caused by a single gene mutation, symptoms can be usually traced back to the malfunction of a specific gene. This means that elucidating why a set of symptoms occurs can not only provide therapeutic options for patients, but also reveal the function of a specific gene in the healthy population.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Sweaty hands. Knees buckling. An acute desire to run to the toilet, lock myself in a stall and not come out for the rest of the night. And those weren’t even all the signs of acute nervousness I felt minutes before going onto the stage to perform my first Bright Club set. Let’s pretend you are me, roughly a year ago, which is incidentally the amount of time it took me to take up all my courage and convince myself to actually do this. You might ask yourself questions such as: ‘What is a Bright Club?’ and ‘Why does it freak this poor person out so much?’. Easy enough to answer: Bright Club, often also dubbed the ‘thinking person’s variety night’, is a comedy night about science and everything academia. The clue is in the name, and that’s where my nervousness comes back in: the people on the stage, telling the jokes? That’s academics, who for one night only exchange their pipette for a microphone or their lecture theatre for a comedy club to tell some jokes about their work. And that night, it was my turn.

Let’s rewind a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good laugh just as much as the next person. But to actually get up on a stage and talk about things you thought were funny when you wrote them up at home? That seemed just completely inconceivable to me. I mean, how do you even find things that are funny about your work? Being a PhD student in my first year, the only way I could keep my impostor syndrome in check was by appearing as serious about my area of interest as possible. To make matters worse, in the weeks preceding Bright Club, my science just flat-out refused to work, full-stop. Suffice to say, I was not in a very good place to see the humour in my daily work. So when Elin Roberts and Marilena Pace at the Centre for Life sent us home to ‘just write down some ideas for your set’, I was stumped. Where should I even begin to look? But as I got on with experiments and meetings, my work started to transform in front of my eyes. Surely not everyone has conversations about blood in the lunch room? And am I the only one that kind of treats their cell cultures like pets to be nurtured and loved?

I think there are a lot of good reasons to do Bright Club. The relief you feel when the audience laughs at your first joke. The growing exhilaration after the second laugh, and every laugh thereafter. The boost in confidence after doing something that you never thought yourself capable of. The amazing support from the Centre for Life, which will take you by the hand to write your first comedy set and practice it with you until you are ready to shine. But for me personally, the ability to see the humour in my work has been the best and most long-lasting effect of doing Bright Club. Everyone knows PhDs are hard, but everything gets that much easier if you can have a good laugh about it.

Interested in taking part in the next Bright Club event on the 3rd of October at the Stand Comedy Club in Newcastle? Contact marilena.pace@life.org.uk fore more information and all the important dates for your diary.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Everyone’s had those good intentions – that fitness app just after new years, this meditation app that the colleague that always seems like she has it all together recommended. The first few days go well, but then – well, let’s say the reminders keep popping up, without causing much more action than the thumb swipe that dismisses them. So how could text message-based intervention help people who have problems with binge-drinking? That is just what a collaborative study between Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle wants to find out.

Over 12 weeks they sent over 100 text messages to each study participant – the clue: instead of merely reminding them to drink less, they were designed to foster interaction and response. Questions such as ‘Can you think of any reasons why it might be a good idea to cut down a bit on your drinking?’ were interspersed with real quotes from pilot study participants (Mark from Edinburgh says: “Sometimes I’ve not had enough money to pay the bills.”) and challenges to identify achievable goals to reduce alcohol intake, if even just a little bit.

Responses ranged from humourous (On the question who would be pleased to see them drink less: “My wife, she’d get more money for shoes!!”) over heart-breaking (on the question, if they or their friends had experienced problems due to drinking: “I’ve had a friend that’s died because of drink. Fell off a balcony in a block of flats.”) to aspirational (“Stop earlier in the evening or at the very least slow down compared to others.”). While the researchers including Dr. Falko F. Sniehotta from Newcastle University, still note some caveats of the study, the success of actively engaging individuals in a text-based intervention programme instead of passively informing them speaks for itself. Answering one of the last messages one participant writes: “Had my ups and downs but I’m getting there now. Enjoyed the experience, thank you.”

If you want to have a look at the study yourself: Irvine, Linda, et al. (2017) “Real time monitoring of engagement with a text message intervention to reduce binge drinking among men living in socially disadvantaged areas of Scotland.”

By Leonie Schittenhelm

This week is British Science Week 2017, a yearly occurrence that promises a week full of talks, hands-on experiments and film-showings for the British public of all ages. With international women’s day still fresh in our minds, what better way to start British Science Week than to have a look at some of the exciting things female scientists did and do get up to all over the world? Most people will be familiar with the likes of Marie Curie, Nobel Prize winner in both Physics and Chemistry, and Rosalind Franklin, who essentially laid the foundation for the discovery of the structure of DNA . If you are not familiar, I recommend picking up the newest issue of our print magazine and checking out Abbie Kelly’s take on ‘Women in Science’ to discover some exciting new facts about these pivotal women. How about a few of the others?

Kamala Sohonie for example. As the first Indian woman to earn a PhD in science in the UK, she discovered the enzyme cytochrome c, a protein that is fundamental in how we understand photosynthesis and energy generation within cells in general. Vera Danchakoff, the first woman to attain a professorship in Russia, essentially predicted the presence of stem cells as early as 1916, when she suggested that all blood cells, as different as they may seem, originate from a single precursor. And what about present day scientists, such as Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli, the Morrocan nuclear physicist who worked on the discovery of the Higgs Boson, or Kathleen I. Pritchard, whose work on breast cancer has made her one of the most-cited scientists in the world two years in a row.

Let us know your favourite female scientists in the comments and check out the events organised for British Science Week in Newcastle over the next week – maybe you’ll meet some inspiring scientists there for yourself?

To have a look at events put on for British Science Week 2017: https://www.britishscienceweek.org/events/

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Getting your hands on one of the coveted LEGO™ catalogues, full of marvels and usually conveniently found in toy shops, was always considered a lucky day in my house. Discussions about new models with friends and family and overturning our LEGO™ collections to build something even remotely similar invariably ensued.  My prime objective was having fun, so only in hindsight is it that I learned about all the positive effects playing with the colourful building blocks was supposed to have: improving spatial sense, honing fine motor skills and encouraging creativity. Now that I’m working in a lab full time, incidentally these are all skills I am using every day, from figuring out how a molecule might bind to a receptor to pipetting a truly minuscule amount of reagent. After facing repeated criticism for targeting their marketing campaigns increasingly towards boys, with their ranges targeted at girls often portraying harmful gender stereotypes, LEGO™ even introduced a mini-figure range of female scientists.

But LEGO™ is not only a thing to be enjoyed when you’re a child – researchers all over the world are using the brick-based toy for their own purposes. A group of researchers in Canada uses a lego-built model to teach first year medical students how to interview a patient most effectively. And – maybe not surprisingly – it turns out that building space-filling protein models out of LEGO™ is not only a more reliable way to teach protein synthesis but also might be a quick way to generate 3D geometric models of various compounds you want to visualise.

This weekend the Centre for Life, the beloved science museum of Newcastle, reopens its doors with its new exhibition North East LEGO™ Landmarks. Why don’t you check it out for yourself? I’m sure I will.

https://pixabay.com/en/lego-doll-the-per-amphitheatre-1044891/

 

Papers:
Using LEGO™ to teach med students how to talk to patients: Harding, Sheila Rutledge, and Marcel F. D’Eon. “Using a LegoTM-Based Communications Simulation to Introduce Medical Students to Patient-Centered Interviewing.” Teaching and learning in medicine 13, no. 2 (2001): 130-135.

Teaching Protein Synthesis using LEGO™: Templin, Mark A., and Marcia K. Fetters. “A working model of protein synthesis using LegoTM building blocks.” The American Biology Teacher 64, no. 9 (2002): 673-678.

Using LEGO™ as inspiration for a 3D modelling system: Eng, Markus, Ken Camarata, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, and Mark D. Gross. “Flexm: Designing a physical construction kit for 3d modeling.” International Journal of Architectural Computing 4, no. 2 (2006): 27-47.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Science is serious business. Why else would people toil over experiments until deep into the night, read papers until their eyes go red and devote their lives to researching the specifics a single protein?  And it can’t be denied that scientists have been given some really hard nuts to crack, from the specific health challenges of an ageing population to emerging viruses such as ebola. But sometimes it is nice to remember that science – in its very heart – is still about being curious about our everyday surroundings and trying to understand them to the best of our abilities. I here present to you five published papers that ask the real questions and finally give us the – sometimes surprising – answers.

• An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces (Harvey et al., 2002)
  You might laugh now, but did you ever try to get a very unwilling sheep to get its yearly haircut? The trick seems to be a slightly sloped surface…

• The nature of navel fluff (Steinhauser 2009)
  What the nature of navel fluff? This study brings us a bit closer to understanding this phenomenon and shows that old shirts produce more naval fluff than new ones. It actually hypothesises that naval fluff has a cleaning function? Pretty neat.

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh – calculations on avian defecation (Meyer-Rochow et al., 2003)
  I’m sure these penguins from the coronation islands in the south Orkneys would love some information how to being covered in poo. Not sure how you might ever need this information, but make sure to check out the original paper – the figures are amazingly informative…

• Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of bearded men (Barbeito et al., 1967)
  Apparently beards are able to harbour a variety of microorganisms you can pick up in microbiological lab – even washing merely reduces chances of unwittingly infecting others.

• Physics take the biscuit (Fisher, 1999)
  Finally, the physical formula on achieving biscuit-in-tea-dunking perfection! Not always quite applicable maybe, the author advises that best results could be achieved when always having a thermometer on you for taking the exact temperature of the tea into account before dunking your digestive.

Reference List:

Harvey, J. T., Culvenor, J., Payne, W., Cowley, S., Lawrance, M., Stuart, D., & Williams, R. (2002). An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. Applied ergonomics, 33(6), 523-531.

Steinhauser, G. (2009). The nature of navel fluff. Medical hypotheses, 72(6), 623-625.

Meyer-Rochow, V. B., & Gal, J. (2003). Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation. Polar Biology, 27(1), 56-58.

Barbeito, M. S., Mathews, C. T., & Taylor, L. A. (1967). Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men. Applied microbiology, 15(4), 899-906.

Fisher, L. (1999). Physics takes the biscuit. Nature, 397(6719), 469-469.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Research at Newcastle University shows how algae-gels could lead the way in treating blindness with stem cell therapy

When Vanna Belton, a woman from Baltimore, was the first woman to regain her eyesight due to stem cell treatment earlier this year, excitement ensued. The possibility to repair diseased or damaged tissue using an individual’s own stem cells seemed close at hand. But while success of the treatment was undisputed, researching scientists can still not reliably explain exactly why improvement of eyesight in around 60% of patients occurs. Other studies have shown that reliably differentiating pluripotent stem cells into the coveted retinal cells, which are lost in many conditions leading to blindness, still poses a huge problem.

A group of researchers working alongside Prof. Majilinda Lako, Professor of Stem Cell Science at Newcastle University, have made a decisive step towards solving this problem. In a paper published earlier this month, they were able to show that growing human pluripotent stem cells in a gel obtained from brown seaweed significantly increased the amount of stem cells developing into pigmented retinal cells, similar to the ones found in the human eye. In addition to using the algae gel this was achieved by growing the cells in a so-called 3D culture, which had stem cells fully encapsulated within the gel for protection from external forces.

While stem cell treatment remains controversial, understanding how these cells could be safely and reliably used for therapy makes a tremendous difference and provides relief for people suffering from progressive sight loss. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) predicts that rates of sight loss could increase dramatically within the ageing population of the UK, with estimates predicting the number of people affected by age-related blindness to double by 2050. Research in Newcastle will continue on this exciting topic, as it is hoped that the algae-gel could not only be useful for growing but also for transport and transplantation of retinal stem cells.

Check out the paper: Hunt, N. C., Hallam, D., Karimi, A., Mellough, C. B., Chen, J., Steel, D. H., & Lako, M. (2016). 3D culture of human pluripotent stem cells in RGD-alginate hydrogel improves retinal tissue development. Acta Biomaterialia.