sip AUTUMN 2012 8/10/12 13:17 Page 1 SCIENCE IN PARLIAMENT A proton collides with a proton The Higgs boson appears at last sip AUTUMN 2012 The Journal of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee www.scienceinparliament.org.uk sip AUTUMN 2012 8/10/12 13:17 Page 2 Physics for All Science and engineering students are important for the future of the UK IOP wants to see more people studying physics www.iop.org / 35 $' 3$5/, $ LQGG sip AUTUMN 2012 8/10/12 13:17 Page 3 Last years's winter of discontent was indeed made SCIENCE IN PARLIAMENT glorious summer by several sons and daughters of York. So many medals in the Olympics were won by scions of Yorkshire that the county claimed tenth place in the medals table, something hard to accept on my side of the Pennines! As well as being fantastic athletic performances the Olympics and Paralympics were stunning demonstrations of the efficiency of UK engineering, and sip the imagination of British science. The Journal of the Parliamentary and Scientific Surely we have good reason to be all eagerly awaiting Andrew Miller MP Committee. Chairman, Parliamentary The Committee is an Associate Parliamentary the announcements from Stockholm of this year's Nobel and Scientific Group of members of both Houses of Prizes? Surely the Higgs boson will be recognised? John Committee Parliament and British members of the European Parliament, representatives of Ellis recently eloquently described the "legacy" of the scientific and technical institutions, industrial hadron collider and we would be missing an important organisations and universities. opportunity if we didn't use it to help inspire the next generation. This point was not missed by John Wormersley, Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, in the excitement of the 4th July announcement. Meanwhile back in Whitehall, David Willetts has made available some funding for the TSB, and also to help Science in Parliament has two main objectives: universities to meet the costs associated with open access 1. to inform the scientific and industrial communities of activities within Parliament publishing. of a scientific nature and of the progress of relevant legislation; However, within a few weeks we will start to understand 2. to keep Members of Parliament abreast of what effect on science admissions the crippling increase in scientific affairs. tuition fees has had. Let us hope that the salaries offered by future employers will enable graduates to meet their obligations! CONTENTS MARS – A HAPPY LANDING 2 PLUGGING IN 20 INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION 40 Professor John Zarnecki Paul Davies Dr Ellie Dommett LARGE HADRON COLLIDER COMES TO HIV/AIDS AND TUBERCULOSIS IN THE GOLD SCIENCE AND THE DEVOLVED BODIES 41 PARLIAMENT 4 MINING INDUSTRY IN SOUTH AFRICA 22 SELECTED DEBATES 42 Professor John Womersley Rt Hon Peter Hain MP and Martin Caton MP HOUSE OF LORDS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY HOW WE CAN MEET THE MEASUREMENT OBITUARY: The Rt Hon Lord Morris of Manchester 24 SELECT COMMITTEE 43 CHALLENGES OF THE COMING DECADE 6 THE QUEEN’S DIAMOND JUBILEE: A CELEBRATION Kamal Hossain HOUSE OF COMMONS SELECT COMMITTEE ON OF SCIENCE 25 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 44 MEETING THE NEED FOR PHYSICS TEACHERS 8 Ken Brown, Brian Cox, Paul Glendinning, Natasha Professor Peter Main McCarthy, Nancy Rothwell, Christopher White, Lesley PARLIAMENTARY OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 46 BIOLOGY WEEK 2012 10 Yellowlees HOUSE OF COMMONS LIBRARY SCIENCE AND AN UNSCIENTIFIC CAMPAIGN 36 ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION: ENVIRONMENT SECTION 48 ARE EU REGULATIONS ADEQUATE? 12 Bradley Keelor SCIENCE DIRECTORY 50 Addresses to the P&SC by Dr Judy MacArthur Clark, NORTHERN LIGHTS 38 Dr Maggy Jennings and Dr Stephen Mitchell Hazel Gibson SCIENCE DIARY 59 PARLIAMENTARY LINKS DAY 2012 18 Science in Parliament Vol 69 No 4 Autumn 2012 1 sip AUTUMN 2012 8/10/12 13:17 Page 4 MARS – A HAPPY LANDING The successful landing of inflated around the precious nylon ropes to a gentle landing. NASA’s Curiosity Rover, or Mars payload during the last stages of This technique has been Science Laboratory (MSL) descent. This works well but dubbed the “skycrane” for mission to give it its full name, there is a limit to the mass (and obvious reasons. But why not on August 6th 2012 was truly a therefore size) of payload which use the retro rockets for a slow great feat of space engineering. can be delivered in this way. controlled final descent all the Why, you may ask, as landers With the proposed MSL, we had way down you might ask? Well, and rovers have been delivered already reached that limit. So the exhaust from the rockets to the surface of Mars since as space engineers had to devise a would have thrown up so much far back as 1975. Well, the new scheme – and what they dust and debris from the Professor John Zarnecki answer, at least partly, lies in the came up with did almost seem Martian surface that the delicate Professor of Space Science, size and weight of the MSL. It like science fiction, even to the instruments would have been Planetary & Space Sciences Research Institute, The Open weighs in at a total of 899 kg, University only about 10% less than my car! Previous rovers, for example, . the most sophisticated array delivered to the surface of Mars of instruments ever . have ranged from a mere 10.5 kg for the Mars Pathfinder up to 185 kg each for the highly designers themselves! It damaged or even destroyed. successful Spirit and Opportunity involved an initial descent under Furthermore, the landing area rovers (although the total a parachute followed by the would have been significantly “landed” masses in all cases was firing of 8 retro rockets when the chemically altered by the rockets slightly greater than the rover payload was about 1 km above – and one of the prime aims of mass). The “traditional” the surface in order to slow the MSL is to carry out a technique for delivering a down the payload further. At this detailed chemical analysis of the package to the surface of Mars point, the designers’ imagination Martian surface. involved an atmospheric braking really took hold – they Because of the novelty of the at the top of the atmosphere developed a system which landing system, there was real followed by a parachute descent involved lowering the precious trepidation in the MSL team at and finally, if required, a fall payload from a height of some NASA and the research institutes cushioned by airbags which are 8 m above the surface on three and in the worldwide Mars community. But the landing . carry out a detailed chemical seems to have happened nearly flawlessly – a tribute to analysis of the Martian surface. outstanding design and a meticulous test programme designed to tease out any flaws on the Earth before launch rather than during the real landing! And what of MSL’s future? It carries the most sophisticated array of instruments ever sent to the Red planet, including some never before deployed there. We want to study Mars for several reasons – it is our near neighbour, made of much the same stuff as Earth and once, in NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS its early history, much warmer One of the earliest images taken by the Mast Camera on the Curiosity rover from the landing site. It shows and wetter and with a thicker interesting geology on the lower slopes of the nearby Mount Sharp. The region in the middle distance is believed to be an area of sand dunes which the rover will attempt to circumnavigate in order to reach the base atmosphere than now – of Mount Sharp where water is thought to have existed in the distant past. perhaps not too dissimilar to 2 Science in Parliament Vol 69 No 4 Autumn 2012 sip AUTUMN 2012 8/10/12 13:17 Page 5 early Earth. But somewhere 150 km sized impact crater . evolutionary paths of Earth and along the line, the evolutionary formed about 3.5 billion years paths of Earth and Mars have ago as a result of an asteroid Mars have diverged . diverged to make them rather impact with Mars. But the target different worlds today. Why? area was much smaller than this to address the above questions. the first controlled landing on That’s just one of the questions – it is an ellipse of 7 x 20 km at The 12 scientific instruments Mars in 1975. can be divided into the following that Planetologsts want to the base of a mountain within At the time of writing, MSL is broad categories: cameras, answer. Secondly, despite us the crater. This region was just coming to the end of its spectrometers, radiation having found exotic selected after painstaking work commissioning phase – all of detectors, environmental sensors environments elsewhere in the by Martian experts worldwide to the instruments and on board and atmospheric sensors. Taking Solar System, (such as certain of select the region most likely to systems, including the robot up nearly half of the entire the moons of Jupiter and show tangible signs of life arm, are being put through their payload is the SAM (Science Saturn), Mars probably still should it ever have existed. This paces. So far, almost everything Analysis at Mars) instrument for region shows distinctive is working to plan – and the presents the best chance of the purpose of analysing Rover has taken its first tentative elements and compounds that “steps”, moving for example are associated with life. Another 15m on Sol 22 (a Sol is a instrument is the ChemCam Martian day). which will employ Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy, a MSL is a NASA mission with technique used in terrestrial two of the instruments coming applications but never so far also from Russia and Spain.