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Home » Page 1508

Isotope study puts a chill on ancient oceans

 

A new study of stable isotopes in ancient rocks suggests that the oceans were much cooler 3.4 billion years ago than previously thought. The discovery that the ocean could have been cooler than 40 °C was made by geophysicists in the US and could change our understanding of how life evolved after first appearing in these ancient seas.

Fossils created by mats of microbes suggest that life began on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago in the Archaean eon, when many geologists believe that our planet was covered in an ocean that was very hot (55–80 °C). The origin of life in such a hostile environment is backed up by “universal tree of life” studies of DNA, which suggest that modern life can be traced back to “thermophilic” microbes that thrive at such temperatures.

Geophysicists have a rough idea of how hot the Archaean oceans were thanks to studies of the relative abundance of oxygen isotopes in certain rocks called “cherts”. These studies are based on the fact that cherts formed in room temperature waters, for example, contain much more oxygen-18 than cherts formed in water at 80 °C.

Unknown quantity

But to estimate the temperature of Archaean oceans we need to know the relative abundance of oxygen isotopes in Archaean seawater, which most studies to date have assumed is the same as in modern seawater. However, that may not be the case. The Earth looked very different 3.5 billion years ago compared with today – with little land and an atmosphere possibly rich in hydrogen gas – and the abundance of isotopes may have been very different.

Now Michael Hren at the University of Michigan, Mike Tice of Texas A&M University and Page Chamberlain at Stanford University have devised a new way of working out Archaean temperatures – without having to make any assumptions about Archaean seawater.

Their technique is based on the fact that cherts also contain small amounts of deuterium, the abundance of which the team measured along with oxygen-18. It turns out that the abundance of oxygen-18 drops dramatically if the chert is formed at temperatures greater than about 55 °C, whereas the deuterium abundance remains relatively stable.

Lower upper limit

The team examined the deuterium and oxygen-18 abundances for about 25 chert samples from South Africa known to be about 3.42 billion years old. From their data they were able to constrain the ancient ocean composition and put an upper limit on ocean temperatures of about 40 °C.

The result suggests that Archaean life could have existed in a wider diversity of environments than previously thought. For example, life could have first emerged as thermopiles in hot water near to hydrothermal vents, but then ventured further away into cooler water, adapting to conditions there. “A cooler ocean would mean that life could be more diverse,” explained Hren.

Commenting on the research, astrobiologist Malcolm Walter of the University of New South Wales told physicsworld.com that “one of the big issues in speculation about the origin of life is whether the ancient oceans were hot”. Walter also pointed out that “there have long been doubts that…the oxygen isotopic composition has been constant” – a problem that he said is compounded by the fact there are very few known examples of Achaean cherts that can be studied.

Walter described the work of Hren and colleagues as “innovative”, but added that he will treat the results with “caution” until he could gauge the response of the wider geological community.

In the meantime, Hren and colleagues will repeat their measurements on other cherts that have been subject to different aging processes.

Elspeth Drayson: life in the fast lane

What sparked your interest in physics?

At school, my best subjects were maths and sciences, and while I was doing my degree at Imperial College London I particularly enjoyed classes in medical physics. This was partly because my father ran the medical-engineering department at Oxford University, so I had been exposed to the subject as an early age. My five sisters also studied science, so it was definitely in the blood. While I was then doing my MSc in medical physics and electronics at Bart’s Hospital, I became interested in the business side, so after finishing the MSc I did a degree in management studies at Oxford.

What did you do next?

I joined a small start-up company that was working on a system that monitored platelets prior to blood transfusion, to assess their viability. Platelets have to be stored at room temperature, not frozen, and they only last about five to seven days. At the end of their life they change from a disc shape to a sphere, and the idea was that we could measure their shape by shining light through them. The machine the company built to do this turned out to be an expensive solution, but it was a very interesting field, and I got quite involved in the marketing side. Then after I met my husband – which happened, literally, over a Bunsen burner in a lab at Oxford – we co-founded a vaccine company, PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, and developed it over a 10-year period.

How did you become involved in motor racing?

Paul went into politics after we sold PowderJect in 2003, and by that time I had already stepped down from being a director to have a family. But we had really enjoyed working together and we wanted to do something else. When he announced that he had always wanted to drive a racing car, I thought this was obviously a midlife crisis of some description. Then, after he had entered several races and started doing quite well, I recognized that it was not a temporary interest and if the children and I did not get involved, then we would hardly see him. We set up our own race team two years ago, and owing to Paul’s political commitments, I have been the one running it. My current role does not involve a lot of physics, but it does involve understanding the engineering decisions and the financial side of the business. I also love numbers, so at races I find myself concentrating on lap times and average fuel consumption. Having a numerical mind is really useful.

What are you working on now?

In this year’s American Le Mans Series, we are racing in the prototype category for the first time. One of the reasons we moved into this category is that you have much more scope to showcase new technologies. We did use biofuel made from waste wood in our previous car, but otherwise the rules really limit what you can do. With the prototype, we are looking at a whole range of things, from carbon capture to electric motors and flywheels, which may aid performance but will also be more energy efficient. One of the key reasons we got into racing was to show that you can combine green technology with a very fast race car. Also, race technology develops very quickly, so if innovations work and have applications in other areas, they can be on a fast track to integration.

Do you worry about safety when your husband is driving?

If you are just watching the cars, oddly enough it is easy to forget who is inside them. Even when you see a crash on the big screen, you just think “Oh, I hope that person’s okay”. But also the technology has improved tremendously. Back in the old days, when people had a crash at high speeds, they would break their neck from the sheer impact. Now, there is a device that attaches the helmet to the seat so that drivers’ heads are supported. That has saved many lives, and there are also fire-retardant race suits and so on. Having better technology still does not prevent all accidents; in fact, last year at Le Mans, the cars had a tendency to take off on a certain part of the track. They are like aeroplanes at that speed – not enough down force! Quite a few competitors were taking off, spinning, with parts of the car coming flying off – and then the driver would get out and walk off the track saying “I’m fine”. That reassures me that safety is pretty good.

Physics and motor racing are both very male-dominated – have you experienced any problems in either field?

At Imperial I was one of 20 women out of 200 students in my year, and at a careers evening I asked a medical physicist for advice. He said, “My advice to you – dear – is to find yourself a nice husband and not bother.” I was not disrupted by this, thankfully! There are even fewer women in motor racing than there are in physics; in fact, for a long time the only women associated with the sport were glamour models posing on the cars. But now there are a number of very good female engineers and mechanics who are not decoration – they make a contribution and excel at their jobs. I would like to think that in the future, any woman studying physics or engineering could think “Ah, perhaps a career in motor sport is for me”.

How do you think your physics background has helped you?

I think the training in physics makes you an analytical person, someone who is very precise and direct and who expects direct answers. This means you can spot people who do not know what they are talking about, even if they try to use technical language. Also, you can ask a couple of questions and soon ascertain exactly what is wrong. For example, during a race I listen to a lot of dialogue between engineers and drivers, so when someone reports smoke in the cockpit, noises or understeer, I can hear the solutions to the problems, and I know to ask about spare parts, why something was not tightened or tested, and so on.

Do you have any advice for physics students?

Pursue things that you are interested in, and dare to be different. A lot of people view science graduates as having limited options – teaching, research or finance – but it is possible to become an entrepreneur, and do something completely different that you never thought you could do. If you had asked me at aged 18 where I would be all these years later, I could never have painted the picture that now describes my life. I never thought it would be possible to have a business, a family that balances with challenging work, and the freedom to make choices without being constrained by a large institution. I really enjoyed studying physics, but I also enjoy doing things that are not necessarily related but where the physics training has been really useful.

APS rejects plea to alter stance on climate change

The American Physical Society (APS) has “overwhelmingly rejected” a proposal from a group of 160 physicists to alter its official position on climate change. The physicists, who include the Nobel laureate Ivar Giaver, wanted the APS to modify its stance to reflect their own doubts about the human contribution to global warming. The APS turned down the request on the recommendations of a six-person committee chaired by atomic physicist Daniel Kleppner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The committee was set up by APS president Cherry Murray in July, when the society received the proposal for changing its statement, which had originally been drawn up in November 2007. It has spent the last four months carrying out what the APS calls “a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research” and took soundings from its members. “We recommended not accepting the proposal,” Kleppner told physicsworld.com. “The [APS] council almost unanimously decided to go with that.”

Different positions

The official APS position on climate change says that “emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate” and adds that there is “incontrovertible” evidence that global warming is occurring. The APS also wants reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to start immediately. “If no mitigating actions are taken,” it says, “significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”

However, the petition’s signatories claim that “measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20–21st century changes [in climate] are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today”. They say that various natural processes, such as ocean cycles and solar variability, could account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries.

“Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate,” the petition concludes. It also points to “extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals”.

Next steps

Although the APS council turned down the request, it has, however, agreed to one proposal from Kleppner’s committee: that the society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) should “examine the statement for improvements in clarity and tone”. Princeton University atomic physicist Will Happer, who was one of those leading the proposal for change, sees that fact as a form of vindication. “They basically sent both statements back to their committee on public affairs and asked them to reconsider,” says Happer. “I think it’s a big victory for us. Many of [the people who signed the petition] took quite a bit of risk in signing this statement.”

However, the APS firmly refutes Happer’s reading. “The council has, in effect, said we reject outright the replacement of our statement,” points out APS spokesperson Tawanda Johnson. “We are certainly not rejecting the 2007 statement. It’s still on our website. POPA reviews statements every five years; it would have come up for review anyway.”

Kleppner also points out that the call for change came from a small minority of the APS’s 47,000 members. “This is certainly not a majority opinion,” he says. “Most other physicists have come to a different conclusion looking at the same evidence.”

X-ray diffraction microscopy peers into tiny cells

Two independent groups of physicists have found a new way to get high-definition glimpses of the innards of living cells. The technique uses X-ray diffraction microscopy on cells frozen below –170 °C, and could pave the way for highly detailed 3D images of cells. This would provide biologists with valuable new information about how the smallest structures in cells interact with one another.

Imaging the tiny structures in cells has been difficult because conventional optical microscopes are limited by the wavelength of light and are unable to pick out fine structures below around 400 nm in size. While electron microscopes can resolve details as small as 3–5 nm, they are unable to penetrate very deeply through biological samples.

The most promising solution is X-ray diffraction microscopy (XDM), which can image whole cells at once and pick out much smaller features, down to around 10 nm. XDM does not use lenses; instead it uses a CCD to measure the intensity and trajectory of X-rays that have been diffracted from the target object. A computer algorithm is then used to reconstruct the image from this diffraction data.

Radiation damage

However, using X-rays on biological samples usually causes significant radiation damage to the cells, which reduces the resolution of any images produced. To get around this problem, previous work has focused on freeze-dried cells, with all water removed from the system. Unfortunately, this process no longer provides a realistic picture of how the cells might appear while alive.

Instead of freeze-drying cells to be imaged, the two teams have plunged cells in their natural wet state into liquid ethane. This freezes the cells very rapidly, which preserves much of their structure while making them more resistant to radiation damage.

“The difference between dehydrated cells and frozen hydrated cells is like the difference between raisins and grapes” Xiaojing Huang, Stony Brook University

“The difference between dehydrated cells and frozen hydrated cells is like the difference between raisins and grapes,” explained Xiaojing Huang of Stony Brook University in New York. “This process does not damage the cells, and keeps them very close to their natural living state, so it gives us a much more accurate picture of what is happening,” he told physicsworld.com.

Huang’s group used “soft” 520 eV X-rays to image yeast cells at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, US. At the same time, researchers led by Anders Madsen at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, used a similar freezing technique and “harder” 8 keV X-rays to image radiation-resistant cells of the bacteria D. radiodurans. In each case, the team was able to attain resolutions of between 25 and 50 nm – enough to discern internal structures of interest, such as possible mitochondria or nucleus regions. Both results are published in Physical Review Letters.

Freezing advantage

The low radiation damage associated with this technique should allow the same cell to be rotated slowly and imaged from many different angles to build up a 3D image.

Huang’s team has already started on this next stage, and is planning to build and implement a system that would automatically collect and produce 3D images in minutes.

“All the work so far indicates that 3D imaging is possible using this process” John Miao, University of California, Los Angeles

“3D imaging is very important because the most interesting cells are relatively thick,” says John Miao, who is also working on imaging cells at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In a 2D-projection you don’t see all the details you would like to, such as internal organelles or possibly larger macromolecules.” “I think this is a very important step in the right direction,” Miao adds, noting that high-quality 3D images may be available sooner than we think. “All the work so far indicates that 3D imaging is possible using this process and the images could even be as high as 10 nm in resolution in the future.”

Breaking down walls in science

By Michael Banks

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses delegates at the Falling Walls conference

“The fall of the Wall changed my life, but it didn’t put a dampener on my passion for science,” said German chancellor Angela Merkel at yesterday’s Falling Walls conference held in Berlin.

I was in Berlin to attend the one-day event, which was organized by the Einstein Foundation. It was held in a former water pumping station in the east of the city to celebrate 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.

Top researchers from different backgrounds gave 15 minute talks about what they believe are modern walls in their disciplines.

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Rolf-Dieter Heuer discusses walls of the hidden universe

Merkel, a former physicist, delighted scientists by attending the conference to talk to researchers about her background and about breaking the walls of the 21st century.

Speaking for 25 minutes, Merkel outlined tackling climate change as a wall that needs to be overcome. She said this was a challenge that cannot be done alone and needs international cooperation — something that scientists excel at and could teach politicians a lesson or two about.

The list of speakers was quite impressive from Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus from the Yunus Centre, who talked about how to break the wall of introducing “social business” into today’s corporate giants to Alain Aspect from the Écoles Polytechnique who talked about breaking down the wall of quantum weirdness and his experiments on single photon diffraction.

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Using the desert to power the world

In the third session, entitled “walls around our universe”, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of the CERN particle-physics lab, told the 500 strong audience about the Large Hadron Collider and how it could break the wall of the hidden universe by possibly explaining what makes up dark matter and gives particles their mass.

Also speaking was Norbert Holtkamp, deputy director general of the ITER fusion experiment, who talked about breaking the wall of limitless energy via fusion.

Perhaps the most amusing part of the conference was provided by an actor, who, when the speaker went over the 15 minute allowance, came on stage to do an act like pretending to sweep the floor or starting to blow balloons up.

Perhaps Gerhard Knies from the Desertec foundation, which is planning to build large solar energy plant in North Africa, gave members of the audience most food for thought when he talked about breaking the wall of the fossil age. “The whole desert gets in six hours what mankind needs for a year,” he said.

Beam makes it halfway round LHC

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Splashing out at the LHC

By Hamish Johnston

Slowly but surely the Large Hadron Collider is coming back to life at CERN in Geneva. Over the weekend the beam was sent halfway round the 27 km ring for the first time since the collider failed last year.

The low-energy beam was then dumped in a collimator just upstream of the CMS cavern and the experiment’s calorimeters and the muon chambers saw the above “splash event”.

Just another 13.5 km (and a few TeV) to go!

Laser creates record-breaking protons

An international group of physicists working at the Los Alamos Laboratory in the US has used a laser to generate 67.5 MeV protons – the highest-energy protons yet produced in this way. Their work points the way to new laser-based devices for proton therapy, which would be far smaller and cheaper than existing particle-accelerator sources.

When a high-energy proton beam travels through the human body it deposits most of its energy within a small volume, the size and location of which can be calculated to great precision. As a result, protons offer a distinct advantage over other forms of radiation used to destroy tumour cells because they cause less damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Unfortunately, the accelerators needed to generate the protons can cover thousands of square metres and cost some $100m. This has limited the number of proton-therapy facilities available and patients often have to travel considerable distances to be treated in this way.

Some physicists believe that a laser-based proton generator could be made for about one tenth of the cost of a conventional accelerator and be small enough to be contained within a classroom-sized laboratory. The idea is that ultra-powerful laser pulses knock electrons out of the atoms within a tiny target, causing the electrons to accumulate on the target’s rear surface. This sets up an electric field across the target, accelerating the resultant ions and forcing them to leave the material as a very high-energy beam.

Energy is a problem

In practice, however, some of the world’s most powerful petawatt (1015 W) lasers have only been able to generate protons with a maximum energy of about 58 megaelectronvolts (MeV). While tumours of the eye can be treated using protons of 60–70 MeV, deeper tumours require energies of about 300 MeV.

The latest breakthrough was carried out by Kirk Flippo of Los Alamos, Sandrine Gaillard of the Forschungszentrum Dresden–Rossendorf research centre (FZD) in Germany and colleagues, who used Los Alamos’ Trident laser to generate 67.5 MeV protons. The work relies on a novel target design – an anvil-shaped piece of copper comprising a cone around 100 µm long with a 100 µm flat disc across perched on its tip. Flippo’s team directed the laser beam to the inside of the cone, liberating electrons that were guided to the tip and which set up an electric field that accelerated protons away from the disc. The researchers claim that this arrangement is far more efficient than the thin films used in previous experiments – they used 80 J laser pulses, whereas the previous record of 58 MeV involved 450 J laser pulses.

Team-member Michael Bussmann of the FZD says that this significant step forward in maximum proton energy was also made possible by increasing the intensity of the main part of each pulse relative to the “pre-pulse”, which precedes the main pulse and can damage the target.

Not enough protons

However, it might take a decade or more before laser-generated protons can be used to combat cancer. Another major challenge is that Trident and the other more intense lasers simply require too much energy to be able to function at the roughly 10 Hz pulse rate needed to produce enough protons for cancer therapy.

According to Bussmann, reaching the sought-after high production rates will be a matter of getting the target right. One possibility will be some kind of refinement of the anvil shape, he says. Others, however, believe that the answer lies in reducing the size of the target, allowing electrons to be heated and ejected from the target much more quickly and therefore with a more uniform energy distribution, in other words leading to fewer low-energy electrons. “We already have enough energy in our lasers, the question is how can we use it more efficiently,” says Bussmann. “Nobody has the final idea right now,” he said, “but we are in a position to test all these different theories and see which works best.”

Looking beyond cancer therapy, Flippo believes that such proton sources could also be used to create medical isotopes and employed to generate neutrons for research in condensed-matter physics and other areas of science. They might also be used to search for nuclear materials inside cargo, given that the characteristics of a proton beam are altered in a well defined way by radioactive substances.

The research was presented at the annual meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society, held in Atlanta on 2–6 November.

Vitaly Ginzburg: 1916–2009

Vitaly Ginzburg, who was one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century, died on Sunday 8 November at the age of 93. Ginzburg shared the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics with Alexei Abrikosov and Tony Leggett for their work on the theory of superconductors and superfluids. He had been ill for some time and had been in hospital since 5 October.

Ginzburg was born in Moscow on 4 October 1916 into a Jewish family. He had a relatively short primary education, only starting school at age 11 and leaving four years later in 1931 to work as a technician in an X-ray laboratory at a local higher-education technical institute. It was here that his interest in physics first began, sparked by popular-science books such as Physics in Our Day by the Russian physicist Orest Danilovich Hvolson.

Ginzburg joined Moscow State University in 1933, graduating five years later with a degree in physics. He then began a PhD, which he completed in 1940, taking just two years instead of the usual three. Ginzburg immediately joined the P N Lebedev Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which, the following year, after the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, was moved to the city of Kazan in central Russia. Ginzburg obtained a DSc in 1942.

Enter the H-bomb

After the war, Ginzburg returned to the Lebedev, where he worked in the institute’s theory department as a deputy to Igor Tamm. In 1948 Ginzburg became part of the team that developed the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb after Tamm was asked to suggest people who could contribute to the effort. Ginzburg’s key contribution was to suggest using lithium-6 as a nuclear fuel – an idea that made it possible to build a practical H-bomb. In 1951 Ginzburg was removed from the H-bomb team for reasons that were never made explicit but that were undoubtedly due to his Jewish background and the fact that his wife was a former political prisoner.

Although Ginzburg started out as an experimental physicist in the field of optics, he quickly realised that his talents were as a theorist and went on to work in many different areas of physics and astrophysics. In 1950, for example, he developed with Lev Landau a partially phenomenological theory of superconductivity. He also studied how electromagnetic waves propagate through plasmas, such as the ionosphere, developed a theory of the origin of cosmic radiation, and worked on the superfluidity of helium II.

Ginzburg’s Nobel prize centred on his work on “type-II” superconductors – materials in which superconductivity and magnetism can co-exist. They differ from “type-I” superconductors, which completely repel magnetic fields. In 1950 Ginzburg, together with Lev Landau, introduced a parameter to describe the interaction between the superconductor and the magnetic field, and went on to show that superconductiivty and magnetism could only co-exist if this parameter is greater than 0.71.

However all superconductors at the time had much lower values and the pair did not pursure the theory in this regime. It was in 1952 that Abrikosov, building on Ginzburg and Landau’s work, who predicted the existence of type-II superconductors for the first time.

“To me, the special charm and specific feature of theoretical physics is that you can quickly change what you are studying,” said Ginzburg in an interview with physicsworld.com published only last week. “Typically, you do not need many years to build new equipment, as experimentalists often do. Having said all that, I think that my biggest achievement in physics is connected with the theory of superconductivity.”

Staunch atheist

In 1971, after Tamm’s death, Ginzburg was appointed head of the theoretical department at the Lebedev before officially retiring in 1988, although he continued giving his famous weekly seminars, which he had begun in the 1950s, for many more years. In 1998 Ginzburg took over as editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk – a position he held until his death.

Ginzburg married twice – first to fellow student Olga Zamsha in 1937, whom he divorced in 1946, and then in the same year to Nina Ermakova. The couple did not have any children although Ginzburg had a daughter from his first marriage. His second wife survives him.

A staunch atheist, Ginzburg was critical in later years of the growing influence of the church in Russian secular education. He particularly disliked the church pushing creationism as the foundation of science, although he always maintained that to be – or not be – religious was a fundamental human right. “But I am convinced that the bright future of mankind is connected with the progress of science,” he said in his interview with physicsworld.com, “and I believe it is inevitable that one day religions (at least those existing now) will drop in status to no higher than that of astrology.”

Throwing a baguette in the works

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Crusty problems for the LHC

By Michael Banks

Oh crumbs.

After talk of the Higgs boson travelling back in time and sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab, a more mundane object temporarily stopped the machine from operating on Tuesday night.

According to a note posted today on the CERN users’ pages, a piece of baguette placed in a cooling station caused a sector in the LHC to heat up by a few degrees to the bemusement of engineers.

The 27 km circumference LHC has eight sectors, each 3.3 km long. Each sector has a cooling station, or “cryoplant”, which helps the machine get down to the chilly temperature of 4.2 K.

The crusty piece of bread was found in one of the cryoplants and happened to be lying on a busbar — an electrical connection made of copper that are generally wide and flat to allow heat to dissipate more easily.

The well placed baguette then caused a short circuit in the cryogenic equipment that heated one of the sectors to around 10 K.

“The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane,” a spokeswoman from CERN told the Times.

But it seems the best guess was right after all. The note on the CERN users page said that the culprit was a “bird carrying a baguette bread” and that the “bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread”.

The statement read: “The standard failsafe systems came into operation and after the cause was identified, re-cooling of the machine began and the sectors were back at operating temperature last night. The incident was similar in effect to a standard power cut, for which the machine protection systems are very well prepared.”

At least the note didn’t say that it was a bird travelling back in time with a piece of bread hellbent on sabotaging the LHC from finding the Higgs.

Physicist and monster hunter dies at 87

By Hamish Johnston

There’s a fascinating obituary in the Daily Telegraph of Robert Rines — the American physicist, lawyer, inventor, award-winning composer and hunter of the Loch Ness monster.

The Boston-born polymath studied physics at MIT and worked on radar imaging technology at the institute’s famous radiation laboratory. This technology has since been used in a wide range of applications from missile guidance to medical imaging — and monster hunting.

Rines then went on to become a lawyer specializing in intellectual property and spent much of his working life in this profession.

But Rines did find time to write several Broadway productions — winning an Emmy award along the way — and dedicated much of his spare time to searching for the Loch Ness Monster.

His interest in the mythical — or perhaps elusive! — creature began in 1972, and his sonar and photographic images of objects resembling Nessie were the subject of great scientific debate.

It’s hard to believe today, but some images were even published in a 1975 news story in Nature.

The article is entitled Nessiteras skeptyx, perhaps a “scientific” name for the monster! Amazingly it wasn’t the 1 April issue of the journal!

I tried to read the article online but I could seem to access it via my subscription, maybe you will have better luck.

Rines died on 1 November at the age of 87.

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