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Broadcasts and Transcripts

Chris Forbes Ewan

Processed Food and Functional Foods - Broadcast Sunday 5 January 2003
Genetically Modified Foods - Potential Benefits and Regulations -  Broadcast Sunday 15 September 2002
The Obesity Epidemic - Broadcast Sunday 12 August 2001

The History of Sugar -  Broadcast Sunday 29 September 2002

Books and Articles

  Peter Macinnis
 

Peter Macinnis - Bittersweet - Published  by Allen and Unwin, 2002 From the blurb: Bittersweet is full of ripping yarns and acts of bastardry.  Through the ages sugar has offered opportunities of tremendous riches to the unscrupulous few who grew and sold it.  But in the days of manual processing, these fortunes were built on the backbreaking labour of slaves. Bittersweet explores the effect that sugar has had on the world.  This foodstuff that we take for granted - and indulge in more than we should - has caused wars and geopolitical balances that have shaped the modern world and the power balances that we see in the 21st century.

Peter Macinnis - Rockets: Sulfur, Sputnik and Scramjets - Published  by Allen and Unwin, 2003 From the blurb:The story begins with me travelling in the outback of Australia, heading off to see the experimental launch of a scramjet at Woomera in South Australia. We visit China, where rockets were invented, India, where they came to the attention of the British, Fort McHenry where the British used them against the Americans, Sacramento, where I interviewed retired rocket chemists at Aerojet, Gallipoli, and quite a few other places as well. Rockets had a chequered career, most of the military hated them, but they won World War II by giving Allied forces the edge against battleships, submarines, fortified coastlines and tanks. Later, rockets won the unfought Battle of Berlin when the Soviets blockaded it, and later still, the space race and the missile race left the US as the only remaining superpower with an intact economy. Rockets chewed up large amounts of German resources that might otherwise have gone to nuclear weapons. I look also at the social effects of technology, one of my key interests, and how it generally takes 50 years for a technology to fully mature. When it does, it has usually turned out to be something very different from what people expected at the start. The Internet, for example, was to let geeks communicate, and to provide communications secure from nuclear war — through the Web, it has turned into much more, and who would have expected people to publicise their books there?

"...a careful look at poison and poisoners, how poison works, and some of the jollier cases of poisoning." From the blurb: "Painting a broad canvas, from the early Egyptians to the arsenical tube wells in Bangladesh and the Sarin gas attacks in a Tokyo subway, The Killer Bean of Calabar explores the accidental and intentional tales of poisons and their use throughout history. Historically difficult substances to trace, poisons have been used by many for their own dastardly purposes, from the Great Poisoners such as Nero and Madame de Brinvilliers to the mass gassings of World War II. But the truly great poisoners are those who make selective use of poisons to save human life, not the few who use poison to take human life. Most of the medicines we take are themselves poisons - therapeutic only by virtue of being more deadly to our viruses than to us. Poisons are all around us - from the plants in our gardens and lead in our homes, to the bacteria and toxins in our bodies. With ripping yarns and unusual views of famous people, Macinnis explains the whys and wherefores of poisons and poisoning."

Toby Fiander

As well as making invaluable contributions on matters ranging from ancient Chinese water engineering to Zinc  deficiency, Toby has found time to become the second published author  among the regular contributors.  He has produced several chapters in Wise Water Management: A Demand Management Manual for Water Authorities, edited by  Dr  Stuart White.  More details, and how it can be purchased,  can be found at  http://www.isf.uts.edu.au/publications/wisewater2.html

Ian Musgrave

Our resident astronomy guru has also found time to contribute a chapter to "Why Intelligent Design Fails", edited by Matt Young and Taner Edis. " In Why Intelligent Design Fails, a team of scientists call on their expertise in physics, biology, computer science, and archaeology to examine intelligent design. They take design claims at face value, without attempting to rule out the hypothesis of a designed universe just because of its supernatural overtones. They consistently find grandiose claims with no scientific merit. The questions intelligent-design advocates raise have largely already been answered, or else mainstream scientists have been making excellent progress on them with a Darwinian, naturalistic approach."  More details, and how to purchase it can be found at http://www2.truman.edu/~edis/books/id/

Congratulations to long-standing listmember Ian "Aurora Alert/Southern Skywatch" Musgrave, PhD, whose postgraduate students have nominated him for their university's Supervisor of the Year award.

Science Natterers will know Ian from his regular Aurora Alerts that let us know when something spectacular is happening overhead. He publishes the Southern Skywatch web site for amateur astronomers and has been active for some years in online (and real-life) debate and education about genetics, evolution and related matters.

Southern Skywatch
http://home.mira.net/~reynella/skywatch/ssky.htm

Astroblog
http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/

These are, of course, Ian's (laughingly called) spare-time activities. By day, he's a mild-mannered hard-working scientist who's looking into (and I quote from his official biography) "how nerve activity is controlled at the biochemical level. In particular, the signal transduction pathways by which receptors control neuronal activity are incompletely understood. His research focuses on pathways that are important in controlling blood pressure. He is also investigating how drugs may protect nerve cells from the damage produced by stroke and Alzheimer's disease. These studies may ultimately improve treatment of high blood pressure and stroke."

Ian's scientific papers are available via PubMed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?dispmax=50&db=PubMed&pmfilter_EDatLimit=10%2BYears&cmd_current=Limits&orig_db=PubMed&cmd=Search&term=MUSGRAVE%2BIF&doptcmdl=DocSum%20
or
http://tinyurl.com/e2med

Yay, Ian -- good to know your students like you, they really like you  :-) 

Natterer's Picnics

Are on a page here - for individual events, go to
NSW
Queensland
Victoria

Verse and Worse

Some of the regular contributors are poets in their own right - while others have a retentive memory for other people's efforts.

Memorable Past Members

Doug Rickards