CaSE Debate: STEM skills gap

Science, technology, engineering and maths. These are the disciplines covered within 'STEM' and in the UK we need more people skilled at them and employed within them. At the recent cross-party CaSE debate at the Royal Society, UK politicians gave a not too cheery outlook for the near future.

All agreed that to fill the gap it is imperative that effort is put into schools in order to equip teachers with the knowledge and resources to make science fun! Textbooks are not the answer here. Informal teaching is needed via school trips to museums and events and practical class exercises must be pushed for. It is still famously either space or dinosaurs that hook children into science, so these need to be pushed even further as the entry point into science for youngsters.

Moving on to secondary school, particularly GCSE age, and the careers service is in dire need of improvement. Many people do not feel helped by their careers service and are unaware of the options in STEM disciplines available to them. By pushing these courses at universities we will have more degrees held within STEM and hopefully retain many of these people in the sector for work and research.

However, our skills gap is current and the above plan will take over a decade to trickle through. Despite Government efforts to get the working ages into STEM via part time Masters courses the number of people enrolling on them has dropped. This is troublesome seeing as Career Development Loans are fairly readily available.

So must we look further afield to fill the STEM skills gap? Giving overseas researchers and workers an incentive to come to the UK may be a wise move. We have many of the world's most brilliant universities yet immigration laws and a general perception of immigration being a negative thing is hindering the process.

So for the moment the gap looks set to stay….

CaSE Debate: G8 Funding Comparison

Spending a relatively meagre 1.7% (May 2013) of GDP on science research places the UK as the second lowest investor into science in the G8. As this is the case how do we remain competitive? This was discussed at the CaSE debate a couple of weeks ago, along with justification that our spending is worthwhile. 

An ideal figure of 3% is often thrown around when discussing GDP spend on science. UK science ministers at the event explained that the UK meeting this number is highly unlikely at current time. The key to making our 1.7% count, they explained, is to create incentives to keep large R&D companies interested in us and not just the emerging economies. This can be achieved by creating long term contracts with the companies which entices them with security that perhaps smaller economies cannot offer.

Another promising point is how the UK are spending broadly and with a fairly stable cash figure. This is allowing continual funding into many different aspects of science and technology. Compare this with Germany, who at first glance put a formidable percentage of GDP into science, but in actual fact are investing a massive chunk of this into energy. Their shift away from nuclear is draining their science budget, allowing other areas of research to perhaps slip through the net. If Aesop is to be believed, the UK with our slow and steady approach may be doing just fine.

CaSE Debate: Women in Science

I learnt a shocking fact about women in UK science at the CaSE debate. Half of state schools send not a single female student to A-level physics. Perhaps this may not be so shocking to some – physics is still thought of as a predominantly male discipline. However, after coming from an all girls grammar school I forgot these stereotypes are still so engrained in society. In my school year roughly a quarter of girls took A-level physics.

Along with physics, both biology and chemistry were well received at school – I myself took A-level biology. In this respect I represent the far greater proportion of girls in the UK. Biology is seen as the ‘girls’ science, with dreams of one day become a doctor being at the root of this. However, unlike other degrees the number of places for medicine are set by the government each year as advised by the NHS. Therefore when leaving physics and chemistry behind if girls do not make the cut for medicine they may find it hard to find roles in other science and engineering sectors, leading to our female deficit.

How can we inspire females to follow predominantly male-based areas of science? On this all parties agreed. Ambition needs to be fostered in school and from an early age. Female role models are required – for example Roma Agrawel, a female structural engineer who worked on The Shard. And stereotypes need breaking down. I myself am guilty of replying “thank you” when someone tells me “you don’t look like a geologist”. We should be dismissing that a geologist or physicist has a certain look. Not just in gender but in age and ethnicity as well. Diversity can only help science. The more minds and viewpoints that are shared and contrasted, the more likely scientific discoveries are likely to occur.

CaSE Debate 2013

CaSE (Campaign for Science and Engineering) are a self described 'plucky' independent group resolved to increasing the political profile of science in the UK. On 30th October 2013 the Royal Society hosted a CaSE debate for which the science ministers for the three main UK political parties were invited to share their views on science funding. Strangely for UK politics science does not induce the normal cross-party knock about and subsequently views on funding were fairly uniform. The event therefore gave a fairly clear glimpse into the way science will be financed and promoted in the UK in the near future.

With a 'Question Time' style set up and excellent chairing from BBC's Pallab Ghosh the debate was informative, at times humorous and, most importantly, it made sense to me - a scientist sitting in the audience.

L-R David Willetts, Liam Payne, Dr Julian Huppert and Pallab Ghosh

As I enjoyed the event so much and feel a lot of wisdom was communicated to the audience, I am going to do a short series of posts highlighting some of the key topics discussed. They will be broken down as follows:

• the STEM skills gap
• where funding should go within science and engineering 
• how UK science funding compares to that of other nations
• women in science

Check back soon for the first round up.

New Australian Beasties

The majority of my posts so far have been a tad doom and gloom; either about the loss of resources or about new technologies created to get round these losses. So today I am happy to share a pleasant news story about some "new" biotic resources. 

Cape Melville leaf-tailed gecko (Saltuarius eximius)

Blink and you might miss it but hiding in the above picture is the recently discovered Cape Melville leaf-tailed gecko. No guesses for how it was named! This gecko is just one of three new vertebrate species found in a remote region of northern Queensland in Australia. I remember being fascinated by the BBC series 'Land of the Lost Volcano' in which scientists were dropped into the New Guinea jungle and found many new invertebrate and vertebrate species, including a giant rat. However, I am even more in awe that three new vertebrates have been found in a single expedition in Australia - a relatively well explored country!

Golden-coloured Cape Melville shade skink (Saproscincus saltus) 

Blotched boulder-frog (Cophixalus petrophilus)

This just goes to show that by cutting down our rainforests we could be destroying wonderful species, such as the Cape Melville leaf-tail gecko, that we don't even know exist. More on rainforest depletion coming soon as I am going to be exploring palm oil use in UK products.

For more information on the Cape Melville discoveries head over to the Guardian site.

Just me again

Hi there! So a fair bit of time has passed since my last post. In that time quite a lot has happened. I graduated (with a first!) from UCL and have completed a four month internship with Deloitte in their Petroleum Services Group. Whilst that experience was wonderful, now that I have finished I am itching to learn about Earth Sciences as a whole again! To help me get back into the habit of checking the news and scientific journals I am going to be writing posts on here once more.

So watch this space...

To Wrap It All Up

Hi guys, last post here, sad I know! I have thoroughly enjoyed having my blog this term, it has encouraged me to keep up with other science blogs, news sites and journals which I probably would not have had the motivation to make time for otherwise.

During the past few weeks we have looked at natural resources and how we humans have utilised them in ways beneficial to us but in many cases totally destructive to the environment and our planet. Examples of finite resources and their impacts from exploitation were diamond mining, fracking, methane hydrates and over fishing. On a more positive note renewable energy sources were looked at such as wind, solar and biogenic energy.

There is no doubt that our need for natural resources is just going to keep on growing alongside our expanding population. So if we can't reduce our need for energy, food and technology then mitigation of the adverse effects caused by them is what we need to focus on. Through schemes such as ecosystem services and, more dramatically geoengineering, us humans hopefully won't be our own demise.

Thank you for reading my blog, I hope that you have enjoyed it as much as I have writing it, who knows it may even resurface once again...

Becca.

Looking to the year ahead

The Science and Environment section of the BBC News site has put together a great little feature of science topics which are likely to get the most coverage in 2013. To make it easier for you to digest I am putting them here in bullet point form, but please go onto the site to read about any that interest you in more detail.

• Summer sea-ice 
• The next instalment of the IPCC report (for my post about it's leak, see here)
• Extreme weather events
• Synthetic biology and other emerging fields of science
• The badger cull
• The Keyston XL oil pipeline, which if built will span from Alberta (Canada) all the way to Texas
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) which is taking place in Thailand
• The passing of asteroid 2012 DA14, which will come extremely close to Earth (let's hope that calculations are right, and its not coming straight at up!)

So as can be seen from the list environmental topics are at the forefront of science in 2013. Stories that will directly relate to this blog are summer sea-ice (loss is resultant from anthropogenic climate change) and the massive oil pipeline proposed across North America. I will be interested to see how these turn out.

Geoengineering

Geoengineering in many ways still seems a rather fantastical idea to me. It aims to undo some of the horrific changes we have forced our planet into via greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of CO2, which has warmed our Earth considerably:

The Keeling Curve: showing the sharp rise in global temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Geoengineering attempts to reduce the problems through large scale intervention. There are two main ways of doing this: tackling the rising carbon levels by removing it from our atmosphere (such as carbon geosequestration - pumping it underground into disused oil fields), and reducing solar input to Earth in order to drop the global temperature (for example giant reflectors orbiting Earth to reflect back sunlight). The latter technique, however, just masks the problem; CO2 will still be rising without further intervention.

Table from Resnik and Vallero, 2011

Despite being cutting edge in terms of relevance in society at the moment, geoengineering is a fairly old concept; Cesare Marchetti wrote a paper on 'the CO2 problem' and the possiblity of geoengineering in 1977. Nowadays whilst some can see the benefit of geoengineering, others are set completely against it and we shall explore both views now.

I feel fairly confident in saying that nobody is singing the praises of geoengineering; it is after all extremely large scale, dramatic and unnatural. However, Resnik and Vallero have outlined in a 2011 paper that it may be something that we are forced to turn too. Other solutions such as recycling, cutting CO2 emissions and turning to renewables have too many social, political and economic hurdles that our world just can't seem to overcome. Bearing that in mind it may be the lesser evil to completely disrupt our planet's natural state and change the climate ourselves by the means of solar reflectors and spraying SO2 into the stratosphere. We have already, after all, been changing our Earth's natural balance for the past couple hundred of years, just in a seemingly smaller, less invasive way. If we don't do something dramatic to intervene our global temperature is going to keep on increasing, bringing with it all sorts of unpleasant knock on effects.

Possible methods of carbon geosequestration

Others, however, think that the effects of geoengineering will be even worse than just 'leaving the planet to it'. Alan Robock in 2008 stated twenty reasons as to why it should not be utilised. By adding SO2 to the atmosphere to cool the planet (in much the same way as volcanic eruptions do) the ozone is harmed and depleted, leading to greater warming potential of the Sun in the future. Similarly as chemicals from geoengineering work their way into the sea ocean acidification will get worse. Reflecting solar energy will cool the planet, yet there will then be less solar radiation for use in solar energy, one of the renewable energy sources that we should be promoting. This will also affect plants who rely on solar radiation to photosynthesise, and a decrease in plants results in a decrease of a potential sink of CO2.

An artist's interpretation of solar radiation management (Alan Robock, 2008)

Human issues stated include risk from militaries using the technologies for harm, not good, and the fear that human error could result in catastrophies when implementing geoengineering schemes. The cost of the schemes will also likely be astronomical, and on whom does the funding lie?

I believe that geoengineering at this time is not appropriate. It has far too many cons to be implemented right now, and much much more research must be done before it would be feasible. A far better way of sorting out our planet's problems would be from cutting emissions in a grass roots kind of system. However I fear that is not going to happen and once we can be more certain of the safety of geoengrineering it worringly may be the final choice that we must take.

BGS Risk List (1)

Happy New Year everybody!! We have finally reached the end of our countdown of the BGS’ most at risk elements on Earth. Last week saw tungsten coming in in 2^nd place, and I can now reveal that the number one spot goes to…..the rare earth elements! Thank you for supporting the countdown and taking the time to read it.

The REEs, circled in red.

RANKING:

1

ELEMENT NAME AND SYMBOL:

Rare Earth Elements (REE)

RELATIVE SUPPLY RISK INDEX:

9.5

WHY?:

The rare earth elements are a group of 17 metals that (surprisingly) are actually quite abundant in the Earth’s crust! However they are very well dispersed, and actual economically viable ores of them are rare, meaning mining them is a very tricky business. Add to that the fact that China has quite a monopoly of supplies (and is reducing its export quota dramatically by 2015) and you can see why they are so very at risk. It is not all doom and gloom however, electronic devices contain many rare earth elements, and the increasingly effective recycling of these gadgets will be able to recover some of the valuable metals.

LEADING PRODUCER:

China

TOP RESERVE HOLDER:

China

WHY THE DEMAND?:

REEs are a large group of elements and have an equally wide set of uses. They are predominantly used in electronics. For example: magnets in hard-drives, camera and telescope lenses, use in television screens and catalytic converters in cars.