Taking voluntary redundancy:

• Audrey Gillan – foreign correspondent
• Duncan Campbell – senior correspondent/crime specialist
• David Hencke – Westminster correspondent

Recently departed:

• David Pallister – investigative reporter
• Ian Wylie – editor of Work & Graduate supplement

With a dearth of genuine news reporting (i.e., proper journalism), what will the Grauniad’s ever expanding army of columnists and pro-bloggers have to write about?

Talk about rewarding failure. And I’m not referring to some pin-stripe-suited spiv bringing a listed company to its knees while walking away with a fortune for his troubles.

In this case a senior London police officer – one Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick – is responsible for the termination with extreme prejudice of a Brazilian visa overstayer, and for her troubles is promoted to one of the top jobs in the force: a position which carries a handsome remuneration of £172,000 a year. Nice work if you can get it.

There are many in England’s capital, and no doubt also in the Brazilian town of Gonzaga, who feel that Dick’s reward should have been a swift ejection from New Scotland Yard via a top floor window. Either that or locking up in a police van on the pavement outside the building.

RIP Jean Charles de Menezes (1978–2005)

Following a call for supporters’ opinions, Nick Lowles of the anti-British National party “Hope Not Hate” campaign, about which I wrote last month following the election to the European Parliament of two English neo-Nazis, has put together a short briefing video outlining some of the ideas put forward in the survey…

One of the questions asked in the survey was whether Hope Not Hate should focus on the development of specific policies to combat the BNP. My view is that the campaign would be more effective concentrating on the bigger picture, leaving discussions of policy details to political parties and other campaign groups.

The name “Hope Not Hate” says it all. We need to celebrate all that is positive about multiracial, multicultural Britain, and Hope Not Hate should be at the the centre of this.

Another television comedy great is no more…

Mollie Sugden (1922–2009) – hilarious sitcom actress, best known for playing “Mrs Slocombe” in the 1970s hit series “Are you being served?”. I was raised on this stuff, and it did me no harm whatsoever. Other than the flashbacks I have every time I walk into a branch of John Lewis. Grinning like an idiot in public can lead to some very odd looks.

Ms Sugden is survived by her twin sons Robin and Simon; Mrs Slocombe by her pussy.

After nearly 19 years observing the Sun, together with a fascinating flyby of Jupiter in 1992, the joint European Space Agency/NASA Ulysses mission has come to an end. The satellite is this evening being put into a deep electronic coma, and no further contact with the spacecraft is planned.

Ulysses has been a hugely successful space science mission, and during nearly two decades of operations has revealed a great deal about our neighbourhood star. What occurs in the Sun’s outer layers and interplanetary magnetic field has a direct impact on Earth’s local space environment and upper atmosphere. Results published last year show that the solar wind – a fast stream of charged particles moving away from the Sun in a garden hose pattern – is at its weakest for 50 years.

“Ulysses has taught us far more than we ever expected about the Sun and the way it interacts with the space surrounding it,” says Richard Marsden, ESA’s Ulysses Project Scientist.

It was never envisaged that Ulysses would survive this long. In fact, the mission has been extended four times over the years, and is only being shut down as its ageing, failing hardware means that the now small return of science data cannot justify the considerable running costs.

“We expected the spacecraft to cease functioning much earlier. Its longevity is a tribute to Ulysses’s builders and the people involved in operations over the years,” says Paolo Ferri of ESA’s operations centre in Darmstadt. “Although it is always hard to take the decision to terminate a mission, we have to accept that the satellite is running out of resources and a controlled switch-off is the best ending.”

Ulysses will continue orbiting the Sun as a man-made comet.

Britain’s Royal Society has just published a report of a meeting in which leading experts in energy generation discussed the detail of what is required to achieve a low carbon economy. The nine page summary document and accompanying presentations identify major weaknesses in the UK’s approach to climate change.

The report focuses on technology and economic policy, but along with this comes sharp criticism of the British government’s efforts to date. One leading member of the Royal Society is quoted off-record by the BBC describing the government’s performance on carbon capture and sequestration as “pathetic”. Similar criticisms could be made of many other leading economies.

So far there has been emitted much hot air over global warming, and little action, despite the protestations of the Department of Energy and Climate Change and other ministries of government. Gordon Brown’s commitment to international development is reflected positively in his recent call for $100bn a year to help less wealthy nations deal with climate change. But without massive investment in new technologies, such redistribution of wealth would be throwing good money after bad. This is an area in which the current prime minister has considerable experience, and from which he appears to have learned nothing.

British investment in alternative and renewable energy research and development is growing, but it remains pitifully small in relation to needs. It’s all very well talking about leadership at international summits and what-not, but where is the action?

The video shows a male nematode of the species Caenorhabditis elegans preparing to copulate with a hermaphrodite. There is no cheesy bass flute accompaniment. Honest.

If you don’t see the video embedded above, click here.

Scientists’ commentary…

“He presses the front side of his tail against the hermaphrodite while he backs along and searches for the vulva. If not found along this first side, the tail makes a sharp turn, curling round the end of the hermaphrodite to continue searching on the other side. On finding the vulva, the male inserts his spicules and mating commences.”

Further reading

Allyson J Whittaker & Paul W Sternberg, “Coordination of opposing sex-specific and core muscle groups regulates male tail posture during Caenorhabditis elegans male mating behavior”, BMC Biology 7, 33 (2009)

It was nice to see my old colleague Vladimir Papitashvili interviewed in New Scientist last week. This native of Georgia is a space physicist with a string of affiliations that include the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen. Papitashvili was recently appointed head scientist at the Amundsen-Scott base at the geographic South Pole.

I know of Papitashvili as an expert in ionospheric physics. He has strong ties to Europe, but it was in Ann Arbor that we first met when I paid a visit in late 1999 to arrange a research fellowship following my postdoc years in Southampton.

Much to my regret now, I declined the job offer from Michigan. It’s a shame, as I would have liked to work with Papitashvili. The space science community contains many interesting characters, but few are as universally liked as Vladimir Papitashvili.

Solstice sunrise over Shooters Hill, 21 June 2009

One of the songs performed last night by Chris Wood in Cowden Pound was born of the Darwin Song Project. Here, eight writers were holed up for a week in a retreat in rural Shropshire, and each instructed to come up with a musical celebration to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Shrewsbury’s most famous son, Charles Darwin.

In the introduction to his own contribution to the Darwin Song Project, Chris remarked about the supposed conflict between scientific rationalism and faith, and came out with something that at first sounded like the non-overlapping majisteria thesis. Only it was simpler and deeper than Stephen Jay Gould’s wordy insistence that:

“…science and religion do not glower at each other…[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity.”

Chris appears more interested in the emotional side of faith, and illustrated this with reference to Darwin’s reaction to the death from scarlet fever of his young daughter Annie. When Joseph Hooker wrote to say that his son Willy had contracted the same disease, Darwin replied:

“I grieve to hear about the Scarlet-Fever: my poor dear old friend you are most unfortunate. The tide must turn soon … Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.”

As far as I’m concerned, you can stick religion where the solstice sun don’t shine. But it seems clear to me that the root of spirituality and faith is selfless love, as displayed, for example, in the relationship between parent and child. I see no dichotomy between science and faith in this form. Science is evidence-based even where it follows most anarchic of methodological codes, but it nevertheless remains a creative endeavour in which love and faith play an integral part.

The only people who benefit from the non-overlapping magisteria credo are purveyors of organised religious nonsense who use it to avoid justifying their dogmatic beliefs. In reality we have one human metaculture, with no artificial borders. If that’s faith, you can count me in.

Happy summer solstice!

Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats – what a bunch of ponces. Or at least they were in comparison with the peasant poet John Clare, who really suffered for his art, and was celebrated in song last night by Faversham’s finest, Chris Wood, at a tiny pub in Cowden Pound.

It was an intimate folk club setting, with a couple of dozen punters watching Chris perform three short sets interspersed with their own songs and tunes. All washed down with hoppy Adnams bitter and a few sausage rolls. A wonderful evening.

Chris agreed to a request for my favourite love song, One in a million, which he co-wrote with Hugh Lupton. Very emotional.

Just a couple of hours after returning to the ranch it was time to ascend Shooters Hill with a few friends and watch the sunrise on the longest day of the year. Clouds obscured the disk as it rose over Essex across the River Thames, but the light was nonetheless fantastic, and the birds whooped with joy as they spun around the sky over Shrewsbury Park.