Ok, that’s a somewhat contrived-exotic heading. I chose it because the exciting paper that I want to write about has the less than thrilling title of ‘Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures’. What this means is that scientists are only now beginning to match nature in its power to create complex 3-D structures.  If that sounds odd, consider:

Human beings are supposed to have become civilised through the use of tools – Homo faber – and we can craft anything from a microchip to an A380 jumbo jet. But all of these structures are made by bolting things together. Nature makes EVERYTHING by growing them. And yet the shapes nature fashions are often beyond our engineering capacity. Take a bird's flight feather: this is grown in a single piece by squeezing keratin from cells like toothpaste from a tube. So how on earth does it fashion such an intricate shaped object?

Joanna Aizenberg at Harvard has been working for more than 15 years on mimicking nature’s pattern-forming processes using entirely inorganic components. In recent years she has teamed up with L Mahadevan, also at Harvard, a wizard of pattern-forming usually on larger scales.

In their new paper in Science, they, together with two further Harvard scientists, have produced the most elaborate architecture  yet – imitating flowers and corals by exploiting a reaction-diffusion process first suggested by Alan Turing over 60 years ago as the key to nature’s pattern forming. They can direct the crystallization of barium chloride and sodium metasilicate by diffusing  carbon dioxide through their solutions. This 3 part process can produce an exquisite array of different forms, depending on small changes in the conditions.

Turing’s work on form has recently been taken up in many laboratories but this is the most dramatic use of the principle so far. As the commentary in Science concludes: “More control will undoubtedly lead to structures that may be less artistically pleasing, but more technologically useful.”

W. L. Noorduin, A. Grinthal, L. Mahadevan, J. Aizenberg, ‘‘Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures’. , Science 340, 832 (2013).

This Facility Contains Chemicals...

Besides much that is admirable and glorious California also has its mad bureaucratic streak. A notice that appears in hotels and other public places startles: “This Facility Contains Chemicals Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer, And Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm. A Brochure With More Information Is Available At The Registration Desk”. To which the obvious retort is: why isn’t the State of California doing something about it then rather then frightening people needlessly.  The answer of course is California’s direct voter legislation. This is Proposition 65, passed in 1986. It has a laudable aim of reducing known carcinogens in the environment but the blanket use of this warring; often unattached to any actual assessment of any chemical risk is counterproductive. Wikipedia comments: “Because of the overuse of the vague warning, the ubiquitous signs ultimately communicate very little information to the end user... Most of the Proposition 65 complaints are filed on behalf of straw man plaintiffs by private attorneys, some of whose businesses are built entirely on filing Proposition 65 lawsuits”. Hmmm.

A few weeks ago I read that “Negotiations between the French company and the British government have stalled over acceptable costs for the project and the rate of return that EDF should be granted.” EDF head Henri Proglio said : “As far as I am concerned, negotiations can fail.”

Behind this lies a story that is deeply shaming. Britain in the 1950s was a leader in peaceful nuclear power. For all kinds of reasons this slipped. France, however, powered ahead in the’ 70s and ’80s and by 1988 80% of its electricity was nuclear-generated. France had decarbonised its electricity before global warming was even mooted as a serious problem. Why the world is so agonized about how to decarbonize is a mystery to me when the French showed how to do it decades ago.

EDF is 85% state owned. So the UK, which always boasts that its free market system is better than the statism still the norm in France, is effectively more or less begging the French government to build the nuclear power stations it ought to be able to build itself. A veritable triumph for the free market!

The Californian animal that made the greatest impression on me was the pelican. I first encountered them idling and preening on the rocks at La Jolla, occasionally rousing themselves to a brief and graceful flight across the bay. But what really gripped me was their homeward flight to roost at dusk on Pacific Beach. They’d fly up like a military formation, perhaps 30-40 birds in constantly shifting patterns, often in the classic asymmetrical V with five or so birds in the short arm and the rest more or less straight behind. But they would playfully slip and slide out of this pattern, sometimes a kink ravelling down the whole formation, sometimes the V evening out to a swept-wing formation, sometime all line astern. Sometimes a bird or two would break off and fly out to sea. The whole spectacle conveyed such a sense of power and purpose and an enviable sense of community and purposeful life. At La Jolla they had been wet-suit divers swimming with the seals in mammalian fellowship but it was the pelicans that spoke to the animal spirits in me.

San Diego gave me the chance to see for the first time live what is probably my favourite animal: the leafy sea dragon. When I first became interested in camouflage and mimicry the sea dragon grabbed my attention as one of nature’s finest whimsies. A cousin of the much better known sea horses, the sea dragons are fishes that live amongst seaweed and camouflage themselves with many floating excrescences that perfectly match the drifting swags and fronds of their environment. Their elongated snout gives them a very strong facial character and the impression the animal creates is that of a punk jester in tattered raiment.

Leafy sea dragons are not Californian natives: I saw them in the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography but they are only found in the wild off southern Australia. My first sight of a live, swimming sea dragon was a surprise because they are usually yellow bodied with green appendages but the aquarium animal was almost transparent: they can colour match to their surroundings and the tanks they were kept in were relatively colourless.  The oddities of sea dragons don’t stop with their camouflage. Most notably, the male broods the young on brood patches on the tail. They are, of course, threatened and the Scripps Institute has a program to breed them in captivity.

From the luxuriance of the Californian flora to the austerity of the Salk Institute. This research institute founded by Jonas Salk of polio-vaccine fame, was designed by Louis Kahn and built in 1963. There is no decoration, no signs of life, no sculpture, and no vegetation on most of the site. The only offset to the stark concrete is blackened and bleached wicker-like wood cladding. But the view of the ocean flanked by the wings suggests something like a Mayan Temple to Science: a mystical view of the ocean and the promise of great secrets divulged. On the plane home, my neighbour, who turned out to be a cryogenic physicist, told me that some scientists didn’t find it a good place to work. Perhaps a bit of that California colour would help.

A week in San Diego provided a riot of impressions. The flora of California is a wonder with desert staples mixing with coastal flowers, flowering trees, palms and pines and extravagant tropical exotics. It is an Aeonium paradise with rosettes of all sizes beaming out in profusion.  California is also hospitable to other warm climate flowers such as the Ice Plant from South Africa with abundant large yellow flowers with triangular fleshy leaves. The cliffs at La Jolla are rich in magnificent drifts of colour, some of which proved to be great banks of nasturtiums. Who would have thought the English suburban favourite could appear so Californian?