The 2010s have been a great decade for films that capture the sense of adventure, ambition, beauty and wonder of space exploration. Alfonso Cuarón's beautiful and breathtaking Gravity and Christopher Nolan's emotional and visionary Interstellar are two such examples that I particularly enjoyed.

Ridley Scott's The Martian draws on these films and others, from Silent Running to Apollo 13, injecting humour, 1970s pop music and a strong central performance from Matt Damon as Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars after an accident during a freak storm separates him from his team who are forced to abort. It turns out that Watney isn't dead after all, but when he wakes up in the middle of the dusty Martian landscape, he realises that he has no way of communicating with his crew or with Houston. This is the least of his worries, however, as he must first make it back to the Hab (base) before his oxygen runs out and then perform surgery on his stomach where part of an aerial has become lodged.

Watney knows that the odds of him surviving for long enough for the next Martian mission to arrive — several years in the future — are slim, but with his inventive and methodological problem-solving skills, even this incredible feat starts to seem reasonable. "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this," he explains to his video diary. One of his biggest challenges is to find a new food supply as the Hab's supplies will only last for a year or two. "Luckily, I'm a botanist," he says, and before too long, he has planted potatoes, fertilised using his own biological waste, and worked out a way to create water by reacting hydrogen and oxygen — no mean feat given NASA's fire-retardant equipment.

Eventually, NASA finds out that Watney is still alive and they are able to work out an extremely rudimentary way of communicating with him using pathfinder equipment from the 1990s. Jeff Daniels' steely-eyed Director of NASA, Chiwetel Ejiofor's Director of the Mars Missions and their crews are left to try to find out a way to get some food supplies to Mars that will last Watney until the next Ares Mission arrives. But will he be able to survive that long?

Scott's visually stunning movie is long, clocking in at 2h20, but it never dragged. The last act is extremely suspenseful and nerve-wracking — like Gravity, it left me literally breathless — but although the earlier parts of the film were less tense, they were also very entertaining. Damon's charisma and the humour and realism of the script (by Drew Goddard, based on Andy Weir's novel) contribute strongly to this. The Martian isn't a comedy, but there are some funny lines — often involving Watney swearing into his video diary or at NASA, or complaining about the his commander (Jessica Chastain)'s 1970s music collection that forms the bulk of the audiovisual repertoire he has been bequeathed. I'm not an ABBA fan, but this film may represent the best use of Waterloo in a cinematic work. I also enjoyed the tracks from David Bowie and Gloria Gaynor and more generally, the soundtrack helped to give the film a more upbeat vibe than many others in the genre.

Although Damon is great, The Martian has a talented, if sometimes under-used, supporting cast. Chastain and Ejiofor are, as always, excellent and on a personal note (as I work in science communication), I enjoyed Kristen Wiig's turn as NASA's Director of Media Relations, who has to advise her bosses to try to avoid total PR disaster.

Ultimately, The Martian manages to tell a highly engaging story about a courageous and tenacious man who will do what it takes to survive in formidable circumstances. But I defy anyone to see the film and not to be proud of all of that humanity has accomplished so far in spaceflight and to be optimistic about what we might yet achieve.

This week I saw two coming-of-age movies, both set in San Francisco, and although completely different in genre, mood and scope, they do share certain thematic similarities. They both get thumbs-up from me too.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller's directorial début, based on Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel of the same name, opens boldly with a dear-dictaphone-diary entry from our 15-year-old heroine Minnie (Bel Powley): "I had sex today. Holy shit!" It is the 1970s and Minnie is just starting to understand who she is and who she wants to be — and the power that she is starting to exert over the opposite sex. Desperate to lose her virginity, she pursues a relationship with her mother's (Kristen Wiig) mustached, layabout boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), who is some 20 years her senior and who, intentionally or otherwise, has shown signs of interest. "I didn't want to pass up the chance because I may not get another," she confides.

Minnie wants to be an artist and spends her free time drawing often rather graphic pictures in Indian ink and hanging out with her best friend Kimmie (Madeleine Waters). Her mother, Charlotte, is image obsessed and not entirely helpful as a role model, hosting drunken parties where the adults get high and lewd. Perhaps this is why Minnie never seems very guilty about her affair with Monroe; instead, she is determined to maximise her own enjoyment of the relationship, which is an empowering sentiment, even if Monroe is a sometimes sweet but ultimately weak and unworthy recipient of her affections.

Not much else really happens in the film, but Powley's excellent portrayal of a talented and sensitive teenage girl's efforts to find love — and herself — elevate what could have been a mawkish and hackneyed story into something more interesting. The adult characters were a little more two-dimensional, although Wiig does manage to convey some degree of personal growth in Charlotte, and Skarsgård's Monroe has a necessary ambiguity. The Diary of a Teenage Film is a thoughtful film that is, by turns, sassy and sweet, and I would definitely recommend it.

Like Minnie, the heroine of the latest Pixar movie, Inside Out, is also having something of a crisis. Eleven-year-old Riley's (Kaitlyn Dias) parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) have just uprooted her from Minnesota to San Francisco and the once joyful girl turns promptly into a sullen, tearful tween. But although Riley is the protagonist, the film's real stars are Riley's emotions: principally, Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith), but also Disgust, Fear and Anger, whom we see running the show in terms of how Riley acts and reacts from 'control centre'.

Memory snapshot in the film are portrayed as balls that change colour depending on which emotion has dominated the moment, and at the end of the day, while Riley sleeps, they may play a part in that night's dreams or be sent down to 'long-term storage'. Joy is usually Riley's dominant emotion and she runs a tight ship, but after the San Francisco move, Sadness starts to intrude, touching joyful memories and tarnishing them with sadness. Even Riley's 'islands of personality', which are activated whenever an activity triggers something fundamentally Riley-like about our heroine — family, friendship, zaniness and hockey, for instance — start to malfunction. Then, disaster strikes when Joy and Sadness are transported out of control centre to other parts of Riley's mind/brain, leaving the other three emotions to try — unsuccessfully — to keep things in hand.  Much of the rest of the film is spent watching Joy and Sadness try to make their way back to save 'their girl' from herself, but will Riley ever be the same again?

I work in science communication and neuroscience can be complicated to explain at a level appropriate for non-scientists and especially children, but I thought directors Pete Doctor and Ronaldo Del Carmen did a great job at simplifying concepts from memory and dreams, to emotions and even earworms. A colleague of mine wrote a great review of some of the neuroscience and psychology that underlie the film. Inside Out is joyful to watch, although, of course, with moments of sadness if not, for me at least, disgust, anger or fear. To be honest, I could watch 'Amy Poehler reacting to stuff' for at least 90 minutes without much of a plot, but Inside Out is clever, touching and downright hilarious. Fun and science for all the family!

I missed Nick Payne's play Constellations during its 2012 run at the Royal Court and I was even more disappointed to just miss its Broadway incarnation with Jake Gyllenhaal and the always excellent Ruth Wilson this spring. I like going to the theatre but I'm never very good at keeping on top of what is on, so I was pleased that I scanned the theatre section of last week's Time Out and noticed that Constellations was back for a limited run at the Trafalgar Studios and even happier that I managed to score some cheap tickets for the Saturday matinee.


Constellations tells the story—or, rather, stories—of Marianne (Louise Brealey), an astrophysicist, and Roland (Joe Armstrong), a bee-keeper, who meet at a barbecue. Marianne tells a weird anecdote about elbow licking, but Roland isn't impressed and they don't click. But then they meet at a barbecue and they do click. Above the stark black stage hang dozens of white balloons and every few minutes, different balloons light up and we see a different version of the same scene. The story moves along, sometimes incrementally and sometimes with long time-jumps, and we start to see different versions of their relationship that could have happened.


As in any relationship (or any possible version of any relationship), sometimes things go well, and other times, sad things happen. Intermittently, we also get snapshots from a time much further in the future. We see the same scene several times, but each time, there is slightly more dialogue and slightly more context, which allow us to gradually piece together what is happening.

It is a beautiful play, only 70 minutes long but extremely intense. It's often sad and moving, but it's also funny in places, particularly in some of the variations early on in the relationship. "I f*cking love honey," one Marianne tells one Roland; it's her delivery that's key. Constellations is also very philosophical, and Marianne's job as a physicist allows her to introduce questions of time and of infinite possible worlds. She talks about "everything you have ever and never done," and then later tells Roland: "We still have all the time we've ever had."

Marianne gets the best lines and she is, perhaps, the more interesting character, but Roland makes a great foil. The chemistry between Brealey and Armstrong is fantastic and essential for such a production to work. In some ways, the play reminded me of Patrick Marber's Closer; in particular, the scenes when Marianne and Roland argue made me think of the devastating break-up between Larry and Anna (portrayed wonderfully on-screen by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts). The work with which I drew most connections, though, was Laura Barnett's novel The Versions of Us, which I read recently. Both look at all of the ways characters and relationships could have developed—and maybe have even developed in other possible worlds—and highlight questions of fate, love and what forever really means.


I mentioned the minimalist set design further up, but the play is also visually impressive. It was a nice touch to have the black floor printed with a hexagon grid, which seemed to be symbolic of Roland's beekeeping work (which also proves relevant to the story), whereas the white flashing balloons represented, to me, the infinite universe that Marianne studies.

By the end of Constellations, I was feeling emotionally exhausted but curious. If you're in the mood for a beautiful and thought-provoking play about love, life and even theoretical physics, then do try to get tickets. Unfortunately, this run ends on 1st August, so you'll need to act pretty swiftly.

I hadn't heard of Lisa Genova's 2007 novel Still Alice until awards season rolled around last year and Julianne Moore picked up a whole host of nominations for her performance as the titular Alice in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's film adaptation. Genova is a neuroscientist-turned-writer and Still Alice tells the story of a brilliant 50-year-old psycholinguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

I wanted to read the novel before watching the movie, and I thought Genova's work was a powerful, moving and thoughtful depiction of what it really feels like to experience such a terrible disease. The film was good too and Moore's nominations are richly deserved — she will almost certainly win the Oscar this weekend — as her portrayal is by turns sensitive and multi-layered, inspiring and heartbreaking.

The movie opens with Alice celebrating her 50th birthday with her husband and fellow scientist John (Alec Baldwin), and two of their three grown children, Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Tom (Hunter Parrish — whom I still haven't forgiven for what he did to Will Gardner in The Good Wife) in a New York restaurant. It is a celebratory moment and Alice, at the top of her academic game and with a loving family, is very happy. Soon, though, she finds herself forgetting things. While giving a talk, she can't remember the word 'lexicon' — pretty crucial for a linguist — and before long, the 'thingies' become more common and when she gets lost in the middle of her university campus, she realises that she has to go to see a doctor.

After a barrage of tests, early-onset Alzheimer's is the diagnosis she is given and she is baffled and devastated. She tries to hide it from her family at first, but eventually, she lets John in on the news and, once it is confirmed that she has the familial version, they decide to tell their children. Anna and Tom — a sensible lawyer and doctor — want to get tested to see whether they have the implicated genetic mutation, but the youngest, Lydia (Kristen Stewart), the rebel of the family and an aspiring actress, decides not to.

The decline, then, manages to be both achingly slow and all too rapid. In the book, this time lapse is expressed more clearly — the film feels faster. And it's Moore with her heart-wrenching sobs who carries the whole film. "It feels like my brain is f*cking dying," she cries, becoming increasingly frustrated as ever simpler tasks become too challenging. "I wish I had cancer," she says on another occasion. People understand cancer, she explains, and aren't embarrassed by it. Later, in a slightly more accepting frame of mind, Alice quotes Elizabeth Bishop: "The art of losing isn't hard to master." And that is the key to the film, because it is damn hard to master the art of losing your faculties, losing your life and losing your self. It's a devastating thing.

If you think Mark Wahlberg makes an unconvincing English professor in The Gambler, wait until you see Alec Baldwin as the most implausible cancer cell biology PI you have ever seen. To be fair, the film keeps the science on the sidelines and Baldwin does play a convincing husband here. You can feel his pain, anger and frustration as he watches the wife he has loved for decades slip away from him slowly. Stewart, to my surprise, also performed well as the renegade daughter who comes home when it counts the most. The older children don't have a lot to do other than act sad and grumpy.

Overall, I still preferred the book, but the film is well done. There is a high probability that you will cry, although there are also more uplifting elements to it. There are a few changes in the transition to the big screen — the setting has moved from Harvard, Cambridge, to Columbia, New York, and the characters have ditched their BlackBerries in favour of iPhones, Skype and FaceTime for the film.

One of the things I found most fascinating about the story was that Alice is a linguistics professor — naturally, this is of interest to a former linguistics student, but for someone like Alice for whom language and communication is so utterly central, the prospect of losing even a tiny amount of ability must be a truly terrifying notion. For a good explanation of the genetics of Alzheimer's disease, the US National Institute on Aging has a good factsheet.

In my capacity as a press officer for a scientific journal, I was excited last month to receive a phone call from the distribution company working on The Theory of Everything — James Marsh's new movie about Stephen Hawking and Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. They were inviting someone from our journal to the film's London premiere last month, but somewhat unsurprisingly, they were after one of our journalists and I didn't get to go.

I work in science communication so I probably know more than many about the brilliant mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing. Yesterday, I had a long meeting in the Turing Room, and my journal celebrated the 100-year anniversary of his birth in 2012, sixty years after his conviction for gross indecency and a year before he was eventually given a posthumous royal pardon. But you don't have to know a great deal about Turing to enjoy Morten Tyldum's new film The Imitation Game, which explores Turing's role in the cracking of the Enigma code. I went to see the movie on Friday night with a diverse group of people and we all really enjoyed it.

Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who puts in a really top notch performance. The movie flits seamlessly between three time periods: World War II, as Turing is hired — barely — to join a team of mathematicians and engineers at Bletchley Park to crack the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma code machine; Turing's schooldays in the late 1920s; and the darker years of the early 1950s when Turing is investigated by the police, suspected of spying for the Soviets, and then of the aforementioned gross indecency.

When he arrives at Bletchey, Turing is hardly the most popular of employees. In fact, he is only hired by Commander Denniston (played by a sneering, Tywin Lannister-esque Charles Dance) because Winston Churchill commanded it. Turing takes over from Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), whose team has been making slow progress, and fires the dead wood. He then recruits several crossword enthusiasts including — shock, horror! — a woman, namely the mathematician Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), with whom he develops a friendship.

It isn't long before Turing makes a breakthrough: "What if only a machine can break a machine?" he asks. With a huge government grant of £100,000, he sets about building such a machine that he calls Christopher and which would eventually become known as a Turing machine. But Denniston and MI6 man Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) aren't convinced that they will see a return on their investment and Turing and his team are given an imminent deadline for their work. Will they be able to crack Enigma in time?

Most people probably know the outcome and also know that Turing took his own life in 1954 after being convicted of gross indecency and offered the horrific choice between prison and chemical castration (he took the latter). The Imitation Game ends shortly before then, and it is an emotional but understated ending.

Despite the shocking recency of the UK's former barbaric anti-gay laws and despite the tragedy of Turing's death, the film works very well as a celebration of his often isolated and all-too-short life. It's also quite funny in places, mainly when Turing is standing up to Denniston and Menzies, and when he is trying to do things he sees other people do but does not understand, including jokes and flirting. It reminded me a little of The Social Network — Cumberbatch's Turing is not dissimilar to Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, and although both films are, at their heart, about the cracking and the writing of code, their respective directors manage to tell a much more complex and interesting story.

Cumberbatch really stands out in a great ensemble cast but Alex Lawther, who plays the young Turing, is also excellent, and Knightley does well in a somewhat two-dimensional role. The Imitation Game is a moving, compelling portrait of a fascinating man and it's definitely worth a watch.

There have a lot of great movies released this year — I'm already struggling to narrow down my top five for my end-of-the-year round-up — and Christopher Nolan's new film Interstellar is one of them. It isn't perfect and it probably won't be my overall favourite film of the year, but in terms of its ambition, beauty and all-encompassing emotional depth, it is hard to beat.

I tried to steer clear of all reviews before I went to see the film on Saturday — no mean feat because I follow a lot of science journalists and science comms folks on Twitter, many of whom were discussing some of the scientific aspects of the film — and I will try to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible. That said, if you would like to go into the film completely fresh, look away now (but do go and see it).

Interstellar is set in a dystopian near-future or, perhaps, alternative present. Wheat and okra crops have failed dramatically and the world has suffered huge starvation-induced population declines. Those who remain rely on corn, as demonstrated by the long, sweeping opening shots of corn plants faltering in the wind amid clouds of dust, but it's unclear how much longer life on Earth will remain viable.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former pilot turned farmer, who lives with his father-in-law and two young children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy). Through various turns of events, Cooper finds himself at the secret headquarters of NASA, which was forced into secrecy after the hunger crisis — it would be hard to justify spending money on space exploration when so many people are starving, and the Moon landings have been declared 'propaganda'. Cooper's former mentor, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), recruits him to join a new mission to explore a distant galaxy with the ultimate goal finding a new home for humankind. Observations of some 'gravitational blips' allowed earlier NASA scientists to detect a wormhole near Saturn that would serve as a shortcut and allow the mission to reach a far more distant location in the Universe than would be possible otherwise.

Coop doesn't want to abandon his children, but he believes that joining the mission is the only way he might be able to save them — and the rest of the world — from the impending devastation of the Earth. Murph, an extremely bright and curious ten-year-old, is particularly devastated by her father's departure and for years, she refuses to record video messages to be transmitted to Coop on the spacecraft. But will Cooper and his crew find what they are looking for and if so, given relativity, will anyone they know and care about — or anyone at all, in fact — be left on Earth when they do?

Interstellar is utterly absorbing and an impressive, visionary film. It is a love story of humanity and of our planet, and also of hope against the odds, and faith. It's also the story of a relationship between a father and his children — particularly between Coop and Murph. Foy, who plays the young Murph, is extremely talented and the chemistry between her and McConaughey, who is also on top form in this film, is truly engaging. Anne Hathaway, who plays Coop's co-astrononaut Dr Brand, is something of a weak link, and her character remains unsympathetic and largely two-dimensional.

The film is long — almost three hours — and although I was utterly gripped and it didn't drag, sometimes it felt that Nolan was a little too ambitious in scope. Some scenes felt as though they had been tacked on to add breadth. There was also plenty of silliness and 'science talk'. That being said, it's easy to put aside those small quibbles when the film just grabs you and keeps you glued to the screen throughout. Cheesy as it sounds, I also left the cinema with a warm, fuzzy glow. Jeez, Nolan, you even broke through my cynicism...

Inception is still my favourite Nolan film — incidentally, I can't believe that was four years ago — but Interstellar explores similar themes and is produced with similar style and panache. It's really good and you should definitely go and see it — on an IMAX screen if you can; you won't regret it.

Once a month, the Science Museum in London opens up to adults on a Wednesday evening. The night always has a loosely scientific theme. After a few tough weeks at work, we needed a team outing and when we heard that this month's Science Museum Lates had a photography theme, we were sold. There aren't too many good freebies for people working within science communication, but we do have good contacts, which meant we got to skip the huge queue and go straight into the museum.


If you've never been to the Science Museum, you should check it out, as they have a lot of very cool stuff. First on our list, though, was the build-your-own-macro-lens workshop. Once our iPhones had been suitably converted, we snapped away. The best shots were of the bubbles on a cider bottle and of holographic bank notes, but of course I spent quite a while taking a series of somewhat out-of-focus photos of my eye.




The next activity was screen printing. You could pick whether you wanted a slightly faded black and white photographic print of a betting shop or of a dilapidated building — I love my urban wastelands so I chose the latter — and then choose to screen print one of two different colourful patterns on top. I always like taking away souvenirs, so we joined the short queue and produced our own prints, which we toted round for the rest of the evening.



We had signed up for tickets for a conversation in the IMAX between Roger Highfield (who is the director of external affairs at the Science Museum Group) and Lily Cole (model, actress and now social entrepreneur), partly about evolution and cooperation, but mainly about their respective projects: his book Supercooperators and her website, impossible, which encourages people to do things for other people in the hope that others might do things for them. Certainly a very interesting idea — I'm sure the game theorists will be very interested in the results.


Downstairs, there were some trees onto which you could hang your wishes, as part of impossible. I thought I was being shallow considering writing Clive Owen on one of the wooden tags, but there were plenty of suggestions that were closer to that thought than to the world-peace-type suggestions. I did at least get some free cheese straws when they ran out of whole portions.


We then had a bit more time to explore some of the other galleries, playing various science-themed games. I lost at most of them, but it was still a fun night. There are various bars throughout the venue, as well as eating options of various levels of formality. Given that it's free to go to Lates, it makes for a pretty cheap night out. I would definitely go back – ideally during a less hectic work night — the next time I like the sound of the theme. It's just going to be a shock to the system to join the queue.



Science Museum Lates (last Wednesday of the month). Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD (Tube: South Kensington). Website.

After the tension-establishing opening scene of Steven Soderbergh's new movie, it felt as though Side Effects was going to be another Contagion, Soderbergh's antepenultimate film, in that it was shaping up to be a dispassionate but scientifically accurate depiction of a particular medical issue. In the case of Side Effects, this meant portraying bad behaviour at all levels within the US pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies put out irresponsible actors and take doctors out for lunch. Doctors accept payment from these companies for "consulting" work. Everyone is tired and overworked. Mistakes sometimes happen. It's an interesting and important topic, but one that may work better in a Ben Goldacre invective than in a movie.

Fortunately, about halfway through the film, a series of twists move the film away from this clinical, matter-of-fact approach, finally making it earn its "psychological thriller" categorisation. The film started to drag a little towards the end of the first half—I wasn't in need of a course in bad pharma 101—but it really picked up in the second half. It portrays a world where there are few heroes and few who act altruistically. The performances by Rooney Mara as a young woman suffering from depression, and Jude Law as her psychiatrist, were complex and interesting, and overall, Side Effects is an intelligent, engaging and thought-provoking film. It's hard to write much more about Side Effects without giving too much; I have tried not to spoil the film completely, but if you plan to watch it, you'll enjoy it more if you read no further.

As the film opens, we see a pristine New York apartment sullied by large splatters of blood. Flashing back to three months earlier, Emily (Mara) is waiting for her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) to be released from prison. He has been serving a four-year sentence for insider trading and Emily hasn't taken it well. She knows she is supposed to be happy about his return but she can't quite shake the "poisonous cloud" from her mind. She leaves work one day and very coolly drives her car at full speed into a wall. Later, in hospital, psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Law) suggests she stay in hospital for a while to recover, but Emily insists on being released, promising she will come to see him several times a week.

After consulting with her previous shrink Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Dr Banks prescribes a series of antidepressants for Emily, all of which have pretty nasty side effects. Emily mentions that her friend recommended a new drug called Ablixa, which is being advertised heavily and which happens to be made by the company for whom Banks is a "medical consultant." Initially, Ablixa makes Emily feel great, but then a whole load of other side effects kick in, most troublingly her sleep walking, or, sometimes, sleep cooking. Meanwhile Martin tries to rehabilitate his life. He is thinking of setting up a new financial services company with someone he met in prison, but his attention is distracted by his wife's downward spiral. And Dr Banks isn't without problems of his own. His wife, a former investment banker, has been made redundant and they are struggling to pay her son's private school fees (hence the need for him to take on the pharma consulting on top of his heavy case load).

This is the third and final part of my Christmas and holiday gift guide for this year (part one is here and the second part is here). All of the items listed below cost £10 or under (with one exception) and should suit a range of different people, including Secret Santa recipients.

I've been out every night this week and I'm a bit behind on blog posts but I just got back from a recording of The Now Show and I wanted to write down my thoughts while they are fresh. It was a fun evening but clearly, I should have read my own advice from the last time I went because we made some of the same old n00b mistakes.

Poor photo of Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt

We got there earlier than I did last time--6.45 (when the front doors open) rather than 7.15 (15 minutes before the studio doors open)--but there was a big queue outside Broadcasting House, with about 200 people ahead of us. Random security checking of Balham Babe's bag delayed us and meant we were the first people to enter the second holding room, rather than the last people to enter the first room. As all of the first room people got to go in first and there isn't a queuing system inside the rooms, this didn't work out too well for us, and we ended up in the second row on the balcony with two tall guys in front of us. We also missed out on getting to fill in an answer to the audience question: the woman in charge of our room asked why no one was giving her the answers and we explained we hadn't been given the sheets but apparently they had run out. The funniest answer (which probably won't get included in the show when it airs) was a hilarious example of someone missing the point of the question--or maybe just wanting us to think that...

That aside, it was a good show, with a couple of good songs, a reference to research I publicised, and plenty of naughtiness, although as ever, I found Henning Wehn's segment a little boring. One part, which described a wonderful new variety of a class A drug in the style of a Christmas advert for a popular, middle-class retailer, involved Pippa Evans reading out a number of long, jargony, science words, such as mesolimbic and "exogenous catecholamine transporter ligand" (straight from Wiki, I see). During the "retakes" at the end, Steve Punt made the mistake of asking if there were any chemists in the audience and of course there were, one of whom took the joke far too far by loudly correcting Evans's pronunciations four or five times, until the chemist was persuaded to pipe down. I know it's the Year of Chemistry, but still...

And yes, next time I really will try to arrive a bit earlier so that I can finally get to provide a supremely witty answer to the audience question of the week.

I finally got around to seeing Contagion tonight; I say "finally" because although it has only been out for a week in the UK, it had already been released in the US when I was in New York and so it feels like it's been around for a long time. Some spoilers may follow, although to be honest, it really isn't the kind of film that has major twists. It is just a rigorous, detailed account of what happens and who is affected when a bad-ass new infectious disease appears on the scene.


As Contagion opens, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) is returning to Minnesota from a business trip in Hong Kong. She's been feeling pretty crappy but, it turns out, she has just enough time to breathe over some dice for luck in a casino, allow an Estonian woman to handle her phone and meet up with her former lover in Chicago. By the time she gets home, husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is seriously worried about her and within a couple of days she has had several seizures and died, her young son (Mitch's step-son) also dying. Mitch, it transpires, is immune, although his teenage daughter, who was at her mother's house while Beth was infecting everyone, is probably not. Before long, tens, then hundreds and thousands of people all over the world are becoming sick while scientists struggle even to work out what is causing the disease, let alone how to stop it.

At the CDC, we have Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) who is working on finding a vaccine, while CDC bigwig Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to prevent people from finding out too much about the epidemic and panicking. He sends Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) out to Minnesota to study some of the victims and talk to their relatives to find any connections between the outbreak. A San Francisco virologist (Elliott Gould) is making progress but CDC tell him he has to shut down; he carries on regardless and fortunately, makes a crucial breakthrough. Meanwhile, in Geneva, epidemiologist Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is trying to find patient one; she thinks it is Beth but trying to persuade people in Hong Kong to give her the information she needs to prove this turns out to be more difficult than expected.

Then there's Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), a blogger (sorry, I mean freelance journalist), who is peddling his alternative remedy, which he claims will protect against the disease. He discourages people from taking the official vaccines (if and when they become available) and creates a vlog where he pretends he has been infected and then magically cured by his remedy. Then again, Ally Hextall clearly didn't watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes or was just too desperate to find a vaccine to worry about the limitations of n=1 trials. One monkey has been immunised against the disease by a particular variety of the vaccine so Ally injects herself with it; soon, we're watching lotteries determining the order in which people can be vaccinated so we're assuming the vaccine worked in humans too. Not exactly good science, though. Meanwhile, her boss Cheever looks like he will be in trouble, assuming that humanity does pull through; rumours are circulating on the internets (including on Krumwiede's blog) that Cheever gave his wife advance warning to get the hell out of Chicago and join him in Atlanta just before road blocks were set up. "I'd do it again," he said.

Soderbergh skips neatly from day to day of the epidemic and from character to character. Being an A-list celeb does not prevent you from meeting a grim death, convulsing on the floor and foaming at the mouth. But the film is far from emotional; in fact, it is a very detached, matter-of-fact telling of what could happen were we to find ourselves in the midst of such an epidemic. There is rioting, looting and a bit of panic, of course, particularly when people try to get their hands on food, Krumwiede's remedy and the vaccine, but Outbreak it ain't. It was, however, surprisingly compelling, although I was almost hoping we might get the drama of the virus mutating and Mitch suddenly discovering he isn't immune any more.

Ultimately, we discover that the virus emerged through some bat-pig interaction out in China, and was eventually transmitted to Beth's grubby little mitts. So it was a little unsettling that before the film there was an advert for the Natural Confectionery Company's modular Guzzle Puzzle sweets, which encourage you to combine flavours to create even more flavours. Mash-ups are good, they suggest, as they whip out a cat-donkey hybrid, which they call a catonkey. Kids, don't let your cat play with your donkey because that is how Crazy Bad Viruses are created.

Another week, another ape-related movie. Of course, the release dates of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (ROTPOTA) and Project Nim were nicely coordinated in the UK, and it's not difficult to see the similarities--arrogant man takes baby chimp, raises him as human and is then suitably shocked when cute baby chimp becomes seriously aggressive adult chimp--but only ROTPOTA is fictional. Some spoilers may follow, although let's face it: it is over 40 years since the original Planet of the Apes.

The arrogant human in ROTPOTA is Will Rodman (James Franco), a scientist working on a promising new Alzheimer's drug, ALZ112, at a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco. His father (John Lithgow) has Alzheimer's and this clouds Will's judgement enough for him to think that n=1 is good science. Based on the fact that one chimp (named Bright Eyes because of the way the ALZ112 made her eyes turn a bright, clear green) has shown a remarkable recovery after being treated with the drug, Will persuades his boss Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) to go ahead with the flashy press conference and start pitching to investors. Unfortunately, part way through the pitch, Bright Eyes goes wild, breaking free of her cage and smashing through the glass into the meeting room, baring her teeth at all and sundry and knocking down anyone who tries to stop her. It later emerges that her aggression was probably due to the fact that she thought her newborn baby was being threatened, rather than because of ALZ112, but it's too late--the trials are halted and all the apes are put down.

One of the lab technicians finds Bright Eyes' baby and persuades Will to take him home for a few days until a space at a primate reserve opens up. A few days later and Will has fallen in love and ends up keeping the chimp, whom he names Caesar. It turns out that effects ALZ112 had on Bright Eyes have been passed on to Caesar (it's unclear whether this is through the bloodstream or because of epigenetic changes; I'm trying to avoid passing judgement on the science in this movie) and he becomes super intelligent. For eight years or so, he and Will have a great time, signing to each other (Caesar also seems to understand when Will talks), visiting Muir Woods and chatting up cute vets like Caroline (Freida Pinto).

My photo of the Golden Gate Bridge in the mist

Meanwhile, based on the progress Will has observed in Caesar, he starts treating his dad with ALZ112 and wow, Pops makes a startling recovery. But wait, because this really isn't a good movie week for big pharma: Will's father's immune system starts to fight back against the "ALZ112 virus and Will decides they need to use a stronger form of the drug. Jacobs is impressed (although not wild about yet another n=1 trial) and agrees to start trials of a stronger form of the drug, ALZ113, on chimps. Even though one of the lab technicians breathes in some of the gas containing the ALZ113 and gets very sick very quickly.

Caesar, now eight or so, is getting too big to keep in the house and after he bites the finger off an aggressive neighbour who was attacking Will's dad, Caesar is taken away to a primate centre. Will and Caroline only see a large enclosure with lots of toys and rocks and not the cage into which Caesar is later shut. Initially bullied by the other ape inmates, the charismatic Caesar gets them on side by bribing them with cookies and then later with his presumably rousing sign-language speeches. And because this is a film and not reality, he "learns" to speak (even though chimps don't have the right vocal anatomy to speak). He can say, "no" and "war" and, later, "Caesar is home." And so it is here that the eponymous rise of the planet of the apes begins.

Franco and the other human leads were fine but as with Project Nim, this movie aroused almost no sympathy in me for the humans and plenty for the apes, particularly Caesar, who goes on to shun, although not kill, Will (in fact, he prefers to leave the killing to the other apes), in favour of his new ape buddies, whom he leads into battle against the people of San Francisco. SF was a good city to choose given that the Golden Gate Bridge, on which the grand finale takes place, is a dramatic setting and is also often shrouded in mist, giving the apes a crucial advantage. ROTPOTA had a compelling storyline, nice character development (of the apes, at least), and it managed to be fun, while still having some more moving scenes. I just don't think I can watch any more films with mistreated animals for the time being, even if the animals in question are CGI!

The title of this post obviously stands for Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Not Otherwise Specified. For years I knew that it was wrong to call the type of abbreviations such as NYC, the PO (a favourite Oxford pub) and OHS (my school) "acronyms" but it took me a while to remember that the correct term for them is "initialisms" (or sometimes "alphabetisms"), probably because it's not a very good term--sure, it conveys the meaning but it doesn't have the nice, pseudo-Greek ring to it as acronym. Maybe that's why most people don't know or care that only AIANOS, SPEW and CUMS and the like, which can be pronounced as a word without having to enunciate each letter in turn, really count as acronyms.

As there has been such media hype over the long-awaited re-opening of the California Academy of Sciences, I thought I ought to pay a visit, even if I did baulk at the admission charge of $24.95 ($16.95 if you came via "alternative transport" and have an (ah-hem) valid student ID). Coming from London where you can get into the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and many others for free (or for a genuinely optional "suggested admission"), this is pretty pricey. Even the American Museum of Natural History in New York is only $15 for adults. 

I've been saying for months that it isn't the caffeine in my morning espresso that perks me up, and now it seems I may have been right to say that the smell of coffee is enough to get me going in the morning, even on those absent-minded occasions when I forget to drink the beverage itself.

Is a sniff of coffee as good as a sip? asks New Scientist, reporting on a Japanese study into the effect of that coffee aroma on sleep deprived individuals. OK, so they used rats in the study rather than people, but if the researchers are looking for people to participate in a next stage involving humans, they should really contact me. Being paid to caffeinate myself doesn't sound so bad, although the suggestion of pumping the smell of freshly-roasted coffee beans into factories where workers are unable to drink a cup of joe sounds a bit too dystopian to me. Obviously, I wouldn't object to the smell of coffee but many people strongly dislike it (like Maman, who was a big coffee drinker until my brother arrived; now she hates the smell and the taste, although is one of the best cappuccino makers I know, having made at least one per day for Papa for about 20 years).

The solution to my tiredness, then, is to open a coffee shop in the back garden and to roast my own beans, in-house. Then, the delicious smell of coffee beans would waft throughout the house and keep me constantly alert and raring to go. I'd better not tell Doktor Landlord about this plan.

AKA The evolutionary biologists try their hand at modelling this 'ere thing called language.

"Languages evolve in sudden leaps, not creeps," sez New Scientist today. Oh does it? Well, apparently, that's what some (non social-) scientists in Reading found. I'd love to read this paper as the abstract of the paper by Mark Pagel published in Science doesn't help much:

Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups—Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian—to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.

I did a fair amount of historical linguistics during my degree - in fact, before I discovered the joys of evolutionary psychology, describing (and trying to explain) language change was one of my favourite parts of the course. Semantic change (the change of a word's meaning over time) or lexical change (additions, deletions and modifications to the overall vocabulary of a language) tend to be the hardest to explain away of all the types of language change, simply because the meaning of words and their use are so dependent on context and culture (to some extent, one's accent is too, in some countries, although Italy, for example, has no equivalent of RP). But, if you want to study the history of a language, you have to use the written language and lexical items are the easiest units to study, simply because certain basic concepts seem to be universal and comparison is, thus, easier.

The other thing about studying lexical change is that unlike some types of sound change, the use of a new word to stand for an old concept or of a new concept to be represented by an old word is pretty binary: I either possess the word "internet" or I don't and am forced to paraphrase. According to one model of language change, individual language changes (e.g. the use of the word muptard instead of idiot) spreads from speaker to speaker at a rate that produces an S-curve, with the first 20% and the last 20% being the slowest rate of change. The abstract of Pagel's paper seems to suggest that their results go against the so-called lexical diffusion model, with the most rapid change taking place soon after the language has formed its own branch on the family tree perhaps as part of some in-group bonding type activity. Hay, look at us; we have our own speech patterns that you can't replicate because you're not part of our gang.

Creating phylogenetic-style family trees to represent the "speciation" (or the division of one language into more than one distinct language or dialect) is hardly new in linguistics - it's been going on for over 100 years, in fact. The problem of defining what a language is still remains, though. If we pursue the evolutionary biology model, speakers of the same language are able to communicate to produce fertile conversation (as members of the same species reproduce to produce fertile offspring). But then, the concept of language is often a politically-motivated one: Danes, Swedes and Norwegians are all mutually intelligible to some degree, although Norwegians are better at understanding Swedish and Danish than Swedes and Danes are at understanding each other, and Swedes and Danes understand Norwegian better than they understand each other. It is often convenient, when political boundaries exist to say "Norwegian stops here; long live Swedish" even if there tends to be more of a continuum of intelligibility rather than an abrupt cut-off.

The term "dialect" doesn't help much either, particularly as in some countries, it bears negative connotations of backwardness and peasantry. Until recently (30-40 years ago), no one spoke standard Italian as everyone spoke their own regional variety of Italian, each of which was strongly influenced by the vocabulary and pronunciation of the dialect of the area. Again, it's a fine line between regional variations of a language and dialects.

Presumably, the authors were using some method of linguistic reconstruction, in which you take basic vocabulary items that crop up in all/most languages and trace them back, using cognates in related languages to put together a hypothetical proto-language - the Eve of linguistics. Proto-languages - like Proto-Indo-European - are a bit tricksy because they are based on potentially flawed assumptions and it is easy to think two languages are linguistically related when they are simply geographically close as a lot of lexical borrowing between the two is likely to have taken place, even if the underlying structures of the language are very different. Nor was it likely that this Proto-Indo-European was a homogenous tongue spoken across Eurasia, transcending mountains, lakes and rivers...

One of my main objections, which may well be answered in the article, is that these scientists, who get so defensive when laymen "misuse" words like electricity, don't necessarily exercise the same caution when it comes to other disciplines. I would definitely need to read Pagel's explanation of how he is delimiting a language and when he is beginning to measure its start point before I can really comment any further on this paper. Shame.

In the absence of being able to read the paper itself, the media will have to do. The Economist gets confused by filing its article under the "linguistic evolution" section, whereas I would tend to use linguistic evolution to describe how it was that humans came to have this special communication device known as language, rather than "oh look, words change hands and meaning a lot, particularly when a language is the NKOTB, like" but fair enough. In The Telegraph, a co-author on the paper, Quentin Atkinson, sez:

[Although English seems to be changing rapidly today,] "this is unlikely to be due to the processes we describe in our paper, since English is not currently 'splitting up' into new languages - if anything it seems to be increasingly homogenised under the influence of globalisation and electronic communication."

Perhaps news of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift haven't yet reached the M4 corridor, but one of the most surprising facts about contemporary US English is that although many of the smaller, local language particulars are being eroded over time, these two major vowel shifts are causing the speech of Americans in the north to diverge sharply from that spoken by Americans in the south. This hasn't yet reached the point of mutual intelligibility (although I've never been to Miss-Hippy or elsewhere in the Deep South so I probably can't judge this) but the two varieties are certainly not becoming homogenised. In Rochester, Buffalo and other urban centres along the northeast border with Canada, words like Rochester are pronounced [rahh-chester]; this same [ahh] sound also appears in the south, but in pronunciations of words like time as [tahhm] with a flattened diphthong. NPR has a good interview about this with sociolinguist extraordinaire, Bill Labov, here.

Whether the Yankees are just trying to distinguish themselves from Dixie, and vice-versa, as a means of exerting their own social identity and independence, is something only time will tell. Maybe we are still a long way from fully understanding the motivations for and the mechanisms by which languages change and indeed what causes some changes to spread through a linguistic community. Roger Lass was definitely on to something when he proposed that when it came to explanations of language change, "Even second best is not the same as universal darkness and there may well be areas in which second best is best because first best is simply not possible in principle."

With a Christmas gift voucher, I treated myself to a print copy of the January edition of Wired. In this month's issue, as well as an interview with Thom Yorke (another former patron of the Sandwich Shop of Dreams), the confessions of a Scrabulous cheat and instructions for surviving on two hours of sleep per night (TLDR: take a short nap every four hours), there was an article on climate change in which one paragraph in particular caught my eye: 

 [Glenn] Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the world nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home."

What struck me was the Pynchon-like oxymoron of being homesick while still at home. I spent much of last year trying to find a quotation about nostalgia from Gravity's Rainbow, which I eventually discovered was, "For this crew, nostalgia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive." With hindsight, I actually prefer Ian McEwan's nostalgia quotation from Atonement: "her improbable nostalgia for a time barely concluded."

The concept of nostalgia consists of two basic subconcepts: the idea of having good or comforting thoughts about the past or about home and the idea that the happiness associated with these thoughts is no longer available and so looking back upon them makes one sad. (The etymology being the Greek nostos (homeward journey) and algia (pain), nostos being first applied to Odysseus on his journey from Troy. Like bittersweet, it is an oxymoron and I rather like both words. 

Ian McEwan's play on words is clever because nostalgia by definition applies to the feelings one has for a time in the past (although, obviously there is no limit on how far in the past this must be) and Albrecht's solastalgia is clever because the word implies that the feelings one has are for a place where one is not and yet it is the place itself that is changing over time rather than the thinker. Ah, I remember when nostalgia was a simple concept...those were the days!

While waiting for Steve Pinker's new book to come out, I have at least made a new acquisition: Christine Kenneally's The First Word, which is all about linguistic evolution (or evolutionary linguistics, depending on your perspective). I first read about the book in Wired back in July ("Breakthroughs — babbling dolphins, talking chimps, freshly discovered language genes — are coming so quickly now that Chomsky recently deigned to utter the dreaded "e" word"; the Chomsky bashing made me realise I was onto a winner) but due to various publishing delays and Amazon being a bit special, I only received my copy last week. Thus far, though, I'm really enjoying it, not least because the author earned her Linguistics PhD from Cambridge and profusely thanks her advisor, Peter Matthews, who is the former head of the department and a fellow of my college (most famous for the "desserts" (fruit and port) he hosts each year in his rooms in college for the linguistics students in college (usually about six in total, including grads)). The chapter on Steve P. doesn't hurt either!

I haven't read very much linguistics since I graduated, despite my best intentions, although to be fair I had been planning to apply to do a linguistics PhD at Stanford (or possibly UPenn), which have the best departments in for the areas in which I was interested, although I was, in the end, put off by the finality of it all. I was also put off, in part, at least, by the Cambridge linguistics course, which is ironic given how much I enjoyed my studies there. The problem with Cambridge is that although everyone says that it's not all about Chomsky, this didn't seem to be reflected in the way we were taught.

I was most interested in psycholinguistics (particularly language evolution), cognitive linguistics (especially the work of Steve P.), sociolinguistics (mainly regional variations with special reference to U.S. English) and pragmatics (what people mean by the phrases they utter). The first three of those areas formed two thirds of one paper (and I was doing six papers in my final year). Pragmatics, at least, counted for half a paper (shared with the oh-so-philosophical and formal logicky semantics). The problem was that the department didn't really have any sociolinguists or psycho-/cognitive linguists: there were phoneticians (including the current department head who, among many other accolades, can profess to being the inventor of parseltongue) and there were syntacticians (who were all very heavy on their generative linguistics).

I hated studying syntax. I found it outstandingly boring and I didn't really see the point. I wasn't really interested in the architecture itself but in how it was used. I guess I should really have gone to the psychology department. Except that at Cambridge to do psychology, you had to study natural sciences and to do that I needed A-level maths when I had already renounced maths at age 16, having had the same awful, awful maths teacher for five years (this was in the top set of one of the top schools in the country). By the time I realised I liked this whole cognitive science deal, it was far too late. Of course, with a top degree from one of the world's top universities and supervisors willing to support me, I probably could have got into a graduate program in psychology or cognitive science or linguistics at a good university in the U.S. but by then I had already relegated it to a hobby.

Over the past year or so, my non-fiction reading efforts have largely been focused around the sphere of evolutionary biology - evolutionary psychology, in particular - so it really is the perfect time for me to be reading Kenneally's book, which certainly isn't an introductory work but which is still very interesting for me to read, not least because it integrates my previous linguistic studies into the evolutionary bio context about which I have read quite a lot, of late.

So far I've only read the first chapters, each of which focuses on the contribution made by a significant linguist.

1. Chomsky. Of course. I'm not his greatest fan but no one can deny that he revolutionised the field and the way in which it is studied or his influence.

2. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. She worked on the acquisition and use of language in bonobos and made arguably the most progress to date in teaching apes to communicate using a human-like language.

3. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom. I extol the virtues of SP far too often but I'm a big fan of Bloom's too. He is most famous for the way he and SP, back when the former was a young grad student and the latter was a young professor, took on Stephen Jay Gould in debate and did admirably well (Chomsky was also supposed to participate but couldn't make it in the end; they have both argued extensively that, contrary to Chomsky and Gould, it is entirely plausible that language evolved by natural selection.

4. Philip Lieberman. I hadn't actually heard of Lieberman before reading this book but he mainly works on the biophysics of speech and the evolution of the vocal tract (this is probably why I hadn't heard of him).

In the rest of the book, Kenneally looks as the aspects of human language that differentiate it from animal communication systems and the potential rationales behind the evolution of language in humans before broadening out to look at how linguistic evolution fits into the evolutionary framework as a whole.

I'm sure I'll have more to say when I've actually read the whole book but for now I'm just glad that there is such an accessible text integrating many of the things in which I'm interested into one place. Keep up the good work, Christine!