Leading Edge

Geoff Watts : ..is a matter of concern to astronauts,but also to us Earthlings. I'll be enquiring about the prospect of better forecasting.
We'll also be hearing from a scientist who is trying to map the brain and learning why some forms of noise (Jackhammer sounds) are not just tiresome but intolerable.
 Oh that's better!
Anyway before that,something altogether more dreamy.

(Dreamy sound track plays interspersed with vocal comments,including Einstein's E=Mc^2)

There are dozens of theories about the origin and nature of dreaming. At one extreme there are the Freudians who'd have us believe that dreams are cloudy windows through which we can peer at our unconscious fears and wishes.
At the other are biologists who have suggested that dreaming - at least in animals - represents the mental rehearsal of instinctive behaviours such as following prey and leaping on it.
Writing in this week's issue of the journal Science,psychiatrist Robert Stigold and colleagues at Harvard Medical School have reviewed the evidence of experiments carried out over the years,by them and by others working in the field.
Robert Stigold is on the line from Boston. Bob you've tried to put together a general theory of the nature and significance of dreaming.

Robert Stigold : What we think is going on is that the brain is taking this privileged time when we are sort of disconnected from the outside world, to go back and review memories, consolidate some of those memories,integrate memories,see how they fit together,and they do that by changing the physiology of the brain,the way the brain actually functions when we are asleep and in different stages of sleep is altered [Ref: Audio: Altered States BBCc901/2]
from the way it functions during waking,and those changes we believe are what causes dreaming to occur.

Geoff Watts :  But sleep of course isn't all of a piece,there are two types aren't there?

Robert Stigold : There are two main types of sleep,one is called REM sleep,for rapid eye movement sleep,in which  - amongst other things - you see movements of the eyeballs back and forth, jumping back and forth from one side to the other,and the other which is called none REM sleep.
REM sleep actually only takes about 2hrs of our night,and the rest is none REM,but it's during REM sleep that we do our most intense and complex and bizarre dreaming.

Geoff Watts :  Now during this REM phase of sleep,which you say is when we do most of our dreaming,what do you think is going on in the brain as far as memory an learning are concerned?

Robert Stigold : Well what it looks like the brain is doing in REM sleep is taking one part of the memory system - that involved with general knowledge and information and trying to integrate it together and see how things fit together.It's what we talk about when we talk about "Sleeping on a problem". For example you don't say you're going to sleep on it if you can't remember a phone number. You say you're going to sleep on a problem when you have something like a lot of information about two job alternatives and you can't decide which one to take. So it's taking lots of information from lots of sources and lots of different memories and looking at them.comparing the emotions associated with them,and in some way doing weighing functions and deciding how things best fit together.

Geoff Watts :   So we know that dreaming coincides with a process which seems to be rather important,but from what you are saying we're not really certain whether the dream itself has value or whether it's simply the manifestation of some other valuable underlying process going on,we're still not sure about that?

Robert Stigold :  That's right,and we don't,you know,we're not clever enough yet to figure out how to sort that question out. It's interesting ,if you talk as a hard scientist, we don't even have good scientific evidence that people are conscious at all,I mean we all know that we are,but we have no scientific way of measuring consciousness,except by what people tell us,and people tell us their dreams,and people tell us they're conscious in waking and they can tell us what they think the importance of that is.
But my son used to have a little steering wheel on his car seat and he would tell me that he was driving the car - he was convinced that he was in charge and he wasn't. So even when we are awake we're as scientists,still struggling to think of clever ways to test and hopefully show that our conscious experience,our belief that we're making decisions is anything more than us just watching the brain what's it's doing.

[Not quite true - See  http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/freeuni.html ]

Geoff Watts :  It's implicit in what you're saying that what we've been talking about here is very much in the realms of speculation and theory,there isn't a great deal of hard fact yet?

[That's right because a belief is something you have BEFORE you get hard facts - and a belief is speculation - a theory is a possible explanation backed up by evidence,upon observation -LB]

Robert Stigold :  On the area of dream function,and on the area of the role of the actual experience of dreaming,we're very much in primitive stages,but what we're starting to sort out quite rigorously now,is the types of memory systems that are being used by the brain in constructing dreams and how at least for some types of learning - sleep is absolutely critical.

[No wonder those who get less sleep than they need have trouble learning - mentioning no names - LB]

Geoff Watts :  Bob thanks,Bob Stigold talking to me from Boston. Well with me here in the studio is Gabriel Walker,science writer and a consultant to New Scientist magazine. Gabriel whatever the role of dreaming,there is I think really no doubt at all now that sleep is important from the  point of view of all sorts of processes in the brain?

Gabriel Walker : Oh certainly and learning seems to be a very big part of that as well. I mean there's some evidence that the chemicals in your brain actually change while you're sleeping and that the more sleep you get the more effectively that happens,and that could actually man that rather than learning in your sleep,you're priming yourself while you're sleeping to be more effective at learning the following day.

[Short "napping" sleep tends not to allow REM - which means the following day you're liable not be as effective as having a proper good nights sleep -LB]

But there's also as we just heard,that we do learn when we sleep and we don't really learn like what things as we just heard,like the phone number but we do learn how tasks.

[There's Kekule's inspiration of Benzene molecular structure that happened in a dream [Ref: I. Asimov "The Left Hand of the Electron" p182;Focus Nov93 p61] -LB]

And not always when we're dreaming. I mean sometimes if it's - there's some research that's been done where subjects will be woken up at different stages,sometimes when they're dreaming,sometimes when they're not,and then the following day,they'll try and do a task that they learnt the previous day and it turns out that for certain kinds of tasks,if you learning a whole new task from scratch then if you're woken up in the middle of when you're dreaming, you're rubbish at it the next day. But if it's a task that you already know how to do,and you're just refining it a little bit,then other kinds of sleep are important,sort of lighter sleep where you're not actually dreaming and practising it all out in your head.

Geoff Watts : It's clearly important,it's also clear that there's a lot going on that we just have no idea about at all.

Gabriel Walker :  Oh that's certainly true,and you know if anybody could look inside people's heads and really see what was happening when they were dreaming and sleeping,we'd be in a much better position.

Geoff Watts : Well more now on the brain and looking inside it,in this case how to find your way around it. A map is a very powerful invention
[http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/maps.html]

it tells you where things are and where one thing is in relation to another thing and whether these relationships are fixed or changing.Try without a map,to plan a battle for instance,involving the movement of your troops,those of your allies and those of your enemy - impossible.
In all creation,few things are more complicated that the human brain 
[Speciesist! - A dolphin's brain has a melon - ours doesn't - a cepholopods is not even like ours so all one can say in sheer terms of connectivity is that "few things are more complex than brains" -LB]

so a map would be an invaluable tool for scientists trying to understand it and doctors trying to heal it - at his highly computerised laboratory in the University of California,Los Angeles,Doctor Arthur Toga is endeavouring to compile a map of the brain.That he can even contemplate such a task has been made possible by the variety of scanning and recording techniques we now have for finding out which bits of living brains do what.
It's data of these kinds that Arthur Toga is using to draw his maps. 
[Ref: Video C2 "The Shape of the World";Physics Folder support pamphlet]
But do they bear any resemblance to maps and plans of countries and cities?

Arthur Toga : Well the brain exists,it's an object,it's between our ears right,and so it has features and characteristics that can be observed and measured. So in that respect it's a reasonable model.The problem is of course - there's only one lake whatever,but there's many brains,and we have to try and accommodate all the variability in a population in order to create a map or an atlas.
[I wonder of it shrugs? -LB]

Furthermore,if you try and make a map of our brain today as we're having this conversation, the very conversation we're having is changing our brains and so we have to try to create a map that accommodates the fact that it's dynamic.It's changing all the time.
It's changing by our experiences.It's changing as we age.

[http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/geront1.html]

It's changing depending upon what we had to drink last night. So a map of the brain is far more complex and has many more dimensions than something that we're used to in geography for example.

Geoff Watts : The other thing that's implicit in what you were saying is that the kind of atlas that you're going to be producing can't be printed out in a neat little book that you can hold in your hand.There is a prodigious amount of information involved in this?

Arthur Toga :  Yeah,there's a lot of problems here.This is not a simple task. Number one, there's a tremendous amount of information,and we don't even know how to catalogue it properly just yet,we're just beginning to come up with strategies that allow us to bring all this data into a common data base - that's number one.
Number two is the fact that things are changing so dramatically,so quickly in the human brain depending upon how we make the observation. Electrical activity is on the order of milliseconds,and so we have to have databases that capture all of that information simultaneously and allow us to make sense of it.

Geoff Watts :  Well at this point,let's go and see how you do actually store the information that ultimately is going to build up into your atlas.

Arthur Toga :   Okay,well you're now in a room, a computer room,that houses a supercomputer, this is a machine that has about 65 processors and they're not PC processors.
These are very large systems that are integrated [Nominally known as VLSI technology - very large systems integration - LB],it has about 140 Terabytes of data online,which is each Terabyte is a thousand Gigabytes,and each Gigabyte is a thousand Megabytes [Actually,generally speaking the orders rise by 1024 not 1000 - one Kilobyte is not a 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes -LB].So there's a great deal of data here online,and these are machines that are worth about $10,000,000 (US),so this is a very large system indeed.

Geoff Watts :   Well now we're in one of the rooms where you can actually actually display the kind of data that's stored in the computer. What we've got on the screen in front of us- changing all the time is - it started off,it looked like a model of a solid human brain,that's what it was,was it?

Arthur Toga :  That's right, it was a reconstruction of a human brain,in fact it was several human brains put together,and the notion is that you can ask for a display that describes many different ways of how the brain is represented in this database. In this particular case you may look at specific structures or you may look at a combination of fifty or a hundred people. You might say "let me see all the right handed males,that are 20-25 years of age and how are they different than the left handed females" [See Material World on handedness and chirality],and the  machine can make that calculation and show you a three dimensional representation of it.

Geoff Watts : It's obviously going to be a few years before you can say that your atlas is complete. I mean in a sense you can say it almost will never be complete,would that be true? Because there's so much data you can go on and on and on,doing this can't you?

Arthur Toga :  I would say it never will  be complete.One can say do we have a map of the Earth - well yeah I can find Sunset Boulevard,but do I know all the intricacies of the depths of the ocean?

[Problem is the Earth is DYNAMIC and a map is a STATIC representation - which is why Ordnance Survey have to update their maps. Rather like a belief which doesn't test itself against dynamic reality - the STATIC map gets left behind and becomes further and further out of date and irrelevant -LB]

Do I know all the intricacies of the mountain ranges that are difficult to claim? So I would agree with you that this project is likely never to be complete,but we will increase our understanding [A metaphor for science generally-LB] of brain structure and function in health as well as disease,by having a framework or a system that allows us to continually integrate information that's newly acquired,either by new technologies or new clever questions that might be posed or by new scientists entering the field.

Geoff Watts :  And once that data is more widely available to other researchers who want to use it,is it conceivable that you will find people answering questions with your data which  never even would have occurred to your yourself to ask?

Arthur Toga :  I think that the development of new technologies and new informatic strategies is going to be one of the next revolutions in science,that we've concentrated a great deal on acquiring information and we haven't been so energetic in terms of analysing it or extracting the information from the data,and that's changing now with the input of computer technology and informaticists that help us examine these data and mine it,if you will,for information that teaches us about the brain. So I'm very optimistic about changes that will occur.

Geoff Watts :   Arthur Toga,mapping the brain. Gabriel there's a parallel here I think with the Human Genome Project,because just as Arthur Toga relies on computers and a vast amount of information,so the Genome project also relies on vast amounts of information.

Gabriel Walker : I think that's absolutely right and it has to use a lot of computers to try and process it,and one of the things that's interesting about that,is with the Human Genome Project,we can stand to find out all sorts of medical things about which particular genes might be responsible for certain diseases or whatever,but we can also find out a lot more about ourselves and I think this kind of brain mapping project will have the same effect, we'll find out how we tick.

Geoff Watts :  It's important in the Genome Project how one bit of...one gene interacts with another,I suppose you want to know something about how one part of the brain relates to another here?

Gabriel Walker : Oh yes very much so ,and especially with this level of complexity,even if you've managed to figure out what happens where,if you ever manage to do that ,you still have to work out how it all works together. [Wholism/Systems Integration -LB]
And they can be immensely complicated with lots of different things acting in tandem,and that's something that's going to be very hard to get at - brainwaves and the way that different parts of the brain work together and how you can actually coordinate them and make them interact - it's just very difficult.
[Actually Roger Penrose posits a way in which this orchestration happens - as do biomathematicians and even semi quack scientists - 

Geoff Watts :  I mean seeing all the data stored there on that computer does put a thought in one's head,I mean it would be naive to say that what he has built is actually a replication of the human brain - it's not - but has got a lot of data about the human brain,d'you think if you somehow fed that information into a machine which you were  trying to use to simulate the brain,could you do it? I mean is that a very naive way of looking at it?

[We're in Turing/Penrose territory now -LB]

Gabriel Walker : D'you mean would it be conscious? (Giggles)

Geoff Watts :  Well that's one thing that comes to mind,would it be conscious yes?

[No Geoff it wouldn't -LB]

Gabriel Walker :  Well,here's what I think really,in everyone,every single neurone is active at different parts,different times when we're thinking,learning tasks or whatever and there's an awful lot of them and they interact in all sorts of complicated ways - but there's so much in our brains.

[Size and quantity and complication aren't insurmountable hurdles - it's the quality and nature of the brain which is the impediment to making one - digital computers in principle aren't up to the task - LB]

There's feelings and there's half remembered tunes and there's great memories. You know the human brain is just the most wonderful place and the most wonderfully complex place [Stop eulogising about us as humans and note that it is ALL brain structure  - not just our own - LB]

and the notion that you can take that and make it out of a bunch of bits of silicon I just think is -way out.

Geoff Watts :  I think you're saying "No " aren't you?

Gabriel Walker : I'm saying "No". [You haven't said why it's no though - LB]

Geoff Watts :  What a pity. If dust is matter that's out of place and weeds are plants growing where they shouldn't I suppose you could say that noise can be defined as  any sound you don't want to hear - but while you can easily enough sweep up dust and dig out weeds,escaping  noise can be a lot more difficult. The surprise really is not that unwanted noise can be so distressing,but that we manage to tolerate so much of it so well.
Sometimes of course the coping mechanism fails. Ros Smith reports on the effects of noise and why it can be such a burden.

(Baby cries,Dog barks,alarm clock sounds,Jackhammer sounds)

Ros Smith : Noise can drive you mad. According to government figures 32 million people in the UK are exposed to high levels of noise,but when it comes to annoyance it's not all about volume. Deprak Prasha,Professor of Audiology at University College London.

Deprak Prasha : It's not just the level of noise that leads to annoyance,there are many none acoustical factors - expectation,habituation to sound,psychological well being of the individual and so on. So if it's an unexpected sound - if you are asleep then that's a danger.
[And presumably affects your capacity to learn the next day! -LB]
You're woken up with it and immediately you're under stress and where's it coming from, what's it going to do,who's in my house?

Or if you are trying to concentrate for example (dripping tap sounds),trying to read,trying to understand something and a tap is dripping, that's very annoying.

[Dripping taps are actually something Chaos Theory tells us something about as they move from dripping regularly to laminar flow - they go through a chaotic boundary - it would be interesting to note whether the regular dripping or constant swish of laminar flow or the chaotic boundary is more annoying - since water gardens tend to have a relaxing effect  - people often read by a trickling stream. One OU program explained that the brain doesn't like monotonous sounds like sirens or totally disordered sounds such as TV interchannel noise - but likes patterns and complication - which can be found in chaotic boundaries -it's possible such noises (bees buzzing has been found to be fractal) could be seen as soothing because they are "natural" organic sounds,that the brain has become accustomed to the complication of through it's evolution - whereas regular sounds tend to me man made and annoying by being too regular -LB]

Ros Smith : But whereas it's easy to see why our bodies have evolved so that danger sounds such as that mysterious bump in the night should cause us to wake with a start,

[If I woke with a bump next to my body in the night I've start too! -LB

why should someone sniffing on a train drive you so mad?

It's all down to the way your brain processes different sounds. Dr Jonathan Hazel,Director of the Tinitus and Hyperacusis centre in London.

Jonathan Hazel : The sound of your first name in a nearby conversation is enhanced perhaps 500 times and the sound of the refrigerator in your kitchen is suppressed very strongly and this processing of sound is an extremely individual thing dependent on your own experiences and your own training.
I mean your first name obviously is going to be more important because that's the way people get hold of you,but also sounds that particularly mean danger or threaten you are very individual.

Ros Smith :  It's these sounds with some sort of emotional meaning that are amplified the most ,crying babies, alarm clocks,and indeed your first name - this subconscious audio response system is an intrinsic part of your flight or fight response,designed to help you respond quickly to danger.

[Designed Does NOT mean it had a designER - LB]

I only have to hear something that sounds like my alarm clock and my body runs for cover.

(alarm sounds)

Jonathan Hazel :  This fight or flight response of course it doesn't have to be only your life in danger,it maybe somebody who comes into the room and creates a slight annoyance.
[ Yes - I am privy to that one - LB]
The same areas of the brain are stimulated.
[As long as my brain is stimulated it's okay then -LB]

Now it's this reaction - this emotional and body reaction which causes the stress.You can have the person out there who is being annoying,and if you manage to suppress your annoyance and you don't respond,then there's no stress attached to it.

[I see - so now I have a plan to work to! -LB]

Ros Smith : A body system perfectly designed to keep us safe from predators has come unstuck in the modern world.

[This shows that we evolved and have been selected to evade predators - and now we don't have any -the systems in our old proto brain that make us "knee jerk" are still in operation.
They were not so much perfectly designed - but arrived at though the fact that those people who were less adept at having such a system - were eaten and so didn't propagate the propensity for fight or flight - those who did survive did so by having that response - and so it has been auto honed to perfection - not DESIGNED by a designer -the selection process automatically makes it better each time - thus the system auto optimises for the environment- when the environment alters radically as it has under our own steam - the system might not be so  smart at discriminating a predator from an alarm clock - presumably as we continue to evolve - other things may take priority over these cues - possibly - LB]

Over reacting to situations it should just ignore [I know the feeling - LB].
But what is it about some sounds that annoy us all?

Jonathan Hazel :  There are some sounds which are universally producing a strong reaction,like chalk on a blackboard - well the older generation will remember what blackboards were!
But for other people,it can be very very individual and the reason why it can be annoying can be quite difficult to interpret sometimes. For instance,I have many patients who are extremely annoyed by the sound of other people chewing or eating,more typically there are people who are annoyed by music,particularly if it's leaking out from some young person's headphones. Again not a very loud sound,but something that has some specific meaning about it. That somebody is being careless of irritating and they shouldn't be doing this.

Ros Smith :  And it's this meaning that's the key to it all,it's not so much the sound that's annoying,it's what it represents,and the problem is ,once you've developed this reaction to it you react every single time [ Perhaps your ears are morphically resonating!!!? www.geocities.com/Omegaman_UK/sheldrake.html - What an idiot! -LB].
But for a few people,it has a serious effect on their quality of life .
[I just heard that snoring can do the same thing -LB]
Jonathan Hazel deals with such people at his clinic every day.

Jonathan Hazel :   There's a condition which we call hyperacusis which means that the filter system is just very much more active,the amplification or the gain,between the ear and the brain where we hear the sound is turned up,so that what we hear are sounds which are overly loud,much louder than they are to other people.
The other element is what we call mesophonia - dislike of sound,or phonophobia -fear of sound,and this represents the reaction to that sound.
So the sound may not be amplified very much,it maybe very quiet,but we're reacting to it very strongly,like the chalk on the blackboard.

Ros Smith :   Those with serious conditions need not suffer in silence,as treatments such as retraining therapy can be used to break the cycle,as for the rest of us,I'm afraid the best way to deal with that annoying music coming from the house next door is to try not to let it get you stressed.

(Mostly bass music plays)

Geoff Watts :  Don't let it get you stressed,so easy to say but so hard to do,that report was by Ros Smith.
Finally,this week weather forecasting.
(Lightning bolt sounds)
No no,wrong sound effects - not the weather here on Earth,weather in space - yes silence - the very phrase "space weather" sounds like an oxymoron,it's cold of course,but it's also a vacuum,so no rain,no clouds,no thunderclaps,certainly no hurricanes.
There is though,wind,of a kind. Physicists refer to it as the solar wind,and it's to do with events taking place on the surface of the sun. The solar wind may not do much to sweep your yacht across the winning line,but it can really smash up your satellites and ruin your radio reception.
 Space weather was on the agenda of a recent conference held at the Royal Society in London.Among the speakers was Dr Andrew Coates of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and Professor Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
What's happening on the sun,to cause change in space weather,Richard Harrison?

Richard Harrison : The sun is extremely active. If you look at movies basically films of the sun's atmosphere or corona it's like a complex highly variable mess if you like.

[Which happens because it's a plasma creating a magnetic field and subject TO it's own magnetic field - which creates complex feedback effects -LB]

It doesn't compare to out atmosphere very well. It's actually magnetically dominated,and those magnetic fields in the sun's atmosphere,you can think of like elastic bands getting tied up in knots can simply explode or send huge chunks of gas coming out into space. So the big things that affect us within that solar wind are those  explosions or eruptions. The explosions are called solar flares - they are huge explosions in the sun's atmosphere,the clouds are called coronal mass ejections,which is a wonderful name isn't it? Where you can have a thousand million tonnes of gas coming out in one go,and that can literally engulf the Earth moon system.

Geoff Watts :   Andrew Coates say a little more about what's actually in this solar wind,what does it actually comprise?

[Ions - charged particles,those impinging upon OUR atmosphere are what cause the Aurora Borealis and Australis - LB]

Andrew Coates : Well the solar wind is  called a plasma - this is the 4th state of matter,

[Actually plasma along with Bose Einstein Condensate and Liquid Crystals have all been called the 4th state of matter  www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/bose.html & www.geocities.com/Omegaman_UK/lcd.html  - LB]

beyond solid liquid and gas,and this interacts electrically and carries a magnetic field with it and this actually comes towards the Earth and that has important consequences for things like satellites, which are positioned inside and which we depend for our daily lives,things like weather forecasts,communications,positioning and so on,and these are right - some of them on the edge of the radiation belt - but some of them inside,and so  what we're trying to do is to predict how the radiation belts actually react to the solar wind parameters.

Geoff Watts :    I guess,Richard Harrison that the key using or exploiting this information lies in being able to predict when events of this kind are going to happen,is that true?

Richard Harrison : Absolutely right,and the big problem for me as a solar physicist is you look at these huge eruptions from the sun and you actually detect those using an instrument called a chronograph,it's like an artificial eclipse device,it blocks out the sun and you see something coming out sideways basically,and then when you look at...use other instrumentation to look at the surface of the sun,the sun's atmosphere,can you see where that material comes from? The answer is usually no.
The event that's so dramatic as it comes through the solar system is actually quite subtle when it leaves the sun.

Geoff Watts :    So at the moment, I mean the amount of warning you get ,is really not very long at all,because the event has already started before you can say "look we're going to have trouble".

Richard Harrison :  That is absolutely right,and with a flare if you've got energetic particles coming our way,from a flare,you may have 20 mins,something like that, for a big mass ejection clouds,one of these big clouds coming out,the fastest ones probably get here within a day and a half,so that gives you and idea of the scale of things,and we certainly miss some of these things.

Geoff Watts :   But d'you think it's feasible one day to be able to get...to be able to say yes not in 20 mins we're going to have a problem ,but the chances are that in a day or two days we're going to have something happening? I mean d'you think it's feasible to do that?

Richard Harrison :   Certainly,and one of the future plans is,there's a mission being developed which is a NASA mission which will carry a lot of British instrumentation aboard as well.It's two spacecraft called STEREO which will actually go out of the Sun/Earth line and look back at the sun and the  Earth together and try and see these clouds heading our way in particular. Now those won't help us see the onset of these things but certainly will allow us to track them as they head towards the Earth far better than we do now.

Geoff Watts :  Andrew Coates do you share Richard Harrison's optimism that we will be able to do better in the future than we can now?

Andrew Coates : I'm sure on the solar side yes we have to do better. At the moment they can't predict the eruptions happening at all, and this is why the difficulty is. However with the coronal mass ejections we do have a day and half to perhaps three days notice of these things happening,and by monitoring the conditions just upstream of the Earth in the solar wind and also within the magnetosphere itself we can actually begin to get some idea of prediction. In fact, we're just developing as a sort of spin off of our research for insurance companies,a website where they can actually look what the conditions are going to be like in the magnetosphere over the next couple of days,because they have had significant failures of satellites which - every time a satellite goes pop it's like $250,000,000 something like that - so of course they're interested in this. So we measure the conditions upstream,so we take what Richard throws at us and then actually do the prediction for what is going to be happening in the Earth's magnetic environment.

Geoff Watts :   Andrew Coates and Richard Harrison,speaking to me at the Royal Society. Gabriel one thing we didn't mention there,perhaps we really should do,is the fact that when these waves of particles come drifting towards the Earth,it does have one rather positive consequence in certain parts doesn't it?

Gabriel Walker : Oh you mean the auroras don't you?

Geoff Watts :    Exactly.

Gabriel Walker :  And these don't depend on these massive bursts that we were hearing about there,just the regular bog standard solar wind will do it,and normally around the world the magnetic field of the Earth protects us from these charged particles ,but round the poles they can kind of spiral in down the magnetic field lines and they can light up the sky in the most gorgeous way,reds and greens and these beautiful colours.

Geoff Watts :    Yes,they are stunningly beautiful as we said. Thinking back to the last item we had about noise,this is one sight that you can experience presumably in total silence,or is that actually true?

Gabriel Walker :   Well there's been for years and years,many aurora watchers have said "I've heard them",there've been the odd..you know "I've heard this" or "I've heard that strange crackling noise" and scientists have always said "Absolute rubbish,you can't possibly be hearing them" because by the time the sound made it all the way down to where you are then you know it would have faded and it would take a long time and so on,but in fact it could really be true,because there are some mechanisms whereby if the aurora gave out a pulse of radiation,as it's glowing in the sky- the radiation travels at the speed of light,to somewhere near you,and it might set pine needles rustling or fences moving. 
[I would have thought the ionised air could cause a sound by having the air molecules charged rather as a TV screen is -LB]

And in fact one of the reasons that researchers think they might not have seen that before is that they did their experiments in big open fields away from all sources of influence and that might have cut out the sound as well.

Geoff Watts :  Interesting,so they were being too clever in a sense by trying to cut out the sources of sound,they cut out what might actually have been making the sound?

Gabriel Walker :   Well that's absolutely right,and you know there's all sorts of legends,Inuit legends about how the auroras were making these amazing noises and that there were somehow gods moving in the sky or whatever and it could actually be true.

[Yes when you don't understand something - stick a semi human God in there to explain it away -LB]

Well maybe not about the gods,but certainly about the sounds.

Geoff Watts : The noisy Northern Lights,puts a new angle on the whole thing.Gabriel thanks,science writer Gabriel Walker.
Next week,another foray into the cosmos,how American researchers are using two lasers each a mile and a quarter [Someone tell them we've gone metric - LB] long ,to detect gravity waves.