What We Don’t Yet Know (by sarah)

As many of you now I want to be an Astrobiologist when I grow up - something I am resigned to not doing for the next few years as health and family have to come first.

But when I was working on it I saw so much still to find out it was almost mind blowing. Astrobiology as a formal subject is very young still as in - I bet few of you had heard of it before I started talking about it and I used to call it exo-palaeontology anyway 😉 .

Looking at the concept of life beyond our planet brings you straight to the question of life on Earth. Life's origin, evolution and colonisation of the harshest climes. In recent years life has startled us by turning up in the most unexpected places - entire eco-systems have been found is isolated pockets of water in the ice caps. The study of these creatures and how they interact is only just beginning but what use is knowing about them I hear you ask?

Well as everyone knows there is a thorny issue in science that affects everyone globally and that is Climate Change. Well our climate is a large complex fed back system with interactions that stretch from rock erosion to cows munching grass. One of the things that makes it so very complex is the biosphere - Life is both a driver and a quencher of climatic cycles. It is also a record of it.

Any information or new angles that can be explored with this topic will be immensely useful to mankind. Who knows it may even save us from ourselves but if there is no funding the research can not be done and those pools of ice will melt and be lost forever.

Another aspect is that micro-organisms can live inside rocks - in fact they can even eat the rocks to get what they need. This has reprocusions over say where you can store Nuclear Waste and the like. On top of that one of these little critters happens to etch glass for it's meal times! Photographers may have come across this as a frosting of their lenses - something they curse highly!

The hospitals we go to, especially the older ones often have porous brick work which would appear to now perhaps not be such a good idea! All those nice little nooks and crannies for organisms to live in. But just how much that matters will not be found out with out scientific research continuing.

Another aspect that always captured me was the evolution of the cell and organisms in general. And this where everything we thought we knew about genetics comes a little bit undone. Everything bar those annoying Macro-organisms (and maybe some of them!) appear to be be able to swap DNA. Little circular pieces of DNA called plasmids can be transfered not just between same species but across Kingdoms! (It used to be thought there where 3 Kingdoms in biology but there are at least five and the majority of it is dominated by mirco-organisms not the original Plant, Animal, Fungi!). This is what makes antibiotic resistances in a disease so bad - it can transfer the resistance to other diseases 🙁 But the mechanics and origin of this along with say a solution - lay in exploring how life arose, how the cells evolved. This again needs more work done.

I could keep going, talk about the elemental distributions on the Earth and in the Solar System - how this effects everything from mining for metals to make our computers run to how likely space colinization is but I feel I have made my point!

What we don't know? Just about everything - there is so much - we have just scratched the surface, just set down the tools we need and now the workshop is about to be destroyed before we can even start on the masterpieces.

October’s Challenges (by sarah)

Septembers challenges went well - I haven't finished the novel but am almost there! And am hoping it wont eat too far into the month though I have realised I want to rewrite huge chunks of it :/

Blog post wise I did well over 100 posts over my various blogs and finally sorted out a writing home page and got my head around a few of my on going projects!

And so there is October - and the main question is do I do GothNoWriMo?

I still have the novel from last month to finish :/ and have another project I really really want to complete. This project is The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry and mainly involves sorting out illustrations and the like.

What I am thinking of doing is saying the novel has priority though I still don't want to push at more than 1000 words a day. It is so almost there I don't think it needs it either - then once that is done I shall re-write it, spending an hour on it a day.

I will spend an hour on the Little Book too which should get me a good long way through it and hopefully produce at least a finished book for Jean by the end.

Then if I feel upto it I may well do 1000 words for GothNoWriMo but this will only be on week days as It can only really happen whilst my little girl is at school - this leads me onto another issue with my challenges this month. There is a half term holiday so I will be loosing a weeks worth of writing time which hopefully I will be able to catch up during the rest of the month.

I am also aware that this is basically 3 challenges - GothNoWriMo is taking low priority but hopefully something will get written for it! It may even get it's own monster blog - we will see 🙂

Again wish me luck.

Baby! 20 Week Scan (by sarah)

I had my twenty week scan on Tuesday, we have decided to find the sex of the baby this time round due to the whole room issue.

If it's a girl it can share with Jean in bunk beds once old enough - a prospect Jean is most excited about, if it is a boy then though initially it can share with Jean but would rapidly need it's own bedroom - this means selling my office furniture or getting Barbara to let us have the Stable area to have the office in, allowing us to have the office/hayloft as a domestic space.

Things are a bit up and down domestically where the house is concerned anyway at the moment so (look away if you don't want to know!) I was relieved to find out that the baby is probably another little girl! Obviously it is only a 9 out of 10 chance but still I am breathing a bit easier.

The scan showed no annomalies with the baby though I do have a low laying placenta and so have to go back for another scan at 32 weeks. I am seeing the consultant on Monday about weather to have a C-section or not anyway.

I really really hope they will give me one otherwise I am going to be in a wheel chair again - I might be anyway but I will definatly be without the C-section.

People keep telling me I don't want one (bar the midwife who thinks I need one) as it is an operation and you can't do anything for six weeks. Six weeks? I couldn't do anything for about 10 months after Jean was born via natural birht :/

Having said that I do have a few quarms about it - like how is my body going to flush all the placenta and stuff out? Is there a danger to the baby with knives cutting them out? And how will my body know it's had the baby to start up the proper milk production? Plus it's going to have to be a pretty large cut and into what I consider a major organ so what are the infection risks?

Other issues to be addressed are - the fact I am starting to struggle with walking at all and turning over in bed makes the old pelvis go click crunch but I need to be mobile as I'll just pile on even more weight 🙁 I am having nose bleeds and headaches which are going to be from the stress of whats going on domestically but how can I get it low again - all I've been told so far is to rest.

Still we got to see the little baby and the lady showed us everything she was taking measurements of! We even got to see the four chambers of it's little heart!

It was being like it's sister v. v. wriggly so was not very photogenic :/

I do want to get copies of the ultra sounds up - so bear with us for glimpses of baby 🙂

Eastgate Shopping Center Rock! (by sarah)

Yesterday I wrote a post about the foodcourt charging for tap water - I then put the link on twitter. Whilst there I thought I'd prod around my local tweets and found one of them retweeting a post by none other than the shopping center!

So I sent them the link with a comment that it was bad policy. I didn't expect it to work but within ten minutes I had a response saying they were going to look into it. Then a little later a message that as of now they are no longer going to charge for tap water!

Tis a little victory but I do feel quiet chuffed. However they are just one shopping center so now I am on a mission - I am going to do several things. Firstly I will be making lists of places I go that do and don't give me free tap water, secondly I am going to be writing to my MP and stuff.

Alaric also thinks that there is something about it under the Citizen's Charter but I have to confess that I didn't even know we had a Citizen's Charter and have so far failed to find a copy of it on line.

And just to add to my lame-ness I have also made up a little song/rap thingy about using google-fu which I will post in a few days!

But mainly I need to thank Eastgate Shopping Center for listening and getting on the ball 🙂

Tap Water (by sarah)

Being pregnant I am finding myself getting stupidly hungry and stuff and whilst out in Gloucester I decided to get a meal in the food court of Eastgate Shopping Center. My parents where buying drinks but I just wanted tap water - I often ask for tap water even when I am drinking another drink so was shocked to be told they were now charging for it! 30p a cup!

I was shocked and said I didn't think that was legal but ended up buying a bottle of water in the end. This was mineral water which a) often contains salts and things which I was told you should avoid during pregnancy and b) comes in a plastic bottle which is bad for the environment.

They said it was due to inflation that they where having to charge, but even if they gave it to me in a disposible cup with ice it not cost 30p!

Anyway I came home and looked it up and was sickened to find out that UK law doesn't insist on tap water being free but rather is put into clauses on specific places such as pubs and clubs. And that Defra have been promoting a free drinking water policy.

I live in a country were the tap water is not only safe to drink but of a high quality and the resturants are generally not on meters so they pay a base rate for the water - which they need to do all their cooking and washing up!

Now my main concern is - how is this not a law? When we have so many laws? And secondly is there some older law - which some people seem to believe there is, dating from the Temprance movement where free water is to be served?

I thought the law said that even if someone turned up on my doorstep I would have to provide them with free water to drink.

Oh and the most stupid thing about the meal I had? The little packets of salt that some places charge 5p for where free. So we had free salt but no free water?!? This seems incredibly insane to me.