How Big is Your Love?

“As a species we are preoccupied with size. Men want to be big, women want to be thin. Men want length and girth, women want the best shaped hips to give birth. When we boil nature down to its fundamentals, it is all about size - just not in the way we might necessarily think. Size is an issue, but don't make an issue out of your size. Big is not always better, and small is not always insignificant, or vice versa. The real question you should ask is: How big is your love?”
— Mickie Kent

Why is size so important to us? Why does size matter for life forms? What did it mean for a dinosaur to be big and an ant to be small? Why is a giant redwood tree giant and the dwarf salamander dwarf? What effect did their size have on what they could do? Why are we the size we are? Well, size governs everything that an organism can do. It's a most important factor and it boils down to us being 3-dimensional beings, with an area and volume. When you get bigger or smaller, the ratios of those two things changes and that governs what you're allowed to do.

For example, elephants can't dance or jump, while insects can walk on water, again because of the surface to volume ratio. In my mini-series on the science of twin I have already talked about why size matters in nature, and what size means to our species. As humans our bodies are very well proportioned, and the measurements offer up golden examples of symmetry - e.g., the span of our arms stretched wide equals our height; our forearm is the same length as our foot. From the minuscule to the enormous, science is closely involved with size and discoveries at either end of the scales are changing the way we view the universe.

It's become a du jour of sorts, wondering what the future will be like and whether the human species has a future at all. The general consensus is that unless we learn to cooperate and work together, our end of times might come sooner than the one many see approaching its natural conclusion around the year 3000 (mid-March 2880 to be precise) or 4000 (some predict the year 3797) with the collision of an asteroid - similar to one that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Tracking the dangers of space

We live in a solar system that is littered with debris, and images released by NASA, a culmination of 8 year's work, shows the paths of 1,400 asteroids that have been tracked by NASA scientists. What is special about these ones is that they're classed as potentially hazardous, which means they are quite big, and also come within 7.5 kilometres of Earth.

None are thought to be a threat, at least not in the next 100 years, but by tracking and observing these asteroids, NASA can refine its estimates of where they are. All this could also help us identify near-Earth objects for future humans or robots to explore.

It's believed that evolution constantly goes through this cycle, until the planet itself will ultimately reach its own expiry date with that of the Sun, which after using up its fuel supply will collapse within 7 billion years. Life on Earth will have ended a little before that though as there will be an agonising period of repeated swelling, as our life-giving star grows into a red giant.

And even with so many nations around the world "seeing red" currently, with upheaval in the Middle East and elsewhere, some still believe that the dawn of a new human "golden age" is just around the corner - 2016 to be precise. Whether this prediction will come to fruition is anybody's guess, and only those reading this in that time will know for sure, but even those "golden age" predictions only seem to last about four years. Others predict a more gloomy affair with nuclear warfare laying waste to historical cities such as Rome, and that even nature will seem at war with us, with increased seismic activity becoming common place until 2025.

How will the world meet its end?

It seems that our world and our live will be filled with ups and downs for a long while yet. Predictions continue through the chaos to a hopeful resolution, where semi-world peace is achieved in 2050 (about 57% of the planet) - but again things get worse according to the soothsayers of times past. The year 2076 may bring about a fourth World War (if we ever survive a third) which is thought could last a record 25 years and turn most of the world into a barren dessert. If our human species does indeed fulfil such dark destinies, some might sat it would have been better if the cosmos sent an asteroid sometime earlier in the next two thousand years, before all the Sun has left to give life to is a dead planet, a true sister to Mars.

Michel de Nostredame (aka Nostradamus) was a 16th-century French "seer", best known for The Prophecies, a collection of French quatrains published in 1555. Nostradamus studied astrology and various "occult" sciences and used those to predict the future. Some believe these prophecies are worthy predictions of the future while others say they are merely vague observations retrofitted to match past events.

The see-saw of life, and fate and destiny seemed to be intertwined in such predictions, as although we constantly come to a brink, we seem to pull ourselves back at the eleventh hour - or so the soothsayers would have us believe. After this fourth world war, world peace will finally come it is believed in 2106 to last a thousand years. This will be a real golden age some predict, where the standard of living will rise to heights we cannot comprehend, and innovations in science, medicine and technology will rise accordingly. Naturally, nothing lasts forever, and in 3750 a new war and new fears that have never been faced up to that age will face our species once again, with the year 3797 seen by some as a turning point of humankind's evolution.

There are some that believe it heralds the end of our species, others predict that we will have evolved to achieve immortality. But these are distant futures that we cannot even comprehend. What is certain, however, is that change will always take place. We don't need to be soothsayers to predict that. Life is all about change, and so is science. So, we have looked at what some would consider the hokum of the future, what does science have to say about where humankind is heading?

How much is a millisecond worth? And at what cost to the Earth?

The banking crisis made us realise the astronomical sums of money that are traded around the globe - around 4.5 trillion every day. In the banking world, time very much is money, and the margins are incredibly fine. In New York City, for example, a lot can happen in a very short space of time. Light can travel at 186 miles in just one millisecond, and on Wall Street they want to make deals at the speed of light, because time is literally money.

The annual trades on the New York Stock Exchange are worth 35 trillion. That's more than the combined GDP of the UK, China and the USA. Half of those transactions are done by people, poring over screens, keeping track of price changes. The remainder are now done by computers, automatically and remotely all across the US, with no direct human involvement.

This is no game, however; our global economy is increasingly based on machines making decisions for themselves, as fast as the technology will allow them. The computers are doing what the humans are doing, but much faster. In the world of electronic trading, high frequency trading, a computer can do a thousand of trades in seconds. Computers speaks in electronic speeds of data that could flow between them at the speed of light - but that's in free air. The cables between computers slow that signal down. It's not by a huge amount, but because the trades are so fast these days, the length of wire between computers is becoming a real issue. In this new high speed world, every millisecond, every metre counts, and so the computers thousands of miles away from New York lose out, as vital milliseconds are wasted as their data travels, for example, from Los Angeles, or Chicago, and across the country.

To remove that disadvantage, the stock exchange built a huge data centre just outside New York. It's the size of three football pitches, and the whole process is to set a fair and level playing field to give everyone equal access to the market. But the financial race against time doesn't end there. Electronic traders on the New York Stock Exchange might now all be in one room, but the US is so big it has more than one giant trading centre. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is a massive financial hub in its own right, but it's also vital that Chicago connects to New York at the highest possible speed.

So, in 2010, one company tunnelled through mountains and under cities to lay their own optical fibre cables the whole way. That reduced the time it took for information to flow between Chicago and New York, from 14.5 milliseconds to 13.1 milliseconds. It cost them more than 100 million dollars.

However, it took just two years for that bold step to be outdone. A line of 22 microwave towers stretching all the way from New York to Chicago. because sending information through the air is even faster, then sending it by optical fibre. Microwaves travel at the speed of light, they're only slowed down a fraction by the air they travel through. And even though it cost 30 million dollars, they slashed the connection time by another 5 milliseconds. In effect, each millisecond costs 6 million dollars - but how much is a millisecond worth to a trader? Billions.

In the crazy world of high speed trading, this race to save time sounds incredible, but it has its critics. For the sake of money, some say we have damaged and dug up the environment, and built unsightly microwave towers that emit waves that may with long term exposure detrimentally affect the surrounding people and its environment. Spending all that money to make up a tiny margin of advantage is deemed necessary by algorithmic traders, as the competition is so intense, and every millisecond is incredibly important to the trading companies. There are people suggesting that because the New York and London Stock Exchange needs to communicate faster and faster, people may fly drones across the Atlantic to make sure that connections work as fast possible across there. In effect some say its like sending trading decisions backwards in time. But the ethos that we will do whatever it takes to make money, is seen as a dangerous route to take for the future.

The future, whatever shapes it takes, will be one with an ever more populated planet. From 1460 AD, which seemed a very manageable amount of population compared to the level which that has grown through modern medicine to seven billion and growing, we have known that we will need to be ever more careful with all our resources, and how we expend that and balance that with our desire for financial expansion. In tandem with that, resources are strained, and if we all expect to eat the meals that the developed world eats, we need to be a lot more fairer when it comes to distribution, and more educated when to comes to wasting our resources.

As I began this post, really it is all to do with size - from the size of the prediction that seems too fantastic for rational brains, to the science of size itself - where we are preoccupied with inter-galactic scale of an expanding universe right down to our battle to live harmoniously with the smallest creatures on Earth - survival is ultimately seems to be concerned with how big or small we are. What will secure or incinerate our survival will be the course we take and what we choose to expand on. Focusing on science at least gives us hope for a better future.

Investigating the incredibly vast and infinitesimally small is helping us solve some really big problems. For instance, on the subject of food resources becoming increasingly restricted in the future, some are suggesting that more of the world could take their protein from tiny insects - which expend far less to be reared than the equivalent cattle and poultry. Meanwhile, big data - as it is called - can provide us with new ways of understanding ourselves and how we work and so save lives, while understanding the scientific effects of size, and hunting for the most elusive part of our cosmos - dark matter - can bring us closer to a greater awareness about our environment. The more aware we are about the world we live in, the more geared up we can be to live more consciously - and achieve our greatest desires.

So first, to a group of tiny creatures, among the first life forms on Earth. Bacteria are responsible for keeping our own ecosystem ticking over, but when they attack us it is an ugly sight. Superbugs like MRSA are a major danger, especially in hospitals - I can't speak for other countries, but in England our hospitals have been struggling for decades with this issue. It's interesting, therefore, that science is now suggesting that the Victorians - of all people - had the answer all along.

Bacteria are the most successful life forms on the planet. They are everywhere around us in unimaginable numbers. Most of them are harmless, but some have become our most formidable enemies. Our fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the so-called superbugs, is going to be one of the key health issues over the next ten years. The question many scientists have been asking is this: What if there was a way to kill the bugs before they get to us, instead of using anti-biotics after we get infected - to literally stop them in their tracks?

Bacteria: Are these are greatest enemies?

Scientists have spent years trying to find a way to intercept and kill superbugs before they even have a chance to infect us. And the solution they've found is easier than anyone ever imagined. It is believed that one of the oldest metals known to humankind, it's cheap and abundant and was known to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. It's copper and we've been using it for more than five thousand years. Who knew copper had superbug-battling credentials? It's due to the natural reactivity of copper, as soon as the bacteria land on its surface the copper floods into their cell. They stop the bacteria from respiring, so they can't breathe, and destroy their DNA.

It reckoned that 80% of superbug infections are actually transmitted by touch. Even with through cleaning its really difficult to stop a chance encounter. The problem is we are a very tactile animal; we as humans are brilliant at spreading bacteria. We don't realise how much we touch things without thinking about it.

Think of all the things you touched today, how many handles you touched, how many surfaces, how many rails, how many buttons - and now think about how many times you touched your face, your ear or slightly picked your nose! Then think about how many other people touched those surfaces surrounding you, and it only takes one of them to be infected and it will rapidly spread.

This isn't about making you paranoid, but with increasing urbanisation and cities becoming more populous, it is an issue we need to tackle. Unless everyone in hospitals, doctors, consultants and visitors are hermetically sealed off with masks and white suits, its virtually impossible to keep the bugs out.

We have a big, increasing problem of antibiotic resistance of all bacteria. Most people have heard of E-coli, and increasingly klebsiella, and their numbers are growing greater because of the rate they can multiply and their spontaneous mutations. Some believe we are in danger of returning to a pre-antibiotic era, mid-19th Century situation - a frightening scenario of sepsis, with people dying from surgical operations, transplants, wound infections and most cancer care for example.

Designer drugs for bacteria?

Every year five and half million of us get a stomach bug, but it looks as though we could be on the way to neutralising the bug's main weapon. Yersinia is a bacterium that can cause stomach pains, fever, diarrhoea. It works using little syringe-like structures on the outside of it, which poke into our cells and inject toxic chemicals. For the first time, researchers have been able to see these structures in great detail, and the idea is the more we understand about their tiny structures and how they work, the better we'll be able to design drugs to block them. And this knowledge could not only be useful for this bacterium, but it could also work against other stomach bugs like salmonella.

In the 1830s, Britain wasn't particularly health-concious. Few cared whether you lived or died. After a number of lethal epidemics, it was decided that trying to preserve the lives of its citizens might be a good idea, so the role of Chief Medial Officer was created to help change lives and expand lifespans, and help preserve the health of the nation and become the health conscience of the country. Precariously balanced between medicine and politics for 150 years, under its auspices sewage disposal was revolutionised, it oversaw the difficult births of institutions like the National Health Service, and pushed for greater awareness over the dangerous effects of cigarettes.

It is also the CMO's job to advise the government (appointed by the civil service as an independent advisor), and in the case of antibiotics it has had been raising the alarm as one of the major health challenges we have to face. There is the flu in China, a novel coronavirus coming out of the Middle East and as well as that we have new epidemics. Meanwhile, in the interim, we haven't had any new antibiotic classes since the late 80s. We've begun to rely on antibiotics for routine healthcare, so it's a serious risk, and is something that will threaten our existence long before climate change, if we go on as we are.

This is where copper comes in with the potential to dramatically impact our modern health system; just by adding copper to intensive car units - such as the hand rails, bed rails and tables - scientific studies in America show that superbug rates were slashed by an astonishing 60%. It's incredible that something so simple and commonplace as copper could become a key weapon in our battle with superbugs. It is potentially a way provided by the laboratory of nature to reduce the number of bugs around us whether they are resistant to our medicines or not.

It's not just copper, either, alloys of copper with 60% of copper in them, which includes brass, and the Victorians used brass all over the place, especially for making doorknobs and handles. Phyllis J. Kuhn, a bacteriologist - and an unsung scientific hero - originally recognised this in the 70s-80s, but it has taken 40 years or so to get real trials done on hospitals.

It's incredible how an idea can get going and spread - while in other areas people have known about this all the time. The wine-growers in France use a Bordeaux mix, which is a copper-rich solution to kill fungus on their vines. The Egyptians knew about copper and its ability to heal wounds. It is evidence that sometimes the solutions we seek are right there, staring us in the face.

We must also be careful in thinking solution we find are a complete solution, without do the science thoroughly. There are also studies coming out that suggest a lifetime of too much copper in our diets may be contributing to Alzheimer's disease. However, opinion is divided, with other studies suggesting copper may actually protect the brain. More research is necessary, and there was no true consensus on the role of copper we ingest as a mineral in Alzheimer's disease.

In a related example, our size also governs how we cope in a fall. How big we are will matter whether we survive or not. Sometimes having some extra subcutaneous fat, especially around our hips may cushion a fall, whereas being very think might make us prone to broken bones. Many doctors would advise however that the ideal shape to be would be to have that fat as muscle, and a healthy lifestyle with regular exercise - including some short-intense cardio and weight training - with a correct diet is the way to go.

It raises the important point that our health is not just about health protection from bacteria, it also includes non-communicable diseases like lifestyle ones. Size is an issue because we over-consume food, abuse of alcohol particularly in our young, especially our women, and lack of exercise. Exercise is seen as many as a magic bullet. In this way we are creating the optimum size for the proportions we have been given, for the best chance of survival.

However this size ration can change if we are falling from a large height - when objects smaller with much the same body plan - have a greater chance of surviving the fall, then their larger counterparts. Due to our generic size, we're not going to survive large falls, and yet small animals with a very high surface to volume ratio (like cockroaches) can. This shoes another issue about surface to volume ration, which is not just the pressure on the ground on point of impact, it's also about the air resistance. For something as small as a cockroach the air resistance is appreciable, and that's to do with how much area you present. Thus the terminal velocity of a cockroach will be much lower than ours.

People always say what's your height, or weight, but your surface to volume ration is more important for your survival. But it isn't just living things where the surface to volume ration changes. Inanimate objects depending on their size will crash and break, or even explode. Such dangers have been the cause of a lot of explosions in flour mills where people have lost their lives - any place that creates powders that have a calorific value. The powder mixed with the air has energy trapped inside it that can be explosive.

Big data can be used to save lives

Size is important, and in today's electronic world we generate and capture incredible amounts of information. And if we know what to look for, we have the computing power to analyse it and make unexpected discoveries. In Toronto, Canada, big data is being used to help premature babies by predicting when they might fall ill, for example. If we could spot an infection before it became an illness, then it would buy valuable time, especially for prematurely born babies, whose immune systems are particularly weak. Even in the developed world, if a premature baby contracts one of the most serious forms of infection, they'll have a one in five chance of not making it through their first weeks of life.

Thanks to the huge amount of data generated by newborn babies, that can now happen. To any newborn baby, the world is a hostile place, but with this new science of informatics we have the potential to make it a safer one. Using all the data that is generated, by saving it and learning from it, with computing systems in place necessary to analyse the sheer volume of data, it is believed that more babies can be given a chance at life.

How it works is this: Premature baby wards generate constant streams of data, about heart rate, respiration and blood oxygen levels. A computer system can be created to scan all this data and look for extremely subtle changes in heart rate. For example, in one such system in Toronto the data revealed something that no doctor had seen before - that if a premature baby had a stable heart rate it was an advanced warning of a serious infection. Such a system in effect could help make a diagnosis up to a day before doctors see any visible signs of illness, and clinicians are excited by the prospect of being able to treat babies 24 hours earlier, leading to better outcomes.

We've obviously been measuring things and gathering information for a long time, but it's only just now become possible to do this, as the software we have now allows us to record that information in real time, process it as a stream of data and produce useful information that someone like a doctor can use in enough time to help save lives. We finally have the memory hardware in which to store all this data, we also have the computing speed to do it quickly.

We live in an ocean of data - smartphones, Twitter, Facebook, all of these things. We have sensors in every direction, we have cameras pointing all over the place, and we are collecting information all the time. We're just streaming data all around us, leaving a digital trail for anyoe who wishes to follow it. Leaving aside questions of privacy, having such data benefit people is a great usage of such information, and no one could wish for an environment where you would want advances more than caring for babies in need.

This shows that big data isn't just the fact that we can source lots of materials, but that we can do something with them to benefit humankind. And the data we collect increases immensely. Since computing began to up to 2003 we created something like 500 million gigabytes - we amassed that number every two days in 2011, and every ten minutes in 2013. Information is very easy to collect now, and its size matters just as much as what we can now do with it. Big data can be very abstract, but the studies with premature babies in Toronto show that we can put a human face to it.

Imputing big data into technology extremely fast so that it can keep track of the world around it in real time might even help push the concept of the driverless car into reality, with some believing that by 2045, 75% of all cars could be self-driving. Although this is one prediction that might not happen, it does offer up another example of how using big data will help to change the way we use our world.

This is just the tip of why science says size matters. There are plenty of illustrations of the different scales in our universe, from the smallest quantum foam to the largest limits of the observable universe. But what about the unobservable. Many who believe in the power of the spirit and the mind believe in things unquantifiable - as yet - by science, but what about science itself? Does it believe in things it cannot see?

When it comes to the size of the universe - it appears so. On the subject of size in the universe - why it is the the size it is - is a puzzle for scientists simply because we can't see enough matter in the universe, to explain why it's holding together the way it is. Some believe it should have expanded more, and some reckon there is a lot more matter that we simply can't see - dark matter. But does it actually exist, or is it just the figment of a physicist's overwrought imagination?

Why is it so elusive? The key to observing anything in nature, is to watch it interacting with our world and that is something dark matter rarely does. The exact nature of dark matter is one of the top mysteries in science. From the most powerful telescopes in space, to the Large Hadron Collider, scientists all over the world are looking for this cosmic dark horse, but so far this elusive material has refused to show itself. Here we are in the 21st Century, and we still don't know what the majority of the universe is made of, but should we care?

It's all great from a curiosity point of view to hunt down dark matter, but what does it mean in the bigger picture of things? Well, its believe that our universe as a whole would be fundamentally different if it wasn't for the presence of dark matter, and we probably wouldn't exist, either. This isn't just about weird stuff out there in the universe; if dark matter is real - and the evidence is growing that it is - then it's passing through us right now, we just can't see it.

It's a really strange counter-intuitive idea, and that's what scientists say is infuriating about dark matter. It will pass completely thorough the Earth with very little probability of it interacting, so if it exists, it is almost unobservable. It is supposed to far outnumber conventional matter, we can only guess it's there from its influence on how it holds the universe together. And how can you even catch a particle that can slip through our world without even touching it?

There are many dark matter experiments going on throughout the world, with atom matter locked away in detectors built deep in the crust of the Earth - away from cosmic rays in as a pure environment as possible - waiting for the moment a particle of dark matter will interact with the atoms and give off a release of energy in a resulting flash of light, which is directly measurable. These detectors are waiting to record one such dark matter event with their light sensors - the moment a particle of dark matter collides with our world - and when that happens, it will open a new chapter to a much bigger story.

All the stuff that we see and take for granted is thought to be like a tiny detail on top of what the universe is really made of. We could be on the edge of a real revolution is conventional human thinking. This is not a new idea to those investigating the evolution of the universe, but we are looking for stuff that is invisible to us, and which we can only see its effects. The measurements that initially made humans suspect that there was more to the universe that we can see, was during studies of how galaxies spin around - as they needed many more times the space to rotate at the speed they were.

Size, does indeed, point out the mysteries we need to focus on. By looking out at the biggest things in the universe like galaxies, we can see where dark matter must be, but we can't see what it is. The underground detectors are trying to bridge that gap, to get at what it actually is, and the only way to do that is to look right in at the smallest scales. The chances of dark matter hitting, or interacting, with normal matter, is so small and rare, that we have to put it into a pure environment and wait for a long time. Then we get a chance to see what it is, because the way it interacts will tell us about itself.

People can understandably be very cynical about this level of physics, because according to these theories we're trying to observe the unobservable. It kind of puts physics into the realm of the spiritualists, but in a very real sense science has observed that the universe hasn't expanded as much as it should, yet is this enough of a reason to believe in dark matter? We've also observed that on another scale, we're expanding for reasons we don't know, and again have put forward the theory of dark energy as the reason. It adds up to us calling 93% of the universe dark.

Scientists argue that all the different measurements are pointing to the same thing, but it's like the analogy of blind men looking at an elephant. Each ones feels a different part of the elephant (a truck, ear or leg) and thinks it must be different to the others, and the search for dark matter is proceeding a little in this way. There is something there, but no one knows exactly what it is. It is hoped the final picture will be built with a collection from all experiments together to unlock one mystery and lead us to many more.

Discoveries abound in our world. From the very, very small, to the very, very huge - the University of Central Lancashire discovered this year what they believe to be the largest object in the universe. It's a giant cluster of galaxies, and its four billion light years across. And back again to the very, very small, where scientists have made an animation with very small molecules - in effect making atoms that star in their very own movie. It would take about 1,000 of the frames of the film laid side by side to span a single human hair. It is a showpiece for efforts trying to design next-generation data storage solutions based on single atoms.

What is so amazing about nanotechnology - which is essentially what this is - is that for a long time we could see what was going on in that "world" but we couldn't manipulate it. Even more interesting, is that to be able to manipulate atoms in such a way the conditions had to be as close to absolute zero as possible, as atoms only stay still in freezing conditions, because most atoms are moving constantly. If this technology ever came to be a reality for storage use, it would hit the limit of Moore's Law, that says our storage capacity doubles every 18 months or so.

Although to reach that atomic scale of storage will be an obvious limit, its believed that once reached, it will be the point where your smartphone could store every movie ever made. Arguably it is not just the storage of our lives, but - as we have seen throughout this article - where the science of our life could lead us that is indeed fascinating.

A lot of it has to do with size, but as we close, one thing holds true throughout it all - from the tiniest atom to the largest galaxies the cosmos holds - it is the interconnecting passion that holds us steady on our path. It is the one true focus that - when used as a GPS system in our lives - will guide us to not only safer shores, but more beautiful ones.

All we have read shows us that size does matter in all things, but the only real question for us really should be to ask first and foremost - how big is our love, for it is love that shines the way to a better future.

Yours in love,