Software Samaritans: in praise of science-orientated freeware

In the midst of the gift-giving season it seems an appropriate time to look at a source of presents that keeps on giving, A.K.A. the World Wide Web. In addition to all the scientific information that can be gleaned at comparatively little effort, there is also an immense amount of fantastic freeware that is available to non-professionals. I have found that these can be broken down into three distinctive types of application:

1. Simulated experiments such as microscope simulators or virtual chemistry laboratories
2. Distributed computing projects, which are applications that do not require any user effort other than downloading and installation
3. Aplications with specific purposes to actively aid amateur science practice, such as planetariums

I have to admit to not having any experience with the first category, but examples such as a molecular biology application Gene Designer 2.0, The Virtual Microscope and Virtual (chemistry) Labs - all suitable for school and university students - are astonishing in their ability to extend conventional textbook and lecture-based learning. All I can say is - I wish I had access to such software when I was at school!

I have a bit more experience with distributed computing projects, having been a volunteer on Seti@home - back in its first year (1999-2000). Only the second large-scale project of this type, the grandiose aim is to discover radio signals broadcast by alien civilisations. All the user has to do is download and install the application, which then runs when the computer is idling as per a glorified screensaver. In this particular case, the Seti@home signal-processing software is able to search for extra-terrestrial transmissions that might be only 10% the strength of earlier surveys, using data collected by the giant Arecibo radio telescope. The application has proved to be remarkably successful, having been downloaded to over 3 million personal computers.

But if this project is a bit blue sky for you, there are plenty of others with more down-to-earth objectives. For example, Folding@home and Rosetta@home are fantastic opportunities for all of us non-professionals to help molecular biologists studying protein folding in order to develop cures for diseases such as HIV, Alzheimer's, and Huntington's. So far, the research has generated over a hundred research papers, but the complexity of the subject means there's plenty of room for additional computers to get involved for many years to come.

The third class of software supplies the user with the same sort of functionality as commercially-available applications, but in many cases surpasses them in terms of capabilities and quantity of data. These tend to congregate into a few classes or themes, suitable for usage amongst amateurs of variable capability and commitment.

One popular category is planetarium applications such as Stellarium, which has plenty of features for city-bound (i.e. restricted vision) enthusiasts such as myself. It even includes a night vision mode, red-tinted so as to keep the observer's eye adjusted to the darkness, although unfortunately my telescope camera software doesn't have an equivalent and as I cannot reduce the laptop screen brightness until after I've achieved focus, I'm left stumbling and squinting until my eyes readjust. Stellarium seems reasonably accurate with regards to stars and planets but I've never managed to check if the satellite trajectories confirm to reality. 

For anyone lucky enough to live in a non-light polluted environment  there are more sophisticated free applications, such as Cartes du Ciel-SkyChart which allows you to create printable charts as well as remotely control telescope drives. If you are really an expert at the telescope then C2A (Computer Aided Astronomy) is the bee's knees in planetarium software, even able to simulate natural light pollution during the lunar cycle and allowing you to create your own object catalogues!

As an aside, what gets me with these applications is how they calculate the positioning of celestial objects from any location on Earth, at any time, in any direction, and at varied focal lengths. After all, there is a well-known issue with calculating the gravitational interactions of more than two celestial objects known as the n-body problem. So how do the more sophisticated planetarium applications work out positioning for small objects such as asteroids? I used to have enough issues writing basic gravity and momentum effects in ActionScript when building games in Adobe Flash!  All I can say is that these programmers appear like mathematics geniuses compared to someone of my limited ability.

Generating Jupiter: from raw planetary camera frame to final processed image

Back to the astronomy freeware. Once I've aligned my telescope courtesy of Stellarium and recorded either video or a sequence of stills using the QHY5v planetary camera (wonder if they'll give me any freebies for plugging their hardware?) I need to intensively process the raw material to bring out the details. For this image processing I use another free application called RegiStax which again astonishes me as to the genius of the programmers, not to mention their generosity. Being a regular user of some extremely complex (and expensive) commercial image editing applications since the late 1990s, I undertook a little research into how such software actually works. All I can say is that unless you are interested in Perlin noise functions (seeded random number generators), stochastic patterns, Gaussian distribution and Smallest Univalue Segment Assimilating Nucleus (SUSAN) algorithms - nice! - you might just want to accept that these applications are built by programmers who, as with the planetarium software builders mentioned above, have advanced mathematics skills beyond the comprehension of most of us.

So in case you weren't aware, the World Wide Web provides far more to the amateur scientist or student than just a virtual encyclopaedia: thanks to the freeware Samaritans you can now do everything from finding the position of millions of astronomical objects to examining electron microscope images of lunar dust. It’s like having Christmas every day of the year!

Dark skies vs. light pollution: trying to keep in touch with the cosmos

A few minutes after witnessing the recent solar eclipse - reaching an 87% maximum here in Auckland, New Zealand - I was astonished to overhear the account director of an international advertising agency disparagingly state that all the people on the streets he had just seen staring at the sky would probably have been eaten by dinosaurs a few thousand years ago. I was so shocked by his lack of wonder (and this from the representative of an agency that claims to appeal to the heart as much as to head) that I couldn't even bring myself to ask if he was a creationist, considering his evolutionary timescale differed by approximately sixty-five million years from the scientifically accepted one. As much as the impression he gave of being a follower of the Sarah Palin school of history, what really got to me was his lack of wonder: have many first-worlders become so surrounded by electronic gizmos that they are immune to the marvels of nature?

One of the great natural sights anyone can enjoy is the night sky, but with more than 50% of the human race now living in conurbations we are rapidly cutting ourselves off from view that helped inspire our earliest mythologies. Could an argument be made that as our ability to observe the rest of creation declines, so does our ability to awe? Although my home city of Auckland is less light polluted than my last place of residence, London, a brief visit to rural Queensland, Australia earlier in the year reminded me just how much us city dwellers are missing: for example, Mars really is an angry 'Bringer of War' red whilst the Milky Way does seem like a river cutting through the sky. I also recall that once during a holiday in Cyprus I saw an extremely bright, eerie glow radiating from behind hills near our rural villa, only for the full moon to eventually rise as the source of the light.

Although Auckland isn't bad by the standards of some cities - it's dark enough in my back garden for even a half full (First Quarter) moon to cast strong shadows - the view directly west, currently home to interesting sights such as Mars, Mercury and Venus, is pretty much ruined by the stadium lights used in the local shopping centre car park, which remain on until very late. In addition, there is enough general light pollution from buildings and to a lesser extent street lamps that even a modicum of cloud is enough to reflect a diffuse glow and severely impact astronomical 'seeing'.

The crater Copernicus, as seen from Auckland via a Skywatcher 130P reflector using a QHY5V camera.

With numerous forms of contamination now known to be causing environmental degradation it's hard to see where support can be garnered for this most poetic of forms of man-made pollution. After all, astronomers are hardly an endangered species and with professionals able to use the likes of the Very Large Telescope in Chile and plans afoot for the European Extremely Large Telescope to be operational by 2022 things are looking up for the discipline (an old astronomical pun, if you weren't aware). But as for us city-bound amateurs, we're stuck with poor viewing conditions thanks to all the artificial lighting, never mind the turbulence caused by heat radiating from asphalt and the like.

Research suggests that the USA alone loses billions of dollars per year on night lighting commercial and corporate premises. So why are shops lit up outside of opening hours: to advertise the company logo and wares for any passing punter, just on the off-chance it triggers a bell in the consumer's head? And what about office buildings? Since movement detectors have been installed in most office tower blocks I've worked in, why do companies still feel the need to have dozens of floors lit up like a Christmas tree? The USA currently imports over 20% of its energy so wouldn't make sense to for the largest consumers to cut down on usage rather than become increasingly beholden to other nations? The lifespan of most fossil fuels deposits is now understood and makes for grim reading, especially with regards to oil. European energy reserves for example are known to be extremely low, so how can non-practical nocturnal lighting be anything other than ridiculous?

And then there are street lights, which in most designs seem to radiate light in all directions. There are models that aim their light where it's needed, i.e. downwards, but the vast majority just aim their beam everywhere. I'm assuming that any street light that channels its light downwards in a tighter beam can utilise lower power bulbs than other styles but even with the obvious eventual power savings I can't see much chance of upgrades en masse; there are an estimated 35 million street lamps in the USA alone, so conversion wouldn't be an overnight process. What about tasking local authorities with switching to more efficient models as and when individual lamps require replacements? You would have thought any opportunity to save energy would be a basic tenet of legislation by now. Or is there a naïve belief that science will come up with a miracle solution in our darkest hour? Personally I'm not sure that nuclear fusion is going to be ready any time soon!

So apart from annoying amateur astronomers there are several strong arguments in favour of reduced nocturnal light pollution. A biological rather than economical one has been suggested by several studies investigating the effects strong nocturnal light levels may have on human health, such as reduced melatonin levels. In addition, various types of wildlife from hatching amphibians to migrating birds are affected by artificial night lighting, and as we are becoming increasingly aware, one small change in the ecosystem can rapidly cause a chain reaction up the food pyramid. As if these problems weren't enough, another issue that seems to have garnered minimal media attention is that artificial lighting at night may break down the nitrate radical NO3, which would otherwise help to neutralise other, smog-contributing, nitrogen oxides. All in all, there seems to be very few areas of concern to humanity that are not affected by nocturnal light pollution. By comparison, the inconvenience to us amateur astronomers seems like small fry!

However, it is not entirely doom and gloom. The International Dark-sky Association (IDA) was formed in 1988 to fight light pollution at a grass roots level and has put together information packs as well as organising the International Dark Sky Places programme. There are to date nearly twenty parks and reserves around the world that have qualified for this status, the majority to be found in Canada and the USA. The largest however is the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve on South Island, New Zealand, so I intend to get down there at some point in the next few years...

Another campaign that relies upon public participation is the GLOBE at Night programme, which has collated nocturnal light pollution levels using data supplied by volunteers from 115 countries. It has a family-friendly website with items in up to 14 languages, so for any parents looking to involve their children in an important global experiment, this is the place to go. It even includes instructions on making that essential tool for all night-time observations, a red light, so that you can view documentation without ruining your night vision sensitivity. Incidentally, I know the problems of ruined night vision all too well, since although the superb planetarium freeware I use has a night mode, my telescope camera software does not; I suppose I'll just have to find somewhere that sells sheets of red gel to tape over the laptop screen.

It would appear that the ever-increasing difficulty of viewing at first hand the stars, planets, nebulae and everything else that makes the observable universe is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems caused by too much artificial lighting at night. But thanks to the likes of the IDA and GLOBE at Night programmes there is now an opportunity for anyone to get involved, both to promote conservation of energy and our fragile ecosystem whilst preserving something of the wonders that previous generations took for granted. As the physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe (that's the book with all the tricky stuff about Calabi-Yau spaces) puts it: "I have long thought that anyone who does not...gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe. And as the astounding vastness of the universe becomes obscured, there is a throwback to a vision of a universe that essentially amounts to earth, or one's country, or state or city. Perspective becomes myopic. But a clear night sky...allows anyone to soar in mind and imagination to the farthest reaches of an enormous universe in which we are but a speck. And there is nothing more exhilarating and humbling than that."

If that's not a call to action, I don’t know what is: come on Brian Cox, please get the ball rolling!

From geek to guru: can professional scientists be successful expositors (and maintain careers in both fields)?

The recent BBC TV series Orbit: Earth's Extraordinary Journey gave me food for thought: although presenter Helen Czerski is a professional physicist she was burdened with a co-presenter who has no formal connection with science, namely Kate Humble. You have to ask: why was Humble needed at all? I'll grant that there could have been a logistics issue, namely getting all the locations filmed in the right season within one year, but if that was the case why not use another scientist, perhaps from a different discipline? Were the producers afraid a brace of scientists would put the public off the series?

The old days of senior figures pontificating as if in a university lecture theatre are long gone, with blackboard diagrams and scruffy hair replaced by presenters who are keen to prove their non-geek status via participation in what essentially amount to danger sports in the name of illustrating examples. Okay, so the old style could be very dry and hardly likely to be inspirational to the non-converted, but did Orbit really need a non-scientist when Helen Czerski (who is hardly new to television presenting) can deliver to camera whilst skydiving? In addition, there are some female presenters, a prominent British example being Alice Roberts, who have been allowed to solely present several excellent series, albeit involving science and humanities crossovers (and why not?)

But going back to Kate Humble, some TV presenters seems to cover such a range of subject matter that it makes you wonder if they are just hired faces with no real interest (and/or knowledge) in what they are espousing: “just read the cue cards convincingly, please!” Richard Hammond - presenter of light entertainment show Top Gear and the (literally) explosive Brainiac: Science Abuse has flirted with more in-depth material in Richard Hammond's Journey To The Centre Of The Planet, Richard Hammond's Journey To The Bottom Of The Ocean and Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds. Note the inclusion of his name in the titles – just in case you weren't aware who he is. Indeed, his Top Gear co-presenter James May seems to be genre-hopping in a similar vein, including James May's Big Ideas, James May's Things You Need to Know, James May on the Moon and James May at the Edge of Space amongst others, again providing a hint as to who is fronting the programmes. Could it be that public opinion of scientists is poor enough - part geek, part Dr Strangelove - to force producers to employ non-scientist presenters with a well-established TV image, even if that image largely consists of racing cars?



Having said that, science professionals aren't infallible communicators: Sir David Attenborough, a natural sciences graduate and fossil collector since childhood, made an astonishing howler in his otherwise excellent BBC documentary First Life. During an episode that ironically included Richard 'Mr Trilobite' Fortey himself, Sir David described these organisms as being so named due to their head/body/tail configuration. In fact, the group's name stems somewhat obviously from tri-lobes, being the central and lateral lobes in their body plan. It was an astounding slip up and gave me food for thought as to whether anyone on these series ever double checks the factual content, just to make sure it wasn't copied off the back of a cereal packet.

Another possible reason for using non-science presenters is that in order to make a programme memorable, producers aim to differentiate their expositors as much as possible. I've already discussed the merits of two of the world's best known scientists, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, and the unique attributes they bring to their programmes, even if in Dawkins' case this revolves around his attitude to anyone who has an interest in any form of unproven belief. I wonder if he extends his disapprobation to string theorists?

What is interesting is that whereas the previous generation of popular science expositors achieved fame through their theories and eventually bestselling popularisations, the current crop, of whom Helen Czerski is an example, have become well-known directly through television appearances. That's not to say that the majority of people who have heard of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have read The Selfish Gene or A Brief History of Time. After all, the former was first published in 1976 and achieved renown in academic circles long before the public knew of Dawkins. Some estimates suggest as little as 1% of the ten million or so buyers of the latter have actually read it in its entirety and in fact there has been something of a small industry in reader's companions, not to mention Hawking's own A Briefer History of Time, intended to convey in easier-to-digest form some of the more difficult elements of the original book. In addition, the US newspaper Investors Business Daily published an article in 2009 implying they thought Hawking was an American! So can you define fame solely of being able to identify a face with a name?

In the case of Richard Dawkins it could be argued that he has a remit as a professional science communicator, or at least had from 1995 to 2008, due to his position during this time as the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. What about other scientists who have achieved some degree of recognition outside of their fields of study thanks to effective science communication? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has appeared in over fifty documentaries and counting and has written several bestselling popular science books , whilst if you want a sound bite on dinosaurs Dale Russell is your palaeontologist. But it's difficult to think of any one scientist capable of inspiring the public as much as Carl Sagan post- Cosmos. Sagan though was the antithesis of the shy and retiring scientist stereotype and faced peer accusations of deliberately cultivating fame (and of course, fortune) to the extent of jumping on scientific bandwagons solely in order to gain popularity. As a result, at the height of his popularity and with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book behind him, Sagan failed to gain entry to the US National Academy of Sciences. It could be argued that no-one has taken his place because they don't want their scientific achievements belittled or ignored by the senior science establishment: much better to claim they are a scientist with a sideline in presenting, rather than a communicator with a science background. So in this celebrity-obsessed age, is it better to be a scientific shrinking violet?

At this point you might have noticed that I've missed out Brian Cox (or Professor Brian Cox as it states on the cover of his books, just in case you thought he was an ex-keyboard player who had somehow managed to wangle his way into CERN.) If anyone could wish to be Sagan's heir - and admits to Sagan as a key inspiration - then surely Cox is that scientist. With a recent guest appearance as himself on Dr Who and an action hero-like credibility, his TV series having featured him flying in a vintage supersonic Lightening jet and quad biking across the desert, Cox is an informal, seemingly non-authoritative version of Sagan. A key question is will he become an egotistical prima donna and find himself divorced from the Large Hadron Collider in return for lucrative TV and tie-in book deals?

Of course, you can't have science without communication. After all, what's the opposite of popular science: unpopular science? The alternative to professionals enthusing about their subject is to have a mouth-for-hire, however well presented; delineating material they neither understand nor care about. And considering the power that non-thinking celebrities appear to wield, it's vital that science gets the best communicators it can, recruited from within its own discipline. The alternative can clearly be seen by last years' celebrity suggestion that oceans are salty due to whale sperm. Aargh!

Moulds, mildew and mushrooms: living cheek by jowl with fungi

There is a form of life that probably exists in every house, office and workplace on the planet (operating theatres and clinical laboratories largely excepted) that is so ubiquitous that it goes chiefly unnoticed. The organisms are stationary yet spread rapidly, are composed of numerous species - some of which include common foodstuffs - and are neither animal nor plant. In other words they belong to the third great kingdom of macroscopic life: fungi. But what are these poor relations of the other two groups, seen as both friend and foe?

Having moved last year from a one hundred and thirty year old, centrally-heated and double-glazed terrace house in the UK to a single-glazed, largely unheated detached house less than a quarter that age in New Zealand, I've been able to conduct a comparative domestic mycology experiment. Without sounding  too much like a mould-and-spores collector out of a P.G. Wodehouse story, the subject has proved interesting and reasonably conclusive: a family of four moving to an annual climate on average four degrees warmer but with twice the rainfall has not substantially changed the amount or placement of mould in the home; if anything, it has slightly decreased. But then the amount of bathing, laundry and pans on the hob hasn't changed, so perhaps it's not too surprising. The more humid climate has been tempered by having more windows and doors to open, not to mention being able to dry more of the laundry outside. Mind you, one big plus of the move has been not having to use electric dehumidifiers or salt crystal moisture traps, so a few degrees warmth seems to be making a difference after all.

There appears to be a wide range of dubious stories, old wives' tales and assorted urban myths regarding fungi, no doubt being due to the lack of knowledge: after all, if you ask most people about the kingdom they will probably think of edible mushrooms followed by poisonous toadstools. Yet of the postulated 1.5 million species of fungi, only about 70,000 have so far been described. They are fundamentally closer to animals than they are to plants, but as they live off dead organic matter (and some inorganic substances too), thriving in darkness as unlike plants they do not photosynthesise, their reputation is more than a little sinister. The fact they will grow on just about any damp surface, hence the kitchen and bathroom mould populations, reinforces the opinion of them as being unwelcome visitors. So just how bad are they?

Firstly, fungi play a vital role in the nitrogen cycle, supplying nutrients to the roots of vegetation. The familiar fruiting bodies are, as Richard Dawkins describes them, pretty much the tip of iceberg compared to the enormous network of fungal material under the soil. Even so, they are given short shrift in popular natural history and science books: for example, they only warrant five pages in Richard Fortey's Life: An Unauthorised Biography, whilst Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything spends much of its four pages on the subject concerned with the lack of knowledge about the number of species. Of my five Stephen Jay Gould volumes totalling over two thousand pages, there are just several, short paragraphs. And at least one of my books even refers to fungi as a simple form of plant life! Yet we rely on fungi for so many of our staple foodstuffs; it's just that they are so well hidden we don't consider them if they're not labelled as mushrooms.  But if you eat leavened bread, yoghurt, cheese or soy sauce, or drink beer or wine, fungi such as yeast will have been involved somewhere along the line. On another tack, fungi are party to yet another knife in the coffin of human uniqueness, since both ants and termites cultivate fungi: so much for Man the Farmer.

As this point I could start listing their uses in health cures, from traditional Chinese medicine to Penicillin, but my intention has been to look at fungi in the home. Anyone who has seen the fantastic BBC television series Planet Earth might recall the parasitical attack of the genus Cordyceps upon insects, but our much larger species is far from immune to attack. Minor ailments include Athlete's Foot and Ringworm whilst more serious conditions such as Candidemia, arising from the common Candida yeast, can be life- threatening . The spores are so small that there is no way to prevent them entering buildings, with commonly found species including Cladosporium, Aspergillus, and our old friend Penicillium.

Once they have a presence, moulds and mildew are almost impossible to eradicate. They are extremely resilient, with the poison in Amanita species such as the death cap failing to be destroyed by heat. An increasingly well-known example is the toxin of the cereal-infecting ergot, capable of surviving the bread-making process, even the baking. Indeed, ergot has seemingly become a major star of the fungi world, being used in pharmaceuticals at the same time as being nominated the culprit behind many an historic riddle, from the Salem witch trials to the abandonment of the Marie Celeste. Again, lack of knowledge of much of the fungal world means just about anything can be claimed with only dubious evidence to support it.

A rogue's gallery of household fungi
Although we are vulnerable to many forms of fungus, an at least equally wide range attack our buildings. Whether the material is plaster, timber or fabrics, moulds and mildew can rapidly spread across most surfaces containing even a hint of dampness, often smelt before they are seen. At the very least, occupants of a heavily infested property can suffer allergies, sinus problems and breathing problems. As an asthmatic I should perhaps be more concerned, but other than keeping windows and doors open as much as possible there doesn't seem much that can be done to counter these diminutive foes.  As it is, vinegar is a favourite weapon, particularly on shower curtains and the children's plastic bath toys. Even so, constant vigilance is the watchword, as can be seen by the assorted examples from around the house above. For any mycophobes wondering how large fungi can get indoors, I once worked on a feature film shot in a dilapidated Edwardian hotel in central London about to be demolished which had fungal growths on the top floor (saturated with damp thanks to holes in the roof) which were the size of dinner plates.

So whether you've played with puffballs or like to dine on truffles, remember there's no escape: fungi are a fundamental element of our homes, our diet, and if we're unlucky, us too. Seemingly humble they may be, but even in our age of advanced technology, there's just no escape...

Ancestral claims: why has there been comparatively little research into human origins?

It has been said that we live in a golden age of dinosaur discoveries: from Liaoning Province in China to the Dakota Badlands, new species are being named on an almost monthly basis. But if there is a plethora of dinosaur palaeontologists why has there seemingly been so few scientists studying the origin of Homo sapiens? Surely deciphering the ancestry of mankind is one of the great challenges?

The image of hominins has certainly evolved over the past thirty years, even the naming changing in scientific circles (from the broader term hominid), although as the title of the 2003 BBC series' Walking With Cavemen showed, popular perception has been slow to adopt new research. As a child, I had an early 1970s plastic model kit of a Neanderthal Man. I seem to recall it bore more than a passing resemblance to the Morlocks from the 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, a far cry from the individuals portrayed in Walking With Cavemen and other, more recent, series. Yet this idea of a shambling, zombie-like creature is still to some extent prevalent. Why should this be, when there is now evidence for Neanderthal ritual and art? Are we simply afraid of finding yet more nails in the coffin of human uniqueness (apologies for the rusty metaphor)?

There are still clear elements of taboo to the subject: the humbling  notion of humans being but a 'monkey shaved' was also felt by early evolutionists, with even natural selection co-founder Alfred Russel Wallace believing humanity the product of divine fiat. Perhaps a sense of embarrassment (try watching zoo visitors as they observe apes) combined with Western religious thought has prevented the discipline becoming popular in the way the love of all things dinosaur has skyrocketed since the 1970s.

Then again, it still seems that people misunderstand evolution via natural selection, considering progress as via ladders rather than differentiating bushes. The 2004 discovery of yet another new hominin species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, led the Christian Science Monitor to describe it as that hoary old misnomer the 'missing link'. This is despite three decades of popularising by the likes of Dawkins, Fortey, Jay Gould, etal, to dispel the notion. You only have to read archaeologist (note: not palaeontologist) Mark Roberts’ account of the seemingly shoestring Homo heidelbergensis excavations at Boxgrove in England to realise that hominin research has been attracting about one per cent of the news (and a zillionth of the funds) directed towards cutting-edge particle physics.

A primary cause for the dearth of public knowledge can be put down to the actual lack of direct fossil evidence. Although Neanderthal remains were the first actually recognised as belonging to a human ancestor, it took several decades after the initial 1829 discovery before the identification was scientifically confirmed. Into the Twentieth Century the lack of finds allowed such embarrassments as the poor-quality Piltdown fake to be taken at face value. It is easy to see at least one key reason why this should be: human ancestry carries so much emotional baggage that it took over forty years before British scientists saw the obvious, instead of following the patriotism and jingoism inspired by the finds.

As it is, the history of hominin palaeontology has been riddled with contention, serendipity, unfortunate accidents and amateur bungling. If anyone wants to disprove the myth of science as a sterile, laboratory-conditioned activity, this sphere provides key evidence par excellence (good to get a rhythm going). From Eugene Dubois hiding his Java Man (Homo erectus) remains for several decades early in the Twentieth Century to the disappearance of Peking Man (also Homo erectus) fossils during the Second World War - not to mention the grinding up of yet more erectus bones for Chinese traditional medicine - the fate of finds is enough to make a dedicated specialist weep.

In addition, the fact that humans and their ancestors primarily evolved in what are today remote African locations with limited infrastructure can only exacerbate the situation. The work can be tedious, physically arduous and rewards few and far between. Yet fossil remains are the backbone of the discipline (almost a pun there, if you really look for it). After all, an increase in the number of finds can also lead to a paradigm shift in understanding: in the last few years it has been possible to undermine the opinion given on the BBC documentary The making of Walking with Dinosaurs, first broadcast back in 2000, that we would never know the colour of any dinosaur, courtesy of feathered Chinese theropod fossils (try saying that three times fast).

However, the last few decades has seen an improvement in the number of finds as funding has been allocated and professional enthusiasm increased. The problem has been that rather than solidifying the story of our ancestral line the number of species has multiplied without aiding the overall picture; there are still plenty of dashed lines on the human family tree. This indeterminacy has meant that a consensus is hard to find. If you examine any two charts of human ancestry, the chances are that they won’t agree. In the face of limited evidence it seems relatively easy for palaeoanthropologists to promote their own theories as to which species are our direct ancestors. Human nature being what it is, the favoured species usually happen to be those discovered by the said promoter. Such behaviour led to a thirty-year rift between two of the key players, Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson, partially over the number of branches on the direct ancestral tree. If anyone thinks the days of feuding scientists as long past (consider for example the Nineteenth Century American dinosaur pioneers Cope and Marsh) this quarrel ought to set the record straight.

One area of research that has undoubtedly given a boost to the understanding of human origins is the ability to retrieve and read ancient DNA. That’s not to say that it has yet produced much in the way of definitive evidence, but it undoubtedly widens the knowledge that can be gained from a paucity of finds. A recent report suggested that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals did not after all interbreed but share a similar genome via common ancestry. This is a reversal of a previous report that in turn countered earlier genetic evidence...and so on.

The relatively recent demise of the Neanderthals has provoked some interesting theories that show how science can reflect the concerns of contemporary society, namely that the violent aspect our species may have been directly responsible. There is currently no firm evidence for deliberate genocide, with other likely culprits ranging from inability to adjust to climate change to a less flexible neural architecture (specifically, missing out on the 'Great Leap Forward' via imaginative cogitation). Recent texts have attempted to downplay innate human aggression but writers closer in time to the world wars and to the heyday of Freudianism, especially Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart and American author Robert Ardrey, had a major influence on the subject with their promotion of the 'killer ape' theory. From 1960 onwards the first serious, sustained research on wild chimpanzees by Jane Goodall inadvertently reinforced the notion of mankind as a predominantly violent species. Given such notions, it is perhaps little wonder that funding has been lacking.

The new century has so far seen something of an improvement, with a large increase in the number of popular books and television programmes reflecting and in turn further developing public interest. The controversy surrounding the nature of the Homo floresiensis finds of 2003 has proved fortuitous, with general news media at long last paying serious attention. The ball may have been started rolling by the Chalcolithic ice mummy Otzi, who was discovered in the Alps in 1991. A young upstart at a mere 5,300 years old, the incredible preservation of the man, his clothing and tools have helped bridge the gap in how we relate to our prehistoric ancestors.

So times they are a-changing. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project is a sustained, well-funded effort to examine the past 700,000 years of evidence in the United Kingdom using a plethora of cross-discipline techniques in addition to conventional archaeology and palaeontology. The use of advanced dating methods such as electron spin resonance and the ability to analyse ancient DNA suggest that even without new finds, hominin research in the near future will generate some surprises. All I can say is that it's about time, too!