Politicians are often accused of paying lip service to science. Researcher Jon Copley went behind the scenes of the UK parliament to examine the claim

快猫短视频s, Winston Churchill once opined, should be on tap but not on top. While that comment might set some teeth on edge, it acknowledges that scientific evidence is one of many considerations in policy and government, and does not necessarily have supremacy over other matters.

But science intersects many, if not all, problems tackled by policy-makers and governments. So how well served is the UK parliament by science in its role of scrutinising proposed legislation? And from my selfish perspective as a scientist, how well served is science by parliament? To find out, I spent a week in Westminster, as part of the .

This year, 30 scientists from academia and industry took part and were paired with 15 civil servants, 13 members of parliament (MPs) and two members of the House of Lords. I shadowed Conservative peer John Palmer, the , whose work includes chairing the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.

Science in the background

Those looking to cast doubt on the role of science in UK politics often point to the fact that . But there are arguably other important vocations just as under-represented among MPs. And when science is involved in debate, MPs have the support of briefings, summaries and answers to questions prepared by researchers in the .

Just as important is the second chamber of parliament. In the unelected Lords, which largely exists to scrutinise the work of the Commons, a different picture emerges of the intersection between science and politics. Few countries can count Nobel prize-winning scientists among its legislators, but there are several in the Lords, plus peers with backgrounds in the likes of geology, veterinary science, biomedicine and popular-science writing.

Furthermore, the long-standing tradition of the Lords in testing ideas and challenging arguments from authority feels familiar to a scientist.

While a party or parties with a Commons majority are where real political power lies, the Lords acts as a check, even if it can ultimately be overruled. There has only been one defeat of government legislation in the Commons since 2010, but 94 rejections of government bills by the Lords in that period, to force a rethink on desirability or details.

Both houses also have permanent science and technology committees, with testimony and input from experts. And science often features in ad hoc select committees whose topics of investigation cut across departments and issues, such as events in the .

So although scientist MPs are a rare breed, parliament is better served by science than I had realised, and the subject is perhaps as well served there as it deserves given the many disciplines that inform political decisions. Of course, the system is not perfect. But to paraphrase another quip from Churchill, while our democracy may be imperfect, it is still preferable to the alternatives that have been tried.

is an associate professor of marine ecology at the University of Southampton, UK

Measuring the bacterial biodiversity of soil is difficult because only a few species can be cultured in the lab, according to Jason Gans of Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, US. Fortunately, biologists can also estimate biodiversity using a technique called DNA reassociation. This involves chemically unzipping the two strands of all the bacterial DNA in a sample, mixing them up and seeing how long they take to join up again with matching partners.

If all the DNA strands were the same, they would find matching partners very quickly. But the more diverse the DNA strands, the longer this match-making takes, allowing researchers to estimate how many different species there are in the sample.

When this technique was applied to soils in the late 1990s, it suggested that a gram of dirt contained about 16,000 species. But this estimate contained a simplification that the populations of all the different species in the soil were roughly equal in size. So Gans and his colleagues have developed new equations to reanalyse the same DNA reassociation data but without this size assumption.

Their results reveal that there are a few very common species in soil but lots of rare species. 鈥淭here is a very large number of low abundance species,鈥� says Gans. So many rare species, in fact, that the estimate of bacterial biodiversity rises to one million species per gram of soil.

Sewage sludge

These rare species appear to be absent in soil contaminated with heavy metals, however. The team also reanalysed the DNA reassociation pattern of soil experimentally polluted with metal-rich sewage sludge. Gans suggests that the contamination may have killed 99% of the bacterial species.

But the consequences of losing so much bacterial biodiversity in polluted plots of land are unknown. 鈥淣ow that we have a way to measure it, the next thing is to correlate species diversity with how well plants grow,鈥� he says.

As the new calculations reveal far more bacterial species in soil than anyone realised, the next challenge is to identify those species and the roles that they play in ecosystems.

鈥淭hey might have some key functions that are known, or even unknown,鈥� says Ruth-Anne Sandaa of the University of Bergen in Norway, who measured the original DNA reassociation patterns used in Gans鈥� analysis.

Journal reference: Science (vol 309 p 1387)

Andrea Collins of Cardiff University in the UK and her colleagues looked at the 2004 soccer FA Cup final, held at Cardiff鈥檚 Millennium Stadium. They converted the energy and resources used on the day of the match into an ecological footprint 鈥� the hypothetical area of land required to support the use of those resources. Energy consumed, for example, was converted into the area of forest needed to soak up the carbon dioxide generated in its production, while food consumption was represented as the amount of farmland needed to make it. This method gave the match a footprint of 3051 hectares.

More than half the footprint came from transport. The 73,000 supporters collectively travelled nearly 42 million kilometres to reach the match. Fewer than half travelled by car, but car use generated 68 per cent of the transport footprint. If those fans had travelled by bus instead the footprint would have been 399 hectares smaller.

Food was the second-largest contributor, weighing in at 1381 hectares for the 36,500 snacks consumed. The researchers say this could easily be reduced: for example, substituting all the beef with chicken would have taken 428 hectares off the footprint.

The impact of waste disposal, at 146 hectares, was surprisingly low, says Collins. Recycling would have trimmed this by 39 hectares.

Collins argues that the footprint is a useful management tool to assess the effect of activities. 鈥淲e鈥檇 like to see organisations and policy makers look at the results and hopefully instigate measures to reduce the impact,鈥� she says.

鈥淚t鈥檚 in principle a very good idea,鈥� says environmental statistician and self-styled 鈥渟ceptical environmentalist鈥� Bjorn Lomborg of the University of Aarhus in Denmark. 鈥淏ut how do you translate energy used into an area?鈥� The size of the footprint depends on what assumptions you make. For example, calculating the land in terms of windmills to generate the energy rather than forest cover to soak up CO₂ would give a much smaller footprint.

Marine biologist Mary Ann Daher of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, US, and her colleagues used signals recorded by the US navy鈥檚 submarine-tracking hydrophones to trace the movements of whales in the north Pacific.

The partially declassified records show that a lone whale singing at around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean every autumn and winter since 1992. Its calls do not match those of any known species, although they are clearly those of a baleen whale, a group that includes blue, fin and humpback whales.

Blue whales typically call at frequencies between 15 and 20 hertz. They use some higher frequencies, but not 52 hertz, Daher says. Fin whales make pulsed sounds at around 20 hertz, while humpbacks sing at much higher frequencies. The tracks of the lone whale do not match the migration patterns of any other species, either.

Over the years the calls have deepened slightly, perhaps because the whale has aged, but its voice is still recognisable. Daher doubts that the whale belongs to a new species, although no similar call has been found anywhere else, despite careful monitoring.

Journal reference: Deep-Sea Research (vol 51, p 1889)

Marine biologists have definitively shown that the 鈥淐hilean Blob鈥� and other similar mysteries are simply the remains of whales.

In July 2003, a 13-tonne blob of amorphous tissue rolled ashore in Los Muermos, Chile. Local marine biologists could find no bones in it, prompting speculation that it might be the body of a new species of giant octopus.

Even the discovery of the unique dermal glands of the sperm whale in the blob could not dampen this popular hope.

But Sidney Pierce of the University of Southern Florida in Tampa and his colleagues have put the blob through further tests. As they now report in The Biological Bulletin (vol 206, p 125), electron microscopy has revealed a network of tough collagen fibres that are consistent with whale tissue. Also, although no cells remain in the blob, fragments of its DNA match that of a sperm whale.

By putting preserved samples through similar tests, the researchers have confirmed that the 鈥済iant octopus of St Augustine鈥� from 1896, the 1960 Tasmanian west coast monster, two Bermuda blobs from the 1990s and the 1996 Nantucket blob are also just the washed-up remains of whales.