Research

Marine biologist aims to preserve Seychelles reef

The Coral Reef Research Unit (CRRU) in the Department of Biological Sciences has been awarded a grant to explore unknown coral reefs around an un-explored island in the Seychelles.

The research, funded by the EarthWatch Institute and Mitsubishi, will start in July 2006.

Dr David Smith, Director of the CRRU, recently returned from the annual EarthWatch PI conference where he presented a paper about the research: 'Scientists from all over the world met to discuss their research and the ways to maximise public awareness of the current threats to global biodiversity. It was an excellent opportunity to discuss global issues and this grant represents a very exciting and challenging opportunity for the CRRU.'

Dr David Smith

The research will focus on the previously unexplored reefs off the coast of Silhouette Island in the northeast Seychelles group. Dr Smith said: 'Despite being located in the biggest protected area of the Seychelles, no one has ever surveyed the marine environment and everything we find will be new. Due to the outer Seychelles bank, Silhouette Island was spared by the Asian tsunami and a previous El Nino event that occurred during 1998 which killed up to 90 per cent of the coral reefs within the region. We therefore think it possible that these reefs could act as a biological reserve and seed other areas of the Seychelles.'

With tourism the main industry in the Seychelles, development of the island is a real threat. It will be up to Dr Smith, in collaboration with Drs Richard Barnes, David Barnes and Justin Gerlach, all of the University of Cambridge, to collect data and demonstrate to the Seychelles government the regional importance of the area and the potential consequences of development for the whole Seychelles archipelago.

Dr Smith will fly to the island in the New Year to prepare for the arrival of the first research team in July 2006.

Report reveals ethnic divides

Are young people in Britain today breaking through the class barrier? Yes, according to new research published by Sociology's Lucinda Platt, if they are born to working class families from Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese communities.

Her report, entitled Migration and Social Mobility: The Life Chances of Britain's Minority Ethnic Communities, shows that the educational achievements of these particular groups means that they are now obtaining managerial and professional jobs at a faster rate than their white counterparts.

However Dr Platt's study, based on surveys tracing children's progress over 30 years, found young people from the Pakistani community were the exception. Although their parents were heavily concentrated in the working class, they showed less upward mobility than children from white manual workers' families which could not be easily explained by differences in family background or education.

Overall the research, which analysed data from the Office of National Statistics Longitudinal Study on 140,000 children growing up between the 1960s and 1980s, showed that family background and class had an important influence on later employment. Children with parents in the managerial or professional classes were more likely to get a higher-status job, even after differences in educational achievement were taken into account.

Dr Platt said: 'This study shows that social class and privilege have retained their importance in assisting young people to access the educational opportunities that help them into higher status jobs. Britain is still a long way from being a 'meritocracy' where social class no longer plays a part in determining children's chances of well-paid careers.'

The report has been published by The Policy Press.

Do phones affect attention?

Seeking to bring clarity to the debate on mobile phone use, researchers from the Departments of Psychology and Electronic Systems Engineering have published the results of an investigation into the effects of mobiles on attention.

Arising from recent concerns over the physical effects of mobile phone use, the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme awarded an Essex team funding to investigate if radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by phones have a significant effect on attention performance. The multidisciplinary team, led by Professor Riccardo Russo of the Department of Psychology, draws on expertise in experimental psychology and electronic engineering.

Whilst some limited research has been conducted in the area of attention, these studies tested few people (usually less than 20 per group) so that no firm conclusions could be drawn. However, the Essex team claim their study is the first to test numbers sufficient to draw relatively firm conclusions about the impact of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields on human cognition.

168 participants were tested in a series of attentional tasks, such as vigilance, over two sessions. In one session they were exposed to the electromagnetic field emitted by mobile phones transmitting at about 900MHz, in a second session they were not. The study's findings, to be published in the New Year in Bioelectromagnetics, conclude that the radio frequencies emitted by mobile phones do not statistically affect ability in the performance tasks.

With the office of National Statistics reporting that over 75 per cent of adults in the UK own or have used a mobile, and with the increasingly pervasive growth of mobile technology in general, this contribution to the debate over the effects of these devices is both timely and specific.

An advance copy of the article is available to subscribers at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/110491748.

Also in the printed December edition of Wyvern:

• Sun rise at Essex
• Mast study seeks volunteers
• Bid to boost uptake of bowel cancer screening
• Colchester's medieval inhabitants revealed
• What future for British broadcasting?
• Computers understand emotion
• Marketing multi-nationals to the Japanese
• Bookshelf