POTUS Syria Promise and Amazon Castigation. Stephen Hawking Service. Eggs and Oral Neutrophils.

So far the economic impact of brexit has been relatively unnoticed by us, the average people on the street. We have adjusted to the fall in the value of the pound and some manufacturing firms are talking about a rise in orders. There are still counters to this, with the Guardian reporting that 11% of manufacturers have lost contracts due to Brexit, 58% saying that their prices will be increasing to offset the additional brexit costs. 46% intend to pass the costs on to customers.

President Trump is keeping himself in the news with two controversial pronouncements: He is hinting at a US withdrawal from Syria, in flat contradiction to defence experts who expect such a move to create a vacuum that can only benefit Iran, the Russians and potentially ISIS.  His second blast is at Amazon, with the claim that it it is causing the US postal service to lose $1.50 on average for every parcel it delivers for the internet giant. Yet the Postal Regulatory Commission, overseeing the industry, states the US Postal Service makes a profit from its contract with the company. It is the letter side of the postal service chich is losing money. Most commentators are pointing to the fact that Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, which writes articles unpalatable to the President's world view.

Avoided Cambridge today as the city streets were expected to be filled with people paying their respects to Professor Stephen Hawking on his way to the private funeral service at St Mary's, the university church. His ashes are to be interred next to Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, the first scientist to be buried there for 80 years. he joins Charles Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford and Joseph John Thomson, the latter both atomic physics pioneers. I can't help thinking that it would be fitting if his ashes had a last trip on one of the new pioneering space rockets before ending up in his final resting place as he had always wanted to travel into space. His real immortality will be in the papers and ideas that he contributed to theoretical physics and cosmology.

I successfully completed the third day of chicken sitting for a neighboring friend and spent an afternoon fascinated by what I saw under the microscope. The two are unconnected but the chicken sitting has already been rewarded with eggs. Appropriately, there was a David Attenborough narrated program on eggs on TV tonight. The two differently shaped eggs shown above left me confused about what they might say about the contrasting evolutionary directions the respective chickens who laid themwere going in. Meanwhile, Jane was in an artistic mood, planning her next project.

My intention was to get some decent pictures of mouth epithelial cells using phase contrast on the microscope, hopefully with some bacteria on them. Phase contrast is an optical method that makes transparent biological specimens more contrasty under the microscope. I mounted by cheek scrape in sputum under a coverslip and began to search for cheek cells suitable for photography. I was however distracted by the large number of active neutrophil white blood cells that I hadn't expected. Whilst the epithelial cells that slough off the inner cheek are immobile and probably dead, the neutrophils showed a very active cytoplasm and some movement.

The mouth is obviously an entry point into the body and naturally a host to a wide range of bacteria, most of them beneficial - they keep other disease-causing bacteria at bay. The human body keeps these bacteria under control by sending out neutrophils, the most abundant type of white blood cell to eat the bacteria. I had read somewhere in the distant past that the mouth therefore has one of the highest concentrations of these disease fighting cells in our body. There is still very little known about the relationship of the neutrophils and their importance in the oral cavity. I tried taking two videos and a number of pictures, which now need to be processed.