June 2006 – Page 4 – David Bradley

Coal powered cars

It would be ironic, to say the least, if fossil fuels, such as coal turned out to be the saving grace in the future hydrogen economy, in which this purportedly clean fuel powers our cars and homes through the essentially Victorian technology of fuel cells.

Nevertheless researchers at Pennsylvania State Universityhave demonstrated that coal might be the most convenient storage medium for this explosively elemental gas. More importantly, the production and storage of hydrogen take place in a two-in-one process, according these latest results due to appear in Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS, to its fiends)

Angela Lueking and colleagues at Penn State have used low-cost anthracite, milled, or ground, into fine particles in the presence of cyclohexene, to produce a molecular structure that can trap and hold hydrogen.

The process offers a novel option for the distributed production of hydrogen, for supplying a power source to fuel-cell powered cars, as it would involve production in a small-scale facility located near end-users, rather than in distant central complexes.

SOURCE: JACS, DOI: 10.1021/ja0604818. Look this paper up using our DOI tool or add the tool to your website to allow visitors to track papers through the paper’s unique ID code.

Coffee and alcohol

The morning after the night before often gets a kickstart with a steaming mug of Java, but drinking coffee could be helping those who partake of alcoholic beverages more than was previously thought, at least according to research published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine. According to researchers in California, drinking coffee may have a preventative effect on developing the alcoholic liver disease cirrhosis.

Cirrhosis progressively destroys healthy liver tissue and replaces it with scar tissue. Viruses such as hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis, but long-term, heavy alcohol use is the most common cause of the disease in developed countries. Most drinkers, however, never develop cirrhosis, thankfully, because other factors such as genetics, diet and nutrition, smoking and the interaction of alcohol with other toxins that damage the liver are involved.

Arthur Klatsky and colleagues at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, in Oakland, have analyzed data from 125,580 individuals (55,247 men and 70,333 women) who did not report liver disease when they had baseline examinations, between 1978 and 1985. Participants filled out a questionnaire to provide information about how much alcohol, coffee and tea they drank per day during the past year. Some of the individuals also had their blood tested for levels of certain liver enzymes; the enzymes are released into the bloodstream when the liver is diseased or damaged.

By the end of 2001, 330 participants had been diagnosed with cirrhosis, including 199 with alcoholic cirrhosis. For each cup of coffee they drank per day, participants were 22 percent less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis.

The researchers don’t suggest that physicians prescribe coffee to prevent alcoholic cirrhosis, coffee brings its own problems, after all, including detrimental effects on the cardiovascular system. “Even if coffee is protective, the primary approach to reduction of alcoholic cirrhosis is avoidance or cessation of heavy alcohol drinking,” says Klatsky. I assume that the research did not investigate whether decaf has a beneficial effect. Either way, it’s a pointless morning-after drink anyway, you’re probably better off going for green tea, or a herbal infusion as an alternative to the hair of the dog, just make sure you use it to wash down a nice fry up of sausage, eggs, and tomatoes.

Erotic brain

What a surprise! Medical researchers have discovered that women’s brains light up when they look at erotic images just as men’s brains do.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 colour slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses.

What they found may seem like a “no brainer.” When study volunteers viewed erotic pictures, their brains produced electrical responses that were stronger than those elicited by other material that was viewed, no matter how pleasant or disturbing the other material may have been. This difference in brainwave response emerged very quickly, suggesting that different neural circuits may be involved in the processing of erotic images.

“That surprised us,” says WUSTL’s Andrey Anokhin, “We believed both pleasant and disturbing images would evoke a rapid response, but erotic scenes always elicited the strongest response.”

As subjects looked at the slides, electrodes on their scalps measured changes in the brain’s electrical activity called event-related potentials (ERPs). The researchers learned that regardless of a picture’s content, the brain acts very quickly to classify the visual image. The ERPs begin firing in the brain’s cortex long before a person is conscious of whether they are seeing a picture that is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

Previous research has suggested that men are more stimulated by erotic images than women. Anokhin says the fact that the women’s brains in this study exhibited such a quick response to erotic pictures suggests that, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, our brains are programmed to preferentially respond to erotic material.

“Usually men subjectively rate erotic material much higher than women,” he says. “So based on those data we would expect lower responses in women, but that was not the case. Women have responses as strong as those seen in men.”

So when one sees statistics on net usage that reveal porn accounts for 80% of traffic, it might not just be males who are using up all that bandwidth? Really? Well, I never!

What’s most intriguing though, is that when one searches for the original news release on this item from WUSTL, the cached page in Google shows the context for the phrase “erotic images elicit” as being:

“Attention grabber Erotic images elicit strong response from brain … When study…”

Well, WUSTL press officer, it certainly grabbed my attention. The news release could have done with a few more pictures though!

Chemical Solutions from Damien Hirst

Brit artist Damien Hirst (no relation to Geoff Hurst, of course) is well-known for his fascination with chemistry, his company is called Science, he opened a gallery cafe called Pharmacy, and he’s just completed an interview with the Royal Society of Chemistry in its latest effort to make the subject trendy among young people.

When asked what could be done to change perceptions of chemistry or to render the subject glamorous like forensic science or medicine. This is what he had to say…

“Hard to say but perhaps it’s something to do with how the subject is perceived by the kids through the media – I mean look at the medical and forensic shows that are on TV, however far from the truth. The fact that chemistry isn’t seen as an exciting subject at school, that it involves equations and other disciplines, etc. is also probably something to do with it. How is it taught ? What are its applications? In reality Chemistry is one of the sciences that shows us the building blocks of life. If that’s not exciting enough then what is?”

Having presented such a cogent argument, I really think he should stick to pickling cows.

Anyway, what’s the RSC doing separating forensic science from chemistry, as if 99% of what those guys do isn’t based on either straight analytical or bio-based work?

By the way, in case you’re wondering why the RSC is “interviewing” Mr Hirst, it’s because his latest artistic creation, a bronze statue depicting a pregnant woman, is in the forecourt of the organisation’s London office.

Dell Inspiration

dell-inspiron A couple of weeks ago my Dell laptop started stopping, as it were. At first, I thought it was an issue with the CPU overheating, which I thought I’d addressed with a BIOS update, but a CPU temperature monitoring program showed things were apparently fine in that department. After it happened three or four times, I realised that it was happening when I moved in my chair, or when I leant on the wrist-rest part of the base, or adjusted the screen angle, or inserted a PCMCIA card, or opened the DVD drawer…eventually it wouldn’t even POST, let alone BOOT, so basically I was stuck with a dead Dell.

I suspected a loose connection or perhaps just a chunk of conductive desktop detritus stuck somewhere in the laptop’s guts. Whatever it was I really didn’t have the tools to fix it myself and thought, why should I? The machine is only a couple of years old, and although it’s outside the standard warranty period, I’d have expected at least twice as long as being a reasonable lifetime. So, I got in touch with the manufacturer – Dell – via their press office – and suggested as much.

With the fastest turnaround of any tech support department I’ve ever dealt with, my machine was picked up by DHL on Tuesday last thing, posted to Dell, and booted back to me today (Friday) in plenty of time for the World Cup! Apparently, faulty components included ASSY, PWA, PLN, 5150, DOOR, MINI-PCI, NBK, ABCS, ASSY, HTSNK, W/FAN, THRMGRS, 5150, KYBD, ENG, UK, 86, S-PTG, ABCS…etc etc I recognise the word DOOR in their and KYBD must mean keyboard, and some of the other things seem to relate to different bits of plastic and fans and cuh, but I haven’t really the time nor the inclination to look up any of the others, so we’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, from a quick test, it seems to be working fine. So, I’d like to extend a thank you to John L at Dell in Ireland who handled my complaint so graciously and expeditiously.

Until the fault appeared, the machine had always been fast and reliable, and when a problem arose, the company dealt with it efficiently and professionally. Now, I can get back up to speed…

Google Pharmacy Phake

You know how keen Google is to expand it’s breadth? Well, how about this, it seems it’s swapped the oo in it’s logo for some ooh-la-la, in the shape of two blue diamonds stamped Pfizer.

Before you rush to get stocked up on tamiflu and viagra, however, check out The Register article on Google Pharmacy which reveals it to be a front for a fake drugs seller. How do they know it’s a fake seller, well they claim to be able to provide generic versions of dozens of drugs that are not yet off-patent, that’s how.

The spam that arrived advertising Google Pharmacy stated: “We’ve just launched a pharmaceutical interfaces for Google, as well as several new features for the people buying pills and using pharmaceutical interfaces”. Poor grammar aside, you just can rest assured that it was definitely not the real thing right from the start. Or, could you?

According to an unrelated article on WebProNews, the sponsored Googlads that appear when you search for the likes of “Vicodin” or “Oxycontin” are not necessarily from fully legitimate companies either. Some of these sites, which appear above and to the side of search results in the popular search engine, are selling direct drugs that usually require a doctor’s prescription.

Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, is according to WebProNews, talking with Google about a third-party service that will help them differentiate between rogue and legitimate pharmacies.

It will be interesting to see whether that works out, or whether the pharma spammers and scammers will simply find a way around it.

Band Aid Fuel Cell

Sciencebase has got lots of science fair project ideas as well as fun science experiments to do at home, but one that we haven’t got, admittedly, is how to make a fuel cell out of a couple of large bandaids, a piece of stainless steel bug screen and a few bits of plastic (oh, and you’ll need a pair of cotton gloves). There was a how to on Makezine.com, but it’s showing up as not found. If anyone finds a valid link, please let me know.

Sperm and eggs

Adam Bjork and Scott Pitnick of Syracuse University have found a sexy paradox. But, don’t get too excited, it’s fruit fly sex we’re talking here and specifically sperm and egg production in Drosophila.

Previous work in the Pitnick lab showed that after sex, sperm competition takes place within the females (who mate with several males) can lead to decreased sperm quantities by favouring the production of larger sperm. In other words, never mind the quantity feel the length mode comes into play, because female fruit flies have evolved so that longer sperm have a greater chance of successfully fertilizing eggs. Fertilization failure is obviously important as individuals who fail are essentially an evolutionary dead end.

This leads to the ‘big sperm paradox’ because the idea that postcopulatory sexual selection could favour the evolution of giant sperm clashes with traditional sexual selection theory, which predicts that the most successful sperm competitors will be the males that produce many, tiny sperm. As males evolve to produce larger – and therefore fewer – sperm, eggs become less rare, and sexual selection should weaken, according to theory. The term ‘isogamy’ refers to the state at which males and females have equal investment per gamete (sex cell) when producing sperm and eggs. In a truly isogamous population, each sperm and each egg would have a chance to participate in a successful fertilization. In such a population, sexual selection would be extremely weak, as there would be little or no competition among males to fertilize eggs.

To investigate this apparent paradox between empirical data and traditional theory, Bjork and Pitnick set out to measure the strength of sexual selection in four Drosophila species of varying sperm length, ranging from the anisogamous D. melanogaster (in which a male produces 30 sperm in the time it takes a female to make one egg) to the nearly isogamous D. bifurca (where just six sperm are produced per egg). They found that, contrary to theoretical predictions, the level of competition among males did not decrease; the strength of sexual selection remained high as sperm size increased. Their results show that, once females evolve a preference for longer sperm, intense sperm competition can actually reverse the trajectory of sperm evolution so that the most successful males are those with the most female-like strategy of producing very few, large gametes.’The sperm of Drosophila bifurca is 20 times longer than the male that produces it,’ says Bjork.

‘To put that into perspective, if humans made sperm that long and you took a six-foot man and stood him on the goal line of a football field, his sperm would stretch out to the 40-yard line.’

While it is fascinating, the evolution of giant sperm is puzzling. Says Bjork: ‘Until recently, it was widely believed that selection generated by sperm competition favors males that manufacture the smallest gametes possible in order to maximize sperm number. In essence, sperm competition is attributed with the evolutionary maintenance of anisogamy. I became interested in understanding whether the very act of sexual selection, by definition, can limit its own ability to act.’

The next step is to investigate the details of the effects of sperm length evolution on the intensity of sexual selection.

Details were published in Nature under the banner “Intensity of sexual selection along the anisogamy—isogamy continuum”, which doesn’t give much away unless you’re in the field. The paper’s DOI reference number is 10.1038/nature04683. Use our DOI lookup tool to go straight to it (simply cut and paste the DOI and click DOI lookup in the right-hand toolbox) and don’t forget you can grab the simple script to add this and our other toolboxes to your website.

Round solution to a salty problem

Have you ever been frustrated by salt in humid weather? The little cubic grains get all sticky and clump together and won’t leap on to your seaside fish and chips no matter how hard you shake the salt shaker. The simple solution is simply to not use salt, after all they repeatedly tell us too much salt is bad for us.

Indian chemists worried that was too simple a solution of have come up with a way to make round salt that could be a boon to consumers and industry. According to an ACS news release, round salt represents a dream come true for researchers who have strived for years to smooth the shape of common salt.

Table salt (sodium chloride) adopts a cubic close-packed crystal structure and so the crystals themselves normally exist as cubes. Pushpito Ghosh, P. Dastidar and colleagues at the Central Salt & Marine Chemicals Research Institute in Bhavnagarwere not happy with this and have devised a method for making large quantities of salt in an almost spherical, bead-like, form. They describe how in the July 5 issue of Crystal Growth & Design. They use glycine to modify the crystal growht process and effectively force the sodium chloride crystals to grow at different rates on different crystal faces, so they end up with a different symmetry.

In this novel round form, rhombic dodecahedral, to be strict, salt can flow much more freely, without caking, that claggy effect of humid summer weather, which is great news for fish and chip fans. A bigger market may be industries that store and use sodium chloride by the tonne to make everything from bulk chemicals to dyes, fertilizers, paper and pharmaceuticals. For these companies, non-caking salt would flow more freely on the production line.

Free flowing or not, it doesn’t round off the problem of whether or not salt is good or bad for you.

Satisfying fructose

Fructose is a sugar, it’s the sugar associated with fruit and honey in fact and has in the past been given the green light as being a more beneficial source of sugar than the processed sucrose we get in kilo bags from the supermarkets. However, research earlier this year suggested that fructose could be harmful to health because it makes you feel less sated by a meal containing high levels of this sugar than you would otherwise feel. Since fructose is added to lots of processed foods, this, the research suggests, might be yet another factor underpinning the nation’s health and leading to weight problems and metabolic syndrome.

I hadn’t seen this particular piece of research until a Sciencebase reader alerted me to it today, but it got me thinking. If fructose makes you feel less “full” than you actually are then this finding perhaps conflicts with the urgings of health authorities that we should eat more fruit and use natural sugars, such as honey. It would also explain how my wife can eat half a dozen pieces of fruit at a sitting without ever feeling full…

The original research was published in Nature Clinical Practice: Nephrology and a news write-up on the subject can be found here