Month: July 2006

Chemical panacea

Could researchers in Australia have developed a pharmaceutical panacea to beat all those herbal remedies offered in a multitude of spam emails and websites that claim to cure everything. They are working pre-clinical models of a new class of drug that could treat a range of problems from inflammation and cancer to eye and heart disease.

Certain types of skin cancers, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy are likely to be among the first uses for the drug, which has already shown efficacy in pre-clinical models.

“This may be a ‘one-size fits all’ therapy, because it targets a master regulator gene called c-Jun which appears to be involved in all of these diseases,” explains Levon Khachigian, of the Centre for Vascular Research (CVR), at the University of New South Wales. “c-Jun is an important disease-causing gene,” adds Khachigian. “It stands out because we don’t see much of it in normal tissue but it is highly expressed in diseased blood vessels, eyes, lungs, joints, and in the gut — in any number of areas involving inflammation and aggressive vascular growth.

The experimental drug they are testing goes by the enigmatic name of Dz13, and with equal enigma behaves like a secret agent finding its target, c-Jun, and killing it point blank. “It is a specific, pre-programmed ‘molecular assassin’,” says Khachigian.

He and colleagues report full details in Nature Biotechnology this month. The next step will be to test the drug in a small human trial on non-melanoma skin cancers. “If such a trial were successful, it would be a significant development given the high rates of skin cancer and because the main treatment currently is surgical excision, which can cause scarring,” said Khachigian.

A cooling hot drink

cup of tea

The current heatwave in England has had countless old wives, and a few elderly husbands, calling for a nice cup of tea to cool them down. And, when I say tea, I’m not talking none of that chilled variety that comes in peach and lemon and all sorts of other gawdy flavours, I mean a nice cup pored from a cosy-covered pot, with a splash of semi-skimmed milk and a couple of lumps of sugar (ten if you’re a builder or plumber, of course). So, what’s going on? Why drink a hot drink when it’s hot and you want to cool down.

Physically, it’s an illogical thing to do, Captain. Add something hot to a body at a lower temperature and the cooler body will absorb heat energy from that hot something and its temperature will rise, surely?

Physiologically, things might not be so clear-cut. Drink a hot drink, and yes, the temperature of your stomach’s contents will rise, but this will also cause a slight hastening of the heart, expanding blood vessels across the skin, and an increase in sweating as the brain switches on the various feedback-controlled temperature regulators.

It’s that word ‘feedback’ that provides a possible clue as to why a cup of hot tea might have gained its reputation among English old wives as a good coolant. Feedback loops always have a time delay. So, the instant burst of heat that comes from sipping on a nice cup of tea will inevitably bring you out in a bit of a sweat, raise your heart rate etc, but those compensatory measures take time to be reversed, possibly more time than it takes for the contents of your gut to reach ‘body temperature’ again. So, their cooling effect may just last a little longer than is actually needed to get you back to normal temperature and so you may end up a little cooler than when you started.

All that said, I don’t think our temperature feedback systems are that tardy. The real reason that old wives perceive a hot cup of tea to have a cooling effect is probably more to do with interrupting whatever activity it was that made them hot in the first place, partaking of the cup-of-tea creation ceremony, and sitting down in a darkened room with their feet up to drink it.

I could be wrong, and now that the storms are on their way this atypical English weather is likely to be replaced with the more usual wet and grey with which visitors become so familiar.

Now, where did I put those teabags…?

Full-text literature searching

A neat search engine string allows you to pull in the abstracts from a large section of the scientific literature based on a full text search. It’s analogous to checking only the “journals” box when using Elsevier’s Scirus.com but allows you to search across publications offered by American Physical Society, Cambridge University Press, Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Karger, Nature Publishing Group, Wiley, and many others.

You can give it a try on the full-text literature search page at ChemSpy.com

I’ll also be adding it to the Sciencebase search toolbox when I update those to take account of the imminent Intute launch.

Top 5 scientist blogs

technorati ranking

I suspect some scientists, like some science writers, you might say, have toooo much time on their hands. Nature’s Declan Butler trawled the Technorati blog directory for blogs written by scientists and found that of the 45 million or so blogs it lists at least five scientists’ blogs that make it into the top 3,500.

“There is little agreement about how to rank blogs,” Butler says, “no method is perfect.” He adds that given the huge number of blogs, there will no doubt be omissions. The exercise is, he says, best viewed as “a rough snapshot”. Nevertheless, the results demonstrate (somehow, the press release doesn’t say) that there has been a rapid increase in popularity of scientists’ blogs, and reveal several lessons for science bloggers hoping to get noticed.

I asked Butler about his motive for assessing science blogs in this way, “My idea was really just to get some idea of where science blogs stood in the blogosphere, and also draw attention to the issue of blogging in science,” he told me.

Anyway, here are the Top 5 Science Blogs according to Butler’s Technorati analysis:

179th Pharyngula http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula

1,647th The Panda’s Thumb http://www.pandasthumb.org

1,884th RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org

2,174th Cosmic Variance http://cosmicvariance.com

3,429th The Scientific Activist http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist

Intriguingly, at least two of those Top 5 science blogs is aimed at quashing the pseudoscience claptrap spouted by the extremists in the intelligent design, creationist and reactionary religious movements. All five of those discussed appear to provide a sensible view of various issues with which science is concerned and provide beacons that might see us out of the dark ages of the present anti-science stance many bloggers are taking today.

(Just for the record your very own sciencebase.com comes in at a rather respectable 852nd, although it was about 605th a couple of weeks ago, so not sure how valid their trackback algo really is, to be honest).

Chronic fatigue diagnosis

The cause of CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), post-viral fatigue syndrome (PVFS), is not yet known and its symptoms are broad, ranging from fatigue, pain, muscle weakness, and depression to digestive disturbances, immune system weakness, and breathing problems. Moreover, there is no simple diagnostic test for the disease and patients often rely on a sympathetic physician to recognise the problem, but who, nevertheless, does not necessarily have the tools to offer a definitive answer nor an effective treatment. An objective clinical diagnostic test would make understanding and treating this disease far easier. Japanes researchers have now used a type of infra-red spectroscopy to distinguish between plasma from CFS patients and healthy volunteers. They reckon a non-invasive test will be available soon.

More…

Smartening Raman

Raman spectroscopy can provide elegant views of even the most mixed of materials at the sub-microscopic scale, even picking out chemical bonds. And, because it is sensitive to the lightweight elements found in covalent bonds it can provide detailed information that is inaccessible to sophisticated X-ray techniques. However, Raman is yet to be widely adopted because it suffers from potentially debilitating resolution issues and takes too long for all but the most patient of laboratories.

Now. French researchers have found a way to create a map of the incident laser beam used in Raman spectroscopy which brings it up to speed and could make it a more accessible technique.

More in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.com

Playing tag to detect heart problems

New research using magnetic resonance imageing (MRI) is challenging conventional views regarding atherosclerosis and latent heart problems in patients that otherwise appear healthy.

By tagging different tissue prior to a scan, researchers can obtain a detailed view of the movement and function of those tissues. Now, by studying subjects in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) project, Joao Lima of the Department of Radiology, at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues there and in five other centres, have investigated whether an increase in the thickness of the carotid artery (so-called intima-media thickness, or IMT) can be related to reduced heart function. The MESA study is a prospective observational study including four ethnic groups and the participants have no clinical cardiovascular disease.

You can read the full story in the first July update of spectroscopyNOW.com

Chemical Crowding

Hexaferrocenylbenzene structure

Chemists have produced millions of organic and organometallic compounds, but only recently have they produced one of the most aesthetically pleasing theoretical molecules after decades of trying – hexaferrocenylbenzene. Peter Vollhardt of the University of California at Berkeley and colleagues have finally succeeded in synthesising this super-crowded organometallic complex. NMR spectroscopy revealed that despite the crowded nature of the molecule this dendritic structure has considerable flexibility and average symmetry at room temperature. The team’s success means this previously elusive structure can be investigated for its electronic, magnetic, optical and catalytic properties.

Read more from David Bradley in the July 1 update of spectroscopyNOW.com.