Month: September 2006

How to avoid spam, whatever your email address

I’m almost sweltering in the heat of a late burst of good weather here in southern England but staying cool because I finally implemented the neatest trick to keep all my email inboxes virtually spam free (thanks for nudging me in the right direction on this, Colin)

Colin (who runs the Scoophost system through which sciscoop.com is hosted) suggested that rather than relying on spam filters that wait until you’ve downloaded your email before putting them in the trashcan, a much more effective approach to spam is to re-route all your email through Google Mail and let it take care of the spam. Set your Gmail account to allow pop3 downloads and add this account to your email program and then you get all your legitimate email much faster without having to wait for spam to download alongside it.

The spam messages, by the way, simply accumulate in the spam box on your Gmail account. A quick once a week scan allows you to spot any false positives, but the rest get automatically deleted every 30 days.

It’s a simple solution and one that has cut my spam overload from several hundred a day on a dozen email accounts, to just half a dozen so far this week. Thanks again Colin.

If you also have SpamPal running the Bayesian plugin then that catches any of the remaining detritus and filters it to your local spam folder, leaving your inbox almost pristine.

I’m going to miss those messages offering me a bigger, longer, firmer, slimmer, faster, slower, shorter, tigher, younger, bits. Not!

Recent Volcanic Eruptions

UPDATE APRIL 2009: If you’re after news on the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull, or Eyjafjöll, which is currently belching out masses of ash into the atmosphere and grounding planes across Northern Europe, check out our report on SciScoop.

erupting volcanoesYou can find a regularly updated list of recent volcano eruptions here.

Given the number of Sciencebase visitors looking for information on recent volcano eruptions and currently erupting volcanoes, it seemed sensible to set up a page that would provide the latest information on that very subject. By syndicating the latest announcements and alerts on recent eruptions from the University of North Dakota website (Volcano World), Sciencebase provides a quick route to the information you need in this explosive area.

Volcano World is a collaborative higher education, K-12, and public outreach project of the North Dakota and Oregon Space Grant Consortia administered by the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. Thanks to them for making their updates available as a newsfeed for syndication.

We also have information about the 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster.

Metabolic Typing Body Chemistry and Diet

Of all the millions, if not billions, of web searches being carried out across the net every day, there are approximately 54 looking for this quite spectacular string of words: the metabolic typing diet customize your diet to your own unique body chemistry

It was the word chemistry, that brought it to near the top of a recent keywords trawl I was carrying out to help find new topics to offer visitors to the Chemspy site.

Turns out to be a book. I should’ve guessed, why else would so many people search on such a specific string of words. You can buy it here.

The book’s blurb explains the gist of author, William Linz Wolcott’s diet theory: “People are unique in more ways than we can see. Stomachs and other internal organs come in many different shapes and sizes. Digestive juices, too, can vary dramatically from one person to another…it stands to reason that different foods have very different effects on different people.”

Wolcott believes that tailoring your diet to your body’s particular chemistry – metabolic typing – will improve digestion, circulation, immunity, energy, and mood. To determine your type, he has you take a 65-question test (the questions range from nose moisture to how you feel about potatoes), then place yourself in one of three categories: protein type, carbo type, or mixed type.

Sounds like this will have great potential for those who really cannot bring themselves to let go of the remote control, get up off the sofa and do some exercise. Once they realise it doesn’t actually work for them (usually takes about two weeks for that to happen), this tome will be find its slot on the book shelf alongside Atkins, Cabbage, and F…

Bacteria build nano catalysts

Bacteria could be the key to improving metal catalysts for the chemical industry, according to research in Germany. Scientists from the Forschungszentrum Rossendorf in Dresden have exploited the survival skills of bacteria that live in uranium mining waste to make tiny clusters of the precious metal palladium. These tiny bullets, just a few billionths of a millimetre across, are much better catalysts than normal palladium, which is used in speeding up chemical reactions and in the catalytic converters of cars.

The bacterium, Bacillus sphaericus JG-A12 has a protective protein layer that allows it to survive in the extreme environment of a uranium mining waste pile. This protein layer comprises a grid of nanoscopic pockets of identical size that can trap toxic metal ions and prevent them from harming the bacterium by converting them into tiny clumps of insoluble metal.

Full story…

Scanning vegetative patients

Last week, Cambridge and Belgian researchers reported that they could observe almost identical brain activity in healthy volunteers as a patient purportedly in the persistent vegetative state following emergence from a coma (the patient was originally in a car crash in July 2005). The implications of this functional MRI work are that some (but by no means all) PVS patients may have consciousness to some degree despite their outwardly appearing inanimate.

It is incredibly tragic to imagine that there might be PVS patients who do have some consciousness but cannot move or communicate with the outside world. Functional MRI may in the long-term lead to a way to communicate with such patients.

That said, there is a long way to go before fMRI or any other technique can provide us with a full understanding of the persistent vegetative state and some researchers are cautious of extrapolating the Cambridge findings too far. Indeed, if you read my report about the research in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.com, you can see quite clearly that the fMRI scan of the control volunteer and the patient are superficially similar – activity is in the same region, after all – but the level of activity appears to be markedly less prominent in the patient. This could have important implications for what is meant by such a patient having consciousness as we know it.

Much more research is now needed to help us redefine the PVS. This is perhaps a matter of some urgency given the current definition of PVS states that these patients cannot experience pain and suffering as these are attributes of consciousness.

Chemistry Central Journal launched

A new open access outlet for chemists’ peer reviewed research was launched today. Chemistry Central Journal. Publisher BMC says, the journal is the first international open access journal covering all of chemistry and will publish its first issue early in 2007.

Bryan Vickery, speaking today at the journal’s launch being held during the ACS meeting, said, ‘I am delighted by the number of noted chemists and scientists who have agreed to join the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal from the outset.” Among them is 1996 Nobel laureate Robert Curl. “I think open access journals are a great idea and am delighted to join this venture as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board,” he said.

Vickery continues, “Open communication of research results in physics and biomedicine has evolved rapidly over the last few years. Many believe Chemistry has lagged behind, with access to chemistry-related journals and databases still predominantly limited to subscribers only.”

Vickery explains that Chemistry Central Journal will offer a home for research in areas where there has previously been no open access journal available. “Chemistry Central Journal aims to change all that, by offering an open access publishing option to scientists worldwide,” Vickery says, “The journal will cover all areas of chemistry, and will be broken down into sections.”

Blue LEDs are too bright

Blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are really bright. Too bright for theorists to handle, in fact. Why? Because, the materials from which they are made usually have impurities that should make their glow much duller. Now, an international team of researchers has discovered why this is the case.

Commercially viable blue LEDs are based on the wide band gap semiconductor gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride and were invented by Shuji Nakamura then at the Nichia Corporation in 1993. By the late 1990s, they were widely available and now sit in an important technological niche in the development of large full-colour displays, LEDs for highly energy-efficient solid-state lighting to replace incandescent bulbs, and 400 nanometre laser diodes for optical data storage in high definition DVDs. However, the commonly used indium gallium nitride can only be manufactured at relatively low quality with high levels of impurities. Theoretically at least these impurities should quench the light the device produces, but it does not.

Full story out now, under the Intute Spotlight

Sex and phthalates

pvc dildos and phthalatesIt seems even the sex industry is not immune to chemophobia, according to a recent Greenpeace Netherlands announcement, users of PVC sex toys destined for orificial use should not. Use them, that is.

According to Greenpeace, these plastic devices can contain “extremely high concentrations of phthalate plasticisers which allegedly pose a risk to human health and the environment”. The organisation wants the European Union to ban the use of phthalates in sex toys as it already has done with phthalates previously used in the manufacturer of PVC childrens’ toys.

The Daily Telegraph reports how, “The environmental group said it was shocked to find that seven of the eight sex toys it had tested contained between 24 and 51 per cent of phthalates.”

Their actual report shows that individual phthalates in a range of products are at at trace amounts. They do report the presence of 490 g per kilo of di-isodecyl phthalate (DIDP) in one device as determined by GC/MS.

There is so much disinformation about phthalates on the web, that it is almost impossible to track down the actual levels of additives used as primary plasticisers in PVC products. I’d assume the percentage needs to be relatively high to make the devices we’re currently discussing “plastic” enough, but 51% seems very high regardless.

Moreover, where are the tests revealing how much of this “shocking” percentage might actually leach out of such a device during normal usage? And, even if there is a degree of leaching, does that correlate with actual risk to health. These questions are yet to be answered for any devices whether sex toys, children’s toys or medical devices.

Any thoughts?

Dark side of matter

“There really is dark matter out there,” says Dennis Zaritsky of the University of Arizona talking of the first evidence for this elusive cosmological substance, “Now we just need to figure out what it is.”

It was side-on views of two merging galaxy clusters made with state-of-the-art optical and X-ray telescopes that allowed Zaritsky and his colleagues to make this startling discovery. Dark matter is matter that does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly. Astronomers have assumed since the 1930s that most of the Universe must be composed of dark matter because of the way galaxies move through space. Our present understanding of gravity implies that the Universe must contain five times as much dark matter as normal matter.

Read the full story in my Spotlight physical sciences column on Intute.

Lethal bird flu virus

Although H5N1, the avian influenza virus, darling of a scare-mongering media is lethal. No doubt about it. It’s just that at this point in human history, this virus is not in a human transmissable form, thankfully.

Now, a new study of patients who became infected with H5N1 in Vietnam has revealed clues as to why the virus is so lethal.

Menno de Jong and colleagues compared viral levels and effects on the immune system in one group of patients infected with H5N1 and another group infected with two types of human flu virus. The patients with H5N1 infection had much greater viral load in the throat than the patients infected with the human virus; markers of viral load were highest in the H5N1 patients who died. Virus could also frequently be detected in the blood of H5N1 patients but only in those who died.

The authors found that H5N1 virus at high levels triggers the release of inflammatory cytokines and that levels of these compounds is associated with a higher viral load. Fatal H5N1 infection was also associated with a loss of white blood cells in the peripheral blood.

The authors posit that H5N1 replicates much faster than human flu virus and that the high levels of the virus trigger an overwhelming inflammatory response that contributes to lung dysfunction and eventually death. They report their results in Nature Medicine today.

An important point that should be made is that the lower virulence of human flu is the mechanism by which this virus has remained endemic in humans and infects millions year in year out. If it were highly virulent, like H5N1, it would kill too many hosts to be persistent year in year out. As a dead host cannot infect another in the same way as a living one in direct contact. It is not necessarily true that H5N1 will mutate immediately into such a persistent viral sub-strain. The likelihood is that it will mutate into a fast-infecting form initially, but such a form will remove hosts from the ecosystem too quickly to remain endemic in the way that common human flu is. Viz, we don’t see the 1918 flu today because it died out.