December 2006 – Page 4 – David Bradley

Changing face of XP

Running Windows XP, fancy a change of scene, then download the newly released Zune theme from Microsoft. To my eye, it’s a less juvenile colour scheme than the standard XP theme with its primary colours etc.

Zune theme

There’s a totally pointless video on the web showing you how to install it, but all you have to do is click that link, save and run the MSI file and then hit “Apply” as and when.

Of course, if you’re on Linux or Mac you probably couldn’t care less about the latest XP theme, but if you’re on XP and have people walking by your desk on a regular basis you could probably persuade some of them at least that you’ve got Vista already, without having to actually install it. Or maybe not.

Is the “old” XP them too garish? Have you installed the Zune theme? What do you think of it? Are the desktop and taskbar items as clear as they are in the original?

Catalyzing the hydrogen economy

In order to make biofuel production from biomass as efficient as possible it will be crucial to understand the underlying chemical mechanisms running the reactions. Researchers in Northern Ireland are using infra-red spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to get to the core of the problem.

Frederic Meunier of the CENTACAT research labs at Queen’s University Belfast and his colleagues like many other scientists expect hydrogen to be the currency of the hydrogen economy and that the mint will rely on effective and inexpensive catalysts to produce the gas from renewable resources, such as biomass. Meunier and his colleagues are investigating platinum and rhodium based catalysts used to line the hollows in porous alumina or cerium zirconate.

Get up to speed on the details in SpectroscopyNOW

Is the hydrogen economy going to solve our energy woes? What do you think?

Cholesterol drug withdrawal

According to the FierceBiotech pharma newsletter, Pfizer has been forced to halt development of its cholesterol drug Torcetrapib. The report says that the Data Safety Monitoring Board recommended the withdrawal of the drug from trials because of an “imbalance of mortality and cardiovascular events”.

I presume that’s management speak for “too many patients were having heart attacks and dying”.

The drug was set to become a Pfizer blockbuster, although I’d have hoped the marketing people would have come up with a snappier name before it went to market. “Based on all the evidence we have seen regarding Torcetrapib and in light of prior study results, we were very surprised by the information received from the DSMB,” the company stated. The DSMB has privileged access to the blind trials information so that it can make such decisions in the public and patient interest, but Pfizer claims the announcement was “totally unexpected and disappointing”.

The drug was set to replace Lipitor, a $12b a year blockbuster the patent on which is soon to expire. The FB newsletter says, that Pfizer “continue to invest in a wide range of pipeline opportunities across a diverse range of therapeutic areas.” Which, I presume, is management speak for “back to the drawing board”.

Apparently, just two days before this withdrawal, the company was enthusing about its benefits? Should we be policing drug trials even more stringently than we are now to prevent products getting so far before it is discovered there are serious issues with a particular trial?

Highly strung

Stradivarius violin Infrared and NMR spectroscopy have possibly revealed one of the great secrets of the violin makers Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu – they used chemical wood preservatives to help preserve their instruments and to improve the tonal quality. The discovery could help modern-day violin makers emulate more closely the properties of irreplaceable violins from the 18th Century and well as providing music conservationists with new insights on how to best preserve the antique instruments.

Joseph Nagyvary at Texas A&M University, in College Station, and colleagues, reveal in a brief communication to the journal Nature how the maple wood used by the celebrated craftsmen could have been chemically processed before the violin makers even began crafting the wood. The researchers have analysed in detail the organic matter from small samples of shavings retrieved from the interiors of five antique instruments during repairs.

Get the score here

How Not to do Cosmetic Surgery with WD-40

Ever had the urge to hit an aerosol hard with a sledgehammer, and then thought better of it?

This video will serve as a nice little warning to any budding vandals out there who think it would be fun to smash a burning can of WD-40.

WD-40, as most Sciencebase readers, will know is a petroleum product used to quickly lubricate sticky metal joints, nuts, bolts, bike chains and such. It was named by the product’s developers Rocket Chemical Company and refers to the fact that the successful water displacement formulation was made on the fortieth attempt. Obvious really, and certainly not an urban legend. Whether or not this video clip will become an urban legend one has to wonder, it doesn’t look like the guy is wearing any protective clothing other than his nice blue baseball cap. Puts a whole new slant on the term chemical peel!

Of course, the video is surely a publicity stunt of some kind, either that or the guy’s amazingly fast drop and roll to extinguish the flames was well rehearsed before hand. How else can you explain his keeping his composure to do that while his face is on fire? I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to give this a go. By the way, there’s actually no visible evidence that this was WD-40 at all (other petroleum-based lubes are available).

Expanding proteins

Expanding proteins A new study reveals that the static snapshots recorded in protein crystallography may be missing the bigger picture. Investigations of a bacterial protein using cryomicroscopy shows the protein in a balloon-like mode previously hidden from sold state studies. The discovery suggests that techniques complementary to X-ray crystallography are essential if molecular biology is to gain a complete understanding of protein structure.

Steven Ludtke, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and co-director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging at Baylor College of Medicine and colleagues Dong-Hua Chen and Wah Chiu there and Jiu-Li Song and David Chuang at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, studied a mutant protein and came to this perhaps not so startling conclusion. The protein GroEL chaperones misfolded proteins and nudges them into their active folded state in the cell. Protein misfolding is implicated in a number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and the prion diseases including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The full story is now available at SpectroscopyNOW

Raman best for breast cancer

Breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer among women but screening with mammography involves exposure to ionising radiation and suffers from a high rate of false positives that then require a definitive assay. In the December issue of the journal Biopolymers, researchers in India describe how Raman spectroscopy might be used to discriminate between normal, benign, and malignant breast tissue and so provide a simple and relatively non-invasive complement to a suspicious mammogram.

Murali Krishna of the Center for Laser Spectroscopy at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, in Karnataka and a visiting scientist at the University of Reims, France, and colleagues at Department of Surgical Oncology, Shirdi Sai Baba Cancer Hospital and Research Center and the Department of General Surgery at Kasturba Medical College, both part of Manipal, explain that, as with most cancers, survival rates depend on the stage at which diagnosis is made. More reliable screening and diagnosis methodology could thus improve survival rates.

Read on…

Double heart trouble

US researchers have demonstrated that MRI is twice as sensitive as other techniques at detecting early heart damage in patients with the immune system disorder sarcoidosis.

The early detection of heart problems in patients with sarcoidosis is imperative if the risk of dying from heart failure is to be reduced for such patients. Sarcoidosis is characterized by tiny inflammatory growths, granulomas, that cluster in the lungs, lymph nodes and under the skin, but can also form in the heart. Conventional techniques cannot differentiate between which patients who have cardiac granulomas will suffer long-term heart damage and those who will not.

Now, caridiologists at Duke University Medical Center have shown how MRI can reveal minute areas of heart damage before they reach a critical size. The earlier diagnosis might allow physicians to reduce the incidence of sudden cardiac death, a leading cause of death in patients with sarcoidosis.

The full story is available in my science news column on SpectroscopyNOW

Chemistry with meaning

Online shopping and music downloads are full of meaning, apparently. But, they don’t mean meaning like some deep philosopical property, they mean semantics – the meta data that is hidden from shoppers and downloaders but that makes the whole consumer experience work on the web. Now, my old friends Henry Rzepa and Omer Casher, of Imperial College London, hope to adapt the semantics of other sectors of the internet to provide a richer browsing and downloading experience for chemists.

They suggest that publishers of electronic scientific journals – whether learned societies or commercial publishers – should latch on to the semantic web sooner, rather than later so that the information revolution that is underway in scientific publishing can be complete.

The Semantic Web will foster information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the Internet so that software agents can help in the dissemination of information. Chemistry is well stacked with latent information that is lost if meta data – such as spectra, physical properties, searchable chemical structures, is abandoned, as occurs when a research paper is published electronically as a two-dimensional PDF file, for instance.

Writing in the journal Chemical Information and Modeling, the researchers describe SemanticEye, a semantic web application that adapts the digital music model to chemical-related electronic journal articles. It allows journal articles to contain embedded document object identifiers (DOIs) and other material. Those clues enable software to find relationships between new articles and those already published, and collect all the relevant documents for the user’s benefit.

Ironically, their paper is available as one of those simple PDF things, but at least the html version has CrossRef links.

Smoking ban

Geordie Boffin Asthma sufferers, non-smokers, and those who really just don’t care for passive-smoking-induced lung cancer can breathe a long sigh of relief as England follows other enlightened states and places a ban on smoking in enclosed public places, such as pubs, clubs, and restaurants, from July 1, 2007.

There’s sure to be an enormous backlash from those addicted to the Nicotiana vapours, but it can only be good for the rest of us who prefer not to partake of the various chemical congeners that accompany tobacco smoke: carcinogenic polyaromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, lead, formaldehyde, phenol, butadiene, etc etc etc.

The ban in England will follow those in the Irish Republic and Scotland. Wales ban begins April 2, 2007.

Anyway, for those who simply cannot resist, there’s always those little patches, chewing tobacco, or what about the Victorians’ favourite, snuff? All the artificial benefits with none of the smoke. Oh, but regular use will increase your risk of nasal, oral, or throat cancer. You may even want to consider getting an e-cig with an Aspire tank for sale as these can reduce your nicotine intake and do not contain vapors that are as harmful.

UPDATE: 2021-12-20 Who knew that “vaping” would be such a big thing so many years later?