David Bradley – Page 253

Shedding Light on Neon Signs

As regular readers know, I like to keep a fairly close eye on what Sciencebase visitors are searching for so that I can put together new posts that provide answers to the questions readers want answering. Recently, there has been a spate of search queries related to neon signs. Perhaps not the most exciting of subjects, but there is some nice chemistry to be learned from all the different colours available, so I thought I’d shed some light on the subject of noble gas illumination.

Incidentally, for those unaware of the history of noble gases, they were at one time known as inert gases because chemists thought their full outer shell of electrons made them unreactive. As more and more reactions for these so-called inert gases were discovered, it became necessary to abandon the “inert” label and focus on their nobility.

A neon light is not really much more than a fluorescent tube (actually, it’s less as it needs no phosphor coating on the inside), neon tubes contain the noble gas neon, surprise, surprise. Pass an electric discharge through a tube containing low pressure neon and it will glow with that familiar orange-red glow, so evocative of late-night bars and sleazy movies.

A neon light uses a very high voltage to propel an electric current through a low-density gas of neon atoms held in a glass tube. Charges from the electrode at each end of the tube fly through the gas colliding frequently with neon atoms and transferring some of their energy to the neon atoms. This kicks the neon atoms into a higher energy, excited state, with an electron in a higher orbital than normal. This excited state does not last and as the electron loses energy the atom drops back to a lower energy state and releases a photon of light. The energy of this photon is equivalent to the energy fall and for neon atoms that coincides with an energy that produces a reddish glow.

Many people, unfamiliar with the noble gas group of the periodic table – the p-block, assume that all coloured fluorescent tubes used in signage are neon signs. However, there are two ways to produce other colours – paint a standard mercury tube with the colour you want or far more effectively use a different noble gas in the tube instead of neon, perhaps together with mercury vapour to give a stronger glow. Here’s a break down of the discharge colours for each noble gas.

Helium (He) – Orangey white, usually
Neon (Ne) – Orange-red glow
Argon (Ar) – Violet, pale lavender blue
Krypton (Kr) – Grayish dim off-white
Xenon (Xe) – Blue-grey
Radon (Rn) – radioactive, not used in lighting

Of course, it is not only the noble gases and mercury vapour that can be added to lighting tubes. Nitrogen produces a slightly pinker glow than argon, oxygen glows violet-lavender but dimly. Hydrogen glows lavender at low currents, but pinkish magenta above 10 milliAmps, while carbon dioxide produces a slight bluish-white. Mercury can be made to glow in the ultraviolet, and is used in so-called black lights. Sodium vapour at low pressure glows the bright yellow of street lighting, particularly in England. And, even water vapour produces a glow similar to hydrogen, only dimmer .

The Future

Pundits are predicting that the first computer that will be at least as intelligent as a human will be built in 2010 and by 2049 a $1000 computer will outsmart the entire human race. But, this video is about more than that.

It tracks the shifts that are occurring today and extrapolates them into implications for those currently in high school and higher education. Think about it, if you start a technical degree this year, half of what you learn in that four-year course will be outdated before you reach the end of the third year. After all, it took radio 38 years to reach a 50 million audience, television 13 years, the internet 4 years, and Facebook achieved a market penetration that size in just 2 years.

In 1984, the year I started university, there were 1000 internet devices around the world (I certainly didn’t send an email till more than four years after that). By 1992, that number was 1,000,000. Today, there are at least a billion internet devices and that number will inevitably rise as people with at least one personal computer augment their connectivity with more and more mobile devices, such as smart phones, android phones, tablets, slates, iPads, iPods iPhones etc.

The video was produced by the zyOzy Foundation, which believes that the themes in the “Did You Know?” video are global in nature and apply to schools and children around the world.

Religious Faith in Technology

turner-cross The Elucian Islands in the virtual online world known as Second Life are to host a climate change conference. Speakers will present live from Imperial College London and Stanford University in California, and researchers and university students will attend from the UK and the United States.

However, another climate change conference with a difference also begins today in Sweden. That conference hopes to address the issues from a religious rather than a scientific angle with Christians, Muslims, Jews, Chinese Daoists and a native American representative, among others, taking part in the two-day event, which is the first of its kind, apparently.

It is timely then that a new scientific study of technology among religious people is to be published in the first 2009 issue of the International Journal of Innovation and Learning. The paper found that technological uptake seems to hint that the apparently more trusting character of many religious people makes them more accepting of new technologies. Though it pains me to say it, could religious faith by our saving grace?

If the devout are more inclined to trust new technology, then perhaps they will embrace more quickly novel suggestions for tackling the global issue of climate change. Or, does the research simply reveal that this trusting benevolence apparently associated with “being religious simply means that the devout are not quite so cynical of the hidden agendas of others, which make them more susceptible to the wiles of scammers, spammers, and charlatans.

The research paper discusses a relatively small-scale study into the link between strength of religious belief and how this relates to technology acceptance. The researchers wanted to find out whether people of faith are likely to be more trusting of commercial websites than other people.

With increasing commercial globalisation and international travel, the advent of the internet and online communities, the concept of social trust has become a key focus of research. Social trust has always played a crucial role in building societies and is based on the sum total of connections among people, their social networks and how trustworthiness is reciprocated. Civic participation is facilitated by social capital, as reflected in the social networks characterised by norms of reciprocity and trust, the researchers report.

In this context, they used a standard Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to track online behaviour among a group of users and combined the data with results from an assessment of religious faith known as the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith instrument. The aim being to see how faith, trust, and technology mesh in the modern world.

The researchers questioned 161 current and former postgraduate university students and others with varying levels of internet experience and different religious convictions. They assessed religious strength based on dedication to prayer and how much a person’s faith plays a role in each individual’s daily life. Attitudes to ecommerce were assessed by testing their interaction with an experimental ecommerce website and asking whether users felt the website operated with their best interests in mind and whether it is run competently and sincerely.

An analysis of the results suggests that fundamentally religious faith increases benevolence, which in turn influences perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and behavioural intention. The more religious were more trusting, it seems.

Although one might suggest that this would imply gullibility, the researchers extrapolate their findings to say that communities with strong religious faith may be among the leaders rather than the followers when it comes to technology acceptance, the early adopters in other words. Those people may be the ones paving the way for less trusting and accepting individuals.

The researchers say that it is surprising that religion, given its cultural prominence in some parts of the world, has been largely overlooked in studies of this kind. They hope that the present research will enthuse sociologists, economists, and business experts to investigate more closely how religious faith might affect internet use, with a view to improving the experience.

But, the big question of the day is who will you be listening to, the scientists virtualised in second life or those people of faith in Sweden?

Stuart J. Barnes (2009). Strength of religious faith, trusting beliefs and their role in technology acceptance International Journal of Innovation and Learning, 6 (1), 110-126

This Guy Needs a Reality Check

guy-kawasaki-reality-check Welcome fellow twitterers, don’t forget to follow me on twitter, before you read on…

In the current economic climate, the “Downturn” as the BBC has so brazenly logo-ized it, when banks are running and companies are being crunched like so many cornflakes eaten during the breakfast news, tech companies need all the good advice they can get. This is where Guy Kawasaki, entrepeneur, evangelist, venture capitalist, blogger, and guru can help.

Kawasaki’s latest book – Reality Bites – sucks up to no one, but teaches you to suck down, it takes no bull shiitake and overturns much of the received wisdom of Si-Valley. Moreover, Reality Check is the self-professed “irreverent guide to outsmarting, outmanaging, and outmarketing your competition. If Bubble 2.0 is about to burst, then irreverent advice of this kind could mean the difference between a startup never getting off the blocks before reality bites.

Now, I’ve never quite got the hang of speed reading, boredom, tiredness, and aching eyeballs will often mean I take ten times as long as the average reader to plough through a lacklustre book.

With Kawasaki it has been very different. It has been a long read for me (and I’m still not quite finished as I write this review), but that’s most definitely not because of boredom or tiredness, it’s because I’ve been in and out of my chair as he triggers new thoughts and ideas with almost every paragraph. Each page I turn I come across a new idea that I cannot wait to work on, write about, implement, or even just use to create my latest tweet. And I’m not even running a tech startup, if that’s how I feel reading his words, then I suspect anyone hoping to storm the market with a new gadget, program or their latest paper will get even more out of it than me.

If there were some way to read and work at the same time without compromising either, I’d have Guy sitting on my desk every day. His ideas seem to transcend the jargon and bozo explosions of the day, anyone – individual entrepreneur, blogger, fledgling CEO, head of department – would do well to keep him close to hand while they build their business plan, work on their prototype and develop their team.

guy-kawasaki All of what Kawasaki discusses is about people whether he’s explaining the top ten lies of venture capitalists or how old geezers can capture or enrapture the youth market, whether he’s telling you about how late he came to blogging or how creating a community is not just the latest fad, something scientists are beginning to recognise.

And, that’s no bull shiitake.

You can visit Guy Kawasaki’s website here (and read his blog), get the latest true rumours via his Truemors site, or check out aggregated headlines from top news sources and blogs in almost every field of endeavour you care to mention at Alltop.com, and yes, of course, there is a science.alltop.com

Breast is Best in Melamine Scandal

breastfeeding-baby The melamine in milk scandal continues to draw interest. You recall, across Asia, in particularly in China, infant formula milk was discovered to be contaminated with a starting material for making plastics and fire retardant materials, melamine. Thousands of babies were hospitalised with possible renal failure, and several died.

But, could some good have come out of this scandal? Apparently, breast-feeding rates have bounced back across Asia, according to some reports and a roundtable, Secure nutritious diet: Save children’s lives, organised jointly by Save the Children UK and others is using the melamine scare to help promote the breast is best message. It has been demonstrated time and again that breastfeeding reduces infant mortality rates particularly in the developing world. One wit even suggested that the melamine contamination was done deliberately to promote breastfeeding, a nonsense, obviously.

Others are now reporting that the formula manufacturers are hoping to restrict this renewed enthusiasm for breastfeeding by heavy promotion of their products even if they are in breach of WHO guidelines on marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Others benefiting from the melamine scandal, although not in the same cynical way are chemical analysis companies, who, according to the Boston Globe are seeing improved business as food safety scares raise the profile of state-of-the-art testing equipments, including melamine test kits. The Gainesville Sun even reported on a woman who had developed her own testing kit for melamine.

As was mentioned in a comment on a previous melamine post, the US FDA has updated its import alert on melamine: “Detention without physical examination of all milk products, milk derived ingredients and finished food products containing milk from china due to the presence of melamine and/or melamine analogs.”

Recycled Virgins, Nano, and Trigger Points

virgin-oil My latest science news is now online in the spectroscopyNOW ezine. This week:

Recycled virgin – Recycled engine oil has high levels of organic impurities, heavy metals, and carcinogenic compounds, according to work carried out by researchers in Jordan. They have used atomic absorption (AA), inductive couple plasma (ICP) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analyses to spot the differences between virgin and recycled engine oil.

In a spin over nanomaterials – Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, are hoping to spread the word far and wide of a new analytical technique that can help scientists and technologists working with nanomaterials. They say that their discovery could help accelerate the development of materials for the next generation of solar energy conversion and computer data storage.

Deadly proteins and trigger points – US researchers have used NMR to identify a previously undetected trigger point on a naturally occurring “death protein” that helps the body get rid of damaged or diseased cells. The researchers suggest that their findings may offer a novel target for new drugs that could be used to treat cancer by forcing malignant cells to undergo apoptosis, or cellular suicide.

Finally, a rather technical item that will appeal to that specialist niche working on time-resolved laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy. German researchers have found a new way to fit a statistical model to TRLFS spectra that could reveal hidden details and remove background noise, much more effectively than before. The method could allow samples containing various radioactive elements to be analysed effectively despite the interferences from the different ions present.

Polymer, Nanotech, Vitamins

This week the Alchemist hears how polymer chemists are turning to supramolecular chemistry (or is it supramolecular chemists turning to polymers?) to create novel flexible and elastic materials. In nanotechnology, a British consumer activist organization is calling for more safety data on nano materials used in cosmetics, and French scientists have demonstrated how nitrogen oxides released by snow melt in the Arctic could have a global impact.

In biological research, US scientists are suggesting that a specific active form of vitamin D could be useful as a protective agent against nuclear incidents. And, in interplanetary chemistry, Johns Hopkins researchers have found spectroscopic evidence that water-bearing opal formed on Mars much more recently than previously thought.

Finally, we’re going Dutch with this week’s award in which technology transfer in the area of solar energy conversion brings a financial reward and prestige to a graduate student and his colleagues. Get the full skinny and the links in current issue of The Alchemist

Melanotan Suntan in a Syringe

What is safest? (a) The risk of daily and then weekly injections of an untested compound targeted at activating your pigment cells to give you an all-over suntan without having to spend time in the sun or on a UV sunbed or (b) The great outdoors and a healthy approach to sun exposure?

For a group of delightful young women in Northern England, where the sun shines strongly only rarely I can tell you having grown up there, the answer was obvious – (a) the regular injections.

But, what are they injecting daily for a week and then weekly thereafter? What is this compound that stimulates a higher than normal skin pigmentation level and gives the young women the appearance of having just returned from a fortnight lounging by the pool somewhere much warmer and sunnier than oop north? Well, it is called Melanotan and it’s illegal in the UK, i.e. it has not received approval from the medical authorities. It is nevertheless, being sold illegally over the internet and in some tanning salons and body building gyms.

So, is it worrying is that melanotan has not gone through the full gamut of safety tests required of pharmaceutical products, and yet the young women seem unconcerned when confronted with that fact in the following BBC news video clip.

There is the possibility that it is perfectly safe and if not perfectly safe then safer than ultraviolet tanning beds, and according to cancer charities possibly a whole lot safer than chronic sunbathing. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has said that injecting Melanotan could have serious side-effects. But, given that full clinical trials have not yet been completed, they could just as easily have said that it could have no serious side-effects.

Melanotan purportedly boosts the body’s production of melanin, the natural pigment produced by the skin on exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. To be honest, to my eye, none of the young women in the video even looked particularly tanned.

Apparently, there are two versions of the injectable suntan – melanotan I and melanotan II and both are analogs of the naturally occurring peptide hormone alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone. I’d certainly never consider injecting with any hormone except under doctor’s orders and certainly not for the sake of getting an artificial tan. If the health experts are right and there are safety problems with melanotan, then who’s to say these girls aren’t putting themselves at risk of some nasty effects, melanoma in a syringe, perhaps?

But, like I say, I much prefer the great outdoors and a sensible attitude to sun exposure. (Oh, except for that time I got burnt on that warmer and sunnier fortnight).

Virtual Rehabilitation for MS Sufferers

I recently wrote about how social media might help scientists do their work, so a paper in IJWBS on how those on the receiving end of medical science – patients and healthcare practitioners – might benefit from web 2.0 caught my eye.

IT consultant Maire Heikkinen of University of Tampere, Finland, has focused on how the internet might be used in rehabilitation courses for sufferers of long-term neurological diseases including Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

Today, more than 2,500,000 people have MS, a disorder that affects different areas of the central nervous system and so leads to a wide range of symptoms from blurred vision and numbness to weak limbs, unsteadiness, and fatigue. Periods of relapse and remission are often characteristics of the disease but for other people the disease progressively worsens. Either way, it can limit everyday life seriously and makes for an uncertain future for sufferers and those close to them. “There is no known medical cure,” Heikkinen told Sciencebase, but medicine can help moderate the symptoms and prevent relapses, and rehabilitation can help people considerably.”

Getting hold of useful information about one’s disease, discussing problems, and following rehabilitation schemes, is Heikkinen explains an essential part of the process of healing.The rehabilitation for MS patients has traditionally been face-to-face courses and personal physiotherapy, but the internet has enabled some forms of online rehabilitation.

She has looked at the concept of a virtual community for rehabilitation and, in particular, the opportunities for sociability among participants. She found that peer support and the swapping of experiences were the most important part of the online activities. But, perhaps most intriguingly, the MS patients in her study seemed to have a higher trust level among themselves than is common in some online activities. The participants apparently preferred to get to know each other rather than operating anonymously as is common on other internet rehabilitation and support courses, those for cancer sufferers, she cites.

The internet course Heikkinen studied was “Power and Support from the Net”, which was organised by the Finnish MS Society. While there are those who claim that such virtual communities are somehow worth less than face-to-face contacts, others point out that circumstances and ill-health often prevent people from making direct social contact. It is the virtual nature of “online” that seems to offer a significant advantage in a virtual rehabilitation community, in that people are often more willing to discuss problems online than they would be in a face-to-face meeting.

There is evidence that being online is not the depressing default state that those railing against it would have us believe. Heikkinen’s study certainly suggests this is true with regard to outcomes for MS sufferers involved with PSN.

The internet was shown to be a suitable tool for arranging rehabilitation courses for MS sufferers, she says. The course team could build a virtual community at least for the duration of the course, but it will also be possible to continue the team after the course. The course may thus serve as an initiator for a longer-lasting virtual team that will exist for as long as the participants stay active.

Various researchers have outlined the benefits of online community in the past. Virtual communities are inherently social networks because at the base level they link together people, organisations and knowledge. They can become integrated into our daily lives and, as anyone with an active web 2.0 account knows, the internet can increase our contact with friends, relatives, and other contacts regardless of geography, time, or state of health. Fundamentally, adds Heikkinen, “When computer systems connect people and organisations, they form social networks.”

Maire Heikkinen (2009). Power and support from the net: usability and sociability on an internet-based rehabilitation course for people with multiple sclerosis Int. J. Web Based Communities, 5 (1), 83-104

Scientists Socializing Online

online-networking My post on social media for scientists seems to have been received rather well, with a huge amount of traffic and positive responses from various big name commentators across the networks and blogosphere.

Several scientists have already commented about the post over on Nature Networks. Nature’s own Maxine Clarke describe it as “an amazingly useful post” but was worried that there seem to be so many scientific social media clones now available. It is, she says, “It is hard to see them all enduring.” But, that’s not surprising, natural selection and survival of the fittest will kick in. Indeed, it already is happening to a degree. Some of these communities are fast approaching critical mass.

For instance, Joerg Heber is also concerned that there lots of clones and that although the trend is towards increasing fragmentation of our online identities, he points out that SciLink.com now has 44000 users or thereabouts, whereas SocialMD, claims just 3100. “In the end,” he says, “there surely will be a concentration process for all those sites and only a few will survive. There likely will be a self-accumulating user base for the most successful ones, as the more users there are the more sense they make.”

But, compare those figures with the likes of LinkedIn (30 million users) and Facebook (120 million) and one has to wonder what is the purpose of creating a niche community external to such sites, when one might simply create a group within those and have access to potentially millions of like-minded individuals. Indeed, it never occurred to me to create a standalone science writers community online, I simple organised a Facebook science writers group, which now has almost 400 members. Obviously, there are fewer science writers than scientists.

Heber concedes that LinkedIn and Facebook may not be perfectly suited to scientists, but wonders whether the networking sites I listed in the original post really are specific to scientists? “Can you share lab books and wikis?” he asks.

Martin Fenner mentioned ScienceOnline’09, which I do hope to attend (looking for a sponsor, right now). This unconference, which will be for scientists and science communicators alike will, he says, have a session on social networks for scientists, moderated by my good friends Cameron Neylon of Science in the Open and Deepak Singh of bbgm.

Fenner followed up his original comment with the following, pointing out that AAAS Science Careers (Social Networking Grows Up) also had an article on this topic [which I hadn’t seen when I started writing the original Sciencebase post mid-October, db]. “They talk about a few social networking sites for scientists, but somehow fail to mention Nature Network,” Fenner says, “The article also mentions social networking sites set up by universities, including ResearchConnect (University of Manchester) and Small Worlds (University of Leicester). I didn’t know about this (unless you count the Facebook organisation by universities), but it looks like a good idea.”

Brian Willson of the Microsoft Chemical Team Blog gave my post a mention and noted that most of the sites are apparently aimed at academia rather than industry. He was curious to know whether web 2.0 and online communities would impact scientists in industry, a topic he has discussed previously on the MCTB.

44000 members is impressive (for SciLink), but have any of the social media sites for scientists really achieved critical mass yet? By which I mean do they have enough active members to become self-sustaining and useful to science and the communities they serve?

Way back in the 1990s, I used to work for two of the biggest proto-social media sites for scientists – ChemWeb and BioMedNet. The former had more members than the American Chemical Society (which at the time was around 140,000 I believe) and BMN even more at, if memory serves correctly, close to half a million, far more than Facebook and LinkedIn put together!).

Both CW and BMN were incredibly innovative (having been created by Vitek Tracz, chairman of the Science Navigation Group, and founder of the open access publisher BioMedCentral as well as the those two online communities). CW and BMN were running what were essentially blogs alongside their news and features output, providing preprint servers (in the case of Chemweb), member search tools, webinars and online conferences, and access to dozens of resources. Of course, they were never labelled web 2.0. This was, after all well before the .com bubble burst and the web was reborn.

Unfortunately, both CW and BMN were bought up by a giant shareholder-driven publisher (mentioning no names) and driven into the ground once the company realised it wasn’t making enough money from them. Which was a great shame, because they really could have made huge inroads into the very world we are discussing. ChemWeb.com lives on thanks to Chemindustry.com and is thriving in its new form as my regular readers will know from The Alchemist newsletter, but at the moment it is not quite the community-led system it once was.

In some sense, all these new social media sites for scientists are simply reinventing a well-worn wheel from a decade past and whether or not any of them will achieve the significance (at their height) of a Chemweb or a BioMedNet remains to be seen. Offline scientific networks/societies continue to grow as they have done since their earliest days in the nineteenth century and before (their online efforts don’t seem to have yet built the online communities that could exist)

Given that many of the online efforts are insignificantly small in terms of membership numbers compared to the now defunct BMN and compared to the offline presence of the bigger scientific societies, I seriously doubt that more than one or two will survive and thrive. But, we’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps it will take a killer application for one to emerge as a leader and become as essential to scientists as MySpace is to a teenybopper and Facebook is to students. That killer application, however, remains to be revealed.