David Bradley – Page 314

Climate change hot air

It seems that mere “climate change” was not nearly bad enough for the media scaremongers and the environmental activists so even the smallest upward blip in global average temperatures has became “catastrophic climate change”.

The increasing use of this pejorative term as well as “chaotic”, “irreversible”, and “rapid” climate change has altered the public discourse around climate change. So says Mike Hulme Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

His commentary comes at an interesting point in environmental politics with protests mounting and a report presented to the UK government last week providing Tony Blair yet more ammunition and vote-building rhetoric than ever before.

The Guardian this year mentioned the phrase “climate porn” the apparent thrill of seeing new scientific results that protend natural disaster on a global scale. The media of course is almost entirely to blame for this state of affairs boulstered by anti-capitalist, anti-industry, and other misinformed groups, as well as the politicians hoping to make the most of their opposition’s positions.

Simon Retallack, the IPPR’s head of climate change, told The Guardian that “Currently, climate communications too often terrify or thrill the reader or viewer while failing to make them feel that they can make a difference, which engenders inaction.”

The spirit of his report is echoed by Hulme in this latest commentary.

There is no concensus on climate change catastrophic or otherwise. The South of England basked in the longest “Indian summer” on record this year, the warm spell that began as a warm but wet August faded into September didn’t entirely halt until the beginning of November. Is that an effect of global warming? Who knows? It’s been rather colder than you’d expect these last few days…perhaps there’s an ice age on the way. It’s a facile task to draw a straight line sloping one way then the other through a scatter of temperature plots in which the error margins are almost as wide as the problem being discussed. Couple the experimental issues with the limitations of computer modelling and throw in some oil company disinformation with a few ludicrous pronouncement from a Bush in denial (God moves in mysterious ways) and it’s no wonder the public is at once thrilled and scared sh*tless by all this hot air. The real catastrophe could be that in the confusion we continue to waste resources while whole nations and continents languish in poverty and disease. Whether or not climate change turns out eventually to be catastrophic or not is almost irrelevant when we are faced with so many other global ills.

Grabbing the long tail of search engines

A revamped search engine from Heriot-Watt University in the UK makes the most of the long tail allowing searchers to drill way down into the most obscure, but nevertheless useful, pages across dozens of technology databases and sites.

“It’s a prerequisite for any successful search service in technology
subjects to have a ‘Long Tail’ (or large inventory), Heriot-Watt’s Roddy MacLeod explains, “This is because the majority of search queries made by technologists, or by others seeking information in technology-related subjects, tend to be very specific. It’s in the nature of the subjects, and the real information retrieval needs of those involved in these subjects, for granularity to be important.”

MacLeod heads up the team behind TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/. This search engine aggregates content from a vast array of databases with technology-related content, and provides meta results that are essentially invisible to general search engines. “A search of TechXtra will search across more than 4 million records of various kinds – articles, technical reports, digital theses and dissertations, books, eprints, news items, job announcements, video, learning & teaching resources, key websites, and more – most of which relate to technology subjects,” MacLeod adds.

You can restrict searches to a particular format (technical reports, or
articles, or books, and so on), or select only specific databases among those listed with the ubiquitous Advanced Search option.

Among the most interesting of the databases for the Youtube generation is perhaps the Open Video Project, which is a growing repository of digitized video. And serious tech research can provide the full text of thousands of theses, eprints from arXiv, earthquake engineering
technical reports from Caltech, and almost half a million articles in computer and information science from CiteSeer. In addition many articles in Digital Open Access Journals (DOAJ), are available.

I’ve added a TechXtra link to the Sciencebase science search toolbox and will upgrade that to a fully-fledged search link in the next few days.

One thing which is a fairly recent development is the number of freely available full text digitised theses that TechXtra can now access. “These theses are the results of considerable research,” MacLeod told me, “they can be excellent resources on specialised topics.

HW University also produces the superb Internet Resources Newsletter.

First ever useful chain letter

I usually don’t, you know, read chain-letters, but this one hit my inbox and caught my eye, not least because it appeared to be from someone I know and trust…although closer inspection of the email headers revealed that they were simply one of dozens of people to have been cc’ed when the messages was forward for the umpteenth time.

Anyway, this is what it said:

“Warm Water After a Meal — It is nice to have a cold drink after a meal. However, could it be that the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed. It will slow down digestion and once this “sludge” reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fats and can lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm tea/water after a meal.

The Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea with their meals…not cold water.. maybe it is time we adopt their drinking habit while eating!”

Now, that part sounds fairly reasonable but for the fact that it was couched in a rather unscientific manner, but I think there might just be something in the idea that any warm fats your ingest could indeed become solid once they have cold water poured on to them. Although they don’t say anything about the churning and warming of food by the stomach itself. Moreover, whether that leads to digestive problems, coating of the intestine with fat, and ultimately cancer, is a different matter. It may or it may not. I’d like to see some test results on that before forwarding this chain letter.

Meanwhile, on a totally different theme, albeit still health related, the chain letter goes on to say:

“A serious note about heart attacks — Women should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting. Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line as well. You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms. 60% of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up. A pain in the jaw can wake some from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware The more we know, the better chance we could survive.”

Apparently, some anonymous cardiologist says that if everyone who receives the email forwards it to 10 people, you can be sure that we’ll save at least one life. I suppose statistically that number could be even higher if you have even a 105 marketing hit rate in sending the message on to friends and family. But, I prefer to blog about these things and not simply forward emails. Do any cardiologist readers have any comment on this method of nocturnal myocardial infarction prevention, I wonder?

Red wine diet

Are you middle aged and eating too much? Are you worried about ill health and getting old? Do you have whiskers and prefer wood shavings to down for your bedding?

Researchers at Harvard University may have the answer to a healthier and longer life for you.

David Sinclair and his colleagues have studied middle-aged mice fed on a high-calorie diet and found that a compound extracted from red wine not only improved the health of the mice but also extends the animals’ lifespan. The results appear online today in the journal Nature.

The researchers supplemented a high-calorie diet with resveratrol, a small molecule that has been shown to extend the lifespan of other animals. The treatment shifted the animals’ physiology towards that of mice fed a standard diet. The mice lived longer than other mice on the same high-fat diet that didn’t get the resveratrol supplemement, and even though they didn’t lose any weight, their quality of life was also improved — resveratrol-treated mice had healthier livers and better motor coordination.

Resveratrol seems to counter various of the health risks associated with a high-fat diet, but without skimping on the calories. It could provide a solution to the French paradox in which the stereotypically high-fat diet favoured by the French is counteracted in terms of health by the consumption of red wine.

“Mice are much closer evolutionarily to humans than any previous model organism treated by this molecule, which offers hope that similar impacts might be seen in humans without negative side- effects,’ says Sinclair.

The impact on health and lifespan the researchers observed in the obese mice treated with resveratrol, included increased insulin sensitivity, decreased glucose levels, and a healthier heart and liver. These are all positive clinical indicators and, says Sinclair, may mean we can stave off age-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer in humans. He adds that only time and more research will tell. Just for the record Sinclair is a co-founder of Sirtris, a spin out company part owned by Harvard. The company is currently phase 1b trialling a proprietary formulation of resveratrol in people with diabetes.

When scaled up from the obese mouse model, the doses used in the mouse study should be feasible for human consumption, hence the phase 1b trial, but it’s not yet clear whether the molecule will yield similar effects in people, say the researchers. If it does, it may lead to the development of drugs that can reduce some of the negative consequences of excess calorie intake and improve health and survival.

Alternatively, it may provide those of us in middle age who like our food with an excuse to wash it all down with a classic Chianti, hang the expense, and live longer, healthier lives regardless.

For the French version of this story, or indeed, a version in any of nine languages, click the appropriate flag towards the top right of this page.

Metallic BO

“The smell of iron upon contact with skin is ironically a type of human body odour,” explains Dietmar Glindemann. “That we are smelling the metal itself is actually an illusion.”

Many people notice a peculiar “metallic” smell when handling iron objects, such as tools, utensils, door handles, railings, firearms, coins, and other objects. But, iron untouched by human hand has a subtly different almost garlic like smell. Dietmar Glindemann of the University of Leipzig and his colleagues Andrea Dietrich at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Hans-Joachim Staerk and Peter Kuschk of the Leipzig Environmental Research Center, Germany, have used a sophisticated analytical process to sniff out the reason why. It transpires that the metallic smell of iron that has been touched is a kind of body odour rather than a smelly metal.

More… (fixed link)

For those worrying about other kinds of BO, chemists and microbiologists have an answer to why some people smell the way they do. The research reported in Reactive Reports might one day lead to a new type of deodorant for even the smelliest of pits.

If you’re interested in how armpit scents can affect other people here’s an article from my days freelancing for The Guardian that explains how “eau d’armpit” might be used to treat pre-menstrual syndrome.

Science Teacher Gets Flashed

I remember seeing some dull old film clip of the thermite process in action during school chemistry class. Much better would have been to see it live, in the schoolyard with a science teacher dumb enough to head back over to the reaction vessel because it hadn’t fired up quickly enough. Well, for those who missed out there’s a nice video of that very happening.

What I cannot understand is why those students and the first teacher are not wearing some kind of protective goggles and why they’re not behind a safety screen of some sort. If you did this kind of thing in a British chemistry class OFSTED would put the school on special measures quick as you could weld two chunks of metal together with aluminium (aluminum) powder and iron oxide at 2500 Celsius. D’oh!

Male pill

Despite Carl Djerassi’s prediction (some years ago) that we would never see a “male pill”, it looks like just such a contraceptive treat is coming at last.

The new drug, Adjudin, is currently in early clinical trials and is a long way from human use. However, the very fact that drug companies are taking a male oral contraceptive seriously suggests a sea change iin attitudes. It’s not ten years ago that I heard Djerassi speak on this very subject and point out how the likelihood of a chemical contraceptive for men would never arrive.

Apparently, Adjudin triggers re-absorption of immature sperm cells so that they never reach the seminal point of no return infamously faced by Woody Allen in his notorious tale of sex. Chuen-yan Cheng of the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research in New York has tested the drug on lab rats and found there to be no obvious side effects other than that the males became infertile. Imporantly, the process is entirely temporary and just 20 weeks off the pill gets the sperm fighting fit once more.

Already, the concept of such a contraceptive has those opposed to any form of contraception chomping at the bit and arguing as to whether such a form of contraceptive contravenes religious doctrine or not. When one considers every sperm as sacred, biblically speaking, then are these immature fledgling sperm being “wasted” or not?

Of course, there are much more serious issues to consider, such as sexual health.

Over on Digg, a comment from “mizzack” in response to the CBS News article on this drug announcement goes like this:

Guy: “Hey, wanna go back to my place?”
Girl: “Sure”
[back at the house]
Girl: “Do you have condoms?”
Guy: “Oh, no, don’t need ’em. I’m on the pill”
Girl: “Riggggggght. Do you have condoms?”

Perhaps even more important than putative problems couples may face in the distant future should this male pill ever reach market is the fact that Cheng’s team previously reported that animal tests had shown Adjudin, to be toxic when given orally, causing liver problems and muscle wasting. Not exactly two happy things to happen to a guy. In the current trial, Adjudin has been conjugated with follicle-stimulating hormone to purportedly preclude such toxicity. It worked but only when the conjugate was administered intravenously.

So, the choice would be muscle wasting, which may or may not reduce your chance of a date, liver damage or regular injections into the belly to keep babies at bay, the need for a hormone adjuvant, and no intrinsic protection from HIV, chlamydia, syphyllis, gonnorhea, and any of several other STDs.

So, perhaps Djerassi was right after all and we may never see a marketable male pill. Caps off to the father of the pill.

Halloween pumpkin seeds health benefits

Wondering what to do with all those seeds hacked from the orange flesh of your halloween pumpkin? You could try eating them, especially if you’re on a low-protein diet or likely to be exposed to the organic solcent carbon tetrachloride (tetrachloromethane)!

According to researchers in South Africa, pumpkin seeds can protect the liver from the harmful effects of protein deficiency and exposure to hepatotoxins such as carbon tet.

The seeds of the pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) contain a protein that is a potent antioxidant according to SE Terblanche and colleagues at the University of Zululand in KwaDlangezwa.

The researchers tested the effects of protein isolate on blood plasma levels of certain enzymes including catalase, superoxide dismutase, and glutathione peroxidase, and on total antioxidant capacity in the liver of rats fed a low protein diet that were exposed to carbon tetrachloride.

They report that, “From the results of the present study it is concluded that pumpkin seed protein isolate administration was effective in alleviating the detrimental effects associated with protein malnutrition and carbon tetrachloride intoxication.” Terblanche and colleagues explain that this indicates that pumpkin seed protein isolate has powerful antiperoxidative properties.

Details of the research appears in the November issue of the journal Phytotherapy Research, 2006, 20(11), 935-940.

Of course, swallowing a handful of pumpkin seeds is not really going to provide adequate protection against ingestion of carbon tetrachloride, so please don’t make it a Halloween chaser.

Science blog goes international

UPDATE

I abandoned the international system on Sciencebase some time ago. The translation of documents with relatively high scientific content by Google and Babel is just so poor that I received several emails from readers saying just how bad it made the site look to those whose native tongue is not English.

OLD POST

Regular readers may have noticed the selection of national flags on the right-hand menu have now been demoted to the bottom of the column. We’ve been experimenting with inline machine translation to see how well it copes with a scientific technical site. A few readers have pointed out that the translations into their native tongue are at best amusing and at worse ludicrous.

The translation system is based on Google and the Babelfish (for Chinese) system and uses a plugin to produce translated versions of each post on-the-fly. The system seems to be far from perfect but might provide some of the gist of each post, although one Chinese readers thinks it doesn’t even do that.

At the moment, you can read the sciencebase blog, news and views in a version of the following languages Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish. Please note, no automatic translation of a science site with its various technical terms is going to be 100% accurate, indeed the Google and Babelfish systems are not 100% accurate even for non-technical sites. But, we hope the system provides a flavour of our articles.

If we get any more complaints, we’ll probably ditch the system altogether, or at least until machine translation is less hilarious for readers.

Chemistry really adds up

AP de Silva was born in Sri Lanka but moved to Queen’s University of Belfast, in the 1970s and is now Professor of Chemistry. His fascinating research into small logical molecules has found commercial application in diagnostics and sensors, has recently led to a breakthrough in labelling compound libraries, and may one day help us build a molecular computer.

Read my interview with AP in Reactive Reports to learn a little more about the man behind those glowing molecules that truly add up.