David Bradley – Page 318

Nuclear North Korea Not

New Scientist and others are already casting doubts on whether North Korea really did detonate a nuclear device underground on Monday. The magazine points to discrepancies in the reporting of the size of the explosion as hinting that NK may have simply detonated a massive cache of conventional explosive in the hope of simulating the effects of a nuclear device.

The magazine says that the Korea Earthquake Research Centre in South Korea reported a 3.58-magnitude tremor from North Korea’s North Hamgyong province, which is equivalent to a 800 tonnes of TNT, but the Russian defence minister says the explosion was closer to 5000-15000 tonnes. By contrast, the Hiroshima bomb was estimated at 15 kilotonnes.

Scientists are frantically analysing the seismographic evidence and assessing whether or not this could have been a large conventional explosion, a failed nuclear detonation, or the claimed success that North Korea’s smiling TV correspondent claimed.

Running hot and cold

Julia Seymour, Assistant Editor at the Virginia-based Business and Media Institute emailed to tell me that despite blasting senator James Inhofe, CNN had him on ‘American Morning’ on October 3 in a debate with anchor Miles O’Brien.

According to the BandMI write-up on this debacle, “The spirited debate with Inhofe allowed viewers to get a rebuttal to O’Brien’s charge on the September 28 ‘American Morning’ that Inhofe was waging a ‘lonely battle’ against the ‘overwhelming’ evidence of global warming.”

Climate change has been a threat to sanity for decadeas, as long ago as 1895 people were warned of the coming ice age, by the 1920s a warm spell suggested the earth was getting warmer, by the 1950s, once again the earth was to be frozen. As late as 1975 we were all going to freeze according to the media hype. Global warming was on the cards as of 1981 but with a new twist, it could cause changes in the Gulf Stream as melting icebergs broke away from the frozen north and cooled the Atlantic leading to a mini ice age across the British Isles and Europe.

Today, every change the weather is blamed on global warming, every natural disaster including very dubiously earthquake-driven tsunami and even volcanic activity, and perhaps less dubiously the strength of hurricanes. By the way, if it’s a trend, why wasn’t there another Katrina this year? Could it be that Katrina wasn’t actually as powerful as it seemed and that most of the harm done was caused by inadequate defences against flooding?

AAAS is organising an online climate change debate this week. I’ve posted my questions online in advance and will report back on the results.

Trapped particles and solar energy

Spanish researchers have trapped tiny clusters of titania in the pores of zeolite. They hope to develop a new class of photovoltaic material for solar energy conversion. Ultimately, zeolite-entrapped titania will be less expensive to manufacture, tougher, and more efficient than conventional silicon-based materials.

Titania-based photovoltaics are soon to enter the solar energy market but they suffer from several drawbacks. For instance, the small size of the particles used to make the light-sensitive layer means that they are not highly electrically conductive. Moreover, at less than a few nanometres, titania particles can only be activated by deep ultraviolet light and so don’t exploit the full spectrum of sunlight. Hermenegildo GarcÃa of the Polytechnic University of Valencia and colleagues hope to change all that, Although they need to improve the photo efficiency of their materials by at least an order of magnitude, the adaptability of zeolites means this should be possible.

Read on…

Women as fast as men, almost

Sexual arousal Scientists in Canada have used a close relative of night-vision goggles to watch women and men become sexually aroused while watching videos. Their study reveals that arousal happens in women just as rapidly as it does in men.

“Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal,’ says Irv Binik of McGill University Health Centre.

Rather than using manual intervention or genital connections, Binik focused thermographic cameras on his subjects’ genitals while they watched a montage of material from pornography to horror movies to The Best of Mr. Bean to Canadian tourism travelogues to provide a base of control data.

During the arousal experiment, the male and female subjects watched separate sexually explicit films procured from the Kinsey Institute and determined to be sexually arousing to specific genders. They watched the images through special video goggles to minimize distractions.

Binik remotely monitored body-temperature changes to within a 100th of a degree via a computer in a different room. Both the men and the women began showing arousal within 30 seconds. The men reached maximal arousal in about ten minutes, while women took a minute or two longer.

‘In any experiment on sexual arousal done in a laboratory, there is some distraction,’ concedes Binik. ‘But compared to previous techniques involving invasive measures or electrodes, this is minimally invasive and the same measurements are used for men and women, which makes it very interesting that the data ended up being the same.’

He says they’re the same, but if women are lagging behind the men by a minute or two in reaching full arousal, that could make all the difference for some couples, surely?

Colleague Tuuli Kukkonen adds that ‘This will help diagnose and treat sexual dysfunction in women, such as female sexual arousal disorder, which is poorly understood.’ Details of the work will appear in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in January 2007.

Calcium, cola, and osteoporosis

I just posted a note over on the science news forum sciscoop about the latest research showing how women are at increased risk of osteoporosis if they are regular cola drinkers. Men don’t seem to suffer this increased risk and women are imbibe carbonated drinks other than cola are unaffected too. I suspect it is related to the high phosphoric acid levels in cola.

I remember Prof Bruce Tattershall telling his chemistry students that the only reason cola is manufactured with phosphoric acid is that adding the cheaper, and merely dibasic sulfuric, as opposed to tribasic phosphoric, acid to the ingredients list would reduce the market to zero.

It’s a shame, because it is apparently the high affinity of the phosphate ion for calcium in bones that is the underlying cause of the increased risk of osteoporosis. This doesn’t explain why men are unaffected in the study, but does point to an obvious solution for women worried about the risk. Buy cola made with sulfuric acid instead…no….stop drinking this pathological stuff altogether!

Lou Gehrig protein found

A protein involved in neurodegenerative diseases including Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease (covered by DB in spectroscopynow.com, 2005-01-01), has been identified by researchers in Germany and the US. Manuela Neumann and colleagues identified TDP-43 as the pathogenicprotein involved in this form of dementia. These illnesses are the second most common cause of dementia in the under 65s, after Alzheimer’s disease, and commonly afflict people in their 40s and 50s. TDP-43 is one of the missing misfolded proteins found in the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. The researchers hope that their work will help in the study of dementia and motor neurone disease.

More information in the AAAS magazine Science today.

[Note, the original press release from AAAS actually said motor neutron disease, DB]

Pubchem discussion

Gary Wiggins alerted CHMINF-L subscribers to the launch of a listserv discussion group for Pubchem users:

“The PUBCHEM-L listserv provides a forum for users of the NIH PubChem
database (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) to discover how to make the
best use of the database,” he told us.

Wiggins also provided a warning to users thinking of flaming the makers of PubChem. “It is not intended to be a platform for political debate on whether it is right or wrong for the US government
to create such a database,” he said, “Appropriate questions or comments to be submitted to the list include methods of searching, descriptions of auxiliary tools to enhance the utility of PubChem searches, how best to interface with other systems, how PubChem compares with other sources,
etc.”

Visit Pubchem-L to search the archives and to subscribe.

Art for Science Sake

Two books long overdue for review here, have a more than nanoscopic layer of dust on their covers having sat atop of a pile of other books long overdue for review here that has grown systematically to more than a metre in height. Not the most poetic of intros to a review of scientific poetry but then I haven’t got all day to wax too lyrical.

Art Stewart reckons communication problems are significant obstacles to science but rather than encouraging a stripping away of jargon Stewart suggests science can benefit from a little of that old lyrical wax and perhaps more of an acceptance not to worry about spending more than a little time on matters that seem at first superficial. As such, he’s put together two rather subtly evocative books of poetry and essays that turn the concept of the all-too-common science for poets course on its head and offer up the idea of poetry class for scientists instead.

Superstring theory, katydids at night, natural disaster, and ammonites all succumb to Stewart’s muse in Rough Ascension while respect and care for life are the focus of the second of the pair Bushido – The Virtues of Rei and Makoto. Neither book is much thicker than the layer of dust that accumulated on their covers while I found the time to take a closer look but what they lack in thickness they make up for in depth.

A version of this item is available in our podcast complete with guest appearance by Art Stewart himself with a reading of Superstring Theory. Use the built-in player below to listen, save the mp3 to your hard disk or mp3 player, or subscribe for free with iTunes.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2006

Roger Kornberg will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on unzipping genetic transcription. More info on the Nobel site and my write-up next week under the Intute Spotlight and an XRD-oriented version to appear in spectroscopynow.com.

This just in from the American Chemical Society (19h00 UK time):

‘The research Dr. Kornberg did will help open the door to understanding and treating many human ailments, including cancer, heart disease and inflammation, and will help scientists better understand stem cells and their potential for therapeutic applications,” said Ann Nalley president of the American Chemical Society and a chemistry professor at Cameron University, in Lawton, Oklahoma. ‘This Nobel Prize also underscores the key role of chemistry in the scientific research into genetics. In order to take the first actual pictures revealing how the genetic information stored in genes is copied so that the body can use it, Dr. Kornberg used a mainstay chemical technology called x-ray crystallography.”

She adds that, ‘Chemistry has had a key role from the very onset of the genetics revolution. It has provided the core technologies that enabled molecular biology and biotechnology to leap ahead. I am delighted that this Nobel Prize highlights chemistry’s role in such an important field of research.'”

I couldn’t agree more, but it would be nice if the Chemistry prize were more geared to straight chemistry, especially as the Medicine prize was awarded this year for essentially similar research into RNA interference, which could just as easily be labelled “Chemistry”. Oh well.

Nobel Prize in Physics

Big Bang John Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.