David Bradley – Page 319

I Can Has Cheezburger

Cheeseburger I received a press release today from a US company addressing me by name and asking me whether I’d like to write about nanocardiology. Apparently, the company has a nanotech product in pre-clinical trials that cleans up arterial plaques. The putative product from St Louis company Kereos is based on endothelial alpha-v-beta-3 integrin-targeted fumagillin nanoparticles and can seek out markers for arterial plaques and help break them down.

Obviously, the implications for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease could be enormous, and the medical profession will be keen to see whether the company is successful with this product once it moves on to the clinical stage.

Remarkably though, the person who sent the press release signed off with a rather flippant remark: “Now bring on the cheeseburgers!”

Okay, it’s a joke. Haah, haah. But, hidden within that seemingly throwaway remark is decades of meat-eating substance abuse and an attitude to diet and health that underlies the very reason we in the west, and in particular in the US, are suffering such tragic levels of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, surely?

We cannot continue to shovel in vast quantities of fatty red meat smothered with reconstituted dairy products and a guilty sliver of gherkin without long-term repurcussions. Never mind the vast tracts of wilderness, rainforest, and habitat that is being raised so that beef stocks can remain secured. Never mind the huge fences that segregate our cattle from the wildlife and in so doing block migratory routes to seasonal watering holes that have existed for countless millennia.

But, don’t worry about the buffalo and the wildebeest, the rainforest canopy, or the other effects of overindulgence on your health. Let’s all carry on eating those cheeseburgers safe in the knowledge that we’ll soon be able to pop a little pill that will scrape our arteries clean before that first heart attack.

Nobel Prize for Medicine 2006

This year US scientists Andrew Fire and Craig Mello have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of a fundamental mechanism that controls the flow of genetic information.

The human genome provides the DNA instructions for making proteins in the cell. These instructions are carried by messenger RNA (mRNA). Fire and Mello discovered a mechanism that can degrade mRNA from a specific gene, RNA interference. Details of this process, which they published in 1998, explain how it is activated when RNA molecules occur as double-stranded pairs in the cell. Double-stranded RNA activates biochemical machinery which degrades those mRNA molecules that carry a genetic code identical to that of the double-stranded RNA. When such mRNA molecules disappear, the corresponding gene is silenced and no protein of the encoded type is made.

Check out the Nobel site for more on today’s announcement.

2, 4, 6, 8 – team oxygen

Nature described this finding as “surprising, elegant, and entirely useless”. Well, the journal is half right. Solid elemental oxygen is not thought to exist anywhere on earth or even elsewhere in the universe under the immense pressures created by Malcolm McMahon and Paul Loubeyre. They and their colleagues put the squeeze on solid oxygen, which forms deep red crystals at above a million atmospheres. They used various techniques to determine the structure of this new material and found that oxygen atoms team up to form clusters of eight in the solid. A seemingly esoteric discovery you might think.

However, the new understanding gained of materials under pressure could lead to new efficient rocket fuels or superhard materials formed from oxygen, nitrogen, or carbon that beat diamond for toughness.

Moreover, the results suggest that hydrogen might also form metallic crystals of a similar nature to solid oxygen at 450 gigapascals (4.5 million times terrestrial atmospheric pressure). Such pressures exist at Jupiter’s core astronomers think. Under these conditions metallic hydrogen may behave as an exotic superconductor or superfluid. That finding may be elegant, certainly no longer surprising, but too perhaps even more useless!

Read the full story in SpectroscopyNOW.com

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Over on baldiness.com, the blogging bald guy asks why the hirsute place so much emphasis on hair while those who are follicularly challenged or waxed lyrical cranially don’t seem that fussed.

As you will see from the photo on my resume page I too am less than hirsute from the neck up and so feel I can comment without worrying about being PC.

I think it’s only those without hair that worry about why anyone worries about their hair. Those with hair worry about it, because they can. If you’ve got none, you’ve not got anything to muss up and gel, so you cannot see the point.

Hair is more than merely a way of identifying an individual, it’s a characteristic, a trait, that helps define the individual and has to have been important to our ancestors all along as we at some point in our evolutionary past lost the body hair (mostly) that made us indistinguishable from the mammalian masses. Once we had a sense of being different to those cousins hanging on the family tree who ape around I guess we found that our appearance more than our scent became increasingly important.

Perhaps therein lies the key. We don’t rely as much on sense of smell for attraction but being visual creatures we focus on appearance. Hair can be changed, so setting one individual apart from another in the mating game, is possible with nothing more than a few braids, a bit of wax, or a bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution.

Anyway, if we were all bald, all you hairies would have no right to call anyone else slaphead.

Chemical flickr

It was a tough call given how many photos there are of what those Stateside call a pharmacy or druggist, as opposed to a chemist in the UK, but I managed to track down a few chemists on flickr. Remember, regardless of appearances, chemists are always hot (it’s all those exothermic reactions).

Once again gender merging raises PC concentration.

Flickr Chemists

Grinning Don
Rhiannon
Lynn
Becky
Naser
Begoggled
Gregory
Cleopatra
Karl Pilkington
Little chemist

Any suggestions for the next round of hot science welcome…

X-rays solve transport problem

X-ray crystallography has provided new insights into how the microscopic motorised transport system that operates in our cells is powered. The study could have implications for understanding the symptoms of Down syndrome, the neuromuscular condition Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and some cancers, all of which arise through some form of breakdown of this system. The work may ultimately lead to possible new treatments for such disorders.

The researchers behind the work are from Duke University Medical Center, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, and the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK. They explain that molecular motors are responsible for driving the separation of chromosomes during cell division. This process does not proceed normally in certain genetic disorders and if unchecked can lead to cancer.

Read the full story in my latest news round-up from spectroscopynow.com

Smog Schmog

In his climate-change ain’t happening State of the Union speech of Sept. 25th, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) makes the claim that climate change “skeptic” scientists do not get a fair share of media coverage. But, according to DeSmogBlog a quick infomart media search of US papers shows there have been more than 350 mentions of Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, William Grey, Roger Pielke, Richard Linzen and Patrick Michaels.

It seems the infamous gang of climate change “skeptics” got mentioned, on average, once every 5 days in North American major print outlets.

I’m not sure how that compares to the non-skeptics, they don’t say, so I asked Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog to expand:

“I presume the argument here is that people who recognize the overwhelming evidence of climate change are getting an unfair amount of media coverage,” he told me, “while the skeptics are being bullied into silence. Woefully, this is pretty much the opposite of what is truly happening.”

He points to a peer-reviewed paper from Boykoff and Boykoff [link is now dead] that wades into the subject in some detail. The short version, according to Littlemore is this: “The climate change discussion in peer-reviewed scientific journals includes no papers whatsoever challenging the theory of anthropogenic global warming (check Oreskes in Science Magazine), while in the mainstream press, cranks like Singer and Soon get their [allegedly] unscientific denials mentioned in more than half the stories.”

Earworms burrow into your brain

I just can’t get you outta my head…is the usual thought when an irritatingly catchy pop song gets stuck on loop in your brain for days on end. A start-up company in East Anglia reasoned that this catchiness might be put to good use in helping people quickly learn a foreign language. Or, at the very least, a couple of dozen keyphrases that will help them get by while on holiday or a business trip abroad.

Programme creator Marlon Lodge found that background music seemed to help his language students remember phrases much better than simply hearing and repeating phrases by rote. Lodge teamed up with his brother Andrew and designed Earworms musical brain trainer (mbt) They reckon the system boosts language retention by up to 80%. I ripped the Earworms Italian CD to my mp3 player and listened every time I went for a run – in an effort to get fit and learn how to order pizza, a gelato, and a cappucino when we went on holiday this year.

It works. Very well. I’d done Spanish and French at school and Italian isn’t so different, but the earworms gave me the necessary extra to be able to confidently book a table, order food and drinks, and find out why the return flight got delayed so badly.

The system uniquely anchors foreign words and phrases into long term memory by hooking them to music. The company reckons it could provide a learning breakthrough for people with poor sight, dyslexia, or attention deficit problems by taking away the need to concentrate on reading phrase books and other academically based language courses.

‘Many people are reluctant to begin learning something new after they leave school, but as Mark Twain once said, ‘My education started the day I left school.’ Earworms is very much about giving people an easy handle on learning, and what easier way to learn than simply by listening to music, something we all enjoy?’ Lodge says.

The program is available for French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and now Mandarin Chinese. More information at www.earwormslearning.com. It would be good to see some solid scientific research on how this system works, perhaps a functional MRI study showing the language centres in the brain lighting up more brightly with music rather than without. I’ll cover any such developments on spectroscopynow.com

Anyway, I just ordered the Spanish disc for next year’s holiday and they sent me Mandarin Chinese too…so, maybe I should think about going a little further afield.

Ciao for now!

Chemists escape browser lock down

WebME chemical structure drawing Is your browser so locked down that you can’t install any plugins or enable Java? Firewall refusing to cooperate with your molecules? Antivirus screaming at your structural efforts?

If so, then you probably find it rather difficult to run some of the chemistry drawing packages available for interactive use on the Web. There is an alternative.

Molinspiration Cheminformatics has released WebME, a molecule editor for creating
and editing molecules within a web browser that doesn’t need Java support and requires no plugins to be installed. The molecular editor is based on Web 2.0 Ajax technology and structure processing runs on serverside rather than on your machine.

The result is a web-based structure-input program with all kinds of potential that is not only platform independent but works with those locked down browsers.

Click to try WebME. In this implementation, the program is being used as the structure input for a molecular property calculator.

It may not have the depth of field of programs like ChemSketch and ChemDraw (yet), nor the bells and whistles of the many other structure packages available. But, the benefits to those behind restrictive user settings (in chemistry libraries for instance) are obvious.

The program is still in the beta stages of development, sitting at version 0.96 whatever that means. It seems nice and smooth to use though, quickly calculates properties and generates a Smiles string that you can then use elsewhere to search for your molecules. I hope they add InChI support soon though that’s the way to go for molecular searching these days.

There is, of course, another application that operates under similar general principles – PubChem sketcher (click the sketch button at PubChem.

Baby poop

It’s not a subject for polite conversatio, but anyone who has ever had to handle a soiled nappy (or diaper as our colleagues Stateside refer to them) will know that baby poop comes in a range of colours (unlike the apocryphal Ford Model T). The BabyPoop lens over on Squidoo offers a kind of litmus test, or more appropriately, a universal indicator paper strip, for the spectrum of options available.

Mustard coloured

poop is common for breastfed babies.

Whereas

Blue poop can only mean one thing…