Author: David Bradley

Extra virgin solvents

Olive OilExtracting oil from olives requires solvents and residues of halogenated solvent can sometimes leave a toxic taint in the product. European Union rules restricted the acceptable levels of these residues for the sake of public health but new sensitive and precise analytical procedures are needed to allow strict quality control and regulatory testing to be carried out.

Now, Spanish researchers have turned to chemical informatics to help them optimise the extraction-analysis process. Bromoform, chloroform, ethylene dichloride, trichloroethene, tetrachloroethene, dibromochloromethane, and bromodichloromethane are all employed to extract crude olive-pomace oils from the solid residue obtained in the pressing of olive oils. The EU limits the residues of these solvents to 0.1 milligram per kilogram for individual compounds and double than that for total content. “These solvents have a great negative influence on both the quality of oils and human health,” José Luis Gómez-Ariza of Huelva University told SpectroscopyNOW, “They are all considered to be possible carcinogens and, therefore, human exposure to such compounds should be minimized.”

Making light of spectroscopy

A radically different approach to detecting the way atoms resonate in a magnetic field could improve the sensitivity of NMR spectroscopy, according to US scientists.

Conventional liquid and solid relies on detecting the net dipolar magnetic field outside a spin-polarised sample, explain Michael Romalis and colleagues at Princeton University, New Jersey. However, this only offers the NMR spectroscopist limited structural and spatial information. As such NMR has been extended with elaborate techniques involving magnetic field gradients and spin correlations. Using a laser beam, which is by definition a polarised light source has provided a new avenue of research – optical NMR. However, until now, this has been limited to quantum dots and other specialists materials. Romalis and his colleagues hoped to extend optical NMR to a much wider field of research.

Find out more in the latest news round-up on spectroscopynow.com

Spanish heavy metal

Spanish scientists have used some tricky mathematics to help them work out where heavy metal comes from. Their findings, based on atomic analysis, will provide information useful in protecting us from these toxic elements.

Contamination of soils with heavy metal contaminants has become and increasingly important environmental issue, particularly in developed countries because of shifting land-use patterns. Such contaminants readily leach into water systems or are assimilated by certain crops with putatively detrimental effects on wildlife, livestock and human health. Understanding the role of soil type, organic content, clays and salts, such as carbonates, is essential to characterising the risks and developing a soil protection policy. Indeed, the European Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection requires the characterization of the content and source of heavy metals in soils so that quality standards can be established.

Read on…

Logical chemistry

logical chemistryIt has been thirteen years since Prasanna “AP” de Silva and his colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast published their first paper in the international science journal Nature, outlining how they hoped to convert small molecules into the kind of logical units that could carry out computations. In the September issue of Reactive Reports, we explain how this work has now led to the first practical application of logical chemistry and provided combinatorial chemists with a way to add a unique tag to potentially millions of molecules in parallel.

Combichem uses a set of chemical building blocks to synthesize a vast library of new molecules by building them up in all possible combinations of the building blocks. But, tagging each molecule has always been a stalling point. De Silva’s work could release the bottleneck. Read all about logical molecular tags in the new issue of RR.

Also, in this month’s issue, Peter Loew is featured . Peter is managing director of chemoinformatics software company InfoChem. There have been a lot of changes in the IT world since InfoChem was formed in 1989 and Loew revealed how these changes have evolved the company: Read the full interview.

How to avoid spam, whatever your email address

I’m almost sweltering in the heat of a late burst of good weather here in southern England but staying cool because I finally implemented the neatest trick to keep all my email inboxes virtually spam free (thanks for nudging me in the right direction on this, Colin)

Colin (who runs the Scoophost system through which sciscoop.com is hosted) suggested that rather than relying on spam filters that wait until you’ve downloaded your email before putting them in the trashcan, a much more effective approach to spam is to re-route all your email through Google Mail and let it take care of the spam. Set your Gmail account to allow pop3 downloads and add this account to your email program and then you get all your legitimate email much faster without having to wait for spam to download alongside it.

The spam messages, by the way, simply accumulate in the spam box on your Gmail account. A quick once a week scan allows you to spot any false positives, but the rest get automatically deleted every 30 days.

It’s a simple solution and one that has cut my spam overload from several hundred a day on a dozen email accounts, to just half a dozen so far this week. Thanks again Colin.

If you also have SpamPal running the Bayesian plugin then that catches any of the remaining detritus and filters it to your local spam folder, leaving your inbox almost pristine.

I’m going to miss those messages offering me a bigger, longer, firmer, slimmer, faster, slower, shorter, tigher, younger, bits. Not!

Recent Volcanic Eruptions

UPDATE APRIL 2009: If you’re after news on the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull, or Eyjafjöll, which is currently belching out masses of ash into the atmosphere and grounding planes across Northern Europe, check out our report on SciScoop.

erupting volcanoesYou can find a regularly updated list of recent volcano eruptions here.

Given the number of Sciencebase visitors looking for information on recent volcano eruptions and currently erupting volcanoes, it seemed sensible to set up a page that would provide the latest information on that very subject. By syndicating the latest announcements and alerts on recent eruptions from the University of North Dakota website (Volcano World), Sciencebase provides a quick route to the information you need in this explosive area.

Volcano World is a collaborative higher education, K-12, and public outreach project of the North Dakota and Oregon Space Grant Consortia administered by the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. Thanks to them for making their updates available as a newsfeed for syndication.

We also have information about the 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster.

Metabolic Typing Body Chemistry and Diet

Of all the millions, if not billions, of web searches being carried out across the net every day, there are approximately 54 looking for this quite spectacular string of words: the metabolic typing diet customize your diet to your own unique body chemistry

It was the word chemistry, that brought it to near the top of a recent keywords trawl I was carrying out to help find new topics to offer visitors to the Chemspy site.

Turns out to be a book. I should’ve guessed, why else would so many people search on such a specific string of words. You can buy it here.

The book’s blurb explains the gist of author, William Linz Wolcott’s diet theory: “People are unique in more ways than we can see. Stomachs and other internal organs come in many different shapes and sizes. Digestive juices, too, can vary dramatically from one person to another…it stands to reason that different foods have very different effects on different people.”

Wolcott believes that tailoring your diet to your body’s particular chemistry – metabolic typing – will improve digestion, circulation, immunity, energy, and mood. To determine your type, he has you take a 65-question test (the questions range from nose moisture to how you feel about potatoes), then place yourself in one of three categories: protein type, carbo type, or mixed type.

Sounds like this will have great potential for those who really cannot bring themselves to let go of the remote control, get up off the sofa and do some exercise. Once they realise it doesn’t actually work for them (usually takes about two weeks for that to happen), this tome will be find its slot on the book shelf alongside Atkins, Cabbage, and F…

Bacteria build nano catalysts

Bacteria could be the key to improving metal catalysts for the chemical industry, according to research in Germany. Scientists from the Forschungszentrum Rossendorf in Dresden have exploited the survival skills of bacteria that live in uranium mining waste to make tiny clusters of the precious metal palladium. These tiny bullets, just a few billionths of a millimetre across, are much better catalysts than normal palladium, which is used in speeding up chemical reactions and in the catalytic converters of cars.

The bacterium, Bacillus sphaericus JG-A12 has a protective protein layer that allows it to survive in the extreme environment of a uranium mining waste pile. This protein layer comprises a grid of nanoscopic pockets of identical size that can trap toxic metal ions and prevent them from harming the bacterium by converting them into tiny clumps of insoluble metal.

Full story…

Scanning vegetative patients

Last week, Cambridge and Belgian researchers reported that they could observe almost identical brain activity in healthy volunteers as a patient purportedly in the persistent vegetative state following emergence from a coma (the patient was originally in a car crash in July 2005). The implications of this functional MRI work are that some (but by no means all) PVS patients may have consciousness to some degree despite their outwardly appearing inanimate.

It is incredibly tragic to imagine that there might be PVS patients who do have some consciousness but cannot move or communicate with the outside world. Functional MRI may in the long-term lead to a way to communicate with such patients.

That said, there is a long way to go before fMRI or any other technique can provide us with a full understanding of the persistent vegetative state and some researchers are cautious of extrapolating the Cambridge findings too far. Indeed, if you read my report about the research in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.com, you can see quite clearly that the fMRI scan of the control volunteer and the patient are superficially similar – activity is in the same region, after all – but the level of activity appears to be markedly less prominent in the patient. This could have important implications for what is meant by such a patient having consciousness as we know it.

Much more research is now needed to help us redefine the PVS. This is perhaps a matter of some urgency given the current definition of PVS states that these patients cannot experience pain and suffering as these are attributes of consciousness.