David Bradley – Page 335

Dell Inspiration

dell-inspiron A couple of weeks ago my Dell laptop started stopping, as it were. At first, I thought it was an issue with the CPU overheating, which I thought I’d addressed with a BIOS update, but a CPU temperature monitoring program showed things were apparently fine in that department. After it happened three or four times, I realised that it was happening when I moved in my chair, or when I leant on the wrist-rest part of the base, or adjusted the screen angle, or inserted a PCMCIA card, or opened the DVD drawer…eventually it wouldn’t even POST, let alone BOOT, so basically I was stuck with a dead Dell.

I suspected a loose connection or perhaps just a chunk of conductive desktop detritus stuck somewhere in the laptop’s guts. Whatever it was I really didn’t have the tools to fix it myself and thought, why should I? The machine is only a couple of years old, and although it’s outside the standard warranty period, I’d have expected at least twice as long as being a reasonable lifetime. So, I got in touch with the manufacturer – Dell – via their press office – and suggested as much.

With the fastest turnaround of any tech support department I’ve ever dealt with, my machine was picked up by DHL on Tuesday last thing, posted to Dell, and booted back to me today (Friday) in plenty of time for the World Cup! Apparently, faulty components included ASSY, PWA, PLN, 5150, DOOR, MINI-PCI, NBK, ABCS, ASSY, HTSNK, W/FAN, THRMGRS, 5150, KYBD, ENG, UK, 86, S-PTG, ABCS…etc etc I recognise the word DOOR in their and KYBD must mean keyboard, and some of the other things seem to relate to different bits of plastic and fans and cuh, but I haven’t really the time nor the inclination to look up any of the others, so we’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, from a quick test, it seems to be working fine. So, I’d like to extend a thank you to John L at Dell in Ireland who handled my complaint so graciously and expeditiously.

Until the fault appeared, the machine had always been fast and reliable, and when a problem arose, the company dealt with it efficiently and professionally. Now, I can get back up to speed…

Google Pharmacy Phake

You know how keen Google is to expand it’s breadth? Well, how about this, it seems it’s swapped the oo in it’s logo for some ooh-la-la, in the shape of two blue diamonds stamped Pfizer.

Before you rush to get stocked up on tamiflu and viagra, however, check out The Register article on Google Pharmacy which reveals it to be a front for a fake drugs seller. How do they know it’s a fake seller, well they claim to be able to provide generic versions of dozens of drugs that are not yet off-patent, that’s how.

The spam that arrived advertising Google Pharmacy stated: “We’ve just launched a pharmaceutical interfaces for Google, as well as several new features for the people buying pills and using pharmaceutical interfaces”. Poor grammar aside, you just can rest assured that it was definitely not the real thing right from the start. Or, could you?

According to an unrelated article on WebProNews, the sponsored Googlads that appear when you search for the likes of “Vicodin” or “Oxycontin” are not necessarily from fully legitimate companies either. Some of these sites, which appear above and to the side of search results in the popular search engine, are selling direct drugs that usually require a doctor’s prescription.

Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, is according to WebProNews, talking with Google about a third-party service that will help them differentiate between rogue and legitimate pharmacies.

It will be interesting to see whether that works out, or whether the pharma spammers and scammers will simply find a way around it.

Band Aid Fuel Cell

Sciencebase has got lots of science fair project ideas as well as fun science experiments to do at home, but one that we haven’t got, admittedly, is how to make a fuel cell out of a couple of large bandaids, a piece of stainless steel bug screen and a few bits of plastic (oh, and you’ll need a pair of cotton gloves). There was a how to on Makezine.com, but it’s showing up as not found. If anyone finds a valid link, please let me know.

Sperm and eggs

Adam Bjork and Scott Pitnick of Syracuse University have found a sexy paradox. But, don’t get too excited, it’s fruit fly sex we’re talking here and specifically sperm and egg production in Drosophila.

Previous work in the Pitnick lab showed that after sex, sperm competition takes place within the females (who mate with several males) can lead to decreased sperm quantities by favouring the production of larger sperm. In other words, never mind the quantity feel the length mode comes into play, because female fruit flies have evolved so that longer sperm have a greater chance of successfully fertilizing eggs. Fertilization failure is obviously important as individuals who fail are essentially an evolutionary dead end.

This leads to the ‘big sperm paradox’ because the idea that postcopulatory sexual selection could favour the evolution of giant sperm clashes with traditional sexual selection theory, which predicts that the most successful sperm competitors will be the males that produce many, tiny sperm. As males evolve to produce larger – and therefore fewer – sperm, eggs become less rare, and sexual selection should weaken, according to theory. The term ‘isogamy’ refers to the state at which males and females have equal investment per gamete (sex cell) when producing sperm and eggs. In a truly isogamous population, each sperm and each egg would have a chance to participate in a successful fertilization. In such a population, sexual selection would be extremely weak, as there would be little or no competition among males to fertilize eggs.

To investigate this apparent paradox between empirical data and traditional theory, Bjork and Pitnick set out to measure the strength of sexual selection in four Drosophila species of varying sperm length, ranging from the anisogamous D. melanogaster (in which a male produces 30 sperm in the time it takes a female to make one egg) to the nearly isogamous D. bifurca (where just six sperm are produced per egg). They found that, contrary to theoretical predictions, the level of competition among males did not decrease; the strength of sexual selection remained high as sperm size increased. Their results show that, once females evolve a preference for longer sperm, intense sperm competition can actually reverse the trajectory of sperm evolution so that the most successful males are those with the most female-like strategy of producing very few, large gametes.’The sperm of Drosophila bifurca is 20 times longer than the male that produces it,’ says Bjork.

‘To put that into perspective, if humans made sperm that long and you took a six-foot man and stood him on the goal line of a football field, his sperm would stretch out to the 40-yard line.’

While it is fascinating, the evolution of giant sperm is puzzling. Says Bjork: ‘Until recently, it was widely believed that selection generated by sperm competition favors males that manufacture the smallest gametes possible in order to maximize sperm number. In essence, sperm competition is attributed with the evolutionary maintenance of anisogamy. I became interested in understanding whether the very act of sexual selection, by definition, can limit its own ability to act.’

The next step is to investigate the details of the effects of sperm length evolution on the intensity of sexual selection.

Details were published in Nature under the banner “Intensity of sexual selection along the anisogamy—isogamy continuum”, which doesn’t give much away unless you’re in the field. The paper’s DOI reference number is 10.1038/nature04683. Use our DOI lookup tool to go straight to it (simply cut and paste the DOI and click DOI lookup in the right-hand toolbox) and don’t forget you can grab the simple script to add this and our other toolboxes to your website.

Round solution to a salty problem

Have you ever been frustrated by salt in humid weather? The little cubic grains get all sticky and clump together and won’t leap on to your seaside fish and chips no matter how hard you shake the salt shaker. The simple solution is simply to not use salt, after all they repeatedly tell us too much salt is bad for us.

Indian chemists worried that was too simple a solution of have come up with a way to make round salt that could be a boon to consumers and industry. According to an ACS news release, round salt represents a dream come true for researchers who have strived for years to smooth the shape of common salt.

Table salt (sodium chloride) adopts a cubic close-packed crystal structure and so the crystals themselves normally exist as cubes. Pushpito Ghosh, P. Dastidar and colleagues at the Central Salt & Marine Chemicals Research Institute in Bhavnagarwere not happy with this and have devised a method for making large quantities of salt in an almost spherical, bead-like, form. They describe how in the July 5 issue of Crystal Growth & Design. They use glycine to modify the crystal growht process and effectively force the sodium chloride crystals to grow at different rates on different crystal faces, so they end up with a different symmetry.

In this novel round form, rhombic dodecahedral, to be strict, salt can flow much more freely, without caking, that claggy effect of humid summer weather, which is great news for fish and chip fans. A bigger market may be industries that store and use sodium chloride by the tonne to make everything from bulk chemicals to dyes, fertilizers, paper and pharmaceuticals. For these companies, non-caking salt would flow more freely on the production line.

Free flowing or not, it doesn’t round off the problem of whether or not salt is good or bad for you.

Satisfying fructose

Fructose is a sugar, it’s the sugar associated with fruit and honey in fact and has in the past been given the green light as being a more beneficial source of sugar than the processed sucrose we get in kilo bags from the supermarkets. However, research earlier this year suggested that fructose could be harmful to health because it makes you feel less sated by a meal containing high levels of this sugar than you would otherwise feel. Since fructose is added to lots of processed foods, this, the research suggests, might be yet another factor underpinning the nation’s health and leading to weight problems and metabolic syndrome.

I hadn’t seen this particular piece of research until a Sciencebase reader alerted me to it today, but it got me thinking. If fructose makes you feel less “full” than you actually are then this finding perhaps conflicts with the urgings of health authorities that we should eat more fruit and use natural sugars, such as honey. It would also explain how my wife can eat half a dozen pieces of fruit at a sitting without ever feeling full…

The original research was published in Nature Clinical Practice: Nephrology and a news write-up on the subject can be found here

Chirality – panda thumb

The chirality of life, an issue I’ve discussed on numerous occasions in these and other pages, emerges as yet another source of pseudo-science for the intelligent design lobby. Apparently, the bias in handedness among the molecules of life – amino acids, DNA, etc, could not have arisen spontaneously without a guiding hand…

An interesting discussion on this very subject is underway at The Panda’s Thumb blog, it will be interesting to see where it leads. However, my own interviews with chemists on this subject over the years point to a wide range of natural phenomena that could have led to the emergence of the chiral bias with no need to invoke a supernatural hand.

Beating metals

Ever since the Iron Age, we have known that beating certain metals repeatedly makes them harder, but have not until now understood exactly why. US researchers have discovered finally that three is a magic number in this process in which defects known as dislocations get knotted toughening up the battered metal. Vasily Bulatov and colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, realized that the standard explanation for metal hardening was ignoring a key element. Find out more…

Top Ten and Bottom Ten Foods

Steve Feld, Editor of the ThinkQuest NYC Newsletter emailed to tell me about a multilingual collaboration going by the name of “Ten Best Foods Ten Worst Foods”. The site has been designated a Learning Fountain and a USA Today Educator’s Best Bet, and for good reason. It was also featured as a Good HouseKeeping Site of the Day and was selected as a Seven Wonders of the Web and featured in the Edutopia Newsletter!

The site, created by inner students, tackles the growing problem of childhood obesity head on by providing children with information on foods that are healthy and those to avoid. Childhood obesity has more than doubled in the past 20 years, and leads to a variety of health problems as a result of dangerous diets.

Children need to switch to healthy foods in order to avoid heart disease and raised blood pressure. This project looks at the best foods to eat to manage weight and cure common ailments and then identifies the worst foods which have become all to prevalant in society.

“The students involved in this exploration were fascinated to learn how their lives could be enhanced by selecting natural foods and be able to prevent common ailments,” Feld told me, “They were also delighted to learn how to create a self-scoring quiz to provide site visitors with a vehicle to demonstrate acquired knowledge.”

The two side by side top-tens make interesting reading with watermelon and pine nuts the top two foods, apparently, followed by lean meat. In the worst foods are the usual french fries, hamburgers, and cheesecake. But, they also single out a specific brand of chicken soup, of which I’m a bit dubious, I’m sure any brand of canned soup is going to have just about the same level of health effects as any other give or take a pinch of salt. I’m also curious as to why lean meat is listed, by that do they mean roast chicken as opposed to a fatty lamb cutlet or something else?

One of the foods they list is specific by brand – Campbell’s “red-and-white-label” condensed soups. These are rather high in salt, with half a can providing a person’s daily quota of sodium chloride. Of course, you don’t eat the soup undiluted, so it’s a bit unfair that this company is being singled out for their condensed soups. That said, public awareness has persuaded Campbell to offer a healther option, so the company must have been concerned to some degree themselves.

It’s the foods that heal page with which I am a little more concerned and it seems the students obtained their background information on this from a book on nutrition!

The claims for apples, for instance, would certainly suggest the fruit has a role in daily physician attendance, saying that they protect your heart, prevent constipation, block diarrhoea, improve lung capacity, and cushions joints. Similar claims are made for a whole range of other “natural” foods from peanuts to yogurt. Do strawberries really improve memory and mangoes protect against Alzheimer’s disease? Certainly, prunes are renowned for preventing constipation, but to a susceptible bowel they can achieve the other extreme! But, “olive oil protects your heart”, is not an unequivocal scientific research. There is evidence that the phenols in red wine beloved of the Mediterranean regions that purportedly have lower heart disease could explain the lower incidence of heart disease in France, for instance, but it might just be down to garlic, or olive oil, or hard water, or that more people die younger of liver disease before their hearts pack up!

Don’t get me wrong, the general message from the site is great and nicely put across, it really isn’t the fault of the students if their source of information makes general sweeping statements regarding individual foods. The general message of eat healthy and avoid the burgers is the crucial point. I just hope readers don’t leave the site with the feeling that an apple and a mango a day is all they need do to stay healthy, whereas the truth seems to lie, not in assuming specific foods can stave off ill health, but in having a varied diet that has excesses of no one food type, and generally avoids those associated strongly with particular problems such as fatty red meat with bowel cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Feld also tells me that, “The multi-lingual aspect of the site was translated into French and Romanian by our international peers to attract ESL learners.”

Spyware White Paper

The full impact of spyware has not yet been seen, individuals may suffer person computer slow down and loss of personal information to some corporate database, but in business spyware can be a far more insidious threat. Keeping your organization spyware free is essential and according to Surfcontrol’s White Paper on the subject (available for free download from Sciencebase) requires a comprehensive, multi-layered approach.

Organizations are waking up to the spyware epidemic, but many are still addressing it with point-solutions and treating it as an isolated problem. In reality, it can cost billions in compromised security, network resources, productivity, and even legal liability. This white paper explores the full impact of spyware in the enterprise, and outlines an aggressive, multi-layered approach to not only remove it from the workplace, but deny its admittance entirely.