David Bradley – Page 336

Obesity in pregnancy

expectant mothers who are overweight or obese could be putting their own health and the health of their unborn child at risk, according to UK researchers published in a report today by researchers at the University of Teesside’s School of Health & Social Care. The report is available at http://www.tees.ac.uk/schools/SOH/obesity_maternal.cfm

Carolyn Summerbell, who heads the University of Teesside’s Centre for Food, Physical Activity and Obesity Research, reviewed some of the clinical issues related to caring for obese pregnant mothers. ‘We’re not trying to blame or stigmatize obese pregnant mothers and we would certainly not recommend that overweight mums-to-be go on crash diets. But our initial findings show reasons for concern with obese pregnant mothers, and there is a lack of weight management guidance and support readily available for them’

Lead researcher Nicola Heslehurst said the research team was alerted to the growing problem by anecdotal evidence from midwives and other staff in maternity units in the region who are increasingly concerned about the apparent increase in the number of women who were obese at the start of their pregnancy.

‘Doctors and midwives in the region have expressed concerns about the increase in complications that can arise when mums are obese. One of the problems is that sometimes you can’t see the ultrasound scan of the baby properly in obese pregnant women and this can lead to clinical problems as well as being upsetting for the parents who are not able to see a picture of their baby’.

Dr Judith Rankin, Associate Director of the Regional Maternity Survey Office (RMSO) and a partner in the study, said: ‘This research will help to inform the [UK’s National Health Service] NHS about the changes needed to the way service delivery is carried out and how the information is collected.’

‘While this is clearly a serious issue, we don’t want to do anything that will encourage pregnant women who are obese to go on a crash diet during pregnancy. What they should do is try to eat a healthy diet during pregnancy and then lose weight after their child is born and before they have their next child,’ she said.

Black holes are green

The environmental impact of black holes is perhaps a distant and esoteric concept, unless you’re waiting for part 2 of the latest Doctor Who story, but US astronomers have used the latest observations of nine black holes with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to estimate directly the efficiency of black holes. Their calculations show that black holes are perhaps the most fuel efficient engines in the universe, with a remarkably high fraction of the energy they consume being converted into work. Read on in the latest issue of our physical sciences webzine – Spotlight.

Tequila time!

Back online after a short break and catching up with my various articles that have published while I was away!

So, in the latest issue of Reactive Reports you can read about a testing times for tequila, whether celebrating Cinco de Mayo or just having another relaxing day in Margaritaville. The new chemical test could be the assurance you need that the bottle you’re downing is genuine tequila. Also in this issue, we find out how to test the byproducts of cell death, get the fizz on the benzene in soft drinks story, and follow the life and times of cheminformatics expert Wendy Warr.

Elemental Discoveries – the first chemistry webzine 1995-

This is the old Current Issue page for David Bradley’s Elemental Discoveries, which he launched in December 1995 and ran as part of sciencebase.com when it was launched in July 1999. Below is an archive of titles up to June 2006 issue. You can get more up-to-date listings of science articles here.

To celebrate a decade on the web, I re-launched Elemental Discoveries as an all-new Science News and Blog section within Sciencebase. You can grab our RSS newsfeed to keep up to date, or pick a specific subject feed to get just those posts in your area of interest, whether that’s astronomy, chemistry, sex, or whatever. Below you will find our selection of the best of the blog each month archived up to June 2006.

Archives:

In Issue 93:
June 2006
Coffee and alcohol, The erotic brain, Sperm and eggs

In Issue 92:
May 2006
Llama Caffeine Dip Test, Taxol to a T, Artificial Sweeteners and Cancer, Zoo Poo

In Issue 91:
April 2006
Sex Gets Up Women’s Noses, Carbon Nanosheets, Interview with Martin Walker

In Issue 90:
March 2006
Critical Trials TGN1412, Interview with Steve Bryant, Black Eyed Peas

In Issue 89:
February 2006
Loud music and ecstasy, Uber Pluto, Face Off, Sporty Nanotubes

In Issue 88:
January 2006
Keep Eating Your Greens, Promise of a Rain Garden, Say NO to Straddling Molecules, , Review: Avoiding a Hacking Nightmare
This is the archive of the original Elemental Discoveries as it operated from Spring 1996 until the beginning of 2006:

In Issue 87:
December 2005
Father Christmas Research – seasonal family trees
Healthy Pregnancy – Pregnant women should exercise more
Asthma Treatment (ebook) – asthma relief

In Issue 86:
November 2005
Massive black hole – is it or isn’t it?
How to avoid colds and flu – perfectly timed perennial tips
Women in Science – Short review of the story of Dorothea Bate, unearthed

In Issue 85:
October 2005
Bird flu symptoms – why shouldn’t all get in a flap over avian influenza (just yet)

In Issue 84:
September 2005
Scientific Research in the Past – What do museum researchers get up to

In Issue 83:
August 2005
Weights and Measures – Understanding changing fundamental constants

In Issue 82:
June-July 2005
Corporate Academia – science at the commercial end from the people who straddle the divide
Movie physics – science at the movies from the people who put it there
Extreme science – science at the extremities from the people who know

In Issue 81:
May issue of Elemental Discoveries
Automated image sorting – software that does for pictures what OCR does for text
Embargoed news story – revisiting an old issue

In Issue 80:
April 2005 Mechanism of muscle contraction
Adenosine triphosphate, muscle and myosin
h2h TV
Topics in Thermodynamics
Drugs on the internet

In Issue 79:
March 2005 Folding Protein Sensors
X -ray Movies
Material comforts for cyclists.

In earlier issues:
Digging in the dirt – liquid crystals under the illuminating gaze of the Advanced Photon Source
Ibogaine against alcohol and drug addiction – cure-all or hallucinogenic red herring
The latest physics research – into Einstein’s Brownian motion
Spyware, trojans and worms – computer security and viral updates
Envirox fuel catalyst – UK bus fleet equipped with “green” catalyst
Active galactic nuclei – quasars, black holes and galaxies, Royal Society report from David Bradley
Dissecting the atom – Research at ANL’s APS – annual report entry by David Bradley

Catalytic clues – More ANL APS scientific results
SAXS and the water channel – Ditto
Are films ferroelectric? – Yes, according to APS results
Discipline for gold nanocrystals – More good science at the Advanced Photon Source
X-rays shed light on machinery of photosynthesis – another? Yes!
Engineering a solution for gene therapy with plasmid DNA – One more, for now.
Epilepsy research update Guest writer Michael Marshall the epilepsy’s window on the brain
Does the MMR vaccine cause autism? Michael Marshall clarifies the controversy.
More medical news headlines here.
Distribution, that’s the name of the game – Distributed, or Grid, computing
Contractual Obligation – An increasing trend towards the all too casual employment
A hands-on approach to forensic science – The examination of handwritten documents
Deep-sea exploration – How do scientists cope under pressure? In the depths of the ocean?
The growing problem of biopiracy – Attempts to patent and commercialise
Accidents will happen – human reactions to chemicals and biological reagents
Predicting climate change – As carbon dioxide levels double

Totally tubular peptide rings

The highly unique crystal structure of nanotubes constructed from cyclic peptides is revealed this month by Japanese researchers in the journal Organic Biomolecular Chemistry. The descendents of these novel nanotubes could find a role in future molecular electronic devices, according to the team, who allude to the high macrodipole moment of their materials.

Shunsaku Kimura and colleagues at Kyoto University, have built on the work of ETH’s Dieter Seebach and Wisconsin’s Sam Gellman to use supramolecular chemistry to construct through self-assembly a stacked column of cyclic peptides, themselves made from three ACHC amino acids linked in a ring. ACHC is the trans-2-aminocyclohexylcarboxylic acid. The team used Fourier transform infra-red and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy measurements and computational calculations to demonstrate that this cyclic tri-beta-peptide has C3-symmetry with the amide groups in the trans positions.

To read my full article visit the spectroscopyNOW.com crystallography channel.

Solvent solution

Interest in alternative solvents to replace volatile organic compounds is on the increase, so improved understanding of the properties of these alternatives is needed. One class of solvents researchers are keen to learn more about are the room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs). Researchers have commonly used absorption or fluorescence to study solvation properties. But now scientists in Japan, have carried out a Raman spectroscopic study of a series of RTILs using diphenylcyclopropenone (DPCP) and phenol blue (PB) as probes to reveal information about solvent acceptor numbers. Their results could have implications for the use of these “green” solvents.

Find out more in my latest news write-up on SpectroscopyNOW (Raman channel)

Cesamet, THC and chemotherapy

The drug Cesamet (nabilone), a derivative of tetrahydrocannabinol, was “re-approved” for the clinical market this week for use in treating the side-effects of cancer chemotherapy, including nausea and vomiting. Genetic Engineering News reports that Valeant Pharmaceuticals International (NYSE:VRX) announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given marketing approval for Cesamet (CII) (nabilone) oral capsules. The drug interacts with the CB1 cannabinoid receptor found throughout the nervous system, its interaction with this receptor calms nausea and stifles the vomiting reflex something that many chemo patients would welcome.

What is particularly intriguing though is that this drug made a brief appearance on the pharma market in the 1980s before being pulled. Why? You may well ask. Perhaps attitudes to marijuana were less liberal than today leading ethical committees to feel that derivatives of their active ingredient are acceptable whereas during 1980s they were not. Or, perhaps it is simply that other anti-emetics on the market were at the time more successful with most patients and did not have the negative connotations of illicit drug use associated with them. Now, more than twenty years later those anti-emetics are off-patent and only making generics manufacturers a profit. The time was thus ripe for a new drug to take their place. I could be wrong, Cesamet’s patent was approved on Boxing Day 1985 so it too may have only a short shelf life.

Any Sciencebase readers with insider info on this are welcome to add a comment to this post.

Meanwhile you can subscribe to the print edition of Genetic Engineering News for free here.

Bubbly extractions

Air-assisted solvent extraction (AASX) process is an important new technique for the extraction of valuable metals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and uranium, as well as wastewater treatment where metal concentrations are typically low.

Now, a Canadian research team has discovered that it is the bubbles that play a critical role in providing a high solvent-specific surface area and ease of phase separation. Now, the team has used layer interferometry (in the UV-vis region) to measure the time-dependent thickness of a film formed by blowing an air bubble in kerosene-based solvents. They used Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy to determine its chemical composition.

Read more in my news article on the IR channel on spectroscopyNOW.com

Hangover Culprit Found

Hangover culprit

A fellow “Digger” dugg this article I posted on Reactive Reports issue 47 in which I discussed: Hangover Culprit Found. Of course, the headline was slightly misleading as was the opening paragraph which alluded to acetaldehyde being the cause of hangovers. This was pointed out to me by no less than a few of the other 470+ Digg members who voted the article to the front page of that site.

Of course, it is well known that acetaldehyde (ethanal) is an ethanol metabolite (made when the liver goes from Oooooh, to Aaaaah) and is itself toxic and considered to be one of the leading causes of those awful morning after symptoms. However, the actual research I discussed focused on specific aspects of the genetics of some East Asians who suffer particularly bad hangovers. You can read all about it in Issue 47 of Reactive Reports.

Understanding soil pollution

A lack of understanding of how problematic contaminants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pesticides, and herbicides interact with soil organic matter (SOM) is an issue that can hinder remediation of polluted sites, muddy the waters when it comes to determining the ultimate fate of pollutants, and reduce the viability of risk assessment models when considering new uses for brownfield and old industrial sites. Fortunately, Canadian scientists have now suggested that a range of techniques, including NMR and mass spectrometry, could clarify the various underlying mechanisms.

According to Myrna Simpson of the University of Toronto, Canada, a combination of conventional methods, such as equilibrium sorption and isotherm modelling, with NMR characterization of organic matter in soil, could help researchers get to the root of the problem.

Dig in at SpectroscopyNOW.com to read my complete article.