David Bradley – Page 337

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Lighting up the near infra red

A novel class of lanthanide compounds that emit in the near-infra-red could open up new possibilities for the use of NIR in biological imaging as well as leading to materials for optical amplifiers and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) operating at telecommunications frequencies.

According to Jean-Claude BÃ¼nzli of the EPFL, the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland, lanthanide compounds are of great interest in a number of fields because they produce narrow and easily recognisable emission lines in the NIR, they also have relatively long excited state lifetimes relative to organic chromophores. It is this latter characteristic of lanthanide coordination polymers that makes them of particular interest as they can be applied to time-resolved spectroscopy in analytical procedures allowing an enhanced signal-to-noise ratio and so much-improved sensitivity for luminescent analyses and imaging.

Follow my full write-up in the IR channel on SpectroscopyNOW.com.

Nanotechnology and medicine

X-ray imaging is a very mature, although not infallible, field of medicine, but it does not lend itself to the detection of small tumours or their metastases. Now, Sangeeta Bhatia in Boston, Massachusetts and colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology hope to remedy that by using iron oxide nanoparticles to allow MRI to visualize areas of tumor invasion.

The key to their novel imaging agent is a tumour-specific protease, which is found, as the name would suggest, primarily in and around tumour cells. Bhatia and her team engineered a method by which iron(III) oxide nanoparticles could form aggregate clusters under physiological conditions.

Find out more about how Bhatia and her colleagues hope to exploit nanotechnology to improve medicine in my current news round-up on SpectroscopyNOW.com

Get Your Eyes Tested Ref!

What did I tell you? The floodgates are opening to football (or soccer) related press releases with a scientific twist. The other day it was the Institute of Physics playing keepy-uppy with the physics of football, today it’s the turn of London’s Science Museum (sorry that should be science museum, per their logo.

According to their news release, new data released today [Into the wild, is that?], proves something that all football fans already know – the mood of the crowd can alter the referee’s decision.

Former international referee, David Elleray, will attempt to send off this idea at a debate on the science and psychology of football at the Dana Centre in London. 98% of fans questioned think that referees are influenced by crowds. The national survey of 2,517 football fans was conducted by The Football Fans Census on behalf of the Dana Centre. The results tally closely with research conducted by Alan Nevill of the University of Wolverhampton, whose studies of football crowds and referees show that home advantage is huge and that referees are affected by their environment.

The research could have enormous implications for a possible Germany v England clash in this year’s World Cup, says the press release in a serious attempt to get onside with the tabloid press…

Nevill’s study showed that crowd noise influenced referees’ decisions to favour the home team. It was suggested that whenever a home player commits a foul, the crowd’s reaction is capable of activating the ‘potent stressor’ that might increase the level of uncertainty or indecision of the referees. The research indicated that the home team was penalised approximately 16% less than when compared with no noise condition.

Molecular Weight Search on ChemSpy

Ever wondered whether there might be a way to extract more than the usual information from your chemical data. A query on the sciencebase site wanted to know whether there were a way to convert molecular weight into a formula.

The reverse – calculating molecular weight from a formula, is obviously trivial, just add up the atomic masses of all the elements in the formula. In fact, the likes of ChemDraw, ChemSketch and other chemistry drawing packages have a built in applet to extract the molecular weight from any molecule you can construct or import into them. But, how might one go about converting a molecular weight into a formula?

ChemSketch’s Tony Williams tells me that the visitor was more than likely looking to use monoisotopic mass to derive a molecular formula. In the ChemSketch program: “Use Formulae Generator to generate the possible molecular or fragment ion formulae.”

http://www.nullcdlabs.com/products/spec_lab/exp_spectra/ms/proc_features.html

But, just going back to the ambiguous nature of the query.

Take a molecule with molecular weight “2” as an example. That’s fairly easy. Only one answer possible – dihydrogen, H₂. But, what about “28”? It might be carbon monoxide, CO, but then again it could be a compound of hydrogen, boron, and oxygen, HBO, perhaps? Obviously, a bit of chemical nous would lead to a more likely answer, but what if you wanted to automate the process? More to the point, if you had a molecular weight of say, 346, there’s absolutely no way of extracting a unique chemical formula from that. Now, if you know the molecular mass with more precision, two decimal places say then that would narrow the search somewhat, it would almost be like solving sudoku hunting and pecking until the elements fit.

There is another tool that can do the search the Magnus program from Cambridge U’s Jonathan Goodman and colleagues, which is now included in Chemspy with Dr Goodman’s permission under the banner of Molecular Formula Search (you’ll need a java enabled browser to make it work). This tool runs essentially a reverse lookup for high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) molecular weights:

Of course, knowing other basic information, such as percent elemental analysis, physical properties, and reactivity, could lead you to the formula quicker still.

(This posting originally appeared on 2006-05-06 but since we’ve now added the tool to ChemSpy.com felt it was worth another mention, especially as Jonathan offered us some additional insights into reverse engineering HRMS molecular weights)

Human to human bird flu

The World Health Organization has expressed concern that a recent cluster of deaths associated with the H5N1 virus in Indonesia may not have originated with an animal host, suggesting the possibility of human to human transmission of the virus. However, it also cautions that the analytical evidence suggests that the virus has not mutated into a human transmissable form, which means we are not just yet on the verge of a global bird flu pandemic after all.

The news media inevitably picked up on this warning and ran with it, but thankfully the BBC saw the double-edged nature of the WHO announcement points out with some degree of rational response that many people in Indonesia, as in other southeast Asian countries, live in such close proximity to their animals and not necessarily in the most hygienic of circumstances that the likelihood of catching bird flu is much higher in such an environment.

It is the lack of a mutated form of H5N1 among these victims that means we are not yet doomed to see the feathers fly globally.

Uncrackable windows and unbreakable glass

In the same Digg discussion I read of a novel glass replacement called Kwarx that is meant to be unbreakable and so could save all that sweeping up after your next drunken cocktail party and a purported announcement from Bill Gates that the next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, will be unhackable! Is this just a coincidence or is Gates hoping to exploit the sparkling character and shatter-proof nature of Kwarx to keep his Windows nice and clean?

Upgrade Redux

Microsoft, having given Longhorn a far more marketing-exec friendly name in the form of Vista, has now revealed just how powerful computer needs to be to run this all-new version of the Windows operating system. Surprisingly, the spec is actually far lower than the system inside my Dell laptop which died unceremoniously just last week (out of warranty, of course, but only 26 months old).

Would you be surprised if this new spec were not up to actually running Vista though? Of course, not. Throw a CAD program, a tabbed browser, and maybe some DVD burning and the kind of spec MS suggests as a minimum is going to grind to a halt regardless. So, inevitably users will find themselves having to ditch perfectly serviceable and adequate computer equipment and replacing it once again with the next great chip and googol’s of RAM just to get their software to run.

Anyway, this is the spec:
Minimum processor clock speed: 800MHz (recommended 1GHz 32 or 64 bit), System memory (RAM) 512MB min with 1GB, Graphics card needs to be DirectX 9 capable to run all the new 3D icons in the Windows Aero interface and have at least 128MB. You will need 15GB of free space on your hard drive.

Doctors take an alternative view

A group of leading physicians and scientists in the UK has petitioned the National Health Service, because it is concerned about how unproven or disproved treatments are being encouraged within the system. In a letter reproduced in The Times, they ask that practices be reviewed and that the various concerns about such treatments, which generally sit under the umbrella of complementary or alternative medicine, be raised with the governmental Department of Health.

The bottom line, in other words, is that the authors of the letter, “want patients to benefit from the best treatments available” and don’t think NHS money should wasted on including the likes of highly implausible treatments such as homeopathy on the treatment roster.

The authors express the opinion that, “We are sensitive to the needs of patients for complementary care to enhance well-being and for spiritual support to deal with the fear of death at a time of critical illness, all of which can be supported through services already available within the NHS without resorting to false claims.”

Homeopathy is certainly one of the most inflammatory of the CAM therapies. From the scientific standpoint there is absolutely no serious explanation as to how it might work in terms of the chemical components of the treatments. On the other hand, Toby Murcott’s excellent book on the subject of alternative medicine (reviewed briefly here) emphasises that science is yet to explain fully the placebo effect, or more intriguingly the anticipatory effect of treatments wherein the thought of being healed can have some benefit for many patients even before they are given the therapy.

Modern medicine has “eradicated” so many of the old diseases, that countless health centres and organisations across the globe now must heavily promote their various panaceas as the diseases of longevity begin to stack up for which there are no cures as quick and easy as a course of tablets.

As we live longer, so we expect to live healthily for longer. With that in mind it is inevitable that people will turn to CAM to help give achieve this. However, in this letter, Professor Michael Baum and colleagues essentially point out that the hopes of many patients are being pandered to through the irresponsible embracing of alternative therapies for which there is no evidence of efficacy.

Physics of Football

In the run up to the Football World Cup, it was inevitable that press releases would starting dribbling in from the media relations departments of companies, research establishments, and learned societies, each tackling difficult subjects and presenting them as a game of two halves with some vague footy. The ultimate goal as ever to get their name in the press…

Well, the Institute of Physics is no exception to the rule, obviously, basically, at the end of the day, they just kicked off with their first soccer related release, hoping to get a pre-emptive strike at that goal and hoping to avoid a penalty playoff:

Apparently, Nick Linthorne has discovered how players like Gary Neville can achieve the perfect long throw-in. Writing in Physics World’s June issue Linthorne puts a new spin on throwing showing how the physics of projectiles can be used to calculate the optimum angle at which a ball needs to be released to achieve the longest possible throw-in. The article describes how the optimum angle is much less than physicists previously believed.

I am now just waiting for the Royal Society of Chemistry to come racing up the wings with a press release on how novel polymers used in soccer-ball manufacture will allow footballers…blah…blah…blah….

Someone is bound to cry foul before it’s all over.

Oh, by the way, I’m talking about football here, not the padded-up version of rugby played by Americans, that we know as American Football. If you’re interested in the physics of throwing a football, then check out this Youtube clip: