Author: David Bradley

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:

Cutting your Grass Greener

If you’ve been thinking of going green with your gasoline-powered lawnmower by switching to an ethanol based product, then Thomas Eddie Allen of Huntsville, Alabama, reminded me of a little problem that old-timers might face.

Allen read the Ap Weekly Features on “Go Green In The Grass” this weekend and emailed to say that while he is all for ethanol-based gas but there is a problem that is not mentioned in the article.

Older lawn equipment, mowers, weed-eaters, blowers, and chain-saws use plastic gas tanks that were made before ethanol was a factor. It attacks the tank, hoses, filter, and any carburetor gaskets and o-rings that have not been upgraded from rubber to synthetic material. The resulting leaks are a fire hazard, says Allen. Readers should be warned to check with the owner’s manual to be sure their equipment is set up for ethanol before using this “green” fuel.

Just think of all that CO2 that will be released if you set yourself on fire!

I asked civil engineer Tadeusz Patzek of the University of California, Berkeley, about the problem. “Ethanol dissolves sediments in the fuel systems, making them into electrolytes. Once you have an electrolyte, corrosion accelerates. Alcohol
and its own impurities, especially furan, will dissolve with time any elastomeric seal.,” he explained.

So, be warned.

More information available in pdf.

A380 Touchdown

UPDATE: 4 November 2010

A380 crashlanding news

  • “Qantas grounds A380s after incident on Sydney-bound flight” and related posts
  • Qantas mid-air emergency: A380 factfile
  • Factbox: Airbus A380, the world’s biggest passenger jet
  • Qantas Grounds Airbus A380 Fleet After Emergency Landing
  • Qantas Jet Forced To Make Emergency Landing
  • Qantas Suspends All A380 Flights
  • Engine Explodes Aboard Australian Plane, All Of Airline’s Airbus A380s Grounded (RR)
  • Qantas says crashed plane an Airbus A380

THE damage suffered by Qantas flight 32 en route to Sydney has been described by leading aircraft engineers as potentially life-threatening and extremely rare, says Sydney Morning Herald.

The Airbus A380 is a double-deck, wide-body, four-engine airliner manufactured by the European corporation Airbus. The largest passenger airliner in the world, the A380 made its maiden flight on 27 April 2005 from Toulouse, France, and made its first commercial flight on 25 October 2007 from Singapore to Sydney with Singapore Airlines. Also known as the Superjumbo.

ORIGINAL 18 May 2006: At a time when the UK government has stated that nuclear power is effectively the only option to cut down on pollution and help the UK meet its emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, is it really something to celebrate that the world’s biggest passenger jet, the Airbus A380, has today touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport for the first time? Just a thought.

Is Resistance Futile?

Structure of platensimycin

The authors of a paper published in this week’s Nature claim to have srtuck a blow against the rising tide of antibiotic resistance. Jun Wang and colleagues at Merck’s Research Laboratories, in Rahway, New Jersey, have found a potent antibiotic from a microbial fungus, which they demonstrate kills many Gram-positive bacteria, including the current media darlings methicillin-[or multiple]-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE).

The new antibiotic, platensimycin, was just one of 250,000 natural product extracts they screened from a strain of the South African soil microbe Streptomyces platensis.

What makes platensimycin so interesting is its mode of action, which is completely different from any other antibiotic. This compound kills bacteria by blocking the enzymes involved in the synthesis of fatty acids, the building blocks of lipids. No existing antibiotics target fatty-acid synthesis in this way. The antibiotic clears Staph infection without any apparent side effects and it or an analog is now very likely to be pursued by the pharmaceutical industry.

Only two new classes of antibiotics have been found since the mid-1960s, the linezolid type (oxazolidinones) and daptomycin (lipopeptide), most of the others we use were found in the 1940s and 1950s and target specific bacterial biochemical processes, such as cell wall construction, their DNA and proteins. This limited arsenal allowed bacteria to evolve resistance to pretty much every antibiotic, which is why a new class is so keenly sought.

According to Eric Brown of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, “The report reads like a textbook of modern antibacterial drug discovery, beginning with a screen of 250,000 extracts from drug-producing microorganisms. What follows is a series of elegant studies, spanning bacterial genetics, biochemistry, pharmacology and structural biology, and leading to the discovery of a small molecule.”

Ever the cynic I cannot help worry that regardless of how novel this compound is at this point in its clinical history, as with all of its predecessors, bacteria are likely to evolve just as effective defences as their cousins once we begin to use platensimycin in medicine. That was the lesson we should have learned the very first time the prototypical antibiotic penicillin was used! Today’s wonder drug quickly becomes tomorrows acronym, give it a few years and the headlines will be screaming about PRSA, you can bet on it.

Nature, 2006, 441, 358

Chemunpub Forum Redux

Just got wind, by way of old friend Michael Engel, of a rather intriguing forum for chemists called chemunpub.

The Chemistry Unpublished Papers forum, looks like a great place to find out what’s going on underneath the public face of research chemistry, with posters asking what they should do with their ‘green’ ionic liquids once they’ve finished with them and info about papers that shouldn’t have been published at all!

This from the forum FAQ itself:

Section: Unpublished results – Post procedures, experiments etc that any experienced chemist can think will work, judging on experience, similarity among substrates, known reactions, literature, etc. but they actually work only partially or don’t work at all.

Section: X-Files – Unexpected reactions: post here weird and bizzare chemistry behaviour…

Section: Fake Chemistry – in ten years of research, sometimes we encountered papers claiming wonderful yields and easy procedures that turned out to be absolutely irreproducible. In those case, our conclusion is that latitude is a key reaction parameter…

Section: General Chemistry Discussion – anything chemistry related that you (or moderators) think is not appropriate for the other sections, requests, suggestions, meeting announcements, research proposals, trends in chemistry etc.

I think anyone with an interest in the dark side of chemical research should keep a close eye on this forum over the coming months.

This item was originally published on Tuesday, but I’ve brought it back to the front to highlight interesting comments I received today from both Engel and the ChemUnPub webmaster

Science OPML

For anyone who’d like to import all the individual Sciencebase news feeds in one fell swoop, you can grab the Sciencebase OPML file here.

If you’re unsure what an rss feed is click here, and if you don’t know what you can do with an OPML click here. So long as that ‘opml validated’ button appears in this post then the sciencebase opml file is in working order and you should be able to import all the links to the various sciencebase 2.0 categories with your news aggregator. Once imported you can delete any in which you’re not interested (perish the thought) and rest assured that you won’t then miss any of my random ramblings.

If you’re still unsure as to whether to syndicate sciencebase feeds, consider this: Sciencebase is ranked #657 by technorati and has 1,853 links from 1,112 sites reported by that blog directory alone.

You can also grab a selection of the feeds I read via my personal Google Reader OPML file (more details on the David Bradley RSS Subscriptions page)

Puritan Trojans

Lots of pundits point out that the antivirus/firewall/antispyware companies are making big profits from the fear instilled in computer users the world over. Whether every threat is real or not, who’s got the guts to go out into the cyber world unprotected these days, or even plugin in someone else’s USB key for all that.

Now, it seems a Trojan horse program has surfaced that looks rather suspiciously like a goody-two-shoes kind of application. Rather than handing over access to your hard drive to the nearest script kiddy, opening ports to every electronic eavesdropper, and emailing itself to all your business contacts complete with some salacious come on, this little critter simply deletes all the porn, p2p shared files, and eradicates warez from your computer. It’s almost as if, could it possibly be, a puritanical application created with the sole intent of cleaning up the net?

The clever guys at Sophos have dubbed this latest threat to geek sanity “trojerazera” (like Trokan melded to Kazaa I guess)

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/trojerazera.html

It also goes by the name of TROJ_P2PCOPY.A, Trojan.Win32.Eraser.a, Erazor, and Troj/Erazer-A.

If you’re desperate to retain your collection of electronic smut, don’t fancy losing all those painstakingly downloaded illegal copies of software package, and are hoping to hang on to your p2p-shared folders just long enough for the RIAA to find you, then download the latest update for your antivirus software and do a detailed trojerazera eraser job.

Sussex Saved

The decline in UK chemistry departments has been staved off at least partially with a vote to save the department a Sussex University on the south coast that spawned two Nobel chemists.

According to The Guardian, ‘The University of Sussex has abandoned its controversial plans to axe its chemistry department following intense criticism from scientists across the country.’

Vice-chancellor, Alasdair Smith, originally suggested chemistry teaching be scrapped and a new bio-merged department take its place, but, the paper reports that an extraordinary university council meeting held on May 15 saw members adopting a recommendation that will see the incredibly well-respected department retained and expanded to include biochemistry.

Sussex has produced two Nobel chemists Sir John Cornforth (1975, for stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions) and Sir Harry Kroto (1996 winner for fullerene co-discovery) with a former professor of physics, Anthony Legget, being awarded a share of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics, for his work at Sussex on the theory of superfluids.

Exxon Valdez

I saw rock band R.E.M. in concert seventeen years ago, just after the Exxon Valdez ran aground spilling its oily guts with devastating effect on Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The two events were not related in any way, but the band’s singer, Michael Stipe, implored fans everywhere to boycott Exxon and its European equivalent Esso because the company, he said had failed the environment on so many counts.

Seventeen years later and compelling new evidence is emerging that shows remnants of the worst oil spill in U.S. history extend farther into tidal waters than previously thought. The findings suggest that the oil is causing unanticipated long-term harm to wildlife. The finding appears in the online edition of Environmental Science & Technology, according to chemist Jeffrey Short and colleagues at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Juneau, Alaska.

“This study shows that it is very plausible that exposure to Exxon Valdez oil is having a material impact on many shore-dwelling animals and is contributing to their slow recovery in some parts of Prince William Sound,” Short says. “Sea otters, for instance, have yet to re-inhabit Herring Bay, the most oiled bay we studied, and the population of otters elsewhere around northern Knight Island continues to decline. Unfortunately, because much of this oil is buried in beach sediments and not exposed to weathering and other elements that might degrade it, it could remain hazardous to wildlife for decades.”

In their study, Short and his colleagues found significant amounts of Exxon Valdez oil buried in sand and silt that only becomes dry during the lowest tides. This biologically diverse zone is a prime feeding ground for sea otters, ducks and other wildlife.

You can read the full story on the American Chemical Society site or grab the research paper if you have a subscription.