According to many of the media reports of the death of Arthur Miller he apparently died of congenital heart failure. Wouldn’t “congenital” imply he had heart failure at birth? Presumably, they meant to say “congestive”, he may have had a congenital heart problem of course that led to heart failure in later life. Meanwhile, one of my chums on the NASW discussion lists explained that in the US, “congestive heart failure” is not an acceptable cause of death for entry on a death certificate. Maybe they should have just said he died of a “dodgy ticker”, makes more sense than congenital.
Author: David Bradley
Rational Drug Design
Science Writer David Bradley is currently working on an RSS newsfeed for Simulated Biomolecular Systems, better known as SimBioSys Inc, a Canadian company that specialises in chemistry software with a difference.
UPDATE: Keen-eyed readers will probably have noticed that Sciencebase is no longer working on this project with the chemistry software company. However, I can point you to some exciting developmental work between my co-workers at Chemspider.com and Symbiosis.
Symbiosis is working with ChemSpider on the LASSO project with ChemSpider. Indeed, LASSO descriptor is now available for almost all 18+ million structures in the Chemspider structure database. They have also added the virtual screening results for all ligands against 40 target families, from the DUD database of decoys.
Chemspider recently revealed the preliminary results of this very large cross screening work and the two businesses are now working together to clean up the interface and more powerful search capabilities.
Images Reveal Titan’s Secrets
Images reveal Titan’s secrets: “Spacecraft is 8.9 feet in diameter and 703 pounds (317 kg).”
Those significant figures fascinate me! Why do news agencies insist on giving us such levels of alleged precision. 8.9 feet! That’s 106.8 inches as opposed to 108 inches. Who cares about that 1.2 when you’ve travelled 2 billion miles from home? And, where did they get that 703 pounds, 317kg? Presumably, thes figures have been converted back and forth as I reckon the craft was more than likely given as 700 pounds and someone turned that into kg somewhere and then turned it back again using different conversion factors…but, who cares. 700 lbs, 300 kg, it’s not like anyone is going back to Titan to check.
Budding Science Writer Steve Taylor
Jonathan Goodman
Jonathan Goodman tells me that “Most highly strained molecules have small rings, and most explosive molecules have nitrogen and oxygen atoms close to carbon and each other so they can rearrange easily.” However, when he asks chemists if they can think of a molecule which would spontaneously fall apart, even though it contains only carbon and hydrogen, there are four bonds to every carbon and one to each hydrogen, there are only single bonds, and there are no rings, the usual response is that all such molecules should be stable. His paper shows that this is incorrect, even for rather simple molecules.” Check out his paper on this in J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2005, 45, 81-87 (DOI: 10.1021/ci0497657) You can access the paper by pasting the DOI into the sciencebase DOI lookup tool
Artemisinin Could Kill Selectively
Artemisinin could selectively kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed. Many moons ago I wrote about pioneering medicinal chemistry into this ancient Chinese fever remedy that was showing promise in fighting malaria. Now, in the spirit of modern drug-multitasking it turns out the twisted little tricyclic can also kill cancer cells!
Half Baked
Half Baked. Interesting comment from Sebastian at Onfolio about scientists not being up to speed with syndicated news content. It occurred to me that one area in which it might be incredibly powerful for active scientists is in the preprint arena. They could release their up-coming papers and posters using a newsfeed and by providing comments space on the paper’s web page get instantaneous feedback to help them fine-tune their paper before submission to their favourite scientific journal.
Cobbles
Another interesting hit on the Sciencebase site today: “why silicon is a good alternative to carbon to base a life form on”. Outside Star Trek and Doctor Who, I didn’t think it was. Silicon doesn’t concatenate (form chains of atoms) to quite the same extent as carbon or in the same way and so isn’t able to form anything like the wide array of molecules on which carbon is based (millions of them from simple hyddrocarbons to proteins and DNA).
Saying that, if a computer could evolve from a grain of sand, then perhaps that might be considered a silicon-based life form Meanwhile, support your local “cobbles” clinic.
Systematic name for bleach
It’s quite fascinating to see what visitors to the Sciencebase site are searching for. As you might expect, many of them are after science news articles and related resources. But, occasionally there are some oddities like information on whether Viagra is soluble in water or not.
Yesterday, a visitor hit the site looking for the “systematic name for bleach”. Well, it obviously depends on what you mean by bleach. Sodium hypochlorite is the active ingredient in the common household bleaches that “get right up under the rim” and “kill all known germs”, but there are now several non-chlorine bleaches that contain hydrogen peroxide (more commonly associated with those people who allegedly have more fun).
Environmental Joke
Aren’t we supposed to be cutting emissions and conserving fossil fuels? It’s less than heartening to see a British company that wants to produce even more of the former and use up even more of the latter, by bringing us that much-needed accessory, the personal air-taxi: Flying cars. Maybe I’m being dumb and this is just a sick joke or an ironic statement on our love of personal transport extrapolate to the obvious extreme…