35.9803 years in science communication
As long-time readers will know, Sciencebase has its roots in the first chemistry webzine, Elemental Discoveries, started by David Bradley Science Writer back in December 1995. The site continues to provide chemistry news from around the world.
Check out the Sciencebase Twitter and Facebook pages for even more.
Once more, a news story from the Sciencebase global offices features in Sandra Tsing Loh’s science news podcast out of Caltech. Click the little speaker icon, top left of this post to hear her voice.
“…there’s a new way to stop corrosion: Put it to SLEEP.
The secret, say Dmitry Shchukin of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and colleagues? A gel-like material embedded with nanoparticles .. tiny bits, billionths of a meter across, which house a chemical additive called benzotriazole.”
The ivory trade was banned by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in 1989. However, illegal trade continues and as such researchers in India suggest that there is a continued need to characterize Asian elephant ivory and to be able to compare it with African ivory so that national and international laws can be implemented more effectively.
Previously, Erich Raubenheimer and colleagues in the Department of Oral Pathology, Medical University of Southern Africa, established an ivory database that would allow law enforcers to trace the source of illegal ivory and so identify poorly managed game parks, particularly in Africa. However, the ivory of Asian elephants, of which half are found in India, is more prized than African ivory. It is only the males of the Asian elephant that has tusks and they are much smaller than those of its African counterpart. Despite the illegal price differential between continents, the ivory of African and Asian elephants is indistinguishable in superficial appearance, particularly once processed, so it is almost impossible to trace the origin of tusks or a piece of work.
Read the elephant’s tale on spectroscopynow.com
There are lots of opportunities out there in the job market for chemists, so check out our newly updated chemistry jobs newsfeed powered by ScienceJobs.net. You will find the latest opportunities in all areas of the chemical sciences: Lectureships, research jobs, MBAs, tenure track positions, fellowships, university programs, lectureships, post-doctoral positions, research experience opportunities, research assistant jobs, and faculty positions from all the big players.
Technical tasks include Pfizer looking to fill Molecular & Cell Biology Pathways R4-R6 2 positions and Cell Biologist / Assay Development R3-R5. On the admin side of science, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is looking for an Assistant to Chairman.
Clinilabs has several jobs to fill in New York: Clinical Research Associate, Clinical Research Coordinator, Director of Business Development, Quality Assurance and Compliance Manager, and several others.
For more science jobs, check out the Careers section here.
Brazilian researchers have developed a method to analyse the metal ion content of food products by combining X-ray spectroscopy (XRS) with a partial least-squares (PLS) data treatment. Their approach promises to be faster, more widely applicable to a range of food and agricultural products, and less expensive than other methods.
Food quality control is critical to consumer safety and satisfaction. Knowing levels of inorganic analytes, such as the toxic elements arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and lead, is important, as is information on macro-nutrients like calcium, potassium, magnesium, sodium, phosphorus, and sulfur and micronutrients (copper, iron, manganese, and zinc).
Read the complete story in the latest science news round-up from David Bradley in Spectroscopynow.com
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope continues to surprise astronomers, this time by identifying the parent star of a distant planet through the observational technique of gravitational microlensing. By elucidating detailed information about the star associated with an exoplanet, astronomers should now be able to unearth the properties of the planet itself and so improve our understanding of planet formation and evolution.
Read the full story in the latest issue of Spotlight from David Bradley and Intute.
Also in this month’s Spotlight – Cornell physicist J.C. Séamus Davis and colleagues at Tokyo University and AIST Labs, Tsukuba, Japan, have been watching superconductors ever so closely, atom by atom in fact. Now, his shocking observations could turn up the heat on this area of research as he has found that high-temperature superconductors may be much more like low-temperature superconductors than scientists previously thought. The discovery has implications for making new superconducting materials. Read on…
And…
The radioactive decay of the rust-coloured mineral monazite can help scientists synchronise their geological clocks thanks to work carried out at New York’s Vanderbilt University. Microscopic crystals of the material act as tiny clocks allowing a date to be stamped on rich ore deposits in rock formations altered by high-temperature fluids. More…
No…not that kind of model!
“The formation and evolution of dislocation cell structures (patterning) is one of the most important aspects of the deformation process in ductile metals,” according to Lyle Levine and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Southern California. Metallurgists already know that this patterning process arises as clusters of dislocations interact with each other while recent diffraction-resolved studies have shown that the process is initiated by crystal lattice breakup. However, predicting exactly how a metal will behave under stress remains an unresolved problem. Now, Levine and his colleagues have turned to a twenty-year old model to help them out.
Read on…
A key protein linked to neurodegenerative diseases, such as Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, has been characterised using NMR by US researchers.
John Cavanagh, Douglas Kojetin, David Kordys, and Richele Thompson of North Carolina State University teamed with colleagues Ronald Venters of Duke University and Rajiv Kumar of the Mayo Clinic and Foundation have obtained a structure for the protein, calbindin-D28K. This protein modulates calcium levels by sequestering calcium from areas that have too much or serves as an on/off switch for further chemical reactions. It is found in the kidneys, pancreas, ocular nerve and large amounts are present in the brain. It is its role in the brain as a “bodyguard” against the action of the enzyme caspase-3 that links it to neurodegenerative diseases. By binding to and inhibiting caspase-3, calbindin D28K prevents the formation of damaging plaque and tangle formation in the brain, which are hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease. The structure of this key protein has remained elusive, until now.
Read on…
In the latest issue of The Alchemist on ChemWeb.com I provide a round-up of the week’s chemistry news, of particular importance could be news that UK and Australian researchers may have found a new way to approach drug design for bird flu viruses that precludes drug resistance.
A new drug to fight bird flu that should be able to side-step the emergence of viral resistance is being developed by Andrew Watts of the University of Bath, UK and Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin of CSIRO Australia. Both Tamiflu and Relenza, the two drugs currently being stockpiled by governments in preparation for a global outbreak of bird flu, are inherently susceptible to resistance because of the way they work. Although the new drug acts on the same target as these treatments, the enzyme neuraminidase, it targets a specific region of the enzyme that essential to its function. If this region mutates the virus would no longer be viable, so that resistance cannot emerge.
Read about this and more in this week’s Alchemist.
It’s not something Nirvana mentioned in their elemental song, I presume they had other things on their mind, but there isn’t enough lithium in the universe. It’s not that there’s a shortage, it’s just that our knowledge of cosmic and stellar chemistry would suggest that there ought to be more of this alkali metal than there actually is. A paper published in this week’s Nature could offer an explanation.
The problem is that old stars, which ought to be made from a mixture of elements close to the ‘primordial’ blend generated in the Big Bang, don’t appear to have as much lithium as this would require. Although most of the matter produced by the Big Bang was hydrogen and helium, theories of element production predict that there should also be a fair proportion of lithium. But the amount predicted is a factor of two or three times larger than that seen in old stars. This implies that our understanding of the physics either of the Big Bang or of stars – or both – is lacking.
Andreas Korn and colleagues look at 18 stars in a cluster of old stars to see how the elemental content of their atmospheres changes with evolutionary stage. They find that various elemental abundances depend on a star’s temperature. This, the researchers say, is because heavy elements tend to diffuse deep into the star. For those stars that have evolved into giants, the elements are mixed back into the stellar atmosphere by convection, so that the stars’ composition is restored. Not so for lithium: it does not survive the trip through the stellar interior, as it is burnt when temperatures exceed 2 million degrees.
Korn and colleagues estimate that the original lithium abundance in these stars was around 78 percent higher than that suggested by current average values – which is enough to make up the discrepancy with the predicted primordial abundance.
Nature, 2006, 657-659
Polish student Marcin Mielecki emailed to ask where he might find a 3D, as opposed to 2D, structure for the compound Avenacoside B. A very quick Google brought me almost immediately to this page (by searching for “avenacoside b mol file”: http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?cpd+C08888, which provides the flat molecular structure and a link to the MDL mol file for this molecule. If Marcin has Chime or another mol reader installed in his browser clicking that link will spawn the 3D structure he requires. It’s also in Pubchem of course.
Marcin’s research focuses on the biological role of the avenacosides, which are steroidal saponins from Avena sativa.