Category: Spectroscopy

My latest science news write-ups on the SpectroscopyNOW portal are now up for grabs. This week, I cover the apparent gender gap when it comes to computer games, how Japanese researchers are using near-infrared light to probe young women’s brains to find out if they can reduce stress and potentially acne with pleasant fragrances, and the discovery that cancer cells seem to be stuffed full of the dreaded trans fats. You can find my other spec news from this week linked in the Sciencebase Geeky Bits column.

However, I want to step back a little with respect to that video games research. The team used the apparently powerful technique of functional MRI (basically a brain scan that can spot changes and lights up active regions of the brain). The researchers devised a very simple computer game, a kind of cross between Tetris and Pong (without the bats). To win you had to gain territory. The researchers scanned the brains of males and females while they played this game. Their results showed that men and women got the game, but the men were sharper when it came to realising you had to use a particular strategy to gain the most territory.

What was most interesting to Allan Reiss and colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine who carried out the research was that the region of the brain associated with rewarding feelings lit up the most in the males than in the females. This, the researchers say, suggests a possible explanation as to why males enjoy, and even become addicted to, video games more commonly than females. “These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become ‘hooked’ on video games than females,” Reiss explains in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Now, I take issue with the fundamental assumption that Reiss and his colleagues make regarding video games. While historically video games have been aimed almost squarely at boys, the manufacturers over the last few years have recognised that they only corner half the potential market with such a biased aim. As such, they have developed dozens of new types of games that are not of the familiar war and killing fantasy type. They have also remodelled their hardware to offer colours and skins that will appeal to females, the pink and white Nintendos, for instance, generally appeal to the female market more than the blue.

More to the point though, my ten-year old daughter and dozens, if not all, of her friends have taken to Nintendos, Wiis, Playstations, Tamagotchi, just as addictively as their male counterparts, fighting for screen time on their various devices and computers. Admittedly, the games they play are more frequently of the SingStar, Petz, and Sims kind as opposed to Halo, World of Warcraft etc. They also network with each other online in various online games with small furry animals rather than three-eyed aliens with vast armaments. Like I say, though, they are just as addicted to these games as the boys.

So, while Reiss’s work is fascinating and does hint vaguely at latent aspects of how territorialism evolved in the male brain. One has to wonder whether if he and his colleagues created a different type of game, a more “feminine” type game, like a pet simulation, for instance, they would see those reward centres lighting up more brightly in the female brain. Perhaps if the experiment had had an intrinsic bias towards a feminine type of game and they’d seen such activity in their fMRI, they would have come to a very different conclusion about video game addiction.

That has to be the oddest blog headline I’ve come up with this week, but it’s not in fact that esoteric once you get down to it. Basically, researchers in China have created a new material based on dolomite (porous kitty litter material) and the crab shell derivative chitosan.

The new composite material not only absorbs water it can release an NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) fertiliser over a prolonged period for use in agriculture and horticulture. Advantages are, improved irrigation efficiency and less run off into waterways together with improved crop yields. More on this, in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week and you get a chance to see a photo of my kitty too. What more could you want? Other than links to the rest of this week’s news in SpecNOW, of course.

In NMR news, a brainy approach to using microNMR coils could allow scientists to probe the activity of cerebral compounds, such as choline, without having to worry about NMR’s relatively low sensitivity. In the X-ray ezine, I report on how British scientists have demonstrated that it is possible to predict the crystal structures of small organic molecules using software, winning them accolades at this year’s Blind Test in Crystal Structure Prediction, organised by the University of Cambridge and hosted by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.

Finally, new informatics evidence suggests that the land-bridge which is currently the Bering Strait was the sole route into the Americas for humans tens of thousands of years.

A new naturally derived artificial sweetener could soon hit the market, thanks to the development of a mass production technique devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison research Fariba Assadi-Porter. The sweetener, known as brazzein, is a 54 amino acid protein derived from an extract of the fruit of the tropical plant Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon. It has been eaten in West Africa across the millennia, but only recently caught the attention of the West because of its incredible sweetness. The protein extract tastes sweet only to humans and old-world monkeys and is is 2000 times sweeter than sucrose when compared to a 2% solution of sugar.

Assadi-Porter and her colleagues are using spectroscopy to help them understand the relationship between the structure of this protein and its sweetness. They have recently devised a new approach to fermenting it on a large scale and startup company Natur Research is now seeking FDA approval to commercialise the protein as a food stuff for the low-calorie drinks and food industries. A paper detailing the production process has now been accepted by Protein Expression and Purification Journal, and you can read more about the story in the NMR channel on SpectroscopyNOW.

More on proteins in this week’s issue: Roderick MacKinnon and his colleagues at Rockerfeller U have come up with a novel technique, lipid-detergent-mediated crystallization, that allows them to crystallise membrane proteins, such as the voltage-dependent potassium ion channel, in as near as natural state as possible. The approach could open the door to countless studies of membrane proteins using crystallography that have not previously been possible. More on that in the SpectroscopyNOW X-ray ezine, here

Also in this week’s round up, news not related directly to proteins and molecular biology. Researchers in Canada and the US have used MRI to demonstrate that there is something like a three-year delay in the development of certain regions of the brain in children with ADHD. The most obvious delay is seen in the front cortex, a region important in thinking, concentration, and planning. Rather than worrying parents, the discovery should be reassuring to parents and sufferers, says Philip Shaw of the NIMH Child Psychiatry Branch who led the research because although there is a delay, brain development is otherwise normal. “Finding a normal pattern of cortex maturation, albeit delayed, in children with ADHD should be reassuring to families and could help to explain why many youth eventually seem to grow out of the disorder,” he says.

The research also revealed that the regions affected by the developmental delay are coincident with the regions that develop precociously in children with autism. More on the scan results, again in SpectroscopyNOW.

A new approach to testing urine samples without having to purify them first has led to the discovery of a new hormone that controls sodium excretion and so could be involved in controlling high blood pressure. Too much sodium equates to raised bp. The discovery solves a riddle that confronted medical scientists for more than four decades and could lead to new approaches to treating high blood pressure.

I asked team leader Frank Schroeder about the work and discuss it in detail in this week’s SpectroscopyNOW. One issue that must be addressed before such a discovery can be applied realistically to the develop of new therapies for high blood pressure, or even low blood pressure, is to find out whether the hormone is involved in other control systems in the body. This is somewhat likely given that most other known hormones multitask. I asked Schroeder about this aspect of the research:

“At this point, it is difficult to speculate about what other biological processes might be influenced by the newly identified compounds, and the next step will be to find the receptor(s) that the [hormonal] xanthurenic acid derivatives bind to,” he told me. “From our analyses, it appears that the two xanthurenic acid derivatives represent the actual signalling molecules – the activity is very well-defined and the compounds are of high specific potency. Furthermore, a closely related metabolite, xanthurenic acid itself, is not active.”

Also, in this week’s issue, in the field of atomic spectroscopy, Jordanian scientists have found that garlic extract can reduce the levels of the toxic heavy metals, cadmium and lead, in vital organs, such as the liver, heart, and kidneys. You can read more about that here.

In pure chemistry, it has been a record-breaking year for coordination chemists Klaus Theopold and Kevin Kreisel of the University of Delaware and their colleagues who have synthesised an organometallic chromium compound with the shortest Cr-Cr bond ever. Not since the 1978 work of F. Albert Cotton and his team at Texas A&M University has such a short one been seen. Theopold told me that he does not think it will be too long before this new record is broken. “I don’t think it will be another 30 years, although I’d like to hold on to the record for a while,” he said, “As to who, there are three possibilities: somebody who is not trying for it, and discovers it accidentally (like us), Phil Power, or myself, because I am now interested and have some ideas.”

Finally, the rather delicate subject of turning raw sewage into compost for farms. Remy Albrecht of the Paul Cézanne University in Aix-Marseille and colleagues have developed an infra-red technique that could be used to monitor how well the composting process is going for biological wastes, such as sewage sludge. Obviously, compost quality for land application must be monitored and controlled closely, but there are so many benefits, such as quickly raising nutrient levels and improving soil quality that it is worth the effort. An analytical approach to near infrared reflectance spectroscopy can provide an inexpensive way to monitor the composting process, Albrecht told me.

“NIRS is a highly reproducible technique able to draw a precise chemical fingerprint of an organic material Moreover, NIRS is rapid and makes it possible to analyse a large number of samples in a practical and timely manner. Control of maturation can be easily simplified with good calibrations and a data bank in reference,” he said.

I do worry about the accumulation of heavy metals from such biological sources as with each iteration from crop/livestock, to dinner table, to sewage plant, back to farm, they could increase in concentration. There is also the issue of pathogens. I’d be interested to learn what safeguards are in place to prevent their circulation.