Category: Science

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Wireless power

Cambridge start up Splashpower hopes to commercialize wireless power technology for recharging all your rechargeable devices, cellphones, mp3 players etc, without having to worry about plugging different chargers into power outlets.

Their approach has two parts: the first is a sub-millimeter thin receiver module that can be customized to just about any size, shape or curve of a device. The second part is a thin pad (less than 6 mm) that acts as a universal wireless charging platform and is plugged into the power outlet. Any device fitted with a SplashModule instantly begins to recharge when placed anywhere on the pad.Several devices can be charged at the same time.

Major benefit cited by the company include:

  1. Contactless, efficient, wire-free power
  2. Fast and safe charging rates
  3. Low-cost technology
  4. Low profile

Nothing new under the sun

Concerns about acrylamide, an organic compound formed in foods when they are heavily browned or even burnt have been raised. The compound has worryingly been classified as a probable carcinogen. But acrylamide from cooked foods is very unlikely to be a cause of cancer in humans. Cancer Research UK stated that the notion that eating burnt food would cause cancer is deceived wisdom, a “myth”.

Anyway, for those who think the revelation that carcinogens are formed in the non-enzymic browning reaction known as the Maillard reaction is something new, take a look at the following article I wrote for New Scientist back in the day: Science: Cooking up carcinogens – The chemicals generated in our food, New Scientist vol 127 issue 1729 – 11 August 1990).

Chemical reactions that take place during cooking, baking and preserving generate products that are very important in giving different foods their distinctive aromas and colour. Recently, researchers have discovered that many of these products can reduce the food’s nutritional value, and some can actually be toxic.

Franze Ledl of Stuttgart University and Erwin Schleicher of the academic hospital Munich-Schwabing in West Germany have studied many of the reactions involved, which are known collectively as the Maillard reaction. They believe that the reaction products could cause some diseases, including certain forms of cancer (Angewandte Chemie, International Edition in English, 1990, vol 29, p 565).

 

Dead parrot sketch

woman brought a very limp parrot into a veterinary surgery. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest. After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, “I’m so sorry, Polly has passed away.”

The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure? I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”

The vet rolled his eyes, shrugged, turned and left the room, returning a few moments later with a beautiful black labrador. As the bird’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the dead parrot from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet fussed the dog and took it out, but returned a few moments later with a cat. The cat jumped up and also sniffed delicately at the ex-bird. The cat sat back, shook its head, meowed and ran out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry, but like I said, your parrot is most definitely 100% certifiably…dead.” He then turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill which he handed to the woman. The parrot’s owner, still in shock, took the bill.

“£150!,” she cried, “£150 just to tell me my bird is dead!” The vet shrugged. “If you’d taken my word for it the bill would only have been £20, but what with the Lab report and the Cat scan…”

Interesting Beer Supply

A recent spam email was offering me the rather desirable possibility of “firmer, lager breasts”. Perhaps the next one will offer a “bigger beer belly” to go with them? Although too much of the old hop juice often leads to brewer’s droop, so the next spam after that will inevitably be for herbal Viagara (sic) or verbal hiagra.

UPDATE for 4th July 2008: did you take part in the Sciencebase Beer or Wine poll yet? Or, read about the beer vs wine debate (apologies for using the same picture of lager breasts on both posts, by the way).

Silly molecule of the month

As if to prove chemists have a sense of humour, Bristol University’s Paul May has added a list of unusual, but genuine, chemical names to his Molecule of the Month web site. Among the chemical delicacies are the super-tough compound ‘adamantane’ and its chemical cousin ‘bastardane’ (more formally known as ethano-bridged noradamantane.

Then there’s the soccer-ball shaped ‘buckminsterfullerene’ and the natural product ‘megaphone’ from the roots of the plant Aniba megaphylla. There is even a mineral with the enticing name of ‘cummingtonite’ while the stuttering ‘unununium’ makes an elemental appearance too. But, the choice that May puts at the top of his list is…for the sake of decency…best left to visitors to find for themselves. Suffice to say, it involves the arsenic version of the molecule pyrrole and it’s ring shaped: sillymols.htm.

Planetary poop

I just got a software planetarium to review…very nice program allows you to put in your city or coordinates and then shows you the night sky as it would appear if there were no clouds. There’s the water carrier (Aquarius), the archer, and the various planets.

All seems in order, there are a few constellations I wasn’t familiar with – the hare (turns out to be lepus), the air pump (that’s Antlia) and “poop”. Poop? Nice! I did a quick search on some French astronomy websites and came up with the answer, Poop is what the French call Puppis. This one was originally part of the larger constellation Argo Navis. Indeed, it was the stern, or poop deck of the mythological ship, the Argo.

So, not only am I ignorant of the constellations, I don’t know my classics well enough either. But, thankfully the poop isn’t the last turd in constellations.

Caps in hand

A recent announcement from The Scientific World website has the chemical information discussion group CHMINF in something of a panic. Apparently, the medical database MEDLINE is to abstract the Scientific World journal. But how will it be referenced the chemical informaticians wonder. The official name is “TheScientificWorldJOURNAL”. And, yes, all those capital letters really should be there. CHMINF’ers worry that the abstractors will create a whole range of variations on this theme in typing up their abstracts, which means the journal might be listed under several different entries, such as Scientificworldjournal, TheScientificWorldJournal etc. and this could have enormous repercussions for getting to the facts. Or, maybe not. The real chance for panic was brought to light by Wendy Warr of www.Warr.com. She points out that there are probably countless mistyped references to systems such as Cerius-squared and RS-cubed, “STN Express with Discover!” with its bizarre exclamation mark and the word Discover in italics, and even the Royal Society of Chemistry’s “chemsoc”, which must never start with a capital “C”. Then there are molFile, MolFile, and molfile, ISIS/Base (no dash just a slash), ChemWeb and chemweb, and even SCIENCEbase.com, or is it Sciencebase.com?

Google agog

We were searching for a mugshot of a medical scientist to illustrate a news story but Google’s image browser failed us in our quest. Until, that is, we switched “off” the Adult Content filter employed by the search engine.

At this point our elusive scientist appeared together with pictures of the covers of the journals Science, Nature, PNAS, and Neuron. Now, what was it about our scientist contact that meant he was X-rated and what was it about those journals that they were considered by Google to be adults only? Should librarians be putting them on the top shelf? One possible explanation is that Google filtered because the cover pictures of the journals were on the University of California’s Anatomy Department website.

So, the reasoning goes, “anatomy” must be too salacious for Google hence it was filtered. Just think what else you might be missing in your image searches. Incidentally, his research is in the totally unsalacious field of TB.

Stable bonded oxygen

Have you heard of stable bonded oxygen molecules? No? Neither had we until an associate showed us an advert for Aerobic Oxygen.

Apparently, this wonderful stuff can treat multiple sclerosis, asthma, malaria, Parkinson’s disease, cancers, ME, flu, eczema and many other disorders. So claim the manufacturers in their marketing spiel.

The molecules in Aerobic Oxygen ‘will not release themselves until the body has need for them, therefore they travel through the body in a stable form.’ Aside from the obvious pseudoscience and the large drop of snake oil, we wonder why anyone would buy the stuff when there is so much stable bonded oxygen all around us – just enough in each breath to fulfill the body’s needs, in fact.

Weirdly, on the next page of the magazine carrying the advert, we were startled to find another, this time, marketing a product for improving eye health. The Visionace nutrient capsules from Vitabiotics apparently ‘help maintain healthy eyes and vision’ and the ‘formula’ includes ‘important antioxidant nutrients like ”natural” carotenoids, vitamin C and bioflavonoids in common with lots of other health supplements.

We began to imagine the consequences of matter colliding with antimatter, and wondered what terrible health effects might befall any one taking Aerobic Oxygen at the same time as these antioxidant capsules. Perhaps they would simply cancel each other out in a flash of the credit card. Now, take a deep breath, count to ten…and relax.

Really cookin’

Pizza

Most chemists now agree that microwaves are not doing anything mysterious to chemicals. They are simply another form of electromagnetic radiation, like light, infra-red or radio waves.

Microwaves have a wavelength between 1 mm and 0.1 m (corresponding to a frequency of 300 to 3 GHz). At these wavelengths the electromagnetic energy interacts with polar molecules, such as water, making them spin. The spinning water molecules knock into each other and pass on their rotational energy by making their neighbours vibrate. The more molecules vibrate the hotter they get.

But, while there is nothing mystical about this, the process of microwave heating means that the energy is transferred to the molecules more effectively than simply heating them in a flask with a Bunsen burner so that the reactions generally go faster.

The formation of hot spots in a reaction mixture means that there are also very sharp rises in temperature without the solvent having a chance to boil away. Water, for instance, can reach 105 Celsius before boiling in such a hot spot in the microwave. The common organic solvent acetonitrile can reach 38 degrees above its normal boiling point.

Since most reaction rates are accelerated by increasing the reaction temperature – a ten-degree rise in temperature, doubles the reaction rate – a hot spot at a temperature above the normal boiling point of the reaction solvent means a microwave reaction can be that much faster.