Category: Sciencebase

There’s often an implication in social media comments on some of my updates that somehow my work ethic must be deficient because I don’t, apparently, adhere to the early starts, late finishes, working weekends, and checking in at the office even when on holiday, that some workers are inclined to do. Why should I? I’m self employed, I have parallel contracts (multiple bosses), but either work piecemeal or as work-for-hire, so that I can do the requisite work in my own time and pace and be paid the same, usually per job or per word. What could be better?

There are, of course, people who get more done and have a greater creative output than those tied to the notion that a strong work ethic requires you to be stuck behind a desk 9-5 or 8-6+. I work hard, on lots of different things in parallel. Not having a 9-5 with extras suits people with ADHD* much better too, you can chop around between multiple projects, write a feature article, work on a news story…or four, interview a scientist, review a book, photograph a music festival, do some birdwatching and then write about the birds you see for local newsletter, trap and photograph and blog about moths as part of a citizen science effort, write a song or two a month, record a cover song do the remixing, record and produce another musician’s album…etc et cetera…

See, even now, I am processing photos from Strawberry Fair and updating the festival’s Facebook, getting ready to photograph this morning’s haul of moths including two Burnished Brass (which I wrote about from a biomimetic materials science perspective for a magazine last year) and a Poplar Hawk-moth, and also writing this riposte to a recent (playful, but nevertheless) sarcastic comment about how little work I apparently do…it’s Sunday by the way, traditionally a day of rest.

*I did the test and am not even borderline, apparently fully fledged.

 

For those who don’t speak Emoji:

“Family: man, woman, girl, boy, dog face. Guitar man, singer microphone musical note. Camera. Owl, eagle, butterfly, deciduous tree, evergreen tree. Camping, sunglasses ️, house with garden, desert island, aeroplane. Beer mug, wine glass, whiskey tumbler. Pie, hot beverage. Cinema, performing arts, person swimming, recycling symbol. Scientist, alembic ️, books, test tube, telescope, crescent moon, microscope, Tyrannosaurus rex, volcano, DNA, magnet. European Union + United Kingdom.

Lock up your tortoise, there’s a Bearded Vulture in town, my lovelies. According to a piece in the Telegraph today a young Bearded Vulture (Gypaetus barbatus) that had been seen in Belgium a few days ago made it all the way to the Devon coast and then another 100 miles up on to Dartmoor. This species is well known for its appetite for bone marrow. It’s a bone-cruncher and will chew the brittle bones of dead animals to get to the nutritious marrow within, the digestive juices in its gizzard being plenty strong enough to dissolve bone. But, for tougher cookies, it will carry them aloft and drop them from hundreds of metres up to smash them open to make accessing that marrow easier.

So, the headline? Well, these birds can carry off animals that up to their own size and again drop them from on high to kill them and make eating their bones much easier. Alternatively, they will simply smash their way into a tortoise, like an enthusiastic child at Easter cracking open a chocolate egg.

G. barbatus is now known to be quite closely related to the Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus, which myself and Mrs Sciencebase saw many years ago on The Canary Island of Fuerteventura. That said, G. barbatus is the only member of the Gypaetus genus.

Turns out the one seen in May 2016 was most likely an escapee from a collection or aviary rather than a wild bird so was never added to the so-called British list.

N-Acetyl-L-tyrosine is showing up in spam emails and on twitter so I had to take a look to find out what claims are being made for it. I suspected that marketers might be calling it a panacea, and I was right. At least one website (which mentions, hilariously, FDA censorship on this) lists several diseases, disorders and conditions, that the compound (a metabolic precursor of tyrosine) might help with. Although they don’t say specifically that it’s the N-acetyl-L-tyrosine functioning medically but allude to its putative activity on the basis that tyrosine itself supposedly has these activities.

They claim that the compound is a precursor for the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, a precursor for the pigment compounds melanins, and for the thyroid hormones (e.g. thyroxin). Lifelink, for instance, makes the bold statement:

Most of the medical research relating to tyrosine supplementation has been conducted using L-tyrosine itself, not acetyl-L-tyrosine. It is logical to assume, however, that the conclusions reached will apply to acetyl-L-tyrosine as well, since the latter is converted to L-tyrosine in the body. The following discussion therefore draws from studies of L-tyrosine.

By implication then N-acetyl-L-tyrosine can purportedly be used in treating mood problems and depression, hair and skin colour, blood pressure, and Parkinson’s disease!

If you were offered a drug by your physician to improve your hair colour but the doc then pointed out that it might affect your brain and your blood pressure, wouldn’t you be worried? Indeed, the pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars trying to eliminate side effects and focus the specificity of its products to avoid such issues as multiple activities of any given drug.

Several of the references given to support the use of N-acetyl-L-tyrosine are nothing more than Wikipedia entries. I don’t want wiki entries when I’m assessing a medical effect, it’s not that Wiki is not credible, but how can the lay reader be sure that what they’re reading on there is valid, it may have been edited to promote the compound by someone with a vested interest or a conflict of interest.

Give me large-scale, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, clinical trials every time and you’ll convince me. Spurious musings on possible benefits are not medical evidence.

Also of note are the physical properties of N-acetyl-L-tyrosine listed by ChemSpider:

CAUTION: May irritate eyes, skin, and respiratory tract

According to an AP investigation, US pharma companies have released at least 1000 tonnes of pharmaceuticals into American waterways. This putative contamination of the drinking water supply has been consistently overlooked by the Federal government, their report says.

Interestingly, this drugs in the water supply is a topic I discussed at least a decade ago in the original ChemWeb Catalyst column (now available on Sciencebase.com) and one that was also in the news in India not too long ago: Indian Stream A Cocktail Of Drugs. The exact same news was also discussed back in January on the thdblog: Pharmaceutical Waste Dumped at Record Levels.

It’s not the acidity of cranberry juice that prevent urinary track infections and cystitis, it’s natural chemicals in the tarty juice that prevent pathogenic bacteria from adhering to the cells that line the urinary tract. That’s according to research in the Journal of Medicinal Food.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) cost $2b annually in the US and are a major burden on healthcare systems. They are common in patients with a urinary catheter in place, but some people are also more susceptible to such infections than others, particularly after sexual activity, although the infections are rarely sexually transmitted in nature.

Adhesion of Escherichia coli bacteria (which live in the lower gut) to cells lining the urinary tract is the first step in the development of a UTI. Chemicals found in cranberry products called proanthocyanidins (PACs) prevent this microbe from adhering to these urinary tract epithelial cells by affecting the surface properties of the bacteria.

Paola Pinzón-Arango, Yatao Liu, and Terri Camesano, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, exposed E. coli grown in culture to either light cranberry juice cocktail or cranberry PACs and measured the adhesion forces between the bacteria and a silicon surface using atomic force microscopy. They demonstrated that the longer the bacteria were exposed to either the cranberry juice or the PACS the less able were the bacteria to adhere.

Cranberries, one of only three species of fruits native to North America, have a long history of medicinal food use. Native Americans used the fruit for the treatment of bladder and kidney ailments.

Chemistry textbooks will tell you that you need at least two different elements to produce an ionic material. So, what to make of a paper in the journal Nature by Artem Oganov of the Swiss research center, ETH Zurich, and colleagus have simulated a superhard form of boron that contains ionic bonds.

The team was developing a computational method to help them predict the structure of various types of material and applied the technique to a newly synthesized form of pure boron that possesses some
unusual physical properties.

They were surprised to discover that this novel boron was more unusual than they could have imagined, revealing a degree of ionic bonding between boron atoms, that theoretically should not exist, but apparently do.

The new structure can be viewed as a NaCl-type structure, with anionic and cationic positions occupied by two different clusters of boron atoms (B12 and B2). The difference of the electronic properties of these clusters brings about charge transfer, making this material a partially ionic boron boride. the press release on this work says that boron is the chemical element most susceptible to changes in structure due to the presence of impurities. Maybe that’s the explanation…but of course it cannot be so, this is a computer simulation, there are no impurities.

The discovery could mark an important step towards a better understanding of boron. But, perhaps more intriguingly is that it beggars questions about what we mean by a chemical bond…

All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players. But, some of us play more than others. Take yours truly for instance, David Bradley Science Writer, also known as David Bradley Lover, Player, Puller, Guitarist, Photographer, Singer (but thankfully not Killer, see BBC news recently). I like to play with extramural pages on the Sciencebase website, creating little vignettes outside the conventional science blog. One of the aims is to ensure that my rather common name is seen more widely in the context of my website rather than web surfers heading elsewhere.

Of course you may actually be looking for the Shakesperean actor David Bradley who most famously plays Argus Filch in the Harry Potter movies. It’s rather a peculiar coincidence that David Bradley the actor is a member of the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) as David Bradley Science Writer is also a member of  the RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry). [UPDATE: I met that David Bradley in a pub once, he told me had had my book and we swapped autographs.

Of course, you may be looking for the other David Bradley actor, known now as Dai Bradley (because of Equity rules) who played Billy Casper in Ken Loach’s movie Kes, adapted from the story A Kestrel for a Knave.

So, here’s the link to Filch the actor – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0103195/

and here’s the link to the Kes actor – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0103193/

There may be other David Bradley actors out there and there may be other links on this page that are of more interest to anyone looking for information on David Bradley, either way, this has been David Bradley Science Writer playing.

This post may have appeared long before 8th January 2009, but that’s the most recent timestamp I have for it in the archives, so that’s the date it gets in the blog.