Top Ten Hot Biologists

Purely in the interests of science, I headed over to flickr to see if I could find a snap of a particular biologist I was writing about today. Couldn’t find a single one, but all the faces that came up got me thinking that perhaps it would be fun and waste a few minutes when I should be working to pull together a list of the top biological totty. So, here it is a whirlwind tour of the world of biologists, in no particular order and no one vetted particularly closely.

Female biologists in action

  • Ninoka
  • Heather
  • Louise and friends
  • Susan
  • Claire
  • Alicia
  • Cerbu
  • Neguin
  • Elinay
  • Beck

For the sake of completeness, and to avoid accusations of sexism, I also gathered together ten male biologists in the field who also featured on flickr.

  • Glyn
  • John
  • Geoff
  • James
  • Dan
  • Alan
  • Bruce
  • Stan
  • Jeff
  • Chuck

I’ll leave it to Sciencebase readers to decide which if any should be in either top ten list. One thing to note, facial hair is common among biologists (but only in the second list).

Tomorrow, physicists on Pixsy.com and then chemists on myspace

Cheating agents

Sciencebase visitors commonly search the site for specific chemicals they’re interested in. Of course, I’d always recommend hoping over to Chemspy.com for structures, MSDS and other information. You can search PubChem, ChemFinder, ChemRefer, ChemIndustry and several other chem sites via the ChemSpy toolbox (bottom right, homepage, enter your keywords and click the database of choice)

Anyway, yesterday someone was looking for 2,4,6-tri(2-pyridyl)-1,3,5-triazine, so I did a quick search myself to see where the interest in this compound lay. Lots of search results came back, but one in particular caught my eye, this claw-like molecule is apparently a “cheating agent”, at least according to a patent that came up on an esp@cenet search. Now, unless the compound in question has gained some novel yet devious physiological properties, I’d have to assume they missed the “l” and that it’s actually a chelating agent that can grab on to metal ions with more than one of its own items with a claw-like grip, in fact. I could be wrong…

Why Does Natural Selection Take So Long

In an item on The Register about why natural selection takes so long to get results, Dr Stephen Juan, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney makes several statements that seem to me to be at odds with evolutionary theory.

“Most mutations do not help the species survive.”

This is true in one sense, but natural selection doesn’t act on species, all it does is remove individuals from the gene pool that are no longer best adapted for a particular environment. If a mutation in an individual’s DNA mean it is better adapted to a changing environment then it will pass the “new” gene(s) on to its offspring who will then have the trait and the viability in that environment to reproduce and so on.

“A species and an environment exist in balance with each other.”

Do they? Perhaps, but only in the sense that should either one change radically then we will no longer observe a balance. Moreover, several mutations over several generations that allow individuals to cope with a changing environment leads to species diversity.

“Populations simply adapt to their current surroundings and to changes in those surroundings.”

No they don’t. Individuals either survive the new surroundings and pass on their genes to their offspring or they don’t. Usually, only those best adapted to new environmental conditions survive to do so. Populations may display synergetic effects between individuals but this is not the same as a population adapting.

“They do not necessarily become better in any absolute sense over time.”

There is no such thing as “better” or “worse” evolutionarily speaking. An individual either survives and passes on its genes or it does not. If those genes endow the offspring with the ability to survive and pass the genes on again then the genes survive. If they don’t they are lost. Evolution is littered with dead-ends but every single living thing on the planet has ancestors that were capable of reproducing.

How to avoid spam, whatever your email address

I’m almost sweltering in the heat of a late burst of good weather here in southern England but staying cool because I finally implemented the neatest trick to keep all my email inboxes virtually spam free (thanks for nudging me in the right direction on this, Colin)

Colin (who runs the Scoophost system through which sciscoop.com is hosted) suggested that rather than relying on spam filters that wait until you’ve downloaded your email before putting them in the trashcan, a much more effective approach to spam is to re-route all your email through Google Mail and let it take care of the spam. Set your Gmail account to allow pop3 downloads and add this account to your email program and then you get all your legitimate email much faster without having to wait for spam to download alongside it.

The spam messages, by the way, simply accumulate in the spam box on your Gmail account. A quick once a week scan allows you to spot any false positives, but the rest get automatically deleted every 30 days.

It’s a simple solution and one that has cut my spam overload from several hundred a day on a dozen email accounts, to just half a dozen so far this week. Thanks again Colin.

If you also have SpamPal running the Bayesian plugin then that catches any of the remaining detritus and filters it to your local spam folder, leaving your inbox almost pristine.

I’m going to miss those messages offering me a bigger, longer, firmer, slimmer, faster, slower, shorter, tigher, younger, bits. Not!

Chemistry Central Journal launched

A new open access outlet for chemists’ peer reviewed research was launched today. Chemistry Central Journal. Publisher BMC says, the journal is the first international open access journal covering all of chemistry and will publish its first issue early in 2007.

Bryan Vickery, speaking today at the journal’s launch being held during the ACS meeting, said, ‘I am delighted by the number of noted chemists and scientists who have agreed to join the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal from the outset.” Among them is 1996 Nobel laureate Robert Curl. “I think open access journals are a great idea and am delighted to join this venture as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board,” he said.

Vickery continues, “Open communication of research results in physics and biomedicine has evolved rapidly over the last few years. Many believe Chemistry has lagged behind, with access to chemistry-related journals and databases still predominantly limited to subscribers only.”

Vickery explains that Chemistry Central Journal will offer a home for research in areas where there has previously been no open access journal available. “Chemistry Central Journal aims to change all that, by offering an open access publishing option to scientists worldwide,” Vickery says, “The journal will cover all areas of chemistry, and will be broken down into sections.”

Pink Floyd, Sir Isaac Newton, and the missing indigo

First posted 2006-09-06. Updated 2023-01-23

2023 is the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”. You’ll know it instantly from the cover art which shows a prism splitting a ray of light into a rainbow. I grew up with this album, but I must admit I didn’t remember noticing that the rainbow has just six colours. Don’t we normally think of rainbows as having seven – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet?

Interestingly, the six-colour rainbow has been a pride symbol for the LGBTQ+ community for many years. I wondered why that it didn’t have all seven colours either…was it something to do with the suspicion that confirmed bachelor Sir Isaac Newton was maybe gay? Probably not.

Anyway, the Floyd recently updated their socila media logo. The logo features the six-colour rainbow motif, just like the original album artwork. It triggered a load of bigoted comments and ignorant trolling [for which read: free publicity]. The trolls hated that their Pink Floyd had gone all “woke”. Well, aside from the fact that being woke is not a bad thing, the Floyd were woke long before anybody used that word to mean tolerant and accepting. Indeed, the whole album is lyrically about as woke as you can get without propping your eyelids up with matchsticks and wrapping yourself in a rainbow flag, and shouting “right on!”

Pink Floyd 50th Anniversary DSotM logo

But, trolls will be trolls, the endless antiwoke and bigoted bile spat out about the new artwork and the rants from people saying they will never listen to the band again is just incredible.

Better antifa than antiwoke I say. Shine on!

Original Post

Everyone knows the song…

Red and Yellow and Pink and Green, Orange and Purple, and Blue…

Not exactly the best mnemonic for recalling the rainbow, that purple should be “violet” after all, and then there’s the little problem of “pink”!

Much better is my late mother’s VIBGYOR (violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red) as cited in Newton’s famous prismatic experiments. Although some people prefer Richard of York gave battle in vain.

There is a problem. Where is this indigo? Can anyone really distinguish between violet and blue? To my eye, there certainly isn’t a jeans-coloured slice in the spectrum, and as chemist M. Farooq of the University of Karachi in Pakistan suggests this isn’t due to limitations of the prism. An article in the American Journal of Physics (1972, vol 20, p 526), he points out, drew attention to the fact that indigo does not exist in the spectrum some years ago and that instead was nothing more than one of Newton’s “preconceived notions”.

According to that AJP paper, Newton adapted the colours of the artist’s wheel – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and purple and then added something from his religiosity and his alchemistical bent. The number 7 after all is more heaven than the 6 of hell. Newton gave us the seven colours of the rainbow not because there are seven but because it fit his view of God’s universe better.

The indigo of our mnemonic is actually violet, and what Newton referred to as violet is probably what we call purple. Of course, purple is not present in sunlight but is a colour of mixed pigments on the artist’s wheel. More to the point though, there aren’t just seven colours. The electromagnetic spectrum is just that a spectrum, a continuous spread of hues in the visible and beyond.

All that said, some people do see seven “main colours” when prompted, some people do see a colour between purple/violet and blue in the rainbow.

Meanwhile, here’s the tech bit from the US National Bureau of Standards showing the range of wavelengths of light corresponding to the colour:

400-465 nm violet
465-482 nm blue
482-487 nm greenish blue


597-617 nm reddish orange
617-780 nm red

It’s all very well laying down the colourful law like that, but your idea of “reddish” might be slightly different from mine, in fact I might see orangey-red when you perceive reddish-orange (maybe it’s another example of the ambiguity in art I discussed recently in this blog). Moreover, as John Denker points out, there is a “band” between yellow and green that if the word chartreuse is in your vocabulary you might label it as such. “The question is not whether the band is there, but whether the observer chooses to take notice of it,” he says. “This whole colour-naming issue depends relatively more on cultural and behavioural factors, and depends relatively little on physics,” he adds.

On the same discussion group Thomas O’Haver of the University of Maryland asks, “Is there really in value in having students memorize something like this?”

It still doesn’t help much with the words of that song, though, Red and yellow and pink and green…

Ask Jeeves about science

Here’s a top listing of questions that bring readers to sciencebase from the Ask Jeeves search engine. We cannot promise to answer them all here, but search the site and you may find enlightenment or at the very least some factlets of even more interest.

How old was Einstein when he wrote his papers on relativity?
When were the largest glaciers in history?
Where can I find some wow facts about sodium?
When Mars will look as large as the full Moon to the naked eye?
How much does the Japanese government spend on computers?
What planet is most like Earth?
How many barrels of oil do Americans use every day?
What is the width of a dime?
Why can’t frogs smoke?
How far is Sedna from the sun?
How do humans recognize faces?
What killed Otzi the iceman?
Where is the Earth’s crust thickest?

Chitika

No doubt I’ll get round to creating a Chitika stream for my readers viewing pleasure. But, first, just check out the blurb with which they try to entice bloggers:

“Chitika eMiniMalls bring life to product promotion on the web. With eMiniMalls you can hand-select specific products (or product categories) targeted to the content of your webpage, and provides your users with robust comparative shopping information to make an informed buying decision – before they leave your site. As users click, you make money.”

Unfortunately for a science blog and its readership, they don’t yet have a minimall for silica gel TLC plates and test-tubes, maybe one day.

Periodic Post

Periodic table of sex

Mosts chemists get to see some wacky periodic tables during their careers – circular ones, spiral ones, ones that rearrange all the elements etc etc. Then there are the foody ones and then there are the giant periodic tables, the arty farty ones, the online version, the flash table.

And, then there’s the periodic table of sex.

I didn’t think it was real at first, but several sciencebase visitors have been searching for this incredible object during the last few days, so I thought I’d uncover the truth. Apparently, just such a PT exists, its elementary in the most lewd way, but is available from Amazon. Apparently, allposters.com have stopped selling it, so I’d grab one while you can: Periodic table of sex

It’s not every post I get to categorise as chemistry, sex and geek all at the same time, but this one was simply begging for it. I hate to think what good-ole Dmitri Mendeleev would have made of it though, but surely it’d make the perfect gift for the chemistry student in your life. Wouldn’t it?

Natural power for TV

A posting about telemarketing on digg reminded me how a teacher friend used to mess with the heads of cold callers, asking them obviously dumb questions.

One of the less subtle was to ask the telemarketer from British Gas, which now also offer electricity as well as natural gas to UK customers, whether he’d be able to run his TV from the gas supply.

They caller would politely tell him no, but become increasingly frustrated as my friend continued his line of enquiry embellishing his questions all the while with thermodynamic gobbledegook and nonsense about improved efficiency. He could keep them hanging on for hours…

Of course, the irony is that once we all have methane-fed fuel cells in our homes, we will indeed be running our TVs off natural gas!