Mar 31, 2006
The BBC reports today that it has been given exclusive “access” to a Belgian trial of a new bird flu vaccine.
400 volunteers signed up to receive either the new vaccine or a placebo in the randomised double-blind trial of the GlaxoSmithkline vaccine. 399 said they were doing it for humanitarian reasons, one admitted it was for the money (300 euros) and the experience. Let’s just hope the “experience” isn’t as interesting as that …
This is an update to my earlier posting about benzene in soda.
Today, March 31, the UK’s Food Standards Agency has published the results of an analytical survey of benzene levels in 150 soft drinks on the market in the UK. They state that contrary to fears, benzene was not detectable in the majority of products sampled.
However, four products did contain trace amounts of benzene that are above World …
Pnicogen. Silent “p” or sounded? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) people just contacted me, wanting a definitive answer.
Partly because they found my Molecule of the Month on the subject at Paul May’s excellent site and suspected I was some kind of expert. Sadly I’m not, so I’ve resorted to asking a couple of contacts who might actually have a clue. I’d like it to be p’nuh but suspect the p should be silent, as …
The new series of Dr Who, this term starring my wife’s favourite hearthrob of the moment, David Tennant, starts April 15 on the BBC. No one is to tell her though…and I’m not setting the VCR. Bah!
More info on the good Doctor can be found at The Register
Some time ago I wrote about the possibility of a shikimic acid shortage and what science is doing to address the problem. Shikimic acid, you say? The starting material for the influenza drug Tamiflu, of course!
Microbial fermentation seemed to be the way forward, but now chemists have discovered that the seeds of the sweetgum fruit – gumballs – contain significant amounts of shikimic acid. The finding means manufacturers will not have to rely on …
Mar 30, 2006
The strongest magnetic fields in the universe have been simulated on the computer by researchers in the UK and Germany. The fields, which are thousand million million times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth are produced when two magnetised neutron stars collide. Theory suggests these fields could be the source of violent gamma-ray burst explosions.
Neutron stars have a mass similar to that of our Sun but are just 20 km across, which makes …
Anyone who enjoys a tipple, the fruit of the vine, a pint of hop-derived beverage, or a peaty distillate from the Scottish isles can no longer kid themselves that they were imbibing for the sake of their health. Previously, research had suggested that “moderate” drinking (of alcohol) might help prevent heart disease, but a new study published today demonstrates that this argument is intrinsically flawed.
Researchers from Australia, Canada, and the US have analyzed 54 studies …
The latest chemistry news round-up from David Bradley is now available on The Alchemist.
This week, I report on a glowing reporter that can spot biological zinc, a new class of enzyme inhibitor that starves the malaria parasite of its human blood supply, and how to convert slimy waste oil into compost. We also find out what Europeans are doing to address concerns over chemical unknowns and how at least one meeting at this week’s ACS …
Mar 29, 2006
An EU directive that will become UK law by 2008, could stifle cutting edge research that uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see how medical treatments are working. The new legislation restricts the amount of time MRI operators are allowed to use the equipment each day.
Speaking at the “Science and Health” meeting this evening (March 29), Professor Penny Gowland of Nottingham University explained that, “The guidelines that will be imposed by the directive are overcautious …
I was intrigued by a rash of searches on the Sciencebase site from people looking for the phrase “Penggunaan Eceng Gondok”. A quick Google revealed that Eceng Gondok is the water hyacinth, although “gondok” itself is actually the Indonesian word for goitre.
A scan of three Indonesian-English dictionaries then revealed that “penggunaan” means employing or using, so visitors searching for “Penggunaan Eceng Gondok” were presumably looking for mentions of …
A, B, AB, or O?
A blood type (also called a blood group) is a classification of blood based on the presence or absence of inherited antigenic substances on the surface of red blood cells (RBCs). These antigens may be proteins, carbohydrates, glycoproteins, or glycolipids, depending on the blood group system, and some of these antigens are also present on the surface of other types of cells of various tissues. Several of …
Mar 28, 2006
The idea of robots in the military brings about thoughts of a sci-fi nightmare, probably starring Arnie and most definitely not R2. The military does, nevertheless, already use robotics to help members of the armed forces protect themselves against a wide range of dangers. But, the idea of a robot fighter shooting at the enemy is not that far from reality.
Read about this and the latest robotics news on our scenta robots news page.
“What is a viral infection?” A question asked by lots of Sciencebase visitors either directly or through the medium of dance, no, sorry, through the keywords they use in the search engines.
As such, some time ago, I put together a short definition of viral infection here.
Isn’t web spam wonderful? The Sciencebase blog received a dozen new “comments” to posts overnight, all from a single source in China and all listing chemical compounds a company over there is trying to sell.
Here are just a few, 2,2-Bis(hydroxymethyl) propionic acid, Morpholine, Pelargonic Acid, 2,2-Dimethylbutyric acid (without the links to the spammer’s site, of course). The first person to give me a run-down of what these materials are used for can award themselves a …
Mar 27, 2006
British medical journal, The Lancet, has called for an open and independent investigation of what went wrong with the small phase I clinical trial of TGN-1412 that had six men in intensive care within hours of the trial beginning.
“Commercial confidentiality should not obstruct independent scrutiny of the drug trial that led to six men becoming seriously ill in Northwick Park Hospital in London, UK,” states an Editorial in the Journal, “Both TeGenero …
Mar 25, 2006
The Sciencebase science newsfeed helps you keep up to date with news in chemistry, life sciences, materials, medicine, nanotechnology, and physics as featured in webzines and blogs to which freelance science writer David Bradley contributes. You subscribe (FREE) or grab the newsfeed with your news reader, iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Firefox Active Bookmarks etc, and it delivers the headlines straight to your newsreader without you having to check back with the site to find out …
Mar 24, 2006
P30%_gha! or p0%3ghA!?
If you’ve ever resorted to scribbling your assigned computer password on a Post-It and sticking it to the side of your monitor because it was too cryptic to remember, then research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Germany, could be just what you’ve been waiting for.
The scientists there have developed a new program – PasswordSitter. “Using it, you only need to remember a single password. The program provides all the …
UK chemists have devised a new approach hydrogen gas storage that could power fuel-cell cars and vehicles without the need to carry hazardous cylinders of compressed gas. The approach is base on a highly porous polymer that can trap huge numbers of gas molecules allowing hydrogen gas to be stored in a compact container in a safe form.
You can read the full story in the March issue of Spotlight, the physical sciences magazine from …
Mar 23, 2006
According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov’s analysis of the data suggests that changes in the amount of water vapour at 5000 to 13000 metres altitude has lead to the …
A new type of microscopic particle that has a hard shell and a soft core that changes structure depending on the temperature has been developed by Walter Richtering and graduate student Ingo Berndt of the University of Aachen, Germany, and Jan Skov Pedersen of the University of Århus, Denmark, and their colleagues. The particles might have industrial and biomedical applications. For instance, they could be used for the controlled release of substances held within the …
A press release just in from the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry announces that HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) intends to throw £5million ($9m) into two major initiatives from the RSC and the Institute of Physics. The announcement follows an agreement last year that HEFCE would work with a group of organisations to support strategically important and vulnerable subjects.
At a time when UK chemistry and physics departments seem to be getting earmarked for …
Mar 22, 2006
Researchers have modified a popular system for protein labelling and modification to reduce the risk of unwanted cross-reactions and so make it more accurate and effective.
With incredible specificity and powerful affinity for each other, the protein streptavidin and its small-molecule target biotin are truly the ‘Dynamic Duo’ of biological research, the researchers explain, and a perennial favourite for use in the design of biochemical experimental techniques. For example, one can easily subject biotin-linked proteins to …
Why doesn’t H5N1 pass from person to person as easily as it passes from bird to bird? After all, H5N1 can replicate very efficiently in someone’s lungs.
Japanese researchers now think they have an answer to this vexing question. The bird virus, they have found, preferentially binds to cells in different regions of the human airway from those favoured by human influenza viruses.
Flu viruses infecting humans and birds are known to home in on slightly different …
A press release from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology describes the latest research into stretch marks. The release says stretch marks are “unsightly” and describes them as a “disorder”. Fair enough. It then goes on to discuss the finding that women with this disorder, appear to be at increased risk of pelvic prolapse. How could this be and what are the warning signs?
Like stretch marks, pelvic prolapse is a connective tissue disorder and pelvic weakness …
It’s like buying two tickets instead of one for the national lottery, you may shorten the odds ever so slightly, but there’s still very little chance of winning. That should be your first thought on hearing that the strain of avian influenza currently making the media sweat has evolved into two distinct variants. That’s the big news emerging from the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta this week.
Rebecca Garten of the US Centers …
Mar 21, 2006
Personally, I’m way past the dating game, having been happily married for several years. But, as an angsty teen with a passion for the more nerdy things in life – many of which begin with the prefixes astro-, star-, and chem- Trek Passions would have been a lifesaver. If you’re looking for love and haven’t yet found your Lieutenant Uhura, your Han Solo, or even your Ford Prefect, then this site could be the place …
A sciencebase visitors attempted to spam the blog recently with an advert for his detox kits. Needless to say, this blog automatically adds a rel=nofollow tag to all comment URLs, so it’s a waste of time spamming us anyway, but moreover, all comments are moderated so that cr*pfloods are easily averted.
Anyway, if you want to find out what a detox kit is check this Google search: detox kits – Google Search
It seems that the …
Why do stars twinkle? It’s a similar effect to why a hot road looks shimmery. The turbulent atmosphere refracts the incoming starlight to different degrees so the “beam” of light reaching your eye becomes randomly distorted but deviates only minutely from its path, just enough so that it looks like the star is twinkling. It’s the bane of ground-based astronomers and is part of the reason we sent up the Hubble space telescope. However, there …
I interviewed Steve Bryant for the chemistry magazine Reactive Reports, mainly about PubChem, how and why it was set up, what are its limitations, and the various controversies surrounding this chemistry database.
Bryant had become increasingly involved with information resources because, he told me, that is the most valuable thing we can do with computers and molecular databases. Making the information as accessible to researchers as possible was to be critical. “There was a …
Mar 20, 2006
Philippa Darbre of the University of Reading, England, has published a review of the putative health effects of organometallic compounds that mimic estrogen and could increase the burden of “aberrant oestrogen signalling within the human breast”. Of particular relevance to public health is her suggestion that the aluminum compounds used in the manufacture of underarm antiperspirants may somehow be involved in an increased risk of breast cancer. The paper is already causing a stir in …
When it comes to particles, we usually think of opposites attracting – north and south, positive and negative. But, somehow particles that one might expect to mutually repel somehow manage to form clusters in solution. How this can be was the subject of a research project undertaken by Gerhard Kahl of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Vienna University of Technology, and colleagues. Their finding could be important for understanding how polymers become organized …
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