Apr 30, 2006
Sciencebase hosts a collection of science experiments from a cool coffee experiment to how to build a homemade electric motor.
Here is a brief list of possible science experiments, although we no longer provide these particular write-ups you can download similar science projects via the links.
Black Light ExperimentSinking and Floating Experiment…
Apr 28, 2006
In the week that the H7 variant of avian influenza has led to the culling of 35000 chickens in England, scientists at Imperial College London have simulated the spread of a “human” bird flu epidemic and say that rapid treatment and isolation of infected individuals not only from the public but their household contacts will be essential to prevent thousands of deaths. They also suggest that vaccine stockpiles should be gathered …
Mr Justic Peter Smith who recently presided over the alleged plagiarism UK case concerning Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (it should really be The Leonardo Code, of course) and the “non-fiction” The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail turns out to be something of a wiggy wag.
Smith italicised a couple of dozen characters in his judgement which cleared Brown of the charges. So what, you might ask? Well, Smith is something of a code …
Chemspy.com, the chemical database and searching site has now updated its search box scripts for science webmasters. If you run a scientific website, and want to provide your visitors with direct access to a range of chemical and science search engines in a single convenient box, then grab the script now. There’s a general box for searching the likes of ChemIndustry, ChemFinder and ChemRefer, and a second more specialist box for anyone who needs to …
Apr 27, 2006
Slicing up carbon to make a new class of electronics, caught The Alchemist’s eye first this week, and then a new class of antibiotics that slices up bacteria came to light. In this issue, we also learn how layered ceramics could build three-dimensional nano-devices and that cars produce too much carbon dioxide for environmental targets. Finally this week, designer zeolites could soon be with us thanks to a new model of the crystal growth process.
Check …
The BBC reports this morning that about 35,000 chickens at a poultry farm in Norfolk, England, are to be culled after dead birds tested positive for a strain of bird flu. What makes this interesting is that the newsdesk subbies are now going to have cope with another strain of avian influenza - H7, as opposed to H5N1. H7N7 was, of course, responsible for an outbreak in The Netherlands where 30 …
Following on from Wednesday’s posting on the subject of an obesity stifling pill, health professionals have been told that they need to use more than tape measures and scales to define and tackle obesity. The claim appears in the British Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Maryanne Davidson of Yale University discovered that many women fail to make the link between high weight and poor health and that culture is to blame, playing a key role in how …
Apr 26, 2006
Anyone who has not yet caught the Sudoku bug, has obviously either been living on another planet during the last year, or just does not like these frustratingly addictive number puzzles. Anyway, I’ve syndicated a daily Sudoku feed for Sciencebase readers, either click the Suduko snapshot on the homepage or play suduko online here.
If you know of or produce a better version of the online game available for syndication please let me know.
Researchers in the UK have discovered that topping up levels of a gut hormone could help people stave off feelings of hunger as well as increase activity in overweight and obese people.
According to research to be published in the International Journal of Obesity injections of the appetite-suppressing hormone oxyntomodulin, which is found in the lower intestine, have a “double effect” on people.
Chief researcher Steve Bloom of Imperial College London points out that, “The discovery that …
Apr 24, 2006
Spray-on sex could usher in an age of McNookie, according to an article in The Observer on Sunday. PT-141 is billed as libido in an atomiser, says the paper, and could finally offer women the chance to turn on their sexual desire as and when they need it.
“A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as …
According to news just in from the American Chemical Society, millions of women use the herb black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) as a dietary supplement to help treat hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms. However, there are no definitive clinical trials to say whether they are wasting their money or not. Some studies report that black cohosh helps relieve menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, while others do not.
A …
Writing on the CHMINF-l discussion group, Buffalo U librarian A. Ben Wagner explains how he has come to an agreement with faculty to draw a line under subscribing to new spinoff publications of the journal Nature. “no sooner had reluctantly subscribed to Nature Physics partly under the justification that at least this time they had picked a major discipline,” he says, “only to find
out in a few months they are bringing out Nature Nanotechnology …
Apr 21, 2006
According to a press release I only just spotted from the journal “The Cochrane Library, a randomised controlled trials has demonstrated that extracts of Devils Claw (Harpagophytum procumbens), White Willow Bark (Salix alba) and Cayenne (Capsicum frutescens) all reduce low-back pain better than placebo. Devils’ Claw and White Willow Bark also compare well with conventional medicines, claim researchers in a a systematic review published in Issue 2 of the journal this week.
Devils’ Claw is …
Several Sciencebase visitors have been trying to locate the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Division of Chemical Science, a chemistry journal coming out of, you guessed it, Russia. Well, according to the Springer Publishers website this journal is now known as Russian Chemical Bulletin and can be found here.
The journal is edited by well-known Russian chemist O.M. Nefedov and publishes some 500 original, peer reviewed papers a year in the …
Andre Geim of the University of Manchester and his colleagues reckon graphite, the slippery soft allotrope of carbon, could lead to a new generation of microelectronic devices. Geim and colleagues laid out graphite sheets one layer at a time to allow them to study the properties of these graphene sheets.
A graphene sheet is electrically conducting, behaving essentially like a two-dimensional metal. But it is a strange kind of metal, with …
Proud to report that Sciencebase received a Good Housekeeping Site of the Day award today! From a quick glance at the site, which seems to have an archive of future awardees as well as those already given, it doesn’t look like it’s actually anything to do with the eponymous magazine, but it’s still nice to get some recognition for the site anyway.
If anyone can tell me who Good Housekeeping (not …
Apr 20, 2006
Imagine the hoards of adoring fans, sellout arenas, the groupies, these are now virtually within the grasp of anyone who can play a searing solo on the air guitar, thanks to researchers at Helsinki University of Technology.
The Virtual Air Guitar uses a computer to monitor the hand movements of an air guitarist and adds genuine guitar sounds to match the player’s fret work. The innovative application combines gesture recognition with musical …
Fluorescent “barcodes” created by labelling pools of cells with different combinations of dyes could be a boon to researchers interested in performing large-scale cell-based studies for drug discovery and other applications, according to Gary Nolan and colleagues at Stanford.
Protein phosphorylation has a major role in a wide variety of essential cellular functions, and several years ago Nolan and colleagues developed “phospho flow”, an approach for simultaneously characterizing the phosphorylation status of multiple proteins in …
Peter Petrov of the University of Exeter and colleagues have found that tears are a much more complex fluid than previously thought. Their surfaces are, they say, highly structured, almost like cell membranes with a protective coating just two molecules thick.
The tear film that covers and moistens our eyes must keep debris and microorganisms out as well as holding water in and keeping the eye lubricated. Petrov’s team has investigated how this two-molecule coating, made …
Apr 19, 2006
A perennial point of contention among chemists is the issue of naming the chemical elements. At least at the top end of the periodic table. However, the periodic table of rejected elements provides some light relief while concentrating on this crucial chemical conundrum. Where else can you find delirium, sin, and crouton?
I’m sure they meant element 15 (Bs) to be Bosphorus, but somehow missed the s, although Boss Porous would be a great name …
I haven’t mentioned search terms for a while, but one that drew in the punters to the sciencebase site stood out in my recent trawl of the site logs - “crystallized ink”. Now, what’s all that about? I wondered.
At first, I assumed it was someone worrying about their little pot of Indian blue going all glacial on them (as is the wont of certain types of honey and concentrated acetic acid solutions). But, then …
Issue 54 of the Reactive Reports chemistry magazine is now online, featuring an interview with chemical Wikipedian Prof Martin Walker of SUNY Potsdam.
Also in this issue, hula-hoop DNA amplification, metals taking on carbon’s bonding characteristics, and a bacterium’s sticky solution. Check our reactions to the latest chemical discoveries here.
We’ve got a stack of information available to science students including science homework and chemistry assignment help, science fair projects and science class demonstration guides. The free stuff is fine, but we also offer science project resources in partnership with 24 Hour Science Projects, which you or your parent will have to pay for. We recommend these project packs very highly though …
How do you clean up waste water contaminated with the deadly metal cadmium and what do you do with the resulting material? French scientists reckon they have found the answer.
The mineral hydroxyapatite, like its natural counterpart found in tooth and bone, has an affinity for the toxic heavy metal cadmium, they say. Now, they have used X-ray diffraction spectroscopic analysis, and electron microscopy to follow the kinetics of uptake and release of this metal from …
Apr 18, 2006
French researchers have now demonstrated a way to circumvent one of the main problems associated with cellular imaging and can obtain nanomolar concentration readings even for complex biological samples using their approach.
The method has led to an extension of the use of spectroscopy and spectro-imaging to many more parameters associated with cellular activity in both cultured and xenografted cells, and living tissues. No other analytical technique is available that can analyse tissue sections without embedding, …
Huángqí (huangqi) is a plant root used in one of the most common tonics of Chinese traditional herbal medicine with purported activity in cancer, diabetes, inflammation, and nephritis.
As such, there is a lot of interest in the active ingredients of this species as it might lead to novel pharmaceuticals against a range of illnesses. Now, researchers in China have used a powerful spectroscopic technique to identify the active chemical components of this remedy.
Improving detection of toxic metals in the environment and trace elements in medical samples is often time-consuming and, worse, reagent demanding, as well as potentially having false positives as samples become contaminated by pre-treatment.Portuguese researchers have now overcome these drawbacks by using an online sample pre-treatment method.
The team has coupled an online high-intensity focused ultrasound system with a more conventional analytical technique, which they say is greener than conventional approaches because it needs less reagents …
Apr 17, 2006
Jennifer Barnett and researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry have discovered that intelligence can reduce the effects and severity of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
It was already known that intelligence can protect against dementia and the effects of head injury. Now, Barnett and her colleagues have reviewed the literature to discover that intelligence can also act as a buffer against the potentially debilitating effects of schizophrenia and other …
Apr 16, 2006
Researchers in the US have developed an exquisitely sensitive test, better by a thousand-fold than previous efforts, for detecting trace quantities of cholera and botulinum toxins. These two agents are considered potential agents of a bioterrorist attack. Their test takes just three hours to provide a result.
Until now, the most rapid and sensitive approach to biotoxin detection has involved coupling the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with antibody specificity for toxins.
To boost the sensitivity of this …
Apr 15, 2006
Researchers at Imperial College London have demonstrated that an antibiotic is effective at treating acute asthma attacks, potentially providing a new way to help asthma sufferers.
The team found that the antibiotic, telithromycin, can hasten the recovery time of patients who have had asthma attacks by three days, as well as reducing their symptoms and improving lung function. Treatment for some serious asthma attacks can involve the use of steroids, which help control inflammation of …
Apr 14, 2006
A system that can help CCTV operators identify people carrying concealed guns is being developed at Loughborough University. The MEDUSA (Multi Environment Deployable Universal Software Application) project will help reduce gun crime by providing software that can analyse CCTV images and report whether people in the frame, are in the frame. The system will work in in real time allowing the police to grab anyone toting a gun before a serious crime is …
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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery publishes the highest-quality reviews and perspectives plus news stories and features that investigate key issues in drug discovery...moreover if you check my resume, you'll see that the magazine is in my client list. more info...
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