May 30, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
The highly unique crystal structure of nanotubes constructed from cyclic peptides is revealed this month by Japanese researchers in the journal Organic Biomolecular Chemistry. The descendents of these novel nanotubes could find a role in future molecular electronic devices, according to the team, who allude to the high macrodipole moment of their materials.
Shunsaku Kimura and colleagues at Kyoto University, have built on the work of ETH’s Dieter Seebach and Wisconsin’s …
May 29, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Interest in alternative solvents to replace volatile organic compounds is on the increase, so improved understanding of the properties of these alternatives is needed. One class of solvents researchers are keen to learn more about are the room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs). Researchers have commonly used absorption or fluorescence to study solvation properties. But now scientists in Japan, have carried out a Raman spectroscopic study of a series …
May 28, 2006
Posted in Cancer at 3:03 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
The drug Cesamet (nabilone), a derivative of tetrahydrocannabinol, was “re-approved” for the clinical market this week for use in treating the side-effects of cancer chemotherapy, including nausea and vomiting. Genetic Engineering News reports that Valeant Pharmaceuticals International (NYSE:VRX) announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given marketing approval for Cesamet (CII) (nabilone) oral capsules. The drug interacts with the CB1 cannabinoid receptor found throughout the nervous system, its interaction with …
Posted in Chemistry, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Air-assisted solvent extraction (AASX) process is an important new technique for the extraction of valuable metals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and uranium, as well as wastewater treatment where metal concentrations are typically low.
Now, a Canadian research team has discovered that it is the bubbles that play a critical role in providing a high solvent-specific surface area and ease of phase separation. Now, the team has used layer interferometry (in the UV-vis region) to measure …
May 27, 2006
Posted in Health at 4:08 pm by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
A fellow “Digger” dugg this article I posted on Reactive Reports issue 47 in which I discussed: Hangover Culprit Found. Of course, the headline was slightly misleading as was the opening paragraph which alluded to acetaldehyde being the cause of hangovers. This was pointed out to me by no less than a few of the other 470+ Digg members who voted the article to the front …
Posted in Environment, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
A lack of understanding of how problematic contaminants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pesticides, and herbicides interact with soil organic matter (SOM) is an issue that can hinder remediation of polluted sites, muddy the waters when it comes to determining the ultimate fate of pollutants, and reduce the viability of risk assessment models when considering new uses for brownfield and old industrial sites. Fortunately, Canadian scientists have now suggested that a range of techniques, …
May 26, 2006
Posted in Science at 3:11 pm by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add yours
Why 37? Well, it could have been 42, but then the authors would have been accused of being just toooo geeky. Anyway, this new white paper offers software selection tips from business owners, accounting managers, consultants, and software publishers. The white paper allows you to gather the facts before you make a decision on implementing a new accounting system. This guide will give you smart ideas and …
Posted in Science, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
A novel class of lanthanide compounds that emit in the near-infra-red could open up new possibilities for the use of NIR in biological imaging as well as leading to materials for optical amplifiers and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) operating at telecommunications frequencies.
According to Jean-Claude Bünzli of the EPFL, the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland, lanthanide compounds are of great interest in a number of fields because they produce narrow and easily recognisable emission lines in …
May 25, 2006
Posted in Health, spectroscopy at 3:00 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
X-ray imaging is a very mature, although not infallible, field of medicine, but it does not lend itself to the detection of small tumours or their metastases. Now, Sangeeta Bhatia in Boston, Massachusetts and colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology hope to remedy that by using iron oxide nanoparticles to allow MRI to visualize areas of tumor invasion.
The key to their novel imaging agent is a …
Posted in Science at 1:01 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
What did I tell you? The floodgates are opening to football (or soccer) related press releases with a scientific twist. The other day it was the Institute of Physics playing keepy-uppy with the physics of football, today it’s the turn of London’s Science Museum (sorry that should be science museum, per their logo.
According to their news release, new data released today [Into the wild, is that?], proves something that all football fans already …
May 24, 2006
Posted in Chemistry at 8:10 pm by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
Ever wondered whether there might be a way to extract more than the usual information from your chemical data. A query on the sciencebase site wanted to know whether there were a way to convert molecular weight into a formula.
The reverse - calculating molecular weight from a formula, is obviously trivial, just add up the atomic masses of all the elements in the formula. In fact, the likes of ChemDraw, ChemSketch and other …
Posted in Bird Flu at 5:00 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
The World Health Organization has expressed concern that a recent cluster of deaths associated with the H5N1 virus in Indonesia may not have originated with an animal host, suggesting the possibility of human to human transmission of the virus. However, it also cautions that the analytical evidence suggests that the virus has not mutated into a human transmissable form, which means we are not just yet on the verge of a global bird flu pandemic …
Posted in Geek at 12:55 pm by David Bradley -- 3 Comments; add yours
In the same Digg discussion I read of a novel glass replacement called Kwarx that is meant to be unbreakable and so could save all that sweeping up after your next drunken cocktail party and a purported announcement from Bill Gates that the next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, will be unhackable! Is this just a coincidence or is Gates hoping to exploit the sparkling character and shatter-proof nature …
May 23, 2006
Posted in Geek at 4:37 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Microsoft, having given Longhorn a far more marketing-exec friendly name in the form of Vista, has now revealed just how powerful computer needs to be to run this all-new version of the Windows operating system. Surprisingly, the spec is actually far lower than the system inside my Dell laptop which died unceremoniously just last week (out of warranty, of course, but only 26 months old).
Would you be surprised if this new spec were not up …
Posted in Health at 10:09 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
A group of leading physicians and scientists in the UK has petitioned the National Health Service, because it is concerned about how unproven or disproved treatments are being encouraged within the system. In a letter reproduced in The Times, they ask that practices be reviewed and that the various concerns about such treatments, which generally sit under the umbrella of complementary or alternative medicine, be raised with the governmental Department of Health.
The bottom …
May 22, 2006
Posted in Physics at 9:51 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
In the run up to the Football World Cup, it was inevitable that press releases would starting dribbling in from the media relations departments of companies, research establishments, and learned societies, each tackling difficult subjects and presenting them as a game of two halves with some vague footy. The ultimate goal as ever to get their name in the press…
Well, the Institute of Physics is no exception to the rule, obviously, basically, at the end …
Posted in Chemistry at 2:49 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
If you’ve been thinking of going green with your gasoline-powered lawnmower by switching to an ethanol based product, then Thomas Eddie Allen of Huntsville, Alabama, reminded me of a little problem that old-timers might face.
Allen read the Ap Weekly Features on “Go Green In The Grass” this weekend and emailed to say that while he is all for ethanol-based gas but there is a problem that is not mentioned in the article.
Older lawn equipment, mowers, …
May 18, 2006
Posted in Environment at 3:26 pm by David Bradley -- 3 Comments; add yours
At a time when the UK government has stated that nuclear power is effectively the only option to cut down on pollution and help the UK meet its emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, is it really something to celebrate that the world’s biggest passenger jet, the Airbus A380, has today touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport for the first time?
Just a thought.
Posted in Chemistry at 8:49 am by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
The authors of a paper published in this week’s Nature claim to have srtuck a blow against the rising tide of antibiotic resistance. Jun Wang and colleagues at Merck’s Research Laboratories, in Rahway, New Jersey, have found a potent antibiotic from a microbial fungus, which they demonstrate kills many Gram-positive bacteria, including the current media darlings methicillin-[or multiple]-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE).
The new antibiotic, platensimycin, was …
May 17, 2006
Posted in Chemistry at 7:00 pm by David Bradley -- 5 Comments; add yours
Just got wind, by way of old friend Michael Engel, of a rather intriguing forum for chemists called chemunpub.
The Chemistry Unpublished Papers forum, looks like a great place to find out what’s going on underneath the public face of research chemistry, with posters asking what they should do with their ‘green’ ionic liquids once they’ve finished with them and info about papers that shouldn’t have been published at all!
This from the forum FAQ …
Posted in Science at 9:15 am by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
For anyone who’d like to import all the individual Sciencebase news feeds in one fell swoop, you can grab the Sciencebase OPML file here.
If you’re unsure what an rss feed is click here, and if you don’t know what you can do with an OPML click here. So long as that ‘opml validated’ button appears in this post then the sciencebase …
May 16, 2006
Posted in Geek at 9:39 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Lots of pundits point out that the antivirus/firewall/antispyware companies are making big profits from the fear instilled in computer users the world over. Whether every threat is real or not, who’s got the guts to go out into the cyber world unprotected these days, or even plugin in someone else’s USB key for all that.
Now, it seems a Trojan horse program has surfaced that looks rather suspiciously like a goody-two-shoes kind of application. Rather than …
Posted in Chemistry at 2:55 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
The decline in UK chemistry departments has been staved off at least partially with a vote to save the department a Sussex University on the south coast that spawned two Nobel chemists.
According to The Guardian, ‘The University of Sussex has abandoned its controversial plans to axe its chemistry department following intense criticism from scientists across the country.’
Vice-chancellor, Alasdair Smith, originally suggested chemistry teaching be scrapped and a new bio-merged department take its place, but, the …
Posted in Environment at 9:30 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
I saw rock band R.E.M. in concert seventeen years ago, just after the Exxon Valdez ran aground spilling its oily guts with devastating effect on Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The two events were not related in any way, but the band’s singer, Michael Stipe, implored fans everywhere to boycott Exxon and its European equivalent Esso because the company, he said had failed the environment on so many counts.
Seventeen years later and compelling new evidence is …
May 15, 2006
Posted in spectroscopy at 9:02 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
The latest round up of science news from David Bradley goes live at spectroscopyNOW.com today.
Among May 15’s postings:
Biomedical researchers have long thought that male sex hormones play a critical role in controlling cholesterol levels and lipids and in the development of atherosclerosis, a serious risk factor for heart disease, but new research from Wyeth Laboratories reveals that a protein receptor in the body called FXR, could …
Posted in Geek at 7:37 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
More than one in twenty executable files on your PC could be a spyware program, according to researchers at the University of Washington. Computer scientist Hank Levy and his colleagues analyzed over 20 million internet addresses, to track down programs that can get on to your computer without you knowing and perform tasks ranging from displaying annoying advertising banners and pop-ups to gathering personal information, redirecting you Web …
May 14, 2006
Posted in Geek at 9:08 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
There’s a heated debate underway on the NASW discussion groups about whether marijuana is addictive or not.
Deborah Frisch came up with a great comic dialogue between two dudes [has to be two if it's dialogue, Ed.] discussing the issues and whether or not we should be talking gently about the anandamide receptor or boldly about the cannabinoid receptor in scientific circles. My cartooning colleague Peter Welleman did a …
May 13, 2006
Posted in Science at 2:21 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Some Sciencebase visitors might already be aware of the Significant Figures Blog in which I and a few others pick apart the general media for their poor understanding of errors, accuracy and precision…we’ve had lots of enquiries asking for a quick and simple crib sheet on what sig figs (or sig digs) actually are, how to work them out, and what is their significance, exactly…
So, check out the latest posting on the SF blog …
May 12, 2006
Posted in Chemistry at 3:19 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
After another sleepless night did you ever think that your so-called caffeine-free coffee may not be all it seems. But, how could you test to make sure the manufacturer’s claim of drug-free cafe latte is based on chemical fact?
Now, US scientists have developed a simple test for caffeine that could be incorporated into a portable device for use in the home to test caffeine levels in all kinds of beverages.
“We …
Posted in Astronomy at 9:09 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
There’s an interesting feature article by Frank Schaefer in the latest issue of ERCIM News (No. 65, Apr 2006) all about space junk. Schaefer points out that the historic practice of abandoning spacecraft, rocket stages, and defunct satellites has led to something like 2000 tonnes of debrit accumulating in earth’s orbit. He produces a diagram showing the catalogued distribution of this junk, much of which is in the …
May 11, 2006
Posted in Bird Flu at 7:00 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
In today’s Science magazine policy forum, Ezekiel Emanuel and Alan Wertheimer of The Clinical Center, at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, argue that should a [bird] flu pandemic emerge, any time soon, then, they say, priority should go to people between early adolescence and middle age.
Their argument is based on the idea that every one of us should have the opportunity to live through all life stages. They suggest that this offers the best balance of …
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