Sep 30, 2006
Posted in Cancer, Health at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
X-ray crystallography has provided new insights into how the microscopic motorised transport system that operates in our cells is powered. The study could have implications for understanding the symptoms of Down syndrome, the neuromuscular condition Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and some cancers, all of which arise through some form of breakdown of this system. The work may ultimately lead to possible new treatments for such disorders.
The researchers behind the work are from Duke University Medical Center, …
Sep 29, 2006
Posted in Environment, Science at 7:00 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
In his climate-change ain’t happening State of the Union speech of Sept. 25th, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) makes the claim that climate change “skeptic” scientists do not get a fair share of media coverage. But, according to DeSmogBlog a quick infomart media search of US papers shows there have been more than 350 mentions of Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, William Grey, Roger Pielke, Richard Linzen and Patrick Michaels.
It seems the …
Posted in Science, podcast at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add yours
I just can’t get you outta my head…is the usual thought when an irritatingly catchy pop song gets stuck on loop in your brain for days on end. A start-up company in East Anglia reasoned that this catchiness might be put to good use in helping people quickly learn a foreign language. Or, at the very least, a couple of dozen keyphrases that will help them get by while on holiday or a business trip …
Sep 28, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, Geek at 11:58 am by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
Is your browser so locked down that you can’t install any plugins or enable Java? Firewall refusing to cooperate with your molecules? Antivirus screaming at your structural efforts?
If so, then you probably find it rather difficult to run some of the chemistry drawing packages available for interactive use on the Web. There is an alternative.
Molinspiration Cheminformatics has released WebME, a molecule editor for creating
and editing molecules within a …
Posted in Bio, Health at 8:51 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
It’s not a subject for polite conversatio, but anyone who has ever had to handle a soiled nappy (or diaper as our colleagues Stateside refer to them) will know that baby poop comes in a range of colours (unlike the apocryphal Ford Model T). The BabyPoop lens over on Squidoo offers a kind of litmus test, or more appropriately, a universal indicator paper strip, for the spectrum of options available.
Mustard coloured …
Sep 27, 2006
Posted in Geek, Science at 12:21 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Apple has got ever so touchy about websites using the term podcast more liberally than its claims to trademark registration would allow. Cease and desist letters have been sent to the likes of Mypodder and Podcastready by the company, according to reports in Wired and The Register.
There are, of course, some bloggers that claim that the term podcast actually has nothing to do with Apple’s brand of mp3 player and that it originates in the …
Posted in Geek at 10:40 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
As promised, a round-up of physicists you can see on flickr.com
This time, I’ve merged the genders. Less sexist, more PC, and generally quicker to do.
Flickr Physicists
Brian and friend
Doug
Vadim
Paolo
Lippy
Clarina
Christian
Lisa et al.
Pat
Melodie
Once more, I’ll leave it to readers to decide who if any of these guys should have made it into a Top Ten list of hot physicists.
Watch …
Sep 26, 2006
Posted in Geek, Science at 8:57 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Ever wondered what on earth you could do without yet another social networking and communal bookmarks site? No? Well, neither did I.
Check out my Squidoo Lens for the sciences. Links, feeds, technorati tags, and feedback.
Sep 25, 2006
Posted in Bio, Geek at 7:35 pm by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add yours
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 …
Posted in Chemistry, Environment, podcast at 8:53 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
An incredibly small item in Saturday’s Times announced that a Voluntary Reporting Scheme - established by DEFRA - in the UK to record and assess the risks posed by nanoparticles has been created. Scientists have welcomed the announcement, apparently. More likely, they are rather peeved that yet another layer of bureacracy has been added to their workload.
According to the paper, “Little is known of the potential risk to health by the creation through nanoengineering of …
Sep 22, 2006
Posted in Science, podcast at 12:20 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Welcome to the first Geordie Boffin Podcast from Sciencebase. This irregular and irreverent podcast will bring you audible reporting from the sciences. For most sciencebase readers this will most likely be your first chance to hear my dulcet tones (and those of my wife) as well as a little effected guitar playing for the intro!
You can play the sound file by using the media player built-in to …
Sep 21, 2006
Posted in Chemistry at 6:33 pm by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
The NCI CADD Group headed by Marc Nicklaus and colleagues has just launched the Chemical Structure Lookup Service (CSLS). This web-based system allows one you to locate chemical structures in over 70 different public and commercial data sources. Stored within the system is information on over 30 million chemical structures and it provides a simple search interface for looking up chemicals by specific structure as well as by parent structure, and by various identifiers.
There are …
Posted in Chemistry at 2:26 pm by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add yours
I once interviewed renowned odor theorist Luca Turin who described one particular group of chemicals as being the “the Godzilla of smells”. He added that “You can’t believe how awful they smell…They make you vomit your guts out instantly.” Thankfully, I never came across them when I worked in a lab, but I’m sure he’s right.
Of course, the reason that I never happened upon these compounds during my lab days is that they have …
Sep 20, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, Geek at 12:03 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
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 …
Sep 19, 2006
Posted in Geek, Science at 7:24 pm by David Bradley -- 21 Comments; add yours
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 …
Posted in Science at 12:15 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Search engines spend huge amounts of money fine-tuning their search algorithms, but a report in the journal Complexus suggests that they might be wasting their time. Lörincz and colleagues argue that random results provide just as many positive hits on a given subject as even the sharpest algorithm available. You can read my interpretation of their findings in this article on search engines.
Reposted with link correction.
Posted in Chemistry at 9:18 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Well…it’s our fourteenth today, so a good time to remind sciencebase readers of our alternative chymical wedding anniversary list where you will discover that the fourteenth is “pyrolytic carbon”, which is used to make heart valves, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolytic_carbon.
If you favour the traditional list, then it’s ivory, so we won’t expect gifts, for obvious reasons.
Posted in Chemistry at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Can planetary giants make metallic water? That’s a question answered theoretically by US scientists in this week’s Alchemist, we also learn why mussels are not as happy as clams thanks to Prozac, what makes organic semiconductors light up and the possibility of powering your mp3 player with your beach umbrella. Also in this week’s news distillate, uranium-munching bacteria have the mettle to construct nanoscopic platinum particles. Finally, digestion on a grand scale could be releasing …
Sep 18, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, Health, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Extracting oil from olives requires solvents and residues of halogenated solvent can sometimes leave a toxic taint in the product. European Union rules restricted the acceptable levels of these residues for the sake of public health but new sensitive and precise analytical procedures are needed to allow strict quality control and regulatory testing to be carried out.
Now, Spanish researchers have turned to chemical informatics to help them optimise the extraction-analysis …
Sep 17, 2006
Posted in Science at 2:48 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Quite a spread of pharmaceutically related searches hit the sciencebase site in the last week or two, here’s just a short selection with direct links to pertinent resources:
cdp choline
TGN1412
aceclofenac
citicholine
peptidoglycan
steroids
antihypertensive drugs
ibogaine
4-aminobutanoic acid
ethambutol
sulpiride
You can search for more pharmaceuticals and other small products on our ChemSpy site
Posted in Physics, spectroscopy at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
A radically different approach to detecting the way atoms resonate in a magnetic field could improve the sensitivity of NMR spectroscopy, according to US scientists.
Conventional liquid and solid relies on detecting the net dipolar magnetic field outside a spin-polarised sample, explain Michael Romalis and colleagues at Princeton University, New Jersey. However, this only offers the NMR spectroscopist limited structural and spatial information. As such NMR has been extended with elaborate techniques involving magnetic field gradients …
Sep 16, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, spectroscopy at 10:34 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Spanish scientists have used some tricky mathematics to help them work out where heavy metal comes from. Their findings, based on atomic analysis, will provide information useful in protecting us from these toxic elements.
Contamination of soils with heavy metal contaminants has become and increasingly important environmental issue, particularly in developed countries because of shifting land-use patterns. Such contaminants readily leach into water systems or are assimilated by certain crops with putatively detrimental effects on wildlife, …
Sep 14, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, Science at 8:52 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
It has been thirteen years since Prasanna “AP” de Silva and his colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast published their first paper in the international science journal Nature, outlining how they hoped to convert small molecules into the kind of logical units that could carry out computations. In the September issue of Reactive Reports, we explain how this work has now led to the first practical application of logical chemistry and …
Posted in Geek at 6:14 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
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 …
Posted in Environment, Science at 8:59 am by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add yours
Given the number of Sciencebase visitors looking for information on recent volcano eruptions and currently erupting volcanoes, it seemed sensible to set up a page that would provide the latest information on that very subject. By syndicating the latest announcements and alerts on recent volcano eruptions from the University of North Dakota website (Volcano World), Sciencebase provides a quick route to the information you need in this explosive area.
Volcano World …
Sep 13, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, Health at 3:01 pm by David Bradley -- 2 Comments; add yours
Of all the millions, if not billions, of web searches being carried out across the net every day, there are approximately 54 looking for this quite spectacular string of words: the metabolic typing diet customize your diet to your own unique body chemistry
It was the word chemistry, that brought it to near the top of a recent keywords trawl I was carrying out to help find new topics to offer visitors to the Chemspy site.
Turns …
Posted in Chemistry, Science at 12:00 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Bacteria could be the key to improving metal catalysts for the chemical industry, according to research in Germany. Scientists from the Forschungszentrum Rossendorf in Dresden have exploited the survival skills of bacteria that live in uranium mining waste to make tiny clusters of the precious metal palladium. These tiny bullets, just a few billionths of a millimetre across, are much better catalysts than normal palladium, which is used in speeding up chemical reactions and in …
Sep 12, 2006
Posted in Health, spectroscopy at 9:45 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Last week, Cambridge and Belgian researchers reported that they could observe almost identical brain activity in healthy volunteers as a patient purportedly in the persistent vegetative state following emergence from a coma (the patient was originally in a car crash in July 2005). The implications of this functional MRI work are that some (but by no means all) PVS patients may have consciousness to some degree despite their outwardly appearing inanimate.
It is incredibly tragic to …
Posted in Chemistry at 8:01 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
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 …
Posted in Physics, Science at 12:01 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
Blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are really bright. Too bright for theorists to handle, in fact. Why? Because, the materials from which they are made usually have impurities that should make their glow much duller. Now, an international team of researchers has discovered why this is the case.
Commercially viable blue LEDs are based on the wide band gap semiconductor gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride and were invented by Shuji Nakamura then at the Nichia Corporation …
Sep 11, 2006
Posted in Chemistry, Sex at 5:34 pm by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
It seems even the sex industry is not immune to chemophobia, according to a recent Greenpeace Netherlands announcement, users of PVC sex toys destined for orificial use should not. Use them, that is.
According to Greenpeace, these plastic devices can contain “extremely high concentrations of phthalate plasticisers which allegedly pose a risk to human health and the environment”. The organisation wants the European Union to ban the use of …
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