Oct 31, 2006
I remember seeing some dull old film clip of the thermite process in action during school chemistry class. Much better would have been to see it live, in the schoolyard with a science teacher dumb enough to head back over to the reaction vessel because it hadn’t fired up quickly enough. Well, for those who missed out there’s a nice video of that very happening….
Despite Carl Djerassi’s prediction (some years ago) that we would never see a “male pill”, it looks like just such a contraceptive treat is coming at last.
The new drug, Adjudin, is currently in early clinical trials and is a long way from human use. However, the very fact that drug companies are taking a male oral contraceptive seriously suggests a sea change iin attitudes. It’s not ten years ago that I heard Djerassi speak on …
Oct 30, 2006
Wondering what to do with all those seeds hacked from the orange flesh of your halloween pumpkin? You could try eating them, especially if you’re on a low-protein diet or likely to be exposed to the organic solcent carbon tetrachloride (tetrachloromethane)!
According to researchers in South Africa, pumpkin seeds can protect the liver from the harmful effects of protein deficiency and exposure to hepatotoxins such as carbon tet.
The seeds of the …
UPDATE
I abandoned the international system on Sciencebase some time ago. The translation of documents with relatively high scientific content by Google and Babel is just so poor that I received several emails from readers saying just how bad it made the site look to those whose native tongue is not English.
OLD POST
Regular readers may have noticed the selection of national flags on the right-hand menu have now been demoted to the bottom of the …
Oct 28, 2006
AP de Silva was born in Sri Lanka but moved to Queen’s University of Belfast, in the 1970s and is now Professor of Chemistry. His fascinating research into small logical molecules has found commercial application in diagnostics and sensors, has recently led to a breakthrough in labelling compound libraries, and may one day help us build a molecular computer.
Read my interview with AP in Reactive Reports to learn …
Oct 27, 2006
Adding a little culture to the chemical laboratory could help chemists find structures much faster than before. According to UK chemists, Samantha Chong and Maryjane Tremayne, of the University of Birmingham, combining the principles of social and biological evolution with a little fashion sense to make a new Cultural Differential Evolution algorithm allowed them to half the time it took to solve the structure of a molecule from its powder diffraction data.
Their research could have …
No one of whatever religious persuasion who visits the Sistine Chapel in Rome can fail to be impressed by the results of a 20-year restoration project that has brought Michelangelo’s frescoes back to their original level of artistry. Most notable is the brilliance of the sky blue that almost illuminates the Last Judgement on the altar wall of the chapel. But, recent NMR analysis …
Oct 26, 2006
You can add this science search box to your website or blog and give your readers direct access to science-specific searching using Intute, Google Scholar, Scirus, and Windows Live Academic.
You can add the search box to your site using a tiny snippet of javascript:
<script language=”JavaScript”
src=”http://sciencebase.com/science-search-box.js”>
</script>
<div align=”center”>
<a href=’http://www.sciencebase.com”>Science Search by Sciencebase</a><div>
Simply copy the code and paste it into a suitable slot in your site navigation or page.
If you think I’ve overlooked a particular …
Oct 25, 2006
The common perception of Parkinson’s disease is of a disorder that leads to problems with movement, tremors, involuntary spasms, and a shuffling gait. However, functional MRI has now confirmed that the disease can also cause widespread abnormalities in the sense of touch and vision for sufferers. An international team from the US and China presented their findings at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Atlanta on October 17.
Research into Parkinson’s disease has previously focused …
News just in from Imperial College London suggests that climate change in Europe is worsening the impact of a deadly disease which is wiping out vast numbers of amphibians. IC’s Matthew Fisher and colleagues working with colleagues in Madrid have found a correlation between significant warming of the local climate in Spain between 1976 and 2002 and the emergence of the fungal disease Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (BD) in the area and its …
Oct 24, 2006
The current update of Reactive Reports is now online featuring:
An interview with molecular logician AP de Silva, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, how a biologically compatible gel could revolutionize surgery and save lives in the emergency room, and a dietary response to Alzheimer’s disease that puts red wine, spicy food and a mediterranean salad squarely on the preventative menu.
Check our latest reactions here.
Pubchem is fast growing into one of the most useful repositories of small molecule information on the net and best of all it’s free. The service not only gives you the molecular formula and structure but also provides information on the biological activities of millions of small molecules. It is a component of NIH’s Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative.
NIH provides its own help resources here, but US chemical information aficionados Gary Wiggins and Dana …
Oct 23, 2006
Version 2.0 of the alternative web browser Firefox, has now been launched. The latest browser has many of the features of version 7 of that other browser, including a pop-up blocker, safer surfing, virus protection, tabbed browsing, and better handling of newsfeeds. One thing it will hopefully lack is the never-ending release of security patches that other browser seems to need on a regular basis.
I’m loathe to say that Sciencebase is optimised for Firefox. It’s …
And you thought Brussels was crazy for banning bananas that were too curved, for forcing manufacturers to relabel brandy butter as “modified distilled wine spreadable fat product”, and for limiting pizzas to an eleven-inch standardised diameter only! Now, the US is searching Aussies coming into the country to make sure they’re not bringing that most infamous of products with them – Vegemite!
According to News.com.au, the iconic …
Oct 21, 2006
Do you think of yourself as more than a monkey? I say monkey, but of course I mean ape, and so do the guys who made this video…but as they point out, monkey, ape, are just words to try and elevate the position in the universe of the monkey that happens to have the biggest and most well connected brain. I suspect Richard Dawkins would enjoy this video. It really does tell it like it …
A couple of the recent additions to the Sciencebase science links were research-based blogs rather than the more familiar commentary type (like this one). The chat and waffle sites can be informative and entertaining but sites like the Usefulchem blog are more, well…useful, providing as they do insights into the processes of scientific research and potential offering new solutions through discussion. So, if you’re a scientist running a research-type blog, please get in touch. …
Oct 20, 2006
Probably a really, really good idea to take Brainiacs presenter Richard Hammond’s advice NOT TO TRY THIS AT HOME. The Brainiacs team set up two microwave ovens and stuffed in all the stuff they’d already tested in microwave ovens on previous shows (as a serious experiment so that you don’t have to do it at home). Beer, CDs, soap, petrol, champagne, wire wool and much more leads to some pretty lights and them some serious …
Are we running out of oil? It’s a question that has vexed drivers the world over since the first major oil crisis three decades ago. Oil experts have been telling us for years that supplies are dwindling and that within another few decades the petrochemical legacy left by ancient life will have all but gone.
But, Eric Cheney economic geologist at the University of Washington thinks this notion is nonsense. “The most common question I get …
Oct 19, 2006
A press release arrived yesterday from the American Chemical Society that said, “Japanese scientists have reported the discovery of an additive that can speed up the formation of methane hydrates, literally ice that burns.”
Literally ice that burns?
I know what they mean, but it’s not literally ice that burns is it? That would be a mythical substance composed of flammable frozen water, surely?
Anyway, these not-literally-ice-that-burns materials have some interesting properties not least because they could act …
The world of online publishing continues to evolve and today marks a new landmark with the release on to the web of the complete works of one of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin.
Every book, journal entry, and letter amounting to some 50,000 searchable pages and around 40,000 images from his original publications are now available to everyone with web access for free within a few mouseclicks.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) …
A bag of moss lying in an irrigation ditch in North East Italy does not conjure up a picturesque image nor the cutting edge of analytical science but nevertheless the special characteristics of the moss Rhynchostegium riparioides make it the ideal environmental monitor according to researchers at the University of Trieste and their colleagues at ARPAV.
Waterways are often intermittently polluted by metals from industrial outflows and other sources. Such waterways …
NIST physicists have taken a step towards making entanglement, the quantum phenomenon Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance” – into a practical tool.
The team demonstrated a method for refining entangled atom pairs (a process called purification) so they might be used in quantum computers, communications systems with potentially “unbreakable” data encryption, and highly accurate atomic clocks.
The research reported in today’s issue of Nature marks the first time atoms have been …
Oct 18, 2006
As antibiotics fall to bacterial resistance one by one, it is essential that medicinal chemists keep ahead of the game by finding compounds with new modes of attack. Recently a new antibiotic, platensimycin has been found to act potently through a novel mechanism. Now, US chemists have devised a total synthesis for this unique compound and tracked their progress using mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy.
You can read the full story …
Oct 17, 2006
Researchers at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia, Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, have announced new indirect evidence of element 118 in the journal Phys Rev C.
Previously, the LBNL retracted its 1999 claims of having found element 118 because of reproducability issues. (They couldn’t make it again, in other words). It turned out that one of the team had been fabricating lab-book …
British TV presenter Richard Hammond gained notoriety recently for smashing himself up at almost 300 mph in a dragster for the show Top Gear, but in a parallel life he was presenter of the science experiments show Brainiacs.
This is the classic alkali metals experiment we used to get to watch in chemistry class, but with a difference! These guys take it to the extreme to demonstrate not the fizzing and popping of lithium and sodium, …
I received a job ad indirectly from the Living Fuel website today, it seemed like a fairly run of the mill science writing job asking for a ghost writer-researcher to assist in writing a weekly health newsletter etc…
Usual kind of online job ad in other words.
The prospective candidates need experience in health and nutrition, obviously, and must be skilled at taking complex information and effectively communicating it to lay …
Sick building syndrome and multichemical sensitivity may not hit the headlines as often as they used to, but they do continue to represent an important health and safety issue for those who manage work place environments.
Now, researchers in Sweden have carried out a detailed analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as aldehydes, amines, and acids, that are found in the air of various buildings. They compared their results for buildings in which people with …
Oct 16, 2006
Aside from write-ups in the New York Times and the journal Nature, there has been very little in the media recently concerning the plight of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face death sentences in Libya. The six are charged with deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, the AIDS virus, in 1998. The charges are nothing more than “preposterous” says the NYT, given that infections …
If you run a science blog, chances are we added you to the Sciencebase science and engineering links pages today in our latest update, there are now almost 40 entries on that page. Please take a quick look to confirm we got your URL and anchor text right. If we didn’t please, please, please let me know and I’ll get it fixed. If you’re not listed on that page and would like to …
The day the UK’s medicines approval agency NICE, announces that certain Alzheimer’s drugs are to be limited to those in the latter stages of the disease to get the best value for money, I read a Nature press release announcing a novel approach to treating the disease based on supercharging an enzyme that looks like the video game character Pac-man. US researchers have determined the crystal structure of …
Oct 13, 2006
We’re beta testing a new way for Sciencebase readers to grab the science headlines. You can now access Sciencebase science news headlines on your WAP phone and similar devices, no need to tell us your phone number or anything, just follow this science wap link.
For a preview of what this might look like on a Sony Ericsson, click here.
Everything seems to validate and it shows …
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