Nov 30, 2006
Hangover cures…don’t work. And, that’s official. So you’re stuck with that thumping headache, the sick feeling in your stomach, and the mouth that feels like the bottom of a parrot (or parrot’s cage depending on what you were drinking.
According to a report published in the British Medical Journal some time ago, but timely once again given the imminent holiday season, the only way to reduce the risk of waking …
Determining the chemical composition of 2000 stars in four of our neighboring dwarf galaxies, is a task even the biggest parallel analytical lab would probably baulk at taking on, although of course the referral fees would be stupendous. Nevertheless, a chemical survey of just such inter-galactic proportions has been carried out.
The chemical survey was made possible by the imaginatively named European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. This a bigger …
Nov 29, 2006
A subject that I have returned to on several occasions is arsenic-contaminated drinking water. This insidious environmental disaster was first brought to light by Dipankar Chakraborti of the University of Jadavpur whom I interviewed for The Guardian in 1995. However, the problem has not gone away. Various research teams have looked at various solutions to the problem but Chakraborti emphasises that the issue is one of politics more than anything else.
Nevertheless, there are emerging, simple …
Nov 28, 2006
There are various ways to keep up to date with the latest news and views from Sciencebase. The simplest is to bookmark the page (http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog) and pay us a daily visit to read the new posts.
Or, you could do something that more and more visitors are doing these days and sign up for our full-text science newsfeed to read all the latest posts almost as …
What is it with software and websites and scientific tools that they all have to have these mixed case acronyms, abbreviations, and odd spelling?
Anyway, today sees the launch of another odd spelling from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute - CiteXplore. This is a freely accessible literature resource service that melds data from the peer-reviewed scientific literature with key biological data such as DNA and protein sequences, functions and structures of …
Now that Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the Holiday Weekend, and Cyber Monday are over for another year, it’s time to start writing your letter to Santa Claus…
Of course, to make sure it reaches him, you’ll want to know his proper address, not just one of those scammy spammy addresses that say “North Pole”. As you probably know there are actually two North Poles and they never sit still. There’s the …
…no, sorry…wrong story. Tubes, carbon nanotubes are the new material of choice for a wide range of experimental technological applications. Now, US researchers hope that they will be used to make implantable biomedical devices that could act as artificial nerve cells, control severe pain, or maybe one day move paralyzed muscles.
Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan and colleagues at Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas Medical Branch have used carbon nanotubes to …
Nov 27, 2006
I, like many with a chemistry training, have on occasion dismissed the more mystical-seeming strands of non-western medicine. The origins of homeopathy, for instance, relied on literal Bible bashing of glass phials to ensure the infinitely dilute remedies would work. Which of course western medicine says is ludicrous. Herbal medicine on the other hand needed the industrial age to extract its active ingredients and bring us the likes of aspirin from the sap of the …
It’s not often that I’m on the receiving end of journalism, but today Jenny Gristock gave me a taste of celebrity in a Guardian media article about the role played by science journalism in science.
I’d tipped her off about one of the biggest success stories, from the perspective of academic research becoming an industrial commercial reality, that had emerged from the pages of New Scientist in recent years. This is how she …
From the age of 13, Mark Leach has had a subscription to the popular-science magazine Scientific American, and more recently the journal Nature. His scientific interests include cosmology, high energy and nuclear physics, materials science (particularly carbon nanotubes), geophysics, molecular biology, evolution, information technology, the brain, defense technology, and scientific ethics. Professionally, Mark is a chemist interested in ‘chemistry, the-whole-thing’. I interviewed for my Reactive Profile column this month, find …
Nov 24, 2006
The Cnet newsite has a rather politically incorrect item this week listing the Top Ten girl geeks. I’m not entirely sure how they’re defining geek but among those listed are Marie Curie, Ada Byron (Lovelace), Rosalind Franklin (after whom my wife wanted to name our daughter), and…Paris Hilton (don’t ask).
So, where’s crystallography pioneer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin? And, what about Judith Howard, first female …
Former Russian spy, defector, and activist-writer Alexander Litvinenko has died in a London hospital of suspected poisoning with radioactive thallium. [Subsequently, found to have been polonium]
Litvinenko’s friend Alexander Goldfarb read a statement prepared by the former spy on his deathbed just two days before he passed away. In that statement, Litvinenko lays the blame for his poisoning firmly at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin and says: “You may succeed in silencing me, but …
Ever wanted to observe the dissection of fruitfly ovaries but were too squeamish? What about monitoring actin disassembly with time-lapse microscopy, not sure how it’s done? Maybe you have been wondering how to freeze human embryonic stem cells but were afraid to ask…
Don’t worry the online Journal of Visualized Experiments has come to the rescue of cash-strapped demonstrators with little spare time who can now call on …
Nov 23, 2006
What does it mean to be human? We thought that the Human Genome Project had set the limites on the genetic make-up of our species. But, according to Steve Connor, writing in the Independent today, much of the genetic variation between individuals can best be explained by the presence of multiple copies of certain key genes rather than variations in the genome sequence.
The research suggests that whereas previously we thought all people shared 99.9% of …
Nov 22, 2006
What alchemist’s den would be complete without a crucible? The tough little vessels used for mixing all those odd ingredients, goat urine, cow’s blood, sweat, philosopher’s wool, saltpeter etc etc…
Now, the 500-year old mystery of how crucibles could survive all that chemical punishment and high temperatures has been revealed by archaeologists at University College London and Cardiff University.
Earlier research had demonstrated that the …
Nov 21, 2006
Fancy a whirlwind tour of some of the best technology writing of the year? As part of the digitalculturebooks series from the University of Michigan Press, Brendan Koerner has compiled some of the most stimulating and fascinating feature articles from the web and print media by the likes of the NYT’s David Bernstein, New Republic’s David Bell, Mike Daisy on Slate, Dan Ferber in Popular Science magazine, and …
Nov 20, 2006
A former colonel in the FSB (the successor to the KGB) has allegedly fallen foul of chemistry. Alexander Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, fell ill on November 1, after a meeting in a London sushi bar, reports the BBC.
Litvinenko is on life support in University College Hospital having allegedly been poisoned with a potentially lethal dose of the heavy metal thallium polonium. …
Nov 19, 2006
Canadian and Korean chemists have locked in a form of handedness into a common catalytic molecule that could make it useful for separating the building blocks of proteins, amino acids, into their chiral forms for biotech applications and drug development. The new locked up cat, might also be used to make purer and safer chemical starting materials for reactions in the drug, agrochemicals, and polymer …
Nov 18, 2006
New, healthier alternatives to processed food starches with a lower GI, or glycaemic index, may soon be on the menu, thanks to scientists in China and the US. The researcher have begun to unlock the secrets of starches that make dehusked grains, potatoes, and processed foods such as biscuits and breakfast cereals less healthy compared with low GI foods. Their statistical analysis of starchy data could lead to new processed …
Nov 17, 2006
Arterial plaques represent a "death zone" within the artery in which white blood cells that would otherwise clear away such fatty deposits are killed before they can do their job.
The result is that these plaques eventually reduce the blood supply to the heart causing heart problems. These plaques can break apart at any stage in a person’s life, although most commonly in middle …
This week in the Alchemist, I report on how platinum metal is getting all in a frothy, man… Discover that the Europeans are faking it down on the farm, and find out how regulating a man’s estrogen levels might be used to reverse prostate disease and cancer.
Also in this week’s round-up we discover how to split a beam of light for the first time albeit ever so slightly using extract of lemon juice and find …
Nov 16, 2006
Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed, I’ve been messing around with the site again. I created a new shiny logo, which is hopefully a lot more attractive than the old flat one. I’ve added a much snappier form for busy visitors to sign up for the sciencebase newsletter, so they can get the headlines without even having to visit the site.
Similarly, the newsfeed (RSS) is now being rendered by Feedburner. That means …
Researchers hope to revise the vaccine strategy for inocculating people in certain parts of the world against the crippling disease polio. Their approach could eradicate this endemic disease once and for all, they report, in this week’s Science magazine.
The new study, by researchers from Imperial College London and
international collaborators explains why the disease continues to afflict people in northern India. Poor sanitation and overcrowded living
conditions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar pose a …
Last week, I discussed how to get free research papers online without having to hack into any publisher’s database.
Now, my Google Alert for Journal of Biological Chemistry has raised an interesting issue on the MEDLIB-L list from Thomas B. Craig, Assistant Director of Library Services at The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler.
Craig points out that he gets a lot of eprint requests from users after JBC papers that simply don’t show up in …
If you’re ever out lemur spotting, and thing you’ve seen an entirely new species, you may wish to refer back to US research published today in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology wherein you will find a study that claims that different coat colour does not necessarily correspond to a different species for nocturnal lemurs. In fact, as with cats and dogs, coat colour does not mean an awful lot when trying to distinguish new species. …
Nov 15, 2006
A 25 femtosecond snapshot of a stick man is all that was needed to prove that a new free-electron laser technique would work. Unfortunately, the poor old stick man evaporated within that split second into a 60,000 degree plasma.
Theory suggested that researchers might be able to obtain a single diffraction pattern from a large macromolecule, a virus, or even a cell using a suitably short and bright burst of …
Nov 14, 2006
A natural analgesic (painkiller) that is six times stronger than the opiate morphine has been found in human saliva.
In 2003, Catherine Rougeot and her colleagues at the Pasteur Institute identified a potent pain sensation inhibitor in rats they called sialorphin. The present work confirms the presence of a related compound in humans. The compound inhibits the same class of proteins as sialorphin.
The analgesic, termed opiorphin (someone not related to …
As the name might suggest these are molecules that can sieve out other molecules, acting like a filter but on the molecular scale. They are usually composed of a highly porous mineral or organometallic compound, the tiny pores of which are usually of uniform size and shape.
Clays, porous glasses, microporous charcoals, active carbons, aluminosilicate minerals, zeolites, and various synthetic compounds which we’ve discussed in Elemental Discoveries in the past allow much smaller molecules to enter …
Nov 13, 2006
It always surprises me what visitors to the site are searching for when they hit these pages. A common search this month is for brain pictures. Now, from the search keywords it’s not possible to tell whether it’s a photo of the brain, an MRI scan, or a schematic that the searchers are looking for. So, to cover all bases, here are a few links that might help:
Labelled schematic brain picture
MRI scan of the …
BB King has his Lucille, old slowhand his well-worn Strat, and who could forget Jimmy Page with his Gibson SG twin-neck? You too could join the greats, thanks to new technology from Australia’s science research centre - CSIRO. And, all you have to do is put on their new designer shirt and start strumming…the air.
Engineer Richard Helmer in the Textiles and Fibre Technology section in Geelong has created a …
Most sports stars know that injecting steroids to boost performance is plain stupid. But, some do it anyway, because the potential gains, they reason, outweigh the risks to health and the chances of being stripped of glory are much smaller than their chances of winning the medal without them.
Not all steroids are purely about enhancement. Another group of steroids, known as corticosteroids, are used to reduce inflammation and pain following injury. Alarmingly high doses are …
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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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