Jan 31, 2007
Over on Alex King’s blog, they’re offering suggestions for his workout playlist. Dozens of comments have rolled in with music ranging from Eye of the Tiger to Linkin Park to Pussycat Dolls and everything in between.
One suggestion I don’t think I saw in the comments was simply not to listen to music at all while working out, or watch TV screens, or read or do anything else distracting, but …
A TV public relations campaign is set to air at the beginning of February. The ad campaign sponsored by Avaaz.org is set to demand that G8 leaders put climate change, or global warming as we used to call it in pre-euphemistic times, at the top of the next Summit agenda in June.
Avaaz says this is the first such advocacy campaign and will demonstrate how citizens of every country might take the necessary concerted …
Jan 30, 2007
Fed up with using up so many batteries? Rechargeables giving you poor mileage? Then why not try a couple of sweet potatoes instead.
In this “video tutorial”, you’ll learn how to use a couple of galvanized (zinc coated) nails, some bare copper wire, a pair of mini crocodile clips, AND two sweet potatoes, to power up your mp3 player with not a conventional battery in sight. Great video and the music’s …
Jan 29, 2007
Retailers and industry have tried to paint themselves green through the marketing of so-called “green” laundry detergents. The January 29 issue Chemical & Engineering News claims that this represents parties having “taken the leading role in a new effort by retailers and industry to market mainstream, environmentally friendly consumer products.”
The cleaning products industry has apparently embraced sustainability, with various innovations, including energy-efficient laundry detergents that work without hot water and other products that degrade once …
Swiss chemists have devised a new approach to the familiar analytical technique of Raman spectroscopy that allows them to investigate the structure of individual molecules.
The full story is available today in advance of publication on SpectroscopyNOW’s Raman channel for Sciencebase readers only.
According to research team leader Renato Zenobi, there are two potentially very important applications of this new high-gain Raman technique:
Molecular electronics - This is a field where …
Jan 26, 2007
Advocates of nuclear power point to recent advances in waste storage materials that could allow the radioactive byproducts of the nuclear industry to be stored safely and indefinitely in ceramics rather than glass. Whereas those not in favour of splitting atoms to produce almost limitless energy point out that even vitrified nuclear waste will represent an ongoing problem for thousands of years.
Ceramics have come to the fore as an alternative …
Jan 25, 2007
sciencehorizons (all lower case, apparently) launched today to answer questions like:
“Will we all be sprinting at 80?”, “Sitting in self-driving cars?”, “Will robots be serving us breakfast?”, “Will our fridges be talking to our shopping trolleys?”, “Will organ donors be a thing of the past?”
The idea, funded by the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), is intended to engage the public in the mass debate on what science can and cannot do and what we …
Scientific stereotypes continue to persist, stretching even as far as recent Google acquisition, Youtube, the social video upload site. (Right click and view image to read it full size).
Today, Youtube had a period of allegedly scheduled downtime and to explain the lack of vids, they displayed a cartoon showing a marginally mad scientist (albeit a youngster rather than the usual aged, balding mad scientist). The scientist in …
Jan 24, 2007
In 1919, long before antibiotics were commonplace and long before the notion of drug resistance had emerged, a doctor in the east European state of what is now Georgia, Felix d’Herelle, gave a patient suffering from severe dysentery a seemingly lethal concoction of viruses. You might think such a drink would kill the patient, but these were no ordinary viruses, they were bacteriophages, the nemesis of bacteria.
The patient was well again within a week.
Thus was …
The Intelligent Design and Anti-Evolution lobbies often argue that evolution is but a theory and that opposing theories must be taught in order to be properly scientific about the origins of the human race. Well, if its debate they want, then it’s debate they shall have. The Education section of the Guardian reports that the UK government wants religious education classes for 11-14 year olds to encompass the notion …
Jan 23, 2007
Organic chemist Dan Lednicer has provided us with a guest Sciencebase editorial. “The enormous strides that have recently been made in molecular biology hold great promise for speeding the discovery of pharmaceuticals to treat diseases that have so far been recalcitrant to drug therapy,” he explains, “and the day may well be in the offing when a majority of important new pharmaceutical products will owe their existence to carefully crafted research programs based on the …
Jan 22, 2007
Approximately half of men with diabetes suffer at least one episode of erectile dysfunction and there are several strategies available to overcome what is in those cases usually a problem of body chemistry. According to a report in the Cochrane Review of clinical trials, the well-known drugs for treating erectile dysfunction really do improve sexual satisfaction for sufferers. The report covers the three main phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE-5) inhibitors, sildenafil (Viagra), vardenafil (Levitra) and tadalafil …
Jan 21, 2007
The UK Times paper reported on Saturday that a leading cancer researcher Professor Lawrie Challis chairman of the government-funded mobile telecommunications health research programme believes it is time that a large-scale study into the long-term risks associated with cellphone use.
Intriguingly, health and medicine writer Caroline Richmond pointed out that just such a study was actually published just three days prior to The Times article appearing.
The abstract for this …
Jan 18, 2007
Plos One the new OA science journal, the launch of which we announced here on January 1, seems to be building up quite a head of steam, it’s almost superheated in fact (more on that via the link). There are some rather fancy paper titles on their homepage, as I write, covering some very disparate subject areas, which is what the journal needs if it is to compete in the open market with …
Jan 17, 2007
Put simply, superheating involves raising the temperature of a liquid, for instance, beyond its boiling point without allowing it to vaporize. This can be done by heating water in a sealed container above 100 Celsius. There is an urban myth that has done the rounds for many years that it is possible to superheat the contents of a liquid-filled cup in a microwave and trigger a geyser of fluid when you remove it and …
Two back-to-back papers in the well-known chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie recently could have potentially serious consequences for the pharmaceutical industry, because they reveal what the authors claim are inherent ambiguities in the crystalline forms of aspirin.
A team of scientists from Denmark, Germany, and India suggest that the recently reported form II of the ubiquitous pharmaceutical may indeed exist but the crystallographic evidence could just as readily be interpreted as being from …
Jan 16, 2007
Researchers from Slovenia have used spectroscopy to home in on the active site of an essential bacterial enzyme, DNA gyrase. They say they now understand more clearly how a compound found in green tea, EGCG, which is a health-boosting antioxidant, works to kill bacteria.
The findings should allow researchers to design new, synthetic versions of EGCG that improve on its activity without side effects.
“I think that this direction is worth …
Jan 15, 2007
A simple Q tip is all it takes to grab a microscopic sample from a work of art for laboratory testing, according to Canadian analytical chemists. They’ve used the approach to sample darkening pigments from an ancient map and from a piece of modern art as proof of principle.
They then used a range of standard spectroscopic techniques to identify components of the pigments. This particular work will provide art …
New research points to a possible link between the LDL cholesterol-lowering statin drugs (HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors) and Parkinson’s disease. Such is the concern that a study involving thousands of people is planned to assess the risk, according to a report in Chemistry & Industry today.
Earlier research had hinted at a putative link between Parkinson’s disease and statins, but the latest results from a study linking low LDL cholesterol itself to PD provides the …
Jan 12, 2007
On December 19, 2006 six foreign medical workers, Kristiyana Valtcheva, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova and Ashraf al-Hajuj were convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad by a Libyan court.
Their crime?
The six health workers were accused of conspiring to deliberately infect 426 Libyan children with the HIV virus.
This is the second sentencing, as an earlier death sentence was overturned by the Libyan Supreme Court in 2005.
Now, Euroscience, a pressure …
What’s the connection between Antarctic ice, old volcanic eruptions and global warming? US researchers think they know.
Volcanic activity can have serious consequences for climate change as particles and gases spewed out by volcanoes enter the upper atmosphere and change its chemical balance altering how Solar radiation is absorbed or reflected. Now, French and US researchers have devised a technique for determining how past volcanic eruptions could have affected this delicate …
Sciencebase is not a gadget-fixated site, as regular readers will by now have realized. We leave that to the likes of gizmodo and techcrunch who bring their thousands of subscribers the latest and greatest in carbon-dioxide generating machines and energy-drains as fast as you can say LG chocolate and USB toothbrush. Nevertheless, we are a science and tech site, and we do like to keep up with some of the more techy developments, such as …
Light-emitting diodes almost ubiquitously provide the illumination in electronics and potentially will provide energy-efficient brightness in our homes. However, the LED material of choice, gallium nitride, and its method of processing and manufacture into working devices is relatively expensive. Now, US engineers have developed a novel semiconducting material based on zinc oxide that could be used in a new type of LED that is just as effective but could reduce …
Jan 11, 2007
Regular readers will recall my mention of the Kuzyk Quantum Gap a few days ago and how Intute Spotlight would be covering news on how Kuzyk himself is closing the gap.
Well, here’s the spin: New organic molecules that interact with light more strongly than any other materials could provide the template for new high-speed optical switches for telecommunications and data processing, according to an international team of researchers. The …
Spam comes in all shapes and forms, so I am always suspicious when two emails identical in content and with attachments arrive that purport to be from two different correspondents. However, two such messages arrived this morning one claiming to come from a Dr Suhasini Bhatnagar, the other from Aarif Khatri. Normally, I’d let my spam filter do its job and trash such messages, but my interest was piqued by …
Jan 10, 2007
Adolescent drug use has fallen overall since the late 1990s, but the “recreational” use of solvents is on the increase. Solvent, or inhalant, abuse is now the fourth most abused drug among US teens according to NIDA.
Inhalants, which include volatile organic compounds such as butane and aromatic hydrocarbons (like toluene) activate the same areas of the brain as do other drugs of abuse. However, understanding their precise mode of action has not been clarified until …
Obesity is a major risk factor for colon cancer, but until now medical scientists were at a loss to explain why. Now, a study of on three human colon cancer cell-lines has demonstrated that the “fat hormone” leptin may enhance the growth of colonic cancer cells. The discovery not only offers an explanation as to the underlying cause of the increase colon cancer risk in obesity but could lead to a new approach to …
Jan 9, 2007
Two tea time stories in the news today. The first reports on a very small study showing that adding milk to tea negates the cardiovascular health benefits because it interferes with nitric oxide (NO), the natural vasodilation controller (You’ll know it from my article on Viagra. The second news item is about the antibacterial effects of green tea (it doesn’t say whether adding milk negates those benefits, but I cannot imagine …
Today, the New York City authorities were investigating a persistent smell of “gas” across a large part of the lower Manhattan area of the city.
Hundreds of people reported the odd, but apparently not noxious smell, to the New York Police Department, but at the time of writing the identity of the gas remained unknown. Despite this, Mayor Michael Bloomberg somehow manages to make confident proclamations that the gas is “not dangerous”.
Over on Digg, a …
Jan 8, 2007
I am currently writing about the latest research from Mark Kuzyk - famed discoverer of the Kuzyk effect also known as the Kuzyk quantum gap. He and his colleagues have discovered a whole new class of compounds that could eventually revolutionize optical information processing (more on that in the January issue of Intute Spotlight). Anyway, he told me that getting a stronger and stronger optical, so-called non-linear response, from the materials he and …
A UK version of the free biomedical research server PubMed Central will provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in medicine and the life sciences.
UK research funders, led by the Wellcome Trust, awarded the contract to develop UKPMC to a partnership between the British Library, The University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
Members of this group now require that articles describing the results …
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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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