Mar 30, 2009
On sibling site Sciencetext.com I talk tech, which often includes warning people about spams and scams and, of course phishing. So, it is with some embarrassment that I confess to being slightly caught off guard by a new twitter follower with the handle @richard_dawkins. He followed me first, a fact revealed by the excellent Topify service which emails you new followers and lets you reply to that email to …
Mar 28, 2009
Is Earth Hour a great way to raise global awareness of how much energy we are wasting and the possible consequences or our actions? Or, is it simply a cop out so that we can all feel we did "our bit" for the environment without expending any real effort?
With just hours to go for us Brits before we have to switch …
Mar 27, 2009
Spring has sprung for the Alchemist, who, under the northern sun, takes on a marginal copper tone this week.
First up, a new copper catalyst that can take a sideways swipe at organic aromatic compounds and make them go all meta. We also have copper nanorods for 3D computer chips.
After two decades of trying, it seems buckyballs are to finally come of age with the development of these all-carbon soccerball molecules as …
Mar 25, 2009
Across the globe privacy laws and property rights are confused. Having usually been established in centuries past it is unlikely that any established legal system can cope easily with the requirements of the digital age. Nowhere is this more likely to hold true than when discussing the use of peoples’ biometric information, which are very personal data indeed.
Biometric information might include iris or retinal scans, digitized fingerprints, DNA samples, even lip-recognition …
Mar 23, 2009
The medicalization of many social facets of our lives, multitasking pharmaceuticals and disease mongering are problems we should face head on.
The overlap between business ethics and medical ethics represent a moral minefield. Nowhere more so than in the domain of newly recognised and previously untreated disorders, syndromes and diseases, among them social anxiety disorder, non-physiological erectile dysfunction, aging, fibromyalgia, adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), restless leg syndrome and female sexual …
Mar 20, 2009
A horse walks into a bar, orders a beer, and the bartender asks…Bud or Miller? Of course, you know the real punchline…the bartender actually asks the equine punter “why the long face?”. There, that’s two of the world’s eight jokes in the first sentence.
According to evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke there are only eight types of joke, eight patterns of humour that exist across all cultures regardless of creed, race, or …
Mar 18, 2009
Four more fascinating research discoveries feature in my column on SpectroscopyNOW this week, covering research into the medicinal effects of curry powder, cyst analysis, why nicotine does not kill instantly, and bristling nano balls.
The spicy disciplinarian – Solid state NMR has been used to explain why curcumin, one of the physiologically active components of the yellow spice turmeric has wound healing and other medicinal properties.
Mar 16, 2009
This week The Alchemist goes green offering a survey of environmental news related to the chemical sciences.
First up is the development of porous materials that can extract hydrogen from mixtures of gases. Next, solar energy could be used to convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide back into useful hydrocarbon fuel methane, while chicken manure offers a fowl approach to bioremediating oil-contaminated soil.
On the global scale, NASA hopes to work with Cisco …
Mar 13, 2009
The difference between staying in with friends and going out? Obvious, really. But, translate that idea to networks and you have the basis of self-organized virtual communities, according to Panayotis Antoniadis of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris France.
Writing in the IJWBC (reference below), Antoniadis and Benedicte Le Grand discuss the bootstrapping problem of starting such a virtual community. I’ve discussed scientific virtual communities which relate to this …
Mar 11, 2009
“Nothing beats finding vast lakes of oil for the pumping, or vast deposits of coal for the digging; thanks mother nature!” proclaimed Craig Grimes of Penn State University in an emailed response to my skeptical question regarding his work on catalysts that can convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a fuel, methane.
I report on his fascinating work in the March issue of …
Mar 9, 2009
During my student days, one of the most obviously complicated and beyond-comprehension modules was that on fluid dynamics. It’s not surprising that it was complicated and beyond comprehension, the way fluids (gases and liquids by definition) move is not simple.
There is no single, straightforward equation that can describe the flow of water cascading down waterfall. No clear-cut algorithm can determine exactly how oil will flow in an Alaskan pipeline. Mathematics …
Mar 6, 2009
Probing the brain wirelessly – IR-absorbing lead selenide particles form the basis of a method for the study of neuronal activation in samples of brain tissues without the need for hard-wired electrodes. The technique instead utilises light-triggered nanostructured semiconductor photoelectrodes to probe activity.
Propagation improves MRI, allows remote scanning – Swiss researchers have succeeded in exciting and imaging nuclear magnetic resonance in the human body in a way that …
Mar 4, 2009
I’ve made a Google map showing important scientific locations – scientific locations.
Recently, a fellow singer in the Cottenham Big Mouth collective was telling me about a Google map he’d created with all his favourite eateries that do live jazz, sounded groovy man…but although I love food and don’t mind a bit of jazz, I thought Sciencebase readers would prefer something a little more…well…science based. So, I’ve created …
Mar 2, 2009
Algebra, alchemy, alcohol, aldebaran, alkali, Alhambra, algorithm, Algarve, and, of course, albatross.
One thing in common…they’re all “al” words, and what is “al” you ask? It’s simply the Arabic definite article, it’s the “the”, in other words. Which means that all those words have “the” in their etymology.
So, when Sir Isaac Newton was referred to as an Alchemist, it didn’t necessarily mean he was searching for the philosopher’s stone or weaving the …
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