List categories expanded:

# archaeo – archaeology (thanks to @r8lobster for the suggestion and tweeps)
# bio – medicine, physicians, health, psychologists, psychiatrists, bioinformatics, pharma
# chem – chemical sciences, materials, nanotechnology
# earth – geology, geography, environment, climate, oceans, marine science
# physics – physics, particles, maths
# sci-comms – science communicators, educators, editors, writers, bloggers, marketing, publicity, government
# tech – science computing, software, hardware, technology, engineering
# space – astronomy, space travel, stars, planets, cosmology

The manually compiled Scientwists list of science people on Twitter grew from around 100 of my contacts in January 2009 to almost 700 members, who asked to join or who retweeted the link as of October.

Justin Reid helped automate the inclusion of bios and photos and 2020science did some amazing analyses to show how all those science types were interconnected. The scientwist list is now on Listorious and doing very well in the Top 140 of all lists listed, the more followers the better, would love to make the Top 10 by the end of the year, get science in its rightful place – so please do follow the scientwists list and help make that happen!

A lot of work went into building up the resource, especially when I felt compelled to migrate it all to TweepML.org to allow users to more easily follow members.

Meanwhile, Twitter was working on its own lists feature, which is now open to everyone. I recreated the scientwists list using their system, but they limit membership to just 500 and that was full very quickly. Pressure was then on from various contacts to categorise all those science types and call me stupid and imagine that I have nothing better to do, but I’ve now done that. I’ve also added lots of new science types along the way as they emerged from different corners of the twitterhood.

I’ve categorised people as best I could, some are not on the original scientwists list because of space limitations. Those tweeps, however, will be be listed in two lists as appropriate. Those on the scientwists list will have one additional listing depending on what appears to be their main focus.

The TweepML version of the scientwists list (I’ll add you here too, if you ask):

0 to B | C to D | E to I | J to L | M to O | P to R | S to S | T to Z

Twitter science list categories is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

The monitor consists of two parts, a battery-powered broadcast unit that has a magnetic clamp that you wrap around the main electricity cable (no wiring necessarily) and a display that picks up the signal and tells you how many kW you’re using at any given time. It can also convert that into an equivalent of carbon tonnage, although that’s a more dubious metric given that the monitor doesn’t know how the electricity we’re using is made (renewables, fossils, whatever). You can also tap in your tariff and get it to tell you how much you’re spending.

When I first got the device, I ran around the house, switching lights and gadgets on and off just to see how much energy they were using (a lot, but not as much as the kettle!). Crucially, I also looked at what a difference it makes hard switching off TVs and PVRs compared to leaving them on standby (very little).

Now that the kettle has boiled and my wife has kindly furnished me with a steaming brew, the monitor tells me we’re currently (no pun intended) using approximately 1 kilowatt at a rough cost of 23 pence per hour and a carbon dioxide equivalent of 460 grams per hour.

Having just written about wind power elsewhere and how that costs about 5 cents per kilowatt hour I’m a little confused as to how my power supplier can be charging me ten times as much for the power as it costs to produce, but that’s capitalism for you…

Anyway, back to the monitor. We’ve been using it for about a month now and are averaging about 15 kWh per day (almost 6 kg of carbon dioxide per day), which is actually within the target I set us (for now) based on the average electricity consumption of a family of four. Of course, that average consumption assumes that both kids go out to school and that both parents go out to work, but we’re not an average family and probably spend quite a few more hours using electricity each day working in a home office than most people. So, I can feel ever so slightly smug.

However, I was also one of the first few to sign up for the 10:10 campaign, which means in 2010 we have to cut our energy consumption by 10% (at least) (gas and electricity!). So, I’m already replacing the last few of our incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents and making sure that all our PCs are set to standby after a very short period of inactivity.

TVs and PVRs? Well, there’s little point in having a PVR if it’s not set to standby to record shows you want to see, but it could also be considered redundant because of BBC iPlayer and other channels signing up with Google to run full content on Youtube, so the PVRs might go soon. TVs can always be switched off fully without problems. Persuading the kids to switch off bedroom lights when they leave their rooms is a different matter…

A month with an electricity monitor is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

These days, you’re more likely to simply ask for an eprint of a scientific paper, probably a PDF, possibly a doc file, or some other electronic format. But, even that’s really only a front to making contact with the author as it ever was. However, these days journal copyright clauses usually allow individual researchers to republish their individual papers on their personal website, which opens up a whole new way of accessing single research papers for free.

Dr Ijad Madisch CEO of ResearchGate calls this the “green route” to Open Access. ResearchGate has around 140,000 scientist members after just a year online and each member has their own personal web page within the scientific social network…you see where this is leading, I presume?

ResearchGate today launches its Self­Archiving Repository, which could provide members with free access to potentially millions of research papers without the obstacle of library subscriptions or the financial barrier of pay-per-view. It’s almost like ResearchGate is set to do for journal article what Spotify, Last.fm, and Pandora have done for music – a quick search and you can access the content you want instantly without a fee.

“Our publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically matched with the SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) data set of journal and publisher’s self­archiving agreements,” explains Madisch, “As a result, authors will know which versions of their articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow self­archiving, this project could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available.”

ResearchGate says that by using this approach its SelfArchiving Repository does not infringe copyright because each profile page within ResearchGATE is legally considered the personal website of the user.

It’s a neat idea, and one that could open the floodgates to other similar systems. I suspect, however, that once it becomes more well known, the journal publishers will start looking more closely at their author copyright agreements and adjust them accordingly to preclude uploading to sites that are considered external to the authors’ own company or institution.

“We don’t know how publishers will respond to this,” Madisch told me, “but we are definitely not looking for confrontation. Our primary goal when developing this tool was to serve the entire scientific community.”

Aside from the fact that the green route to Open Access is bound to be welcomed by authors, it’s not going to be music to the ears of the journal publishing industry.

File Sharing for Scientists is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

The growing problem of obesity drug abuse in the UK is highlighted in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Bayer Cropscience is going underground with storage for safety reasons.

Also this week, Korean chemists have developed a scrubber for cleaning up the greenhouse.

Finally, this week’s award is represented by big NSF grants to Rutgers University for sustainable energy developed using nanotechnology and biotechnology.

Get the details and the links in the current issue of The Alchemist on ChemWeb.com

Organic, Nano, Pharma is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

According to an email I received from a CAS spokesman, “The number itself represents an important milestone both for researchers and CAS, but even more significant is the pace of scientific discovery around the world.” Roger Schenck, Manager of the Content Planning Department at CAS, adds that, “More scientific literature is being published and we have noticed an explosive growth of patent literature since 1998 that accounts for the rapid growth of substance information available.”

By contrast, it took 33 years for CAS to register 10 million compounds, a milestone reached in 1990.

It’s intriguing to think that two decades after I wrote a news item (very early in my career) discussing the announcement of that 10 millionth entry for one of the chemistry trade magazines, that CAS should be recording its 50 millionth substance. Indeed, it’s a mere nine months since it announced the 40 millionth.

Apparently, the predominant source of this new chemical substance information is the global patent literature. Several years ago, patents accounted for approximately 20 percent of the substance information added to the registry. Today, that number is closer to 70 percent. It was that statement that intrigued me most.

But, I wonder…if they’re scraping patents on such a vast scale, is the addition of a few extra million entries actually representative of technological advance? An alternative explanation is that it simply shows how clever patent attorneys are at working with chemists to couch their claims in such imaginative ways to envelope a whole chemical space in a single sentence.

The increase could be a real indication that researchers increasingly are thinking in terms of monetizing their discoveries, and doing so much earlier in the research process. It could of course be due to increasing research around the world or maybe it’s driven by demand for more advanced electronics and the need for materials for such devices. There are also increasing demands from medical and pharmaceutical research. But, could this have lead to so many million more compounds?

I’m sure it’s not just CAS running a “stamp collecting” business, there has been research demonstrating molecular diversity in the collection.

Schenck confirmed that molecular diversity is something CAS takes seriously. “In regards to molecular diversity in CAS Registry, CAS scientists recently published an article in the Journal of Organic Chemistry on structural diversity among the 24 million organic substances in Registry at the time and may help to answer in-depth diversity questions,” he says.

He also pointed out that CAS monitors the literature as it is published and selects substances in the literature that meet its criteria. To be added the structure must come from a reputable source, including but not limited to patents, journals, chemical catalogues, and selected substance collections on the web. It has to have been described in largely unambiguous terms, characterized by physical methods or described in a patent document example or claim. It also has to be consistent with the laws of atomic covalent organization.

There are also some subtle legislative effects at play too, as Schenck explains:

In the academic community, such activities were greatly enhanced by U.S. legislation passed in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act, which requires that universities actively seek commercialization for federally-funded research.

The 50-millionth compound will be an interesting milestone. Its identity will not be revealed until tomorrow. It’s probably not going to be a magic bullet for disease or an environmental panacea, but it’s not going to be a trivial compound either. Just how interesting it is will be determined over time, after all there are few compounds without any intrinsic interest.

It would be a happy coincidence if this 50 millionth entry just happened to be something chemically fascinating, to drive innovation from cancer research and nanotechnology to alternative fuel vehicles, cell phones and more. I suspect it will be a little more mundane, but 50 million entries in any collection is a significant milestone regardless.

Lipkus, A., Yuan, Q., Lucas, K., Funk, S., Bartelt, W., Schenck, R., & Trippe, A. (2008). Structural Diversity of Organic Chemistry. A Scaffold Analysis of the CAS Registry The Journal of Organic Chemistry, 73 (12), 4443-4451 DOI: 10.1021/jo8001276

50 Million Chemicals and Counting is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Previously on ChemWeb, we heard rumors of silicon neurons and the coming cyborg age, he discovers that a compound that leads to ovine Cyclops has now been synthesized for cancer drug research, and how chicken poop down on the shooting range could help solve the problem of lead in the soil. Also, in the news, a new type of fuel cell for truckers that reduces their emissions during rest periods and the increasing cost in water of producing bioethanol. Finally, a major award for a generic pharmacologist.

Alchemist Checks Oxy Cholesterol Levels is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

And, of course, we have all heard about the accommodation agent in the US is suing a twitter user for 140 characters of allegedly valid venom about the quality of their rental accommodation, despite the account having just 20 followers. She’ll be down $50,000 if she loses the case.

Regardless of how you feel about bosses, corporations and realtors, the point to remember is that posting on the web is not like gossiping in a pub. What you say on the web is cached, scraped, preserved essentially for all time and for anyone to see. You would have to be rather unfortunate to be caught on video slandering your boss over a pint or two in your local pub.

Worse, say you have several thousand Twitter followers, and you defame a major minor celebrity, word, can get around. You won’t be able to delete that tweet once it’s been archived, cached, and stored by dozens of scraping systems and bots. You and your celeb target will be stuck with it, and if you said something particularly venomous they might just sue.

All this behaviour brings to the fore, once again, privacy. Privacy laws are usually based on protecting personal information, but in most countries they are fairly woolly. They are completely open to interpretation and precedent-setting judgments.

In the nineteenth century, the right to privacy was thought of as a special case of a more general human right to be “let alone” and today we might say that privacy is “the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one’s private life or affairs”. In the global village of social networking and 24/7 connectivity, this is becoming a little difficult to define.

Our ancestors had little notion of privacy, in the middle ages, tightly packed dwellings in the, ahem, gated communities of walled cities and feudal villages, the individual had few rights (unless that individual was the feudal lord, of course). Money and power together bought whatever rights you wanted in those days. Now, money alone is not enough, how much privacy do the likes Britney and other A-listers have, despite their gazillion dollar bank accounts? Perhaps a little more than you think, but not that much more!

The rich and powerful, by whom I mean the shy and anonymous billionaires scrabbling to extract their money from recently open Liechtenstein bank accounts, for instance, presumably have all the privacy they could ever wish for.

Meanwhile, for the likes of you and me…we assume that no one cares about our mom and pop conversations on the phone, our possibly personal tweets, our Facebook Wall graffiti, at least if we’re 99.999% law abiding, anyway. However, as ambient computing of the kind that encompasses not only the internet refrigerator but the implanted biometric chip becomes more prevalent, there are going to be new privacy issues that are way beyond the imaginings of our feudal ancestors.

At first, these concerns will be subtle. Imagine you’re asked to wear a tracking device that would enable a multinational corporation to track your every move and potentially eavesdrop on all your phone conversations…you’d be appalled at the thought. But, how many of you have a mobile phone with location-based services…?

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is considering the idea of allowing clients, patients to you and me, the right to store their medical records on Google or some other cloud computing system (another topic I’ve discussed previously). That idea will open up a plethora of privacy concerns for many people.

Today the most well-known threats against privacy are thought to be public surveillance cameras (CCTV), eavesdropping on telephone networks, internet spying, and theft of medical data among other things. But, ambient computing will bring to light so many more issues in the coming years, when your exact coordinates, medical state, contacts list, biometrics, and much more are stored in a handy gadget connected to a Grid network that you carry in your pocket.

How much
is
your privacy worth?How much is your privacy worth? The benefits of that geo-tracking phone could outweigh the personal costs to you of loss of some privacy, they may not. According to Miltiades Anagnostou of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece, “Today’s information and communication technologies constitute a severe threat for privacy because they increase the volume of personal information available to potential enemies or simply the “society”. At the same time technology enables new ways of intervention in the life of a person.”

Technology is a double-edged sword, in other words, always has been. Our lowly ancestors in the middle ages had little notion of privacy and perhaps even less concern for it. These days, many people worry about it all the time…and if you’re bloggin about it or scribbling on your Facebook wall, they will know all about your concerns…

Anagnostou, M., & Lambrou, M. (2009). Privacy now and in the age of ambient intelligence International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2 (4) DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2009.027668

Meanwhile, is the digital age stifling that all important human trait, the ability to forget?

Digital Privacy Concerns is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Most recently though, scientists have turned to another “omic” metabonomic fingerprinting using the analytical technique of NMR spectroscopy to obtain a unique view of an individual based on the complete range of metabolites produced by their body.

In the press release that discussed the research and in my follow-up news story on Spectroscopynow.com, there was an allusion to the idea that each one of the 6.7 billion people on earth would have a unique metabonomic fingerprint.

Such an identifier might have forensic, biometric, and medical diagnostics implications for us all. But, at the time of writing, I was curious as to how the team could possibly assert that every one of us would be unique, given that only a handful of volunteers had been screened. So, I asked team member Ivano Bertini to tell me a little more about how this might work.

“How can one extrapolate from a few tens of individuals that all 7 billion people on earth can each have a unique metabolic NMR fingerprint. The answer is of course that one cannot be sure!” he told me.

“We hinted at this possibility because it is a legitimate extrapolation to make,” he adds, “I can offer you some speculation along these lines. The proton NMR spectrum of the urine of any individual contains a large number of signals, and the spectrum is usually divided into a few hundreds of buckets (or bins). Let us say 400 of them contain signals. The height of the bin is proportional to the intensity of the signal(s) contained in it. If you simply allow each of these bins to assume two height values, individuals can be characterized by 2400 different ’states’ of their bins, an astronomical number! Even if you allow for several bins being correlated because they contain different signals from the same metabolite, and assume an average of 4 bins reflecting the same metabolite, you only go down to 2100, still an astronomical number. If some metabolites change their amount in a correlated way this number can go down further, but keep in mind that the population on earth is less than 233!”

So, it does indeed look like each of us would be entirely metabolically unique. But, even if that turned out not to be the case and there were only a few hundred, or a few thousand, unique metabolic NMR fingerprints in the whole human population this would still be very useful to know.

“Think of how important it has been to identify a handful of blood types,” Bertini suggests, “Having a baseline metabolic profile for an individual would allow us to monitor changes due to the onset of a disease (early diagnosis) or the effect of a drug treatment and so have an early prediction of the response to a treatment.”

We all like to feel that we are unique, even twins have different actual fingerprints, it’s interesting to think that this may reach all the way down to the contents of your bladder.

Bernini, P., Bertini, I., Luchinat, C., Nepi, S., Saccenti, E., Schäfer, H., Schütz, B., Spraul, M., & Tenori, L. (2009). Individual Human Phenotypes in Metabolic Space and Time Journal of Proteome Research DOI: 10.1021/pr900344m

Unique Urine Fingerprints is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

All hell broke loose as one after another a new sensationalist article about the research blamed Facebook for declining student grades and failed exams across the board. It seems that many outlets simply modified the original Sunday Times piece, which gave those stories a double spin. It caused outrage at OSU and in the media.

OSU’s assistant VP for Research Communications, Earle Holland, discussed the debacle in the summer issue of ScienceWriters, the NASW’s member magazine and slated the media for sensationalising and for mistaking correlation and causation in the runaway coverage that ensued.

Holland says in his article that the press release described only a small pilot study that looked at Facebook use among students and simply asked them about how much studying they did, and their grades. He adds that “it looked for any correlation between Facebook use and GPAs [grades], but suggested no causation.” Moreover, the study looked at a very small sample of students. It didn’t prove what the media headlines had suggested.

According to a report in the Columbia Journalism Review: “The entire episode offers a good lesson in the inherent risks of reporters’ cavalierly covering the social sciences, as well as the risks that young researchers can face in dealing with the news media.” The comments following that page are quite intriguing too.

I originally started this post with the intention of taking an opposing view. After all, surely any news is better than no news? But, before I sent the post to the blog queue, I emailed Earle to ask for his side of the story directly and he told me that, “our attention is focused on more than trying to sneak ways to get news coverage. We get tons of coverage and, as the largest research university in the US, don’t have to think up ways to finagle exposure.”

He added that, “We report on research emerging from most of the more than 100 academic departments on campus comprising more than 4,000 investigators and we’re highly selective about which projects we cover. First and foremost, they have to have undergone some peer review – in this case, publication in a reputable journal or selection for presentation at a major national meeting. Secondly, the research has to be both translateable and be interesting to a general reader/viewer/listener. Both criteria have to be met for us to do a story.”

That’s a fair and solid response and dispels the concerns I raised in my draft post written on a whim. It seems that the initial spin by the Sunday Times story which did not report the actual preliminary results in the original research poster got totally out of hand as these rather topical subjects – Facebook and student grades – collided.

And, before you ask, no, there were no threats to send around the Ohio heavies. However, given that OSU is the biggest research university in the States, I guess they could have done just that and the subsequent story and Youtube clip of my physical demise would have been even bigger than a small research project blown out of all proportion in the name of churnalism.

Spinning Facebook and Student Grades is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

First up, It Takes a Genome by Greg Gibson, Professor of Genetics at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, explains why a clash between our genes and modern life is making us sick. Gibson provides new insights into why we are facing new epidemics that were never a widespread problem for our ancestors, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, Crohn’s disease, asthma, arthritis. He also probes exactly what we mean by physical and emotional “normality” and suggests that the human genome might teach us one of the deepest lessons about the human condition yet.

Galileo’s New Universe as the title might suggest celebrates the 400th anniversary of the telescope by taking us on a tour of astronomical observation from that period to the modern day. Stephen Maran (ex-NASA) and Laurence Marschall (Gettysburg College) discuss the revolution that Galileo wrought in our understanding of the cosmos.

I met Max Perutz once, briefly, at an MRC media open day some time in the 1990s and I’ll tell anyone interested in knowing about the great man the packed lunch anecdote. That’s for another day, though, and it doesn’t get a mention in this posthumous “autobiography” of Perutz entitled What a Time I am Having. Compiled from his life’s letters and edited by his daughter Vivien, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the groundbreaking scientific happenings of the twentieth century and one of the key players.

Biocentrism by Robert Lanza CSO of Advanced Cell Technology with astronomer Bob Berman attempts to explain how life and consciousness are the keys to understanding the true nature of the universe. Lanza proposes a paradigm shift that essentially takes the quantum mechanics notion that the very act of making an observation affects the results of the experiment to the cosmic level. He suggests that life itself creates the universe, rather than life simply being an accident of the laws of physics.

Lanza’s book then is in contrast to Shadows on the Cave Wall: A New Theory of Evolution by Keith Ronald Skene, which arrived after I wrote this post. Skene’s idea is that physics needs to reclaim life and evolution from the biologists and chemists…

Lies, Damned Lies, and Science by science educator Sherry Seethaler turns on its head the idiom that statistics are always to blame for misunderstandings of a scientific nature and offers an escape route. She aims to help you sort through the noise surrounding global warming, the latest health claims, and scientific controversies. In Lies Seethaler explains the difference between cause and coincidence and shows you how to recognise lies, truthiness, and pseudo-expertise.

Summer Science Books is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog