R rosea (aka golden root, roseroot, hóng jǐng tiān in TCM) is a member of the Crassulaceae family and grows across the Arctic, the mountains of Central Asia, the Rockies, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathian Mountains, Scandinavia, Iceland, Great Britain and Ireland.

The Wikipedia entry for R rosea says it may be effective for improving mood and alleviating depression and early stage studies on people have shown some efficacy in improving physical and mental performance, alleviating fatigue, and reducing high-altitude sickness. Someone achieving their healthcare management MBA would find these studies very helpful. A possible mode of action involves what the entry describes as, “optimizing serotonin and dopamine levels”. This apparently happens by inhibition of the enzyme monoamine oxidase, which supposedly ties in with an effect on endorphins, the body’s natural opiates.

A press release that I received could be used as a source in a final project of a student studying their masters in health administration. It was about R rosea and highlights a previously published article that claims that, “the roots appear to aid the brain by alertness and energy, without any trace of stimulants such as caffeine.” Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? If the root stimulates the brain, then surely by definition it is a stimulant?

I asked the author of the press release, Linda Todten of publicity company TMC Communications, to explain exactly what the description was intended to convey, this is what she had to say:

As you know, the trend is for “energy drinks” that combine large amounts of caffeine, or caffeine containing plants such as Guarana, along with high amounts of carbs for a big “energy boost.” The studies that the Swedes and Russians have done over the years have shown how this category of plant, the Adaptogen, can actually bring the body back to its full energy level without being over stimulated as happens with caffeine. Plus, the extract SHR-5 has been shown to have a very solid mental acuity boost via double-blind, placebo controlled studies in students or night shift physicians and others.

But, any product with a physiological effect cannot work without some side-effects; no herbal extract could be that specific at the molecular level.

Indeed, the plant root contains a variety of chemical natural products including rosavin, rosarin, rosin and salidroside (and sometimes p-tyrosol, rhodioniside, rhodiolin and rosiridin), which are all described as active ingredients of R rosea. These compounds are polyphenols, they may have some antioxidant activity but good evidence for positive health effects in people remains elusive, indeed that is the case for most antioxidant supplements.

R rosea products are marketed in the USA and elsewhere. Todten had this suggestion: “Think about the fact that this one product (Arctic Root brand) has sold over 400 million doses. Not many dietary supplements can claim that. That says, to me, that people must like the way it works to reduce stress or energize,” she told me. “People are not sheep, and they wouldn’t make a product a best seller in Europe over ten years with hundreds of millions taken if it didn’t do something that they liked!”

Well, couldn’t that simply be the power of marketing? What we need are references in the medical literature that provide results from large-scale, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials of R rosea. I don’t think there are any such studies published in the peer-reviewed journals yet.

Fundamentally, there is no difference between a “natural” chemical and a “synthetic” one and equally no difference between the active component in a herbal remedy and that present in a pharmaceutical product. Indeed, some 40% of prescription drugs are based on natural products or derivatives of the active components of herbal medicines.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that just because there is some equivalence that all herbal medicines are active. Many are stufff and nonsense and the claims of some marketers for any given product, whether ginseng, hoodia, St John’s Wort, R rosea etc are often entirely sales hype. Moreover, a herbal remedy may contain a range of other components that are not beneficial and may even be detrimental, such as heavy metal contaminants or toxins.

One website describes R rosea thus: “Extracts of the roots have a reputation for stimulating the nervous system, relieving depression, enhancing work performance, improving cognition and memory function, eliminating fatigue and preventing high altitude sickness. The extract has been classified as an adaptogen. In simple terms, an adaptogen helps produce adjustments in the body to resist stress (e.g. chemical, biological, and physical). In addition, Rhodiola rosea also contains a range of antioxidant compounds.”

It’s that phrase “have a reputation for” that is most intriguing. Lots of things have a reputation but reputations are not scientific proof, nor are anecdotes from the countless people who email me or comment on this post claiming to have some insight into R rosea. As I understand it the word “adaptogen” is nothing more than modern pseudoscientific rebranding of the word “restorative” or “tonic”.

Rhodiola rosea is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

One obstacle that stands in the way of the widespread adoption and further rapid development of MEMS technology is the fact that these devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and so harder and more expensive to prototype.

Some MEMS designs are as complex as microelectronics circuits. But, whereas conventional chip designers can simulate their systems with software relatively easily, MEMS designers need something more solid to carry out simulations of the microscopic movements of fluids and energy in a MEMS device.

Now, Liao Ningbo and Yang Ping of the Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing at Jiang Su University, in Zhenjiang, and Yi Huijun of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Nanjing Institute of Chemical Technology, China, think they have the answer. They have turned to the collaborative and interactive design framework made possible by the concept of web-manufacturing.

In their approach, technologies used in dynamic web Java Server Pages (JSP) and computer graphics Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) are integrated to allow them to model a MEMS device. “VRML, is a scene description language that can be used to describe 3D models of objects and scenes with the capabilities of interactive operations on them,” the researchers explain, “These models can be viewed using a web browser with a free plug-in for VRML2.0.” they add that several tools exist to convert almost any computer-aid design (CAD) format to VRML, which enables geometric models to be easily imported from pre-existing formats without having to redraw them. “VRML can be used to simulate fluid flow, of cause, with the description of fluid equations,” Nigbo told Chemspy.

SOURCE: International Journal of Materials and Product Technology, 2008, 31, 259

VRML for MEMS is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts The essence of science, broadly defined, is that it is a systematic approach to figuring out how the world works:

Put those steps together, over and over, and you have the best method ever devised for increasing our store of reliable knowledge.

That’s basically it. Not too scary is it? So, why do we seem to have such a vast gulf in understanding between those who eschew science and its proponents?

Doing Science is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

So, Meskó has been connecting up some pipes on the interwebs to come up with the Scienceroll Search. Basically, a personalized medical search engine powered by Polymeta.com. “You can choose which databases to search in and which one to exclude from your list,” he explains, “It works with well-known medical search engines and databases and we’re totally open to add new ones or remove those you don’t really like.” I almost have a feeling it is something that might have been done with a personalized Google search, but I doubt it could be taken to this logical extreme in Google. So give it a try and leave feedback on Meskó’s site.

Curing Pubmedophobia is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Writing in the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, (2008, 8, 279-297), Reza Bandarian, Ahmad Mousaei, Abbasali Ghadirian and Maham Tabatabaei explain their approach. “The RIPI has a mission to bring ideas to market in terms of developing new technologies and new products,” they say, “Commercialization is one of the critical stages in this process.” Their model examines three pricing scenarios – optimistic, pessimistic and actual – for selling technology and was validate against historical data of various RIPI petrochemical products.

There are increasing demands on companies, not just in the petrochemicals sector but across the commercial spectrum. The marketplace needs better, faster and cheaper technology and products, while intellectual property, once simply seen as an expense has become an important source of revenue. Indeed, many of the problems seen in modern business hinge purely on IP rather than solid, hands-on extracted or manufactured resources. IP provides a critical competitive advantage for the firms that hold it but a serious disadvantage for those that do not.

Bandarian and colleagues point out that companies can no longer rely on the incremental innovation, i.e., improving on what has already been done, to compete and survive. Today it seems that “radical innovation” and “breakthrough products” are essential to long-term commercial sustenance. Even governments are beginning to recognize this in their wealth creation programs. The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds a huge amount of academic research in the USA not only demands that research projects are interesting, good quality and important scientifically, but that they also demonstrate the solution to a societal need or goal, which might be in constant flux.

The bottom line is that: “What customers want today, they will not want tomorrow, says the team. They point out that almost half the major corporations that existed in 1975 no longer trade. This is probably best explained by the fact that those corporations failing to grasp this simple tenet.

“One of the explanations for this dismal record is that companies are still trying to link emerging technologies with existing markets when they should be linking emerging technologies with emerging markets.”

In Iran and other countries of the Middle East, the researchers explain electronics, medicines and chemicals are major imports, while Iran’s national income comes essentially from oil production. Unfortunately, this resource has been used for wealth creation rather than technology creation. “Traditionally, the oil industry has improved in engineering maintenance while based on technology limitation; we have been kept behind that of developed countries, and the gap has increased.

This is perhaps the most important reason why Iran is the market leader in basic petrochemical products, but in high-value products, we have lost the market against developed countries,” the researchers add. They present a model that could allow innovation to seep, if not surge, through, by using know-how to evaluate and price innovative products, it is based on the low-cost and speed of current pricing models -experiential and mathematical – and side-steps their disadvantages of being untimely, requiring too much pre-market testing, and being highly skills dependent.

The researchers incorporate various factors into their model – the life cycle of know-how, annual market size, raw material and total production cost, selling price, net profit, earned income during investment, risk-free rate of return, know-how investment required, know-how return in its life cycle, know-how annual return in its life cycle, present value of know-how return in its life cycle.

Other factors can be fed into the model depending on the specific characteristics of the product in question. Indeed, “Our comprehensive framework of the commercialization of new technologies in the petroleum industry that can be used with some modification for other industries,” the researchers say. They tested their model retrospectively against RIPI product data and demonstrated an accuracy of around 97%.

Pricing Petrochemical Know-how is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Hi, I have a water softener. I met a local repair service, not affiliated with the manufacturer in any way, who can rebuild my broken unit with better quality after-market parts. Sounds like a good plan to me.

So far so good…the reader goes on…

The repair guy proposes to add some good quality resin to the tank to “top it up” if needed, and to add charcoal to the resin tank as well, as a filter enhancement. He claims the charcoal will get cleaned when the resin goes through the water softener’s normal recharge.

Again, sounds reasonable to me, although I suspect that the efficiency of a unit will depend on the quality of the components and presumably the actual fault and how that has been repaired. But, it was the final sentence of the email that made my heart skip a beat.

I only know charcoal filters as something you put inline, and replace before it poisons the drinker with its collected contaminants. Could the charcoal really be recharged and have the same useful lifetime the resin has?

Can you spot the potentially fatal flaw in what this Chemspy reader is doing with his water softener? I can and I’ve emailed him to tell him to cease and desist with immediate effect or suffer the consequences…your thoughts in the comments below would be appreciated.

Drinking Softened Water is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

The 12-page chemistry booklet is now available in HTML and PDF formats for access online, with live and updating links. The page comes out of the MyIntute system which means it gets updated when information about a site is changed in the Intute database, although no new sites will be added to the booklet, the Intute database provides additional access to the latest resources.

• Bibliographic databases
• Data collections and databanks
• Journals
• E-prints
• Web directories
• Professional societies, institutes and associations
• Mailing lists
• Educational resources
• Chemical nomenclature

You can access all of the above via the intute chemistry booklet, online now.

Basic Chemistry Resources is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Anyway, here’s a thought…

Thumbnails (i.e. reduced size) versions of photos, images, and other visual creative works were recently the subject of a court case in the US, I believe. The judge suggested that displaying a thumbnail of an image was not a breach of copyright.

CAS registry numbers, InChIs, DOI’s and other such “creative works” might, in some sense, be considered an analog of an image thumbnail, and therefore may fall outside of a copyright claim similarly. Has anyone got the legal prowess to test such a case.

However, in writing this comment it occurred to me that there may be a more fundamental factor that would preclude CAS numbers being copyrighted. Aren’t they generated sequentially and automatically? If so, then perhaps they don’t fall under the description of “creative works” and therefore may not be copyrightable at all.

Copyright and CAS Numbers is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Anyway, follow the link to search for MSDS on ChemSpy and here if you’d like to add the MSDS search toolbox (feel free to edit the script once you’ve saved it to your server to fit your site’s requirements).

Meanwhile, an offsite resource that looks promising for Chemical MSDS sheets is the obviously named MSDS Search, which duplicates some of the ChemSpy resources but adds a few new ones too.

Chemical MSDS Sheets is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

The launch site usefully reminds us that, “Chemistry is concerned with the study of matter on all levels, including its composition, structure, properties and how it can be transformed in chemical reactions.” Again, they’re not wrong there. But, speaking of definitions of chemistry, I thought Walt’s definition in Breaking Bad was pretty good.

If you don’t know about Breaking Bad (It’s not on UK TV yet, for instance), the plot involves a stressed-out, 50y old, high school chemistry teacher, who’s moonlighting at a carwash to make ends meet when he discovers his wife is pregnant and he’s dying of lung cancer. In desperation he hooks up with a crystal meth pusher and starts cooking up some highly pure and enormous crystals in the back of an RV. Needless to say the local dealers don’t like him muscling in on their patch, and he attempts to murder them (in the back of the RV) by pouring powdered red phosphorus on to a pan of boiling methanol. A quick lesson in the incredible corrosive properties of hydrofluoric acid – it burns through metal, rock, ceramic, but not polythene – all adds to the fun and games.

Anyway, Breaking Bad, with its periodic table credits, is a lot more entertaining than yet another chemistry journal. Although I am sure the Nature effort will turn out not to be YAFCJ at all but instead a major success, nudging JACS, Chem Comm, and Angewandte a little further along the virtual shelving.

Meanwhile, thanks for Chemistry Lab Notebook for the tip-off.

YACJ – Nature Chemistry is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog