In the current issue of The Alchemist we learn how to stick methane molecules to metals without breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds and how to make impossible carbene catalysts without the usual prerequisite of an attendant metal centre.

Another seeming impossibility comes to light: a new microscopy technique for visualizing non-fluorescing biomolecules using the kind of stimulated emission suggested by Einstein almost a century ago.

An exchange program leads to a new way to make nanoscopic tools from tiny wires of cadmium sulfide, we hear, while an extract of grape skin shows promise as a novel therapy for sickle cell anaemia.

Finally, a young medicinal chemist receives a prestigious American Chemical Society fellowship in organic chemistry.

All the write-ups and links in the current issue of the ChemWeb chemistry zine.

Alchemical Anomalies is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

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.

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.

List categories expanded:

# archeo – 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 TweepML version of the scientwists list:

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

Laura Bonetta wrote an excellent article for the science journal Cell recently in which she quoted various science types who use Twitter on the subject of whether or not scientists should be tweeting. It’s a topic I’ve discussed more generally regarding scientists’ use of social media and online networking communities.

Anyway, she asked my opinion on a few matters regarding twitter and quoted me at some length. But, as is the way with such articles, which I’ve experienced from all three angles now, as interviewer, interviewee, and editor, she trimmed off the fat and rind from my responses, so I asked her if she’d be happy for me to reproduce them in their unedited entirety and she was, so here they are:

As far as I can tell you are the most widely followed science-based Twitter there is. Is that right?

I’ve no way of confirming that, but of the scientwists I follow, I don’t think many of them have 5000 or more followers. With the exception of @ProfBrianCox (8000+) and @RichardWiseman (12000+), and a few others. I’m small fry, though, compared to some of the much more successful Twitter users in other niches and I don’t just mean celebrities.

What do you think makes your Twitter entries so popular?

One reason is probably my proactive approach to building up a following with whom I engage on a daily basis via Twitter and in some cases on other online networks. If you tweet and then just sit back and expect users to beat a path to your door it doesn’t work. You have to be “out there” talking to people, being useful for potential followers, drumming up interest and then continually offering something back in return. Being friendly and avoiding expletives may help too ;-)

From what I have read your tweets are all about science or science policy. Do you ever Twitter about personal things?

It’s important to have a niche, I’ve been a science writer for more than 20 years, I guess talking about science is a big part of my life. Occasionally, I’ll tweet a photo via TwitPic I’ve taken or a song I’ve recorded via SoundCloud…but in general my followers know me for the science stuff.

Few scientists Twitter and most of them are postdocs or grad students? Why are few scientists into Twitter?

Well, I created a list of scientwists that now has more than 600 members, and there are lots of science Twibes now, including my scientist Twibe (500+ members). But, those are still small numbers compared to the numbers of scientists who could join. But, I don’t think it’s just Twitter that they are not into. I’ve spoken to lots of people who either just don’t “get it” (online social networking) or if they do get it, they see it as a waste of time.

There are, however, lots of niche online services aimed directly at scientists, even these are, in general, struggling to reach critical mass. That said, LinkedIn and Twitter themselves were not overnight successes. I just wrote about this very issue of generation F scientists on my blog.

Do you think it would be valuable for more scientists to Twitter?

I think there is a lot to gain from being connected in this way. Again, there has to be a way to build a mutually beneficial following that has some purpose. Certainly, there is little point in scientists joining simply to tweet about their coffee breaks, walking holidays, or showering schedule. However, if they wish to share their successes and failures in the lab, swap useful information and tips, or seek advice, then Twitter could be a useful way to do that.

Is the 140-character limit a good or bad thing for disseminating scientific information?

It’s a double-edged sword. The majority of my tweets are pointers to other resources, so there’s a headline, an enticement in other words, and a link to the resource. You don’t need more than 140-characters for that; and it still leaves room for someone to retweet it. However, you cannot have a decent, full-blown, high-level discussion via text message and Twitter is just the same. A lot of scientists recognise that and use FriendFeed as an “uber-twitter” instead.

Do you think Twitter could have an important role in science?

Well, it already does in a limited way. Certainly, I have heard about some scientific discoveries first on Twitter. It also occasionally throws up a truly unique viewpoint on a discovery or theory that can be stimulating for my writing and presumably could do the same for scientists reading those tweets too. The apparent spontaneity and brevity helps, but you have to keep up with a lot of streams to find the nuggets.

What is its value to you?

Fame and fortune! No, seriously, I just find it fun to use and it provides another way to let people know about what I’ve written and so get them reading my words. What more could a science writer ask? Also, as a writer, it’s yet another outlet through which I can express myself as and when the urge arises.

You also have a blog. How do you choose what’s a blog or Twitter-type entry? How do the two media differ?

I’m not sure I know what you mean. I blog about scientific discoveries, policy etc, and also point to my published work on other sites, I try to be unique in what I blog about, so there would be no choice between blogging or tweeting something. I don’t write blog entries with Twitter in mind, I write them with the reader in mind, and I rarely change the way I write a headline to suit Twitter, if I do it’s only to shorten it by a word or two.

The headlines from my blog are automatically fed to my Twitter account using the WordTwit plugin for Wordpress. I hope they will act as a springboard for readers to jump to the blog. I also use a plugin called ChatCatcher, which pulls in comments people make about a post on Twitter and FriendFeed and ties them to the post in question.

How do you choose whom to follow?

Now, that’s a whole new can of worms to open. I no longer actively seek out new people to follow, although if I comes across someone interesting elsewhere I will usually follow them on Twitter. However, when someone new follows me, I do try to check out their bio, their website and their most recent tweets. If those things are of interest, then I’ll follow back.

I created a tongue-in-cheek Twitter decision flowchart that is actually semi-serious to reveal my thought processes and seems to gel with a lot of readers. Mostly, it’s about filtering out spammers, cranks, and selfish marketers.

My Whole Cell Twitter Interview is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

UPDATE – NOV 5: Still working through the almost 650 members of the list, but now up to the P’s.

Pressure was on from lots of science tweeps for to categorise my scientwist list…so I’ve made a start.

The spillover (lots of tweeps in the T to Z group from the TweepML.org version of my scientwist list have now each been given a category as I cannot squeeze them into the 500 limit for the main scientwist list.

Everyone else will get a second list assignment where appropriate as follows:

• bio – med, health, psy, bioinformatics, pharma
• chem – chemical sciences
• earth – geo, environment, climate, oceans
• physics – physics, maths
• sci-comms – science communicators of all breeds
• tech – science computing, technology, engineering
• space – astronomy, space travel

If you’re a science type on twitter and aren’t yet on the list then let me know, either by commenting, email, or tweeting. Retweets of the list always welcome.

However, if you’re not following me and I am not following you, then remedy that situation first – I’m @sciencebase. Also, if you’re updates are protected, unprotect them otherwise there’s little point in adding you.

List categories for Twitter scientists is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Regulars will know that I’ve compiled and recompiled lists of science types on Twitter for mutual benefit. It started out as a list of 100 of my own Twitter friends back in January 2009, who happened to be in science and gradually grew to well over 600 members by November 2009.

However, just as I migrated the old manual list to Tweepml.org to help automate bio and avatar updates, Twitter announced the release of its own lists system. As far as I can tell Twitter lists are now public knowledge (I no longer see the request not to tweet about it).

As such, I’ve been gradually adding the scientwists to my own twitter list. Creating such a list doesn’t seem to have as many advantages as the Tweepml system, but worth doing nevertheless. It does. however, offer users a way to share their “filtered” lists with others. So, view that stream for tweets only from science types.

Unfortunately, Twitter lists have a limit of 500 members per list. You can create 20 lists per account, but rather than breaking the main scientwists list in two, I plan to simply not add those members of my original list if they fail to meet certain criteria.

I will continue to add any science types who ask, to the original scientwists list now running under Tweepml. But, if you have protected updates, I won’t migrate you to the new scientwist Twitter list. Equally, if you express only a passing interest in science rather than actually working with science in some capacity (research, librarian, science writer etc), then I will add you only to the Tweepml version.

Finally, if you don’t follow me, and I don’t follow you, then I won’t be adding you to the scientwist list on Twitter, although you can still be listed on my Tweepml list.

Twitter lists offer yet another metric for those who worry about such things to
focus on. On how many lists are you listed?

Scientists on Twitter is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

On the menu today, why red wine is a no-no when it comes to fishy cuisine, how chemists can help you improve your gravy, and a whole platter of food chemistry to tempt your taste buds:

“Red wine with red meat, white wine with fish.” But, have you ever wondered why? Japanese chemists have discovered that the iron in red wine simply makes fish taste too…well…fishy…giving your mouth an unpleasant, fishy aftertaste, according to a report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Gravy training – The British probably have as many different recipes for making gravy as they have gravy boats from which to pour it over their roast beef. But, a spot of chemistry can improve not only the flavor, texture, and color, but give gravy a healthy boost. Here’s the definitive chemical guide to making gravy.

Pink pepper is actually the dried berry of the Brazilian weed Schinus terebinthifolius and contains an irritating phenol-type compound known as cardanol. Pink pepper causes a range of toxic reactions including rashes, oral and respiratory irritation, chest pains and tightness, headaches, swollen eyelids, stomach upset, diarrhoea and haemorrhoids. Nice… But, despite that it’s a trendy ingredient among trendy chefs. The Guardian provides the skinny on pink pepper.

Apparently, American gourmets are latching on to the Japanese concept of umami, or “deliciousness”, which is considered the fifth taste after salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. The word roughly translates as “tasty”, although “brothy”, “meaty”, or “savory” could do just as well. It’s difficult to translate a whole concept literally. Recently, scientists homed in on a specific tongue receptor linked to natural “glutamate”; as in the amino acid part of monosodium glutamate, the sodium there to make it soluble in water. Glutamate, of course, is the archetypal umami ingredient, so the link grows stronger.

Now, a couple of stories for those parts of the world now entering the barbecue season. Chemists have figured out how to make meats more succulent and tasty on the grill, while others have figured out that it’s the sour receptors on your tongue that respond to the bubbles in soda pop.

Finally, although British scientists came up with an explanation a decade ago, apparently the French have turned their attention to that Great British passtime – tea drinking – and have found a possible way to solve the perennial problem of the dribbling teapot. They report details in a physics preprint just uploaded to the arXiv servers.

Well, after all this talk of food, I’m now feeling a little peckish, so off to do a little cordon blue in the kitchen…or maybe I’ll just break into the snack cupboard instead…

Food Chemistry News is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Don’t be such a scientist! It’s the kind of thing I’d expect my sister to say to my face if I’ve gone off on one of my lecture mode conversations about some great discovery, or something some of my artier friends might whisper about me behind my back. Sometimes it’s a personal wish…but then I think of everything those who choose to stifle their curiosity about the world around them miss out on:

A rainbow is just as beautiful woven or unravelled, understanding the biochemistry of nectar or photosynthesis doesn’t make a rose smell any less sweet, and the beauty of a clear, night sky is all the more awesome (literally) when you’ve got a vague grasp of its true depths.

Anyway, I suspect that’s what Randy Olson is getting at in his book Don’t be such a scientist. Olson is a Harvard marine biologist turned Hollywood filmmaker who wants people to be interested in science and believes passionately that scientists can help the cause only if they become storytellers. If they get the style, then the substance will out.

If I were to quote from Exposed! Henri Boch’s debunking of Ouija, firewalking and other gibberish, I just know I’d hear the echoes of the scathing title of this post from numerous quarters. Pseudoscience, after all, seems to hold a perennial fascination for so many people. Boch, however, has no truck with charlatans and with a dry wit sorts the sense from the nonsense.

Of similar ilk, but with even more serious implications for humanity is Chris Monney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America which looks at how a lack of scientific literacy could threaten our future. The book is a cry from the heart that should have all scientists up in arms to stamp out propagandists and the peddlers of mythology of all kinds.

Speaking of the substance and style of the natural world, the most arty of my friends would surely recognise instantly the wonder of The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants revealed by Wolfgang Stuppy, Bob Kesseler, and Madeleine Harley. Indeed, nature’s true nature as scientific artist and polymath is demonstrated with wonderful photography of the seemingly alien world of pollen grains, stamens and stigmas, and sadistic fruit. Papadakis Publishers does it again with this follow up to Fruit, albeit in smaller hardback format.

Meanwhile, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtue of forgetting, something that every email, tweet and Facebook update continually reminds us we do very little of in the digital age. In delete.

He emphasises that forgetting is an essential human trait, after all forgive and forget is one of those idioms through which redemption can be had. But, with each of us leaving an indelible mouse-click trail following of our every move, M-S suggests that it is time we stamped expiry dates on our digital information, so that we can once more forget.

Also on my desk is Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes, which sets out to explain why Rome feel, Hitler rose, Enrol failed, and her own sister stole her mother’s boyfriend…

Ellen J Langer tells us in Counter Clockwise how we can turn back our psychological clock and so perhaps also turn back physically too. Her paradigm builds on her research with the elderly in the 1970s that suggested that some of the afflictions of old age could be reversed simply by convincing the afflicted that the year was not 1972 but 1959.

Penultimately, Jeremy Coller (with Christine Chamberlain) tells us about the lives, loves and deaths of 30 pioneers who changed the world in Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors. Among them are Jonas Salk of polio vaccine fame, Alfred Nobel and his dynamite, King Gillette and the safety razor, sharpshooting Sam Colt’s revolver, Rudolph Diesel’s engine, and Nikola Tesla’s alternative energy supply (AC power).

Finally, A two-authored novel is quite a rare breed, but The Dyodyne Experiment by James Doulgeris and V Michael Santoro is just such a beast. Personally, I much prefer science-in-fiction to science-fiction per se and this novel falls between those two stools in a positive way.

By the way, I included links to the Amazon pages purely so you’d have a chance to “take a look inside”. These are not amazon associate links.

Don’t be such a scientist! is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Right, the kettle is on for a morning brew and apparently our household is using 3.07 kilowatts. That will include the chest freezer in the garage, the refrigerator in the kitchen, the electric kettle, my laptop and wireless network, oh and a little device sitting on my desk right now that’s monitoring all those electrons as they speed through the mains supply cable.

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

My latest contributions to SpectroscopyNOW.com and my current Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com are now live:

Sweetening breast cancer risk – Experimental and epidemiological evidence previously suggested that circulating glucose and insulin may play a role in the emergence of breast cancer. Now a statistical analysis of baseline plasma levels of these compounds shows that elevated serum levels may indeed be a risk factor in postmenopausal women.

Mysterious marine microbe metabolism – US researchers have used spectroscopy to help them show that microscopic marine microbes, phytoplankton, are the answer to a ten-year-old mystery about the source of an essential nutrient in the oceans, the phosphonates found in organic phosphorus.

Telluride temperature test, just right – Researchers in India have used laser spectroscopy and other techniques to study a new type of glass doped with telluride ions that could have potential as new kind of high temperature sensor.

The fourth item, posted earlier in October, is my extended take on the Nobel Prize for chemistry news, which goes into some of the chronology of the X-ray structures of ribosomes that led to this year’s prize completing a trilogy of important post-Darwin discoveries (Watson-Crick, Wilkins, Kornberg, now the current prize).

A spot of synchronicity this week with the development of rocket-powered chemistry based on water and aluminum powder meshing neatly with the discovery of water on the moon. While, Harvard chemists are taking macromolecules to the truly macro scale to help them understand polymer folding. In Japan, nano scientists have found a way to insulate their wiring using carbon nanotubes and vaporized metal while a highly sensitive breast cancer detection chip is on the horizon in Europe. Read more and get the links in The Alchemist this week.

Breast Cancer, Plankton, Tellurides is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

It’s Blog Action Day 2009 and the subject this year is Climate Change. So, here are a few resources for readers seeking out climate information:

IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – The IPCC assesses the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.

EPA – The US EPA Climate Change site provides comprehensive information on the issue of climate change and global warming in a way that is accessible and meaningful.

BBC Weather Centre – Aims to inform people about the potential changes in our weather over the next 100 years.

RealClimate – A commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.

Island of Doubt …the struggle between the power of rational discourse and the scientific method on one hand, and the forces of superstition and dogma on the other. But mostly about climate change.

Climate Feedback – Blog hosted by Nature Reports to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming.

Recent climate change news

• An Ice Artist’s Poignant Plea to Halt Global Warming
• Activists Sue Texas to Restrict Greenhouse Gases
• Coral Bleaching Creates a Vicious Cycle of Further Bleaching and Disease
• Big Business Gets Behind the Climate Bill
• China: US is sabotaging Copenhagen climate treaty by ‘changing Kyoto rules’
• World Briefing | Asia: Maldives: Bring the Waterproof Pens
• Remember the ozone layer? It’s still there

Climate Change Action is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog