Science Extra Geeky Bits from David Bradley
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The latest science extra Geeky Bits news from Sciencebase's David Bradley. The most recent 30 days of news snippets, worthies and oddities, as well as other items of interest that didn't make it on to the Sciencebase Science Blog homepage because I was (a) too busy to do a full write-up (b) too lazy to do a full write-up (c) too bored to do a full write-up. Visit the Science Extra Geeky Bits Archive for all items posted during the last year.
- RIP Albert Hofmann - Apr 30, 2008 → Father of the archetypal “problem child” LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, chemist Albert Hofmann, has died at the grand, old age of 102. Apparently speed kills but acid…
- Graphetronics - Apr 30, 2008 → Electronic devices based on the all-singing, all-dancing material graphene rather than silicon could be just a few years away, according to the latest proclamations from researchers in the UK.
- Art and absinthe - Apr 30, 2008 → Negligible quantities of the supposed psychedelic agent in potent green liquor absinthe, reveal that its reputation as the green muse of artists past is due to nothing more than its high concentration of alcohol (70% by volume).
- JJ Thomson validated 125 years late - Apr 29, 2008 → J.J. Thomson’s theory on the stability of vortex rings is mathematically sound but now George Vatistas and colleagues at Concordia University have confirmed the Nobel physicist’s predictions in a laboratory experiment.
- Elemental discoveries - Apr 28, 2008 → A group led by Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found the first naturally occurring superheavy element by sifting through a large pile of the heavy metal thorium. Their elemental discovery showed a potential new addition to the periodic table in the form of element 122 with an atomic weight of 292
- Here come the nanobots - Apr 28, 2008 → A prototype for a prototype nanoassembler has been built by NIST scientists, this first tiny step towards a machine that can assemble nanodevices could one day see K Eric Drexler’s engines of creation emerge into reality.
- New Irish mammal - Apr 28, 2008 → A mammal never before seen in Ireland - the greater white-toothed shrew - has been spotted by a QUB researcher. Dave Tosh, from the School of Biological Sciences, found the greater white-toothed shrew Crocidura russula in Tipperary and Limerick while working with University College Cork and BirdWatch Ireland. Its natural range is parts of Africa, France and Germany, but the closest to Ireland it has been seen previously was the Channel Islands. Tosh is an owl pellet aficionado and had found a rather large shrew skull in one such pellet prior to spotting the live animal out and about.
- Alchemical happenings - Apr 25, 2008 → This week, The Alchemist hears of a the opening of a million-dollar green chemistry lab on the Emerald Isle to accommodate a research contract between researchers at Queen’s University Belfast and Malaysian petrochemicals company Petronas. In bioanalytical news atomic spectroscopy has revealed a putative link between raised blood plasma levels of heavy metals and cancer. Chemical philosophers are looking at rebuilding the periodic table, while organic chemists have come up with a fast formula for Tamiflu. Also this week, Nobel chemist Sir Harry Kroto echoed Richard Dawkins in chastising educators who hope to relegate evolution to secondary status in schools. Finally, good news for music fans, with new molecular switches that could one day help technologists build an mp3 player to hold 300 million tunes.
- Ica age astronaut - Apr 24, 2008 → It might be an unpopular view but Dr Phil Chapman is sticking to it. The geophysicist and former NASA astronaut says figures from four separate agencies show the global temperature dropped noticeably during 2007 and that the globe could now be returning to an ice age.
- World Malaria Day - Apr 25, 2008 → April 25 is World Malaria Day. One approach to dealing with the disease is indoor residual spraying (IRS) which has saved millions of lives since the 1930s and continues to do so. However, with unprecedented public resources available for malaria control, donor agencies remain loath to strengthen IRS programs in Africa, and are not training a new cadre of malaria experts or medical entomologists to run the programs or invest in new insecticides. IRS needs renewed attention.
- No soul of you shall eat blood - Apr 23, 2008 → Could the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been right all along about refusing blood transfusions? New research suggests that blood transfusions for some patients (40-60%) may actually do more harm than good because effects on oxygen transport and immune reactions.
- Heart attack and chemo - Apr 22. 2008 → Heart damage from certain anti-cancer drugs no longer should be regarded as a rare or relatively unimportant complication, scientists in Italy have concluded in a new overview of research on the cardiotoxicity of anti-cancer drugs. More on a putative protective agent is discussed in today’s main blog post.
- Chocolate lowers cholesterol - Apr 23, 2008 → The news chocoholics have been waiting for: dark chocolate lowers cholesterol levels. Fantastic! But…there is a caveat, while I’m not doubting the honesty of the researchers involved this work was funded by chocolate bar manufacturer Mars. So, where do their loyalties lie and if the results had been the opposite, would this work have been published?
- Emerging viruses - Apr 22, 2008 → Forget bird flu, for now at least, another rodent virus has emerged as a potentially serious problem in South America with a kill rate of one in three people infected. The virus, Chapare arenavirus, is rare but causes bleeding and shock (severely lowered blood pressure) and has killed at least one man in a remote area of Bolivia.
- Botox blues - Apr 22, 2008 → Have you ever woken up with a pained expression on your face? Been overdoing it with the Botox, you think? New research suggests a mechanism by which this neurotoxin that provides a temporary chemical face lift for the bewrinkled could enter the brain. Still, who’s worried about the brain, it’s how you look, right?
- Solar payback - Apr 21, 2008 → Could solar energy, even in Britain, have a decent payback rate for the energy conscious?
- New antimalarial - Zazengo - Apr 21, 2008 → Startup company launches Malaria Engage to help fight a killer in Africa.
- 14-year-old creates chemical trading cards - Apr 20, 2008 → Elementeo casts two players against each other in card-based fantasy combat. But unlike “Pokemon” or “Magic: the Gathering,” Samar says that Elementeo educates just as much as it entertains. The game is based on a 121-card deck of chemical elements, compounds and catalysts.
- The elly hippo - Apr 20, 2008 → The ancestor of the elephant was a semi-aquatic mammal more akin to the hippo. Now, there’s a surprise.
- Is your beer gut making you hungry? - Apr 18. 2008 → Not only is there evidence that middle-aged spread increases the risk of dementia, but belly fat could be increasing your appetite and so making you fatter still.
- Not teaching evolution is child abuse - Apr 18, 2008 → Not teaching science properly in schools and giving equal footing to pseudoscience is tantamount to child abuse, so says my old friend Sir Harry Kroto, co-discoverer of buckyballs. Humans and fruit flies share the same genes, he says in his evolutionary speech. “You may not like that but it’s not my fault…It’s the way it actually is.”
- Squishology - Apr 16, 2008 → Cornell University’s Itai Cohen studies the squishiness of everything from cartilage to fruit fly wings. He uses use the words “gorgeous” and “fluid dynamics” in the same breath, speaks with infectious enthusiasm about the materials that fill our lives and that display unique properties.
- Spookier and spookier - Apr 16, 2008 → There’s actually nothing weird about the quantum world, it’s just the way things are, nothing weird in that. But, what to make of Toshiba, Cambridge research that shows that two photons that never meet can still interfere with each other. Spookier, indeed.
- WiChempedia - Apr 16, 2008 → Chemspider has lauched a very early beta of WiChempedia. “Our intention is to deliver wiki capabilities in ChemSpider and to use the Open Content associated with chemicals and drugs on Wikipedia within the system. We will then provide an environment for people to continue to add to, enhance and curate the Wikipedia content as well as add their own.”
- World Science Festival - Apr 15, 2008 → Fancy some science in New York City? May 29 to June 1 and the presumed chance to see Alan Alda…
- Swiss biotech - Apr 15, 2008 → Downloadable report on the Swiss biotech sector (or ector as it says on the landing page)
- Black Hole prof dies at 96 - Apr 15, 2008 → John Wheeler who coined the phrase Black Hole has taken the last great journey over the event horizon. Wheeler was a renowned member of the Manhattan Project team, worked with Niels Bohr, and was one of Einstein’s last collaborators. He will always be remembered for his cosmic nomenclature.
- Whalers miss targets - Apr 14, 2008 → Japan’s whaling fleet has failed to catch its quota, after being disrupted by clashes with anti-hunting activists. But, isn’t it a very strange case of nominative determinism that the BBC correspondent who was reporting from on board an activist vessel is called Jonah Fisher?
- Test tube videos - Apr 14, 2008 → Brady Haran is filmmaker-in-residence for Nottingham Science City. He’s producing a feature-length documentary following a year in the life of local scientists. This website is his production blog. It features previews of raw footage and behind-the-scenes material.
- Climate change and beer - Apr 11, 2008 → You can stuff the polar bears (they’re safe anyway, despite Gorish pronouncements that are just plain wrong), but when global warming really kicks in the price of beer could rise sharply! So, not only will we be contributing to greenhouse emissions having to chill it more, but it’s going to eat into the monthly housekeeping budget even more…
- Psychosociosexualbabble - Apr 11, 2008 → Check this out…apparently…androgenisation in men is related to less restricted sexual behaviour and suggest that women are averse to unrestricted men. Whatever turns you on, I guess.
- Running out of fossil fuels - Apr 10, 2008 → We’ve been told for decades that we’re running out of fossil fuels. Now, the US Geological Survey has released estimates of undiscovered volumes of 3.65 billion barrels of oil, 1.85 trillion cubic feet of associated/dissolved natural gas, and 148 million barrels of natural gas liquids in the Bakken Formation of the Williston Basin Province, Montana and North Dakota.
- Periodic challenge - Apr 11, 2008 → Eric Scerri alerted me to his forthcoming article - Periodic Visions - in which he asserts that the “The periodic table we grew up with might one day become obsolete.” Wouldn’t it be very odd if that were not the case? The old Mendeleevian PT looks amazingly overcrowded and fudged (at least outside the elements up to Radium or thereabouts) and has done for decades, at least in my humble opinion what with the lanthanides and actinides sitting as they do in a separate block seemingly outside the PT itself. I also suspect that the whole issue of the predicted stability of some of the super-superheavy elements will require a major rethink some time soon.
- Pizza stem cells - Apr 10, 2008 → Javier the Engineer explains how pizza stem cells can grow into any type of pizza from a simple three-cheese pan to the ultimate super supreme pizza stuff crusted with jalapeno peppers…
- Mooning - Apr 10, 2008 → Stunning new stereo view of Phobos, the larger and inner of Mars’ two tiny moons, have been captured by a NASA spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet
- Spotlight on science - Apr 9, 2008 → The April issue of my Spotlight column for Intute is now online. This issue has posts on the accuracy of climate change models, the storage of hydrogen for powering fuel cell vehicles, and black holes and revelations - the big and the small of it.
- The nano spice world - Apr 9, 2008 → It seems that not a week goes by without a new social networking site appearing, this one is different though, it’s Euro based for a start, but more to the point it’s aimed squarely at nanoscientists and was created by PhD candidate Andras Paszternak.
- Did a Cooked Meteorite Seed Life on Earth? - Apr 8, 2008 → Earth, four billion years ago, was a lifeless, hot and violent place. Not exactly a world where you’d expect life to form. But this was the scene where the first life-forming amino acids appeared. And how did this happen?
- Mindless eating - April 8, 2008 → The bottomless soup bowl, freakonomics of food, and why we eat more than we think
- Heavy elemental discoveries - Apr 7, 2008 → Latest insights into superheavy elements. Watch out for seaborgium-268 with a half life of 3.2 hours, darmstadtium-294, which could survive for at least 300 years and seaborgium-290 with a putative halflife of 100 million years.
- Internet chain letters - Apr 5, 2008 → A study of Internet chain letters by Jon Kleinberg, Cornell professor of computer science, and David Liben-Nowell ‘99, professor of computer science at Carleton College, shows that such messages do not fan out widely, reaching many people in a short time, but instead travel in long straight lines. On average, they found, the last recipient of a message is several hundred steps away from the originator. The study appears in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Husband husbandry - Apr 4, 2008 → Apparently, feminism never happened, men, and specifically husbands, are creating at least seven hours extra housework for their wives each week. That’s according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of US families. Moreover, for men the picture is very different, with a wife saving men from about an hour of housework a week. Those figures don’t quite stack up and I know several families this side of the pond where very little housework is done by either husband or wife, some households where I’d say too much housework is being done overall, and others where the husband is the primary bread-cutter.
- Second Life Harmful to Health - Apr 3, 2008 → A recent medical symposium held on Second Life had a real-life incident of someone bizarrely seeking medical help online. Aside from recommending they head for an appointment with their physician urgently, the best advice would be: get a life!
- ACS Island - Apr 3, 2008 → The American Chemical Society has opened up border control on its Second Life island. Actually, it’s the morning after, the night before launch party, but I’m sure there will be stragglers hanging around for many days to come.
- What is grey goo? - Apr 3, 2008 → Succinct answer to an enormous question from my old mucker at The Grauniad, Tim Radford.
- Chemical scaremongering - Apr 3, 2008 → It’s been at least a week since the last inappropriate chemical scare story, now it’s the turn of bisphenol A, shown in the laboratory to cause breast tissue cells to become cancerous, so that’s a definite link is it? There’s at least one test that can show anything (including water) to be carcinogenic…
- Working workout - Apr 2, 2008 → In his book, Brain Rules, reviewed briefly elsewhere on Sciencebase, John Medina suggests that because we evolved on the move, our brains work best when we’re active. This blogger is putting that idea into practice and burning 600 calories a day into the bargain.
- Great sex in three minutes - Apr 2, 2008 → Contrary to the longer-lasting and reinvigorating spam ads, sex therapists in North America reckon you can have great sex in 3 to 13 minutes rather than hours.
- Carbon footprint calculator carbon footprint - Apr 1, 2008: TreeHugger → It almost looks like yet another April Fool’s, but it’s no joke, the thousands of carbon footprint calculators running on high-energy web servers the world over are essentially pumping out tonnes and tonnes of carbon dioxide. How can we offset the footprint calculators’ carbon footprints? This is really no laughing matter.
- Menopause for thought - Apr 1, 2008 → British scientists have demonstrated that menopause is an adaptation to minimize reproductive competition between females in a family. Why is it taken so long to figure this out?
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