35 years in science communication
This has to be the biggest of small web pages. It’s scalled so that one electron in a hydrogen atom is a single pixel on your computer screen and the proton is 1000 pixels across. Try scrolling across one page at a time to see just how far that electron is from the proton. It will take you quite some time, to say the least as there’s a gap of 11 miles between them!
Hydrogen Atom Scale Model.
Whatever you don, just don’t try to print the page.
Anyone who has seen the San Andreas fault will be familiar with that section of fencing where the farmer hammered in the posts, put up the slats and then moved 20 feet sideways to do the next section.
Or, maybe it was an earthquake that moved the fence posts. Yes, that’s it. So when is the next big fence moving going to happen? Seismologists really don’t know. There has been no major earthquake on the southern section of the fault, running to the east of Los Angeles, during the recorded history of European settlement in western California (the past 250 years).
How much longer can the strain on this part of the fault build up without rupturing?
In this week’s Nature, Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, attempts to answer that question with the help of data on the fault movements collected between 1985 and 2005. These radar and position (for example, GPS) measurements show how much the two sides of the fault have been moving past one another – the so-called slip rate. The bigger the average slip rate along a fault line, the more stress might be expected to be building up on parts of the fault that remain locked together, where a sudden rupture and release of the accumulated strain will happen in an earthquake.
Estimating the chance of such quakes is complicated, because movement across the fault does not necessarily have to lead to a build-up of stress. The stress might be getting released gradually rather than accumulating for a catastrophic event, owing to small movements called creep on the fault. Or it might be relaxed by compensating movements on other geological faults that branch off from the San Andreas fault, such as the San Jacinto fault to the south. Fialko found that the slip rates and accumulated stresses on the southern part of the San Andreas fault are indeed substantial: creep is not helping the fault to relax. The resulting strain is divided roughly equally between this and the San Jacinto fault – so the latter is not taking up most of the stress. Fialko concludes that there is a real likelihood that the long-dormant southern San Andreas fault could undergo a big earthquake before very much longer.
Apparently, “most doctors” have not heard of the “new” killer big that left a nine-year old boy with lungs full of holes after a bad scrape to his knee. At least that’s according to an article in Time magazine. And it seems that readers of the Digg site too were at a loss to understand how this bug could have remained so anonymous. So, what is this mystery bug?
Well, it’s none other than MRSA, or methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, sometimes labelled as multiple resistant, mentioned numerous times on this site and countless others. This nasty little microbe, as it’s name would suggest is a strain of S aureus that has evolved resistance to methicillin, and various other antibiotics. It’s well known in the UK, Japan and elsewhere. It’s certainly been the subject of multiply repugnant media scare stories about killer hospitals in the UK for the last couple of years at the very least. Indeed, its existence has prompted the UK government in its usual kneejerk response to media scare stories to have the whole of the National Health Service re-organised so that everyone has to use an antiseptic gel, wet wipe or whatever every single time they enter a ward, exit a ward, breathe in, breathe out…….
The variation on theme cited by Time, however, adds another couple of capitals to that acronym C and A for community acquired MRSA. This bug has hit the streets in other words.
The street-wise MRSA is not such a tough cookie as its hospital-dwelling cousin. It does respond to antibiotics, but it does spread much more easily among otherwise healthy people, says Time, and could, under pressure, evolve significant resistance. The strain that nine-year old picked up from a knee scrape spread through his body very rapidly indeed. But, his is not an isolated case. Never mind H5N1 and SARS, it’s MRSA you have to watch.
Inspired by orcmagazine.com’s racial profiling site Google
your race) in which they list the results entirely out of context of searching Google
with the phrases "white people are known for", "black people are known for",
"Hispanics are known for" etc etc, we thought we’d give it a try with the phrase
"Scientists are known for". Some interesting results emerged, all of them
totally out of context and not necessarily meaning what you think they mean, but
interesting in some strange way nevertheless.
Scientists are known for…
Later, we’ll Google another job to find out what Google really thinks of you…
The latest issue of the Reactive Reports chemistry news site is now live. In it, I discuss various advances in the chemical sciences including weighty issue of trans fat that has butter lovers everywhere declaring, “I told you so!” Also in issue 56, I report on the basic approach to chemotherapy that side-steps the need for a magic bullet and find out how NASA has lit a fuse under the planetary carbon debate.
Our reactive profile this month is Will Griffiths. Griffiths a chemist by training like me opted out of the lab early in his career with the aim of applying his chemical knowledge and expertise through an altogether different medium. He is now investing his time and energy in developing the ChemRefer.com website, which offers chemists every quick and open access to the free full-text chemistry literature. You can use this search tool via the Chemspy Toolbox or download the Chemrefer toolbar.
A postgraduate student has posted a research problem on sci.chem.analytical, which Sciencebase’s chemically aware readers might be interested in puzzling over.
The student seems to have discovered a new inorganic gas.
Apparently, he heated a zeolite which consists Analcime, feldspar and silica to 500 Celsius. X-ray fluorescence shows the presence of Si Al K Ca Na S Ti and Fe. When the heated material is dissolved in HCl, a gas is evolved with the following properties (summarized by M Farooq on CHEMED-L):
(a) It smells like ammonia
(b) It gives a precipitate with calcium hydroxide which re-dissolves in HCl
(c) It does not decolorize potassium permanganate solution
(These properties would suggest carbon dioxide, but….)
(d) It can be collected over water and has an ammoniacal smell but is not as irritating as ammonia
(e) The gas does not react with silver chloride in solution (unlike ammonia) but can colorize silver nitrate solution (goes from colorless to weak yellow, similar to iron(III) ions in solution)
It might be a gaseous hydride and is almost certainly not an organic compound as all would be destroyed at 500 Celsius. Arsine impuritues are unlikely as the X-ray fluorescence did not reveal arsenic.
So, what is it?
Many years ago, when I was writing on a weekly basis for New Scientist, in fact long before the magazine even had a web presence, I wrote a short news item about a new class of drugs for treating the symptoms schizophrenia.
Within days of that issue hitting the shelves I received several letters from desperate readers asking where they could get hold of the drug. Unfortunately, it was very much in the experimental stages and as far as I am aware the compound in question never did make it to market. A lesson learned.
A press release from the American Chemical Society announces yet another development in the drug discovery process for schizophrenia. At first, I was reluctant to follow it up, but even though once again the discovery is preliminary and not yet at the pharmaceutical marketing stage, it is an interesting enough lead to warrant a mention.
Indeed, scientists are reporting progress toward treating a long-neglected group of symptoms that impair the functioning of people with schizophrenia. This chronic, highly debilitating disease affects 3 million people in the United States. Schizophrenia involves “positive” symptoms (hallucinations and delusions), “negative” symptoms (apathy and withdrawal) and cognitive symptoms (such as difficulty in filtering out unimportant sensory information).
Despite major advances in drug therapy for the positive and negative symptoms, cognitive symptoms – which appear in 85 percent of patients – go largely untreated today. A team of researchers at Pfizer, including Bruce Rogers, report the discovery of a potential drug for schizophrenia’s cognitive symptoms. Their study will appear in the June 29 issue of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
The new compound, PHA-543,613, is believed to mimic nicotine’s biochemical effects in the brain in enhancing cognition. More than 80 percent of people with schizophrenia are heavy smokers, and scientists believe smoking may be a form of self-medication for the disease. PHA-543,613 improved cognitive functioning in animal tests, including object recognition and P50 gating – a common test to measure auditory information processing. The researchalso provides additional support for the hypothesis that such compounds represent a novel, potential pharmacotherapy to treat the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. One has been shown in separate reports to improve cognitive functioning in healthy human volunteers.
You can find the paper through its DOI – 10.1021/jm0602413 – here. Just cut and paste the number into the yellow science toolbox on that page and click the DOI go button. If you’d like to add this toolbox to your website, please grab the simple javascript and slot it into a suitable position on the page. The team at the Usefulchem blog are already using the companion science search box.
Looking at prehistoric climatic change may provide new insights into predicted near-future climate. New results for a greenhouse effect that occurred during the late Cretaceous some 75-90 million years ago suggest that very different mechanisms controlled the climate then and that these may be applicable in the near future, perhaps forcing a revision of received wisdom regarding climate change.
Sascha Floegel and colleagues at the IFM-GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany working with Thomas Wagner of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, have investigated the causal relationships and feedback loops between the tropics and higher latitudes and have identified a “climate kitchen” in a world with an average global temperature between five and 9 degree Celsius higher than today.
More…
Researchers in Beijing have carried out a meta-analysis of AAS and ICP-MS results published during 1994-2004 to obtain a countrywide picture of how the level of lead in children’s blood is changing and how where they live effects their exposure to this toxic element.
Perhaps predictably, the team found that those children living in urban or industrial regions had much higher levels of lead than those living in rural areas. The figures they reviewed also contrast sharply with the children’s western counterparts who have much lower lead levels on average. The issue is a matter of significant public health importance for China, the researchers say.
Exposure to lead can affect the central nervous system and affect learning ability and growth. It is ubiquitous in the environment and can be absorbed in the human body by inhalation and ingestion from a variety of sources such as contaminated water, soil, food, lead-containing products such as paint and from vehicle exhausts in areas where tetra-ethyl lead is still used as engine an anti-knocking agent.
More…
Microscopic printing techniques could be used to make the next generation of electronic components for large-area displays with higher definition and covering much larger areas than is currently possible with even the best displays today. The technology could also lead to versatile sensors for a range of applications from the environmental to the medical, all at dramatically reduced costs compared to current micromanufacturing technology.
Researchers can already carry out microcontact printing on metal surfaces a few tens of square centimetres in size using microcontact printing and etching. However, while this is a fairly straightforward approach on smaller areas, researchers would prefer to be able to develop a much simpler method applicable even to large-scale production for bigger displays and sensor arrays. Now, a team at Philips Research in Eindhoven in the Netherlands has developed what they call a universally applicable “ink” for microcontact printing.