October 2006 – Page 5 – David Bradley

Lou Gehrig protein found

A protein involved in neurodegenerative diseases including Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease (covered by DB in spectroscopynow.com, 2005-01-01), has been identified by researchers in Germany and the US. Manuela Neumann and colleagues identified TDP-43 as the pathogenicprotein involved in this form of dementia. These illnesses are the second most common cause of dementia in the under 65s, after Alzheimer’s disease, and commonly afflict people in their 40s and 50s. TDP-43 is one of the missing misfolded proteins found in the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. The researchers hope that their work will help in the study of dementia and motor neurone disease.

More information in the AAAS magazine Science today.

[Note, the original press release from AAAS actually said motor neutron disease, DB]

Pubchem discussion

Gary Wiggins alerted CHMINF-L subscribers to the launch of a listserv discussion group for Pubchem users:

“The PUBCHEM-L listserv provides a forum for users of the NIH PubChem
database (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) to discover how to make the
best use of the database,” he told us.

Wiggins also provided a warning to users thinking of flaming the makers of PubChem. “It is not intended to be a platform for political debate on whether it is right or wrong for the US government
to create such a database,” he said, “Appropriate questions or comments to be submitted to the list include methods of searching, descriptions of auxiliary tools to enhance the utility of PubChem searches, how best to interface with other systems, how PubChem compares with other sources,
etc.”

Visit Pubchem-L to search the archives and to subscribe.

Art for Science Sake

Two books long overdue for review here, have a more than nanoscopic layer of dust on their covers having sat atop of a pile of other books long overdue for review here that has grown systematically to more than a metre in height. Not the most poetic of intros to a review of scientific poetry but then I haven’t got all day to wax too lyrical.

Art Stewart reckons communication problems are significant obstacles to science but rather than encouraging a stripping away of jargon Stewart suggests science can benefit from a little of that old lyrical wax and perhaps more of an acceptance not to worry about spending more than a little time on matters that seem at first superficial. As such, he’s put together two rather subtly evocative books of poetry and essays that turn the concept of the all-too-common science for poets course on its head and offer up the idea of poetry class for scientists instead.

Superstring theory, katydids at night, natural disaster, and ammonites all succumb to Stewart’s muse in Rough Ascension while respect and care for life are the focus of the second of the pair Bushido – The Virtues of Rei and Makoto. Neither book is much thicker than the layer of dust that accumulated on their covers while I found the time to take a closer look but what they lack in thickness they make up for in depth.

A version of this item is available in our podcast complete with guest appearance by Art Stewart himself with a reading of Superstring Theory. Use the built-in player below to listen, save the mp3 to your hard disk or mp3 player, or subscribe for free with iTunes.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2006

Roger Kornberg will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on unzipping genetic transcription. More info on the Nobel site and my write-up next week under the Intute Spotlight and an XRD-oriented version to appear in spectroscopynow.com.

This just in from the American Chemical Society (19h00 UK time):

‘The research Dr. Kornberg did will help open the door to understanding and treating many human ailments, including cancer, heart disease and inflammation, and will help scientists better understand stem cells and their potential for therapeutic applications,” said Ann Nalley president of the American Chemical Society and a chemistry professor at Cameron University, in Lawton, Oklahoma. ‘This Nobel Prize also underscores the key role of chemistry in the scientific research into genetics. In order to take the first actual pictures revealing how the genetic information stored in genes is copied so that the body can use it, Dr. Kornberg used a mainstay chemical technology called x-ray crystallography.”

She adds that, ‘Chemistry has had a key role from the very onset of the genetics revolution. It has provided the core technologies that enabled molecular biology and biotechnology to leap ahead. I am delighted that this Nobel Prize highlights chemistry’s role in such an important field of research.'”

I couldn’t agree more, but it would be nice if the Chemistry prize were more geared to straight chemistry, especially as the Medicine prize was awarded this year for essentially similar research into RNA interference, which could just as easily be labelled “Chemistry”. Oh well.

Nobel Prize in Physics

Big Bang John Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

I Can Has Cheezburger

Cheeseburger I received a press release today from a US company addressing me by name and asking me whether I’d like to write about nanocardiology. Apparently, the company has a nanotech product in pre-clinical trials that cleans up arterial plaques. The putative product from St Louis company Kereos is based on endothelial alpha-v-beta-3 integrin-targeted fumagillin nanoparticles and can seek out markers for arterial plaques and help break them down.

Obviously, the implications for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease could be enormous, and the medical profession will be keen to see whether the company is successful with this product once it moves on to the clinical stage.

Remarkably though, the person who sent the press release signed off with a rather flippant remark: “Now bring on the cheeseburgers!”

Okay, it’s a joke. Haah, haah. But, hidden within that seemingly throwaway remark is decades of meat-eating substance abuse and an attitude to diet and health that underlies the very reason we in the west, and in particular in the US, are suffering such tragic levels of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, surely?

We cannot continue to shovel in vast quantities of fatty red meat smothered with reconstituted dairy products and a guilty sliver of gherkin without long-term repurcussions. Never mind the vast tracts of wilderness, rainforest, and habitat that is being raised so that beef stocks can remain secured. Never mind the huge fences that segregate our cattle from the wildlife and in so doing block migratory routes to seasonal watering holes that have existed for countless millennia.

But, don’t worry about the buffalo and the wildebeest, the rainforest canopy, or the other effects of overindulgence on your health. Let’s all carry on eating those cheeseburgers safe in the knowledge that we’ll soon be able to pop a little pill that will scrape our arteries clean before that first heart attack.

Nobel Prize for Medicine 2006

This year US scientists Andrew Fire and Craig Mello have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of a fundamental mechanism that controls the flow of genetic information.

The human genome provides the DNA instructions for making proteins in the cell. These instructions are carried by messenger RNA (mRNA). Fire and Mello discovered a mechanism that can degrade mRNA from a specific gene, RNA interference. Details of this process, which they published in 1998, explain how it is activated when RNA molecules occur as double-stranded pairs in the cell. Double-stranded RNA activates biochemical machinery which degrades those mRNA molecules that carry a genetic code identical to that of the double-stranded RNA. When such mRNA molecules disappear, the corresponding gene is silenced and no protein of the encoded type is made.

Check out the Nobel site for more on today’s announcement.

2, 4, 6, 8 – team oxygen

Nature described this finding as “surprising, elegant, and entirely useless”. Well, the journal is half right. Solid elemental oxygen is not thought to exist anywhere on earth or even elsewhere in the universe under the immense pressures created by Malcolm McMahon and Paul Loubeyre. They and their colleagues put the squeeze on solid oxygen, which forms deep red crystals at above a million atmospheres. They used various techniques to determine the structure of this new material and found that oxygen atoms team up to form clusters of eight in the solid. A seemingly esoteric discovery you might think.

However, the new understanding gained of materials under pressure could lead to new efficient rocket fuels or superhard materials formed from oxygen, nitrogen, or carbon that beat diamond for toughness.

Moreover, the results suggest that hydrogen might also form metallic crystals of a similar nature to solid oxygen at 450 gigapascals (4.5 million times terrestrial atmospheric pressure). Such pressures exist at Jupiter’s core astronomers think. Under these conditions metallic hydrogen may behave as an exotic superconductor or superfluid. That finding may be elegant, certainly no longer surprising, but too perhaps even more useless!

Read the full story in SpectroscopyNOW.com

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Over on baldiness.com, the blogging bald guy asks why the hirsute place so much emphasis on hair while those who are follicularly challenged or waxed lyrical cranially don’t seem that fussed.

As you will see from the photo on my resume page I too am less than hirsute from the neck up and so feel I can comment without worrying about being PC.

I think it’s only those without hair that worry about why anyone worries about their hair. Those with hair worry about it, because they can. If you’ve got none, you’ve not got anything to muss up and gel, so you cannot see the point.

Hair is more than merely a way of identifying an individual, it’s a characteristic, a trait, that helps define the individual and has to have been important to our ancestors all along as we at some point in our evolutionary past lost the body hair (mostly) that made us indistinguishable from the mammalian masses. Once we had a sense of being different to those cousins hanging on the family tree who ape around I guess we found that our appearance more than our scent became increasingly important.

Perhaps therein lies the key. We don’t rely as much on sense of smell for attraction but being visual creatures we focus on appearance. Hair can be changed, so setting one individual apart from another in the mating game, is possible with nothing more than a few braids, a bit of wax, or a bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution.

Anyway, if we were all bald, all you hairies would have no right to call anyone else slaphead.

Chemical flickr

It was a tough call given how many photos there are of what those Stateside call a pharmacy or druggist, as opposed to a chemist in the UK, but I managed to track down a few chemists on flickr. Remember, regardless of appearances, chemists are always hot (it’s all those exothermic reactions).

Once again gender merging raises PC concentration.

Flickr Chemists

Grinning Don
Rhiannon
Lynn
Becky
Naser
Begoggled
Gregory
Cleopatra
Karl Pilkington
Little chemist

Any suggestions for the next round of hot science welcome…