January 2009 – Page 2 – David Bradley

Scientists on Twitter

I carried out a little ad hoc experiment in social media this week. Having backed up my twitter friends and followers using Tweetake, I figured it was time to make them earn their keep…I jest. No, seriously, I’d downloaded the lists, which come as CSV files you can open in a spreadsheet program, and just for fun I thought I’d sort them into groups, picking science-related tweeps as the first category. By, pure chance, there were 100 scientific twitter users in that list.

Next, step was to cut and paste this list into my blog software and activate the web addresses for these 100 scientific tweeters. I then, of course, posted a tweet to let everyone know I’d compiled a list of twitter users with a scientific bent. Several people retweeted my tweet and I started to get some nice responses, direct messages, blog comments, and emails. Some of these came from twitter friends who had been inadvertently left off the list, so I added them and also activated their twitter name in the list, making it linkable to their twitter profile.

That move then formed the basis of a nice trade – you retweet or comment on the list and I’ll add you if you’re aren’t already on it and if you are I’d activate your twitter name and so it grows. I’ve not counted how many times it has now been mentioned, suffice to say that my local twitterhood continues to grow. Moreover, those people I listed are getting more followers and growing their own twittersphere as well as gaining traffic (several hundred new readers for some) from other social media sites that got into the loop, including StumbleUpon.

So, not caring what Bryony Garden thinks, it was Thursday that I coined a word to describe the scientwisters. That seemed to give the page a new boost in terms of visitors and retweeters.

For those interested in just how much impact this little project has had on my twitterhood. Here’s the twitter counter chart for the last week. The original post ran late on January 5 and was retweeted by various tweeps and scientwitters on the 6th. The chart below is now very out of date, sciencebase now has almost 3500 followers on twitter, partly due to this experiment, and partly thanks to Andrew Maynard’s Mashable article and Guy Kawasaki’s retweets, as well as the (re)tweets and shouts outs of countless scientwific friends on twitter.

It seems that I’m also a member of the twitterati, at least in Cambridge, UK, where, according to Twitter Grader, I am #4 below Bill Thompson, Vero Pepperrell, and Patrick Haney who is notasausage. Also seem to be doing well on twitterholic.

If you’re a scientific twitterer, let me know, either follow me on twitter itself, comment on this post or the original 100+ scientwitters page, or better still, tweet about the list. In return, I’ll add you to the list so we can expand this scientific twitterhood far and wide. By the way, there are now 400+ scientific twitter users on on my list and its still growing.

Alchemical Start to the Year

The Alchemist took a seasonable tipple over the holiday period but discovered that he needn’t have splashed out on all that expensive wine thanks to the field effect. He also discovers that all those spent coffee grounds he produces could be harvested to make biodiesel and hears of plans to rejuvenate the Baltic Sea with a giant fish-tank oxygenator. Drug users could soon be spotted by their glowing fingerprints, thanks to the latest development in forensic chemistry while a detector for melamine could help prevent future food scandals where this compound has been used illicitly to artificially inflate protein readings on baby milk and pet food. Finally, this week’s award could help boost European research in nanomedicine.

You can read all the headlines and straplines in the current issue of The Alchemist on ChemWeb.com

Oxytocin Facial

Oxytocin, the nurturing hormone involved in child-birth and breast-feeding, apparently plays a role in how we recognize faces, according to a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers gave volunteers a nasal dose of oxytocin and found that they all had improved recognition memory for faces, but not for inanimate objects.

In humans, oxytocin, which comes from the Greek meaning “quick birth”, increases social behaviors like trust, but its role in social memory has been unclear. “Recognizing a familiar face is a crucial feature of successful social interaction in humans,” said Peter Klaver, of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In this study undertaken with Ulrike Rimmele, of New York University and colleagues, the team investigated for the first time the systematic effect of oxytocin on social memory in humans.

“This is the first paper showing that a single dose of oxytocin specifically improves recognition memory for social, but not for nonsocial, stimuli,” said Ernst Fehr, who has studied oxytocin’s effect on trust and is unaffiliated with the new study. “The results suggest an immediate, selective effect of the hormone: strengthening neuronal systems of social memory,” Fehr said.

Reflecting on Climate Change

A radical plan to curb global warming and apparently reverse climate change caused by our rampant burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution would involve simply covering large areas of the world’s deserts with reflective sheeting.

The idea is discussed in detail in the January issue of the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues and was reported widely in the press and across the blogosphere over the holiday period. Is it so much science fantasy or might it actually work? Engineers Takayuki Toyama of company Avix, Inc., in Kanagawa, Japan, and Alan Stainer of Middlesex University Business School, London, UK, suggest that there is too much pessimism around concerning our ability to realistically reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels so other measures may need to be taken.

Reader Thomas Hewitt emailed his concerns about the proposal, he was worried that reflective sheeting would be expensive and intrusive and points out that diluted white latex paint can increase the reflectivity of porous surfaces, such as concrete, by ten percent. “An even better deployment [than painting desert rocks], would be to use it on manmade surfaces, in hot areas,” he says, “Locally, this could be seen as a rollback of the urban heat island effect. If done to enough surface area in high insolation areas, it might have a noticeable effect on global temperatures.”

I asked Toyama about the viability of the team’s proposals. Is it ever likely to be viable to cover such large areas of the desert with reflective sheets weighted down with sandbags? “Yes it is viable,” he says, “We are often questioned if the area we propose is too small! Of course, compared to the surface area of the earth, it is fairly small.”

But, how will such sheets be kept clean and maintained? And what will stop them being covered with dust in a desert? “The sheets would be laid in dry desert, with little rainfall, remembering that half the world’s desert area is composed of rock,” he adds, “Two known relevant examples come to mind: the NAZCA Lines in Peru have been unpaved for 1000 years and the successful covering sheets over snow in the North of Japan to reserve snow for summer skiing. Of course, the issue of maintenance work for sheets preservation needs to be investigated this would certainly provide jobs and benefit the area.”

But, couldn’t the problem be solved by every household simply painting their roofs white instead? “Roof area would be insufficient and would contribute a small percentage,” he added, “However, as a supplemental solution, it would be helpful in contributing to energy saving to cool rooms. Indeed, this is already used in flat-roofed houses of rich people in Middle and Near East. In Japan, it is seen as effective in improving family comfort but is not perceived as sufficient to tackle global problems.”

It still seems as far-fetched a macro-engineering project as subliming millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide at the bottom of the oceans. However, Toyama suggests that this is an unfair comparison. “Our concept is basically to alter the flow of heat whilst subliming relates to treating carbon dioxide stock problems itself, not a well established, suspicious and unreliable technology from the safety angle. As an overview, in management of technology terms, there must be a multi-faceted bold approach to carbon dioxide reduction or the target set of 50% by 2050 at the Touyako Summit will never be reached.”

The obvious thing to note of course, is that surface albedo changes are not a complete replacement for greenhouse gas reductions, adds Hewitt. “For one, the distribution of the cooling effect will never be a good match to the warming effects of greenhouse gases,” he suggests, “Secondly, we still have the serious issue of ocean acidification. The key trick (if cooling via deliberate surface albedo intervention is technically doable), will be to prevent it from being used an excuse to continue business as usual emissions.”

The team’s paper was apparently submitted in order to respond to current discussions about how a more cosmic view of Earth’s energy balance might be addressed regarding human activities. “Carbon dioxide reduction is insufficient from such a viewpoint,” Toyama adds.

Takayuki Toyama, Alan Stainer (2009). Cosmic Heat Emission concept to ‘stop’ global warming International Journal of Global Environmental Issues, 9 (1/2) DOI: 10.1504/IJGENVI.2009.022093

Leukemia Tweezers

stained-leukemia-cells The first 2009 issue of SpectroscopyNOW is now available:

Tweezing out leukemia spectra – US researchers have used laser tweezers Raman spectroscopy (LTRS) to help them characterize the effects of different chemical fixation procedures on the spectra of healthy cells and leukemia cells and to avoid the misinterpretation of data.

Crime and punishment – A truly interdisciplinary collaboration between biology, law and neuroscience at Vanderbilt University has used functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, to watch how the brain changes when a person thinks about crime and punishment.

Folding issues – NMR spectroscopy is helping US chemists work out shorter and simpler routes to protein-based drugs for treating a wide range of illnesses including diabetes, cancer, and hepatitis.

By Jove, it’s hot and steamy – In 2007, astronomers discovered that a scorching-hot gas planet beyond 63 light years from our solar system is steaming with water vapour, now, it seems the planet, a hot Jupiters, also suffers from high carbon dioxide levels in its atmosphere.

Opal reversal – Electrochemically oxidizing and reducing an inverse polymer-gel opal causes it to swell and shrink, which alters the wavelength of the light it diffracts brightly, from ultraviolet through the visible to the near infrared, the material could pave the way to new display and monitor technologies.

X-rayed dinobird – Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to shine intense X-ray beams on the so-called “dinobird” to reveal chemical secrets that have been hidden from view for millions of years.