Month: August 2011

My four latest science news stories now live on SpectroscopyNOW, kicking off with an item about adulteration and red wine – Various approaches to statistical analysis of spectroscopic data can reveal whether red wine has been adulterated with anthocyanins to artificially improve, “correct”, its red colour.

We also have an item on how to use an inexpensive digital camera to test water samples rather than having to fork out for an atomic absorption spectrophotometer. Researchers in Spain are hoping that a standard digital camera is the perfect alternative to expensive and sophisticated laboratory instrumentation for some analytical applications. They have demonstrated how it can be used to determined potassium and magnesium concentrations and water hardness and validated the results against conventional AAS measurements.

In the world of parasites, spectroscopy can be very useful for revealing their weaknesses. NMR spectroscopy has provided researchers with insights into how parasitic organisms exploit nutrients provided by the host organism. The work could open up a new approach to finding unique drug targets and in the present study, specifically against the tropical parasite Leishmania.

Finally, a whole raft of analytical techniques have been used to work out how metal nanoaparticles form within aluminium alloys. The study could lead to approaches for making tuneable materials for engineering, construction and aeronautics based on nanotechnology.

Diluting homeopathic advertising HT @SilvianaJ – The Advertising Standards Authority has ordered online homeopathy advertisers to stop making claims that their treatments work. [Because they don't!] The ASA’s remit was extended to regulating websites in March 2011, since when it says it has received more than 150 complaints about claims for the efficacy of homeopathy. While it carries out a “wider investigation” the ASA has told advertisers to delete content that “claims directly or indirectly that homeopathy and homeopathic products can diagnose/treat/help health conditions”.

Back in the day, we Brits had big billions. A billion was a million millions. Obviously, the “bi” doubling up the “illion” from million. What else would it be? Well…of course…the Americans wanted to talk bigger still and so made their billion a mere 1000 million. Back then, it was hard to be a millionaire (these days, you just go on TV), but becoming a billionaire was not unthinkable and there are more and more multi-1000-millionaires around these days. Given that financial institutions throw billions around like it’s nobody’s business and national debts amount to trillions (just millions of millions as opposed to millions of millions of millions) and there are hints that quadrillions will soon hit tabloid financial pages.

While musing on the true nature of and its reduced immensity I recalled the journal Nature finally bowing to its American authors and even those beyond the US who were increasingly equating the billion with the depreciated 1000-million. I asked Ruth Francis in the press office if she could dig out the announcement. It took her a couple of days and presumably no little door slamming and the clashing together of editorial heads, but eventually the pre-electronic archives of the journal turned up this little gem. I suspect it was written by the inimitable Henry Gee, but cannot be sure. It’s so brilliantly written, so snarky, yet polite. Nature Chemistry’s Stuart Cantrill just messaged me to suggest it may well have been penned by then Editor John Maddox…

In the issue of Nature dated 2nd July 1992, the journal stated: “…from now on, the English word “billion” will be understood as meaning 10^9 rather than 10^12. It is earnestly hoped that readers will not mistake this upheaval in editorial practice for the witless indulgence of innovation for its own sake. Rather it is a case where tradition [of close to 125 years] has been overwhelmed by others’ usage.”

Ruth affirmed Sciencebase that Nature, like The Economist, defines 1 billion = 1,000 million, 1 trillion = 1,000 billion. “We’re not aware of ever having to use quadrillion, but it would 1,000 trillion,” she told me. With debts mount around the world, that day will come. My late father-in-law who was otherwise financially rather estute was, I am certain, more concerned about the banking crisis and envious of the world’s billionaires by three orders of magnitude than he ought to have been.

As a British child watching Carl Sagan’s classic Cosmos, I was awed to the tenth to the 12th degree to imagine those billions upon billions of stars actually being millions of billions upon billions…

Anon (1992). Billion bites the dust Nature, 358 (6381), 2-2 DOI: 10.1038/358002b0

Forget Fanny by Gaslight…an LED light went on for German physicist Harald Haas who suggests that we could utilise LED lightbulbs as an alternative route for connecting to the Internet without disrupting the use of those LEDs for simple illumination. You can dim the lights so that they no longer shine but the data transmission is uninterrupted. 10,000 times more bandwidth, infrastructure already in place. Energy savings. Smartphones usually have an LED flashlight function so they can be a transmitter too. Data through illumination! Of course, light doesn’t pass through walls so security is ensured. Applications are beyond imagination at the moment says Haas.

Researchers in Japan have used high-speed atomic force microscopy (AFM) to shoot an action movie of the biological molecular motor ATPase. ATPase, an enzyme embedded in cell membranes, produces the cellular fuel molecule ATP. the enzyme has two rotating components, but until now only X-ray crystallography and similar “still” imaging techniques had been used to visualise how it works. The microscopy work provides more evidence of how changes in conformation of the subunits of the enzyme generate the required rotation to produce ATP.

I covered this scientific discovery for the RSC magazine Chemistry World this week and quoted AFM expert Cindy Berrie of Kansas University. Having asked for her detailed opinion on the work, I thought Sciencebase readers would be interested to see what more she had to say about ATP and AFM.

“This work highlights the power of AFM for structural characterization of proteins, particularly dynamic proteins such as the F1 ATPase molecular motor,” she told me. “The question of how protein molecular motors such as the ATPase function and generate torque is a critically important one, which is still not well understood despite extensive biochemical analysis.” She pointed out that AFM provides a powerful tool to begin to study structure and dynamics in motors such as these and the Japanese work clearly indicates that it is possible to observe structural changes of the ATPase motor proteins using AFM. It has the distinct advantages of working in physiological conditions and without having to add a label to the protein, which might otherwise change the dynamic behaviour of the system.

However, Berrie told me that AFM does have limits in terms of the speed of frame capture and resolution that can be obtained. “In this case, the rotation rate observed for this [ATPase enzyme] ring appears to be slow enough to be captured with this technique. However, the rotation of the native enzyme is much faster, and would likely be much more difficult to observe using this imaging method,” she says. “The observation that conformational changes occur without the presence of the subunit in this ATPase system is interesting and will certainly prompt more investigations of the possibility of cooperativity in the ring itself. If confirmed, this would be nice evidence that the ring itself is involved in the asymmetric nucleotide binding.”

The study does not provide a definitive answer as to whether or not torque is generated in the F1-ATPase motor in this way, but it does provide invaluable new insights.

As to the advent of AFM as a powerful technique in molecular biology, Berrie is rather enthusiastic about its potential. “The relatively recent development of high-speed AFM has allowed dynamics of proteins to be monitored using this technique in addition to the structural information typically obtained from AFM,” she told me. “This technique has been previously used to capture time course of conformation and binding in protein systems including GroEL-GroES and others.” Berrie adds that, “The AFM technique used in this paper has been and will continue to be applied to a variety of protein systems and provides detailed structural data that are difficult to obtain using other techniques. These types of investigations will hopefully ultimately lead to a much better understanding of the mechanism by which these motor proteins function.”

“AFM has clearly gained popularity as a tool for investigation of protein structure and dynamics and with the advent of high speed imaging capabilities, the range dynamical processes which can be studied is increasing. AFM as a tool for imaging biological systems has only been employed for the past decade or so and has made significant advancements and contributions during this time,” Berrie says.

Takayuki Uchihashi, Ryota Iino, Toshio Ando, & Hiroyuki Noji (2011). High-Speed Atomic Force Microscopy Reveals Rotary Catalysis of Rotorless F1-ATPase Science, 333, 755-758

New media has rapidly become the mechanism by which information is spread quickly in many walks of life from alerting the public to local traffic incidents, terrorist attacks, earthquakes and celebrity deaths. The likes of Twitter and Facebook have become the first responders to almost every event the world over as well as creating the means by which to bring about political change through activist and rebel groups in the Middle East and elsewhere, for instance.

Tina Askanius of Lund University, Sweden and Julie Uldam of Richmond the American International University in London, explain that one area in which new media could become rather powerful is in activism against the causes of climate change. They explain that in protesting against climate change, online video, available via popular social sites such as YouTube, has become key to articulating the message that the underlying causes of climate change are systemic and political and to connect the solutions to addressing the issues of capitalist production and unfettered consumption of resources.

Writing in the International Journal of Electronic Governance, the researchers explain how the radical wing of the Global Justice Movement (GJM), for instance, utilised video activism to gets its message across during the 15th UN Climate Conference, COP15. The effort was, they suggest, reminiscent of successful alternative media activity that led to mobilisation of large-scale protests around previous World Trade Organization and G8 counter-summits. It also presaged the more recent rallying efforts of revolutionary citizens in nations of the Middle East, such as Egypy, Iran and Libya.

The team specifically focused on the activist network “Never Trust a Cop” (NTAC) , which tried to make use of YouTube to mobilise for protests during the COP15 summit. Their research suggests that the use of new media to help
activists provide rallying information and the call to action in contrast to widely held hopes for social media may play only a minor role in terms of mobilisation for political protests, but that they play an important role in motivating political engagement beyond large-scale protest events, partly through broadcast media’s take-up of spectacular posts in social media.

“One of our main points is that [the study] case (NTAC’s War on Capitalism video) in most ways failed as a mobilisation video – but that it nonetheless served an important role in putting climate change on the anti-capitalist agenda beyond the COP15 protests. One of the ways it did so was by generating critique from the anti-capitalist movement’s ‘enemies’ through traditional mass media coverage – something alternative social media often don’t generate,” Uldam told Sciencebase.

The advent of large-scale hacker networks, such as “Anonymous” and others, which use private, encrypted Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and the development of alternative social media sites not under the purview of corporate concerns such as Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, means that much activism is also occurring well below the internet radar of the authorities.

Historically, new media technologies have been greeted as ground-breaking tools for a revitalisation of the public sphere, the internet being no exception, the team asserts. But, while the grassroots and non-profit sector was previously relegated to the remote margins of the internet, online social media now offers activism the very real possibility of accessing mainstream public spheres. Given the distributed nature and robustness of any network and the generic lack of controlling hierarchy one might imagine that new life is now being breathed into the world of activism across many spheres, including climate change.

Tina Askanius, & Julie Uldam (2011). Online social media for radical politics: climate change activism on YouTube Int. J. Electronic Governance, 4 (1/2), 69-84