35 years in science communication
A strip test for mercury in water samples offers results comparable with spectroscopic measurements, according to researchers in China. A Ningbo U team has developed a test strip based on functionalised gold nanoparticles that cause a colour change if mercury is present in a sample at just 3 nanomolar concentrations, lower than the US EPA’s drinking water limit (10 nM). Highly sensitive and highly selective for the hazardous metal.
More details this week in my SpectroscopyNOW column.
Today, the BBC is reporting another medical “breakthrough” – high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) for treating prostate cancer as an adjunct or even alternative to radiotherapy, chemo, and invasive surgery. Ultrasound can be highly focused, essentially boiling the diseased tissue rather than damaging surrounding tissues with the risk of incontinence and impotence associated with invasive surgery.
It’s good news for prostate cancer sufferers, but as far as I am aware HIFU has been used to treat prostate cancer since at least 1989. The technique was first developed in France by Inserm scientists and others and the Ablatherm HIFU was first marketed for the disease in 2000. The first “commercial” treatments were in 1993 and there have been tens of thousands since.
NHS Choices reported on HIFU back in 2009 when there was a flurry of interest from the media in this “new” technique for treating prostate cancer. It says:
“Current NICE guidance advises that the evidence supports…HIFU for prostate cancer, provided that monitoring, audit and clinical governance of any procedures are carried out. It advises that longer-term effects on survival and quality of life are unknown, and that doctors should therefore ensure that patients understand these uncertainties.”
The BBC itself has reported on HIFU for prostate cancer before, there was a report in February 2011 hailing the benefits of the “new” treatment. As an aside, they refer to the urethra as the “water pipe” in that report, how quaint. So, why is this news on the BBC Radio 4 Today program today, could it be that the editors and journalists on the show simply hadn’t heard of HIFU before and so assumed it was new when a press release came from Lancet Oncology touting the benefits over surgery (in a 41-patient trial)? You can almost bet your gland on it.
Regardless, it is all positive stuff, but it does beggar the question as to why the technique, more than two decades in the development, is only now reaching public ears…
A 3D printer and some silicone is all you need to revolutionise chemistry by making the reaction vessel a part of the experiment itself. More details in this week’s Nature Chemistry. Tell the laboratory glassblower to hang up their face guard and shut the door on their way out…
Conotoxins from the predatory cone snail work even at very low levels to block nerve signals. Now, researchers in Germany have investigated the structures of one specific conotoxin with a view to developing the compound, or its derivatives, as a new type of painkiller. Despite being snail-derived, I assume they’d offer fast-acting relief nevertheless.
More details in my SpectroscopyNOW column today.
The Alchemist takes a virtual trip to New Mexico this week to learn of resistant bacteria. He also discovers that counter intuitively putting certain zeolites under pressure can open up the entrances to their pores. In geochemistry, we learn why copper is not found so commonly at the Earth’s surface and could point the way to finding new sources. New technology could kick up a stink in Hollywood by finding a way to detect mould growth on old film reels. Graphene is in the news again, this time putting it under strain apparently makes it behave as if it were in a magnetic field. Finally, the GHS has released its new chemical hazard symbol for carcinogens to no little controversy.
My Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com for April.
Dinosaurs are on my mind…not least because of the ACS’s intelligent alien dinosaur story and the attempt to ban the word and all evolutionary themes by the NYC Department of Education but also because my good buddy Ed Yong just alerted us to a Smithsonian article that puts the dinosaur perspective into some context.
Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, they’re familiar to all dino fans both young and old. These giant creatures and their neighbours roamed western North America about 150 million years ago. That’s the late Jurassic period. But where are Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops? Well they did not appear until the late Cretaceous – about 67 million years ago.
Now, picture the timeline, says the Smithsonian, in isolation, these dates are just labels, but an astounding 83 million years separate Apatosaurus from Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus from Triceratops.
The Age of Mammals has been ongoing for the last 66 million years. So…less time separates us lowly bipedal apes from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus. I always knew they’d messed up their timelines in Jurassic Park…
Dinosaur Tracking.
Forget long-winded, long-form, textbooks, essays and all that overblown background reading stuff! Science 140 is a new crowdsourcing social media project that hopes to collate science definitions andexplanations. As the name would suggest, each has to be 140 characters or fewer, tweet length, in other words.
“As well as definitions we also want people to explain how something works, why things are the way they are or what happens if etc. We want explanations from across the sciences, on topics including the human body, space & astronomy, genetics, particle physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, food science and more. We want the explanations to be challenging yet accessible to all ages. Visit our ‘IDEAS & EXAMPLES’ page for more info.”
Yesterday, I posted about chemist Ronald Breslow’s frivolous claim that the nature of homochirality on Earth might not be duplicated on other planets and that there might be intelligent dinosaurs ruling other worlds. It seems like it was a flippant and not particularly precise comment piece from a retired, but well-respected, ACS past president about origin of life chemistry. He seemingly added some fluff to his conclusion that has no real scientific credence whatsoever. My blog post and others provoked a lot of discussion about the rights and wrongs of such stuff and nonsense.
Breslow was perhaps having a little fun in his dotage or else the piece was ghostwritten and he never even saw that his throwaway remark about alternative evolutionary paths that might occur on distant worlds could lead to a lizard-like ET was used in his comment piece. Sometimes when you get egg on your face the best thing to do is to simply suck it up. Yum, yum, roaaaar!
A short press release in its PressPac earlier this week from the American Chemical Society mentioned intelligent alien dinosaurs. It was bound to pique the interest of the tabloids, wasn’t it? The Daily Mail ran with the bizarre headline:” Welcome new lizard overlords – New study suggests alien worlds super-intelligent dinosaurs.
Of course, the actual paper on which the release was based was nothing to do with dinosaurs or in fact any kind of alien, although it does mention them and the ACS PressPac item does lead on the dinosaurs and has some nice dramatic dino pictures! The paper was actually about chemists trying to understand why we have only one handed forms of amino acids and sugars on earth and how this may or may not have underpinned the emergence of life. An important but relatively mundane topic as far as the general public is concerned.
However, the ACS item and the paper from Ronald Breslow did stretch and extrapolate the concept quite wildly.
According to the PressPac: “Breslow describes evidence supporting the idea that the unusual amino acids carried to a lifeless Earth by meteorites about 4 billion years ago set the pattern for normal amino acids with the L-geometry, the kind in terrestial proteins, and how those could lead to D-sugars of the kind in DNA.”
That’s fine, nothing to do with dinosaurs or aliens. But, then it goes on to say:
“An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.”
Yes, the implication is that the chirality of putative amino acids on extraterrestrial worlds may well be of the opposite handedness, but how does that then make this fantastical leap to planets with intelligent alien dinosaurs? I really cannot see the connection between figuring out the origin of homochirality and extrapolating to alien dinosaurs…just bizarre. Breslow is an incredibly well-respected scientist, was he simply joking? Is this something to do with getting the “banned” word dinosaur back into education following the publication of the NYC DofEd’s 50 offensive words list?
Maybe on some alien world there is an emeritus dinosaur chemistry professor musing on the fact that the human tabloid media simply loves aliens and dinosaurs…or maybe not.
Breslow, R. (2012). Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth Journal of the American Chemical Society DOI: 10.1021/ja3012897
Given the current “drought” here in East Anglia, the water board is urging customers to save water. Well, yes, good idea, but they say that we should be cutting down on consumption from 150 litres per person to 130 or so…and that could stave off real shortages if we have a dry summer.
Who is using 150 litres of water each? I looked at our metered water bills for the last few years. We’re a family of four in an average-sized house with water butts in the garden for the meagre plants and an “if it’s yellow let it mellow” ethic for toilet flushing. We average about 100,000 litres per year. That’s around 270 litres per day, less than 70 litres each, per day. So, a lot less than the supposed average 150 l and way below their target 130 litres per person.
Yes, we have a washing machine, yes we have a dishwasher (they’re both supposed to be water and energy efficient, although that’s something of a misnomer for such devices, I’d think). Yes, we all shower daily and yes, we drink lots of tea. We have a hippo (a sealed bag of gel in one toilet cistern) to lower the flush volume and we ditched the powershower years ago in favour of a mains pressure system and a water-saving showerhead and still get clean, honestly. I’ve also just ordered some tap flow mixers from Cambridge Water Company. But, those are smallscale savings.
So, tell me, if you’re average, how do you manage to use 150 litres of water each day?