Month: April 2012

Apparently New York school children and/or their parents and guardians are easily offended at least that’s what it seems as the NYC Department of Education has put together a list of 50 words, or more specifically topics, banned from use in its Standardized Tests. So, are these words the usual suspects, the four-letter words, the cuss words, the unholy expletives, the coarse, or course, vernacular for sex, death and other facts of life? Of course, not, the list is as ludicrous as the idea of being offended by words in the first place and includes: dinosaur, evolution, divorce, sex, celebrities and computers in the home…in fact, prepare to be mortally offended here’s the full list:

Abuse
Alcohol
Birthday
Bodily functions
Cancer
Catastrophe
Celebrities
Children dealing with serious issues
Cigarettes
Computers in the home
Crime
Death
Dinosaur
Divorce
Evolution
Expensive
Gambling
Halloween
Homelessness
Homes with swimming pools
Hunting
Junk food
Unemployment
Nuclear weapons
Occult
Parapsychology
Politics
Pornography
Poverty
Rap Music
Religion
Religious holidays
Rock-and-Roll
Running away
Sex
Slavery
Terrorism
Television and video games
Traumatic material
Vermin
Violence
War
Weapons
Witchcraft

To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of education an NYC kid is going to get if all those topics are banned from their tests. Does it really mean that they cannot be tested on the pros and cons of video games, the Second World War, evolution? If so, then someone in the Dept of Ed needs to head out into the real world. Creationists are offended by dinosaurs? Tough! Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays, so no one else can mention them? BS! Halloween is a pagan festival? Well, isn’t banning it offensive to pagans? Sheesh. I hope this is all just a happy spoof, although I can see the benefits of banning celebrities. If not the NYC DofEd are bunch of flipping ninnies who ought to know better.

UPDATE: I would love to hear your personal brain “reboot” following anaesthesia story. Mine? I had endoscopy once, wasn’t completely under with the valium, in and out of consciousness, when it was done I remember looking at the clock on the wall and “seeing” it going backwards. I also recall leaving a dental surgery as a child and thinking the lady walking me to the train home was the nurse when in fact it was my mother!

When you come round from an anaesthetic there’s often an initial sense of delirious struggle before you climb fully to awareness and orientation. It’s almost like a low-level computer booting from its BIOS prior to the GUI kicking in.

Scientists reckon they have now imaged this process and suggest that “primitive” consciousness emerges first as we awaken from anaesthesia. According to brain imaging studies of healthy volunteers by Harry Scheinin and colleagues at the University of Turku, in Finland, working with US collaborators they have followed the process of consciousness returning. The images show that lower, older, more primitive parts of the brain boot up first before the “higher” functioning, more human neocortex kicks in. The findings offer a glimpse not only at the level of consciousness our more “primitive” evolutionary ancestors may have had, but offer clues about exactly what consciousness is.

Human consciousness illuminated.

An explosive start to this weeks Alchemist, well actually its a non-explosive start thanks to a reaction scheme that tames diazomethan. In the world of X-ray crystallography, we learn that the bound structure of a drug to treat hepatitis C has been determined and in materials science, truly alchemical-sounding chemistry reveals that Beaujolais is the tipple of choice when preparing iron telluride superconductors. A new approach to pump-probe techniques is more robust and stable than before and the alchemist learns that residues from radiotherapy could allow environmental scientists to trace waste water flow more easily than before. Finally, good news for Henry F. Schaefer III who is to receive the 2012 SURA Distinguished Scientist Award.

Latest Alchemist.

Researchers have developed a novel solid-state NMR spectroscopic method that uses paramagnetic tags to help them visualize the shape of protein molecules. The technique could be used to help scientists understand the properties of various biological molecules under normal, healthy conditions and also in those that are involved in a range of diseases from Alzheimer’s to mad cow disease.

There’s more on this research in my latest on SpectroscopyNOW.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a chronic infectious disease that afflicts some 170 million people worldwide, causing chronic liver disease and, in many cases, liver cancer.

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have finally obtained the first high- resolution crystal structure of a compound that binds to the genetic material of the hepatitis C virus and blocks its replication. More details in my current column on SpectroscopyNow.

There is always room for further innovation in any field and I recently highlight new work in the area of Quantum Dots – those tiny entities hoping to revolutionise computing, analysis and medical diagnostics. Robert Meulenberg, University of Maine, USA, and chemist Geoffrey Strouse, Florida State University (FSU), Tallahassee, USA and colleagues have for the first time generated and observed a tiny magnet, a magnetic spinel inclusion, trapped within a quantum dot made from chromium-laced zinc selenide.

The news item garnered a lot of interest, so I’ve spoken to the researchers, some independent observers and expanded the snippet to this month’s Research Highlight: On the Dot.

Zheng, W., Singh, K., Wang, Z., Wright, J., van Tol, J., Dalal, N., Meulenberg, R., & Strouse, G. (2012). Evidence of a ZnCrSe Spinel Inclusion at the Core of a Cr-Doped ZnSe Quantum Dot Journal of the American Chemical Society, 134 (12), 5577-5585 DOI: 10.1021/ja210285p

Caltech scientist Sameer Walavalkar just emailed me about his latest project. It’s a cultural meeting of science and art on the nanoscale. This is what he had to say:

“I’m a physicist and work on creating silicon nanostructures. As part of my work I figured out how to use one of our fabrication machines to make customized nanoetchings for people. I can take any picture, text or portrait and carve it into a variety of materials, from silicon to sapphire. As a scientist I’m used to seeing things at this size scale but I thought this would be a cool way to introduce people to the world that I work in every day.”

Walavalkar has started a kickstarter project here and shows several examples of his nano sci-art that have been carved next to objects that we are familiar with (you can see the iconic Obama campaign poster next to a grain of salt or Seurat’s Le Grande Jatte next to my eyelash and many more in the video).

“I thought this project was a great blend of science, technology and art as I take the etched chip and (depending on the material and finish of the chip) mount it in a unique frame along with a high resolution scanning electron image of the etching.”

Walavalkar offered to create an “etching” for Sciencebase, so I sent him a copy of our logo, which is an 18-crown-6 complex, which I first used as an icon for my early Elemental Discoveries website back in 1995/6. Here’s the result it has to be the smallest website favicon.ico icon file ever! The logo is just 50 micrometres across or thereabouts shown here in a scanning electron micrograph next to the corner of a grain of sugar.

Microbes fished from the local river could be used to make low-cost and environmentally friendly graphene in an efficient way according to Japanese scientists.

A simple method for the mass production of high quality graphene could help speed up our approach to a future generation of microelectronics devices based on this material. Graphene looks set to complement silicon semiconductors initially and perhaps displace the standard model in years to come.

You can picture the carbon allotrope graphene as monolayer of the more familiar graphite of pencil “lead” and charcoal. Structurally, it resembles hexagonal chickenwire fencing with an arrangement of carbon atoms at the vertices of the "chickenwire hexagons". It is tough, incredibly strong, thin, and has a wide range of unique optical and electronic properties that have become the focus of intense interest since the Nobel-winning work of Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester used sticky tape to tear off a strip.

The Japanese team are reveal little of the biology of their work but you can get a snapshot of their chemistry and microscopy of graphene flakes in my latest update on SpectroscopyNOW.

Anyone who has owned a portable electronic gadget during the last decade (hands up anyone who hasn’t!) or so will have relied on the almost ubiquitous lithium-ion battery. They precluded the need to use noxious cadmium and purportedly side-step the memory charge problem of so-called Ni-cad batteries. But, they are far from perfect, they rarely last as long in use as the manufacturers of said gadgets often claim and they do wear out, usually within about 18 months of purchase and usually on the day when their use is most likely to be most problematic for the user. Moore’s Law may apply to silicon chips, but Sod’s Law is the more common legal mandate of lithium batteries.

Now, a UK-US collaboration has exploited the power of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to take a diagnostic look at one of the perennial problems of modern technology: the chemistry of rechargeable batteries. Find out what their scans told them in my latest post on SpectroscopyNOW.