Month: May 2012

This diagram is an approximation of how BBC children’s news program “Newsround” (formerly John Craven’s Newsround) showed how the recent annular eclipse occurred.

Now, there’s simplifying and there’s just getting it totally wrong. I assume that they checked on Wikipedia for how eclipses occur because no one on staff had done a GCSE in science and simply misconstrued the diagram there. If someone on staff did study science at school, then they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

This is closer to what it should be:

The Google doodle for today celebrates the 78th birthday of musical synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog. The doodle itself is neat enough visually, but mouse those buttons and dials and you’ll discover it’s a fully functioning rendition of a Moog synth, with recording and playback.

Oh, and that issue of how to pronounce Robert’s surname? Apparently, there are three ways. The original Dutch would be Moch (with a short o, as in cop, and a thick, gutteral ch (as in the composer Bach). Us Brits usually pronounce it Mooog (with a long oo as in coool). Robert himself prefers a more Germanic pronunciation to rhyme with vogue, mogue. It should be a “Mogue” synthesiser. Except of course that even members of his family will use all three and perhaps other variants. I suspect if I started talking about Moch or Mogue synthesisers here in the UK I’d get some funny luchs from people confused by my novel brogue.

Do you think flower remedies work?

Apparently, Edward Bach, a bacteriologist trained in homeopathy and created some bacterial homeopathic remedies. He then branched out, says Science-based Medicine. He purportedly used his intuition to access a psychic connection to plants.

“He would hold his hand over different plants to see which one affected his emotional state, and he would collect the dew from that plant to use as a remedy,” says SBM.

The Wikipedia entry for Bach says the remedies are aimed not at curing disease but at rescuing you from emotional and spiritual woes: stress, insomnia, anxiety etc. There are no definitive trials to show that they do anything and certainly not that they help by offering you a psychic connection to plants.

Bach flower remedies are a 50:50 solution of brandy and water, and are said to work by transmitting a vibrational energy through the memory of water. This water being, not the plant sap or anything with perhaps some herbal potential, but simply the dew that has condensed on the bloom.

Bach explains the science underpinning the products in his 1936 book The Twelve Healers:

“From time immemorial it has been known that Providential Means has placed in Nature the prevention and cure of disease, by means of divinely enriched herbs and plants and trees. The remedies of Nature given in this book have proved that they are blest above others in their work of mercy; and that they have been given the power to heal all types of illness and suffering.”

Genuine herbal medicine often (not always) has physiologically active plant components on its side. Indeed, it has been estimated that around 3 or 4 of every ten pharmaceutical products has a direct natural product origin. Homeopathy is pure (but infinitely dilute) quackery. Flower remedies by contrast take sCAM (spurious complementary and alternative medicine) to a whole new level by attempting to infuse divine intervention and claims of providence into the remedies.

So, now, do you think flower remedies work? Bloomin’ idiotic if you ask me.

It hasn’t been hard graft so far, but should we stem the tide of organ donor slogans on Twitter? I think not. Keep ’em coming. No donation too small, no organ refused. Help someone liver little longer…wear your heart on your sleeve, even if we don’t see eye to eye, go on play a lung?

Tim Lihoreau has offered a dozen or so but worries that they’re now getting cornea, which is rich given “Guten Organ”…”Play the lung game”…and “Colon tight to your dreams”. Speaking of ELO, “Endow Liver, Organs”.

Have you got the guts to be an organ donor? It’s a no brainer, even for the spineless…it doesn’t entrail much effort. How about a “Cut out and keep” teeshirt?

In the end they will paraphrase Brucie…”Kidney do well!”

After a half century of trying, spectroscopists have finally pinned down the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum of plutonium-239. The finding will have implications for future studies of the solid-state physics of this important nuclear fuel and might point the way to improved approaches to the long-term storage of nuclear waste as well as the development of nuclear-powered spaceflight.

You can read the full story in my Chemistry World news update today. However, I have some additional comments on the technicalities of the work from team leader Georgios Koutroulakis of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Koutroulakis points out that working with highly pure plutonium(IV) oxide allowed them to achieve what others have been unable to do in fifty years. First, the non-magnetic ground state of the particular system studied helped them overcome the problem of the exceedingly short relaxation time (and huge resonance shift) of the plutonium-239 nucleus. “The energy gap between the ground state and the first excited magnetic state is quite large for the spins to dissipate their energy to the “lattice” in order to relax and, so, the relaxation time becomes reasonable and we can detect the signal,” he told me.

Cooling the system to close (4 Kelvin) to liquid helium temperatures was critical too. “At higher temperature it’s much easier for the spins to “hop” to higher energy states and consequently the relaxation becomes faster,” he explains. “For this reason exactly we went to low temperature, to assure that we were on average on the magnetic ground state hoping that T1 will be long enough and the shift small enough for us to be able able to observe the NMR signal, as proved to be the case.”

As to what they did differently from the many groups that have tried to obtain plutonium NMR spectra in the past: “The main limitation has been the very short T1/huge shift and, of course, the fact that people didn’t know where to look in terms of field-frequency without knowing the value of gamma-n. So, most of the relevant efforts have been concetrated on finding Pu-based materials in which, for one reason or another, these limitations are side-stepped, for instance systems with superconducting or antiferromagnetic ground states, but nothing had worked so far. We thought, contrary maybe to most people in the field, that working on a very pure sample of plutonium(IV) oxide in which Pu ions show a non-magnetic ground state we might have a chance to overcome the aforementioned limitations and observe the signal.”

Koutroulakis adds that his team was “clever” to choose the right system in which to look for the Pu NMR signal. “This, in combination with our very well-equipped NMR laboratory and exceptional knowhow (most NMR chemists, for example, cannot sweep their magnetic field and most solid-state NMR physicists don’t have access to such high-quality Pu-based samples), a lot of perseverance and patience (we had to try very long, time-consuming field sweeps with lots of different experimental/detection parameters), and a touch of luck of course (actually, we detected the signal when we were about to give up!) led to our finding.”

I asked NMR expert Ian Farnan of the University of Cambridge to comment on the importance of the work, he told me the first mention of the results was at a conference back in February. “It is an important breakthrough in actinide science as it provides an element specific insight into the local structural and magnetic environment of Pu in a range of materials,” Farnan says. “We have thought of searching for its resonance ourselves but have been put off by the wide frequency range and the low likelihood of lack of success. The Los Alamos group has to be congratulated and thanked because it is a great effort that opens up the field,” he adds.

Farnan and his colleagues have concentrated on the observation of NMR active ligands, such as oxygen-17 attached to actinides such as Pu using the magic-angle spinning (MAS) technique. This technique provides the high resolution that is required to distinguish subtle structural differences between local atomic environments in solids. “We are adapting the NMR equipment at the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Transuranic Elements for 239Pu observation,” he adds. “This possibility will be available to scientists through the EC FP7 programme EURACT-NMR.”

H. Yasuoka, G. Koutroulakis, H. Chudo, S. Richmond, D. K. Veirs, A. I. Smith, E. D. Bauer, J. D. Thompson, G. D. Jarvinen, D. L. Clark (2012). Observation of 239 Pu Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Science, 336, 901-904 : 10.1126/science.1220801

UPDATE #EveryLittleBitHelps – hashtag H/T to @JoForrest

There is far too much squeamishness regarding organ donation and transplant. Some of it is down to emotional attachment and denial, which is to be expected. Much of it is due to our own death anxiety, again an evolutionarily adaptation one can assume. Then there’s the question of religion, which muddies the waters of many a debate.

Regardless, it is time to break the taboos and quell the squeamishness. The potential for social media is great in this regard. If an 83-year old British man can donate a kidney to an anonymous recipient, purely altruistically and claim his fifteen minutes of fame in life, then each of us should stand up and be counted before it’s too late. Opt into the donor generation, tweet it, update your Facebook page, Google+ about it. Of course, breaking taboos needs slogans, so how about a few to get started…

Kidneys out! And proud

I have a spleen!

Too many broken hearts in the world (need a transplant)

Every little (organ) helps

Transplantation, that’s the name of the game

Hearts out for the lads

I only have eyes for you (and liver, kidneys and more)

A stitch in time, saves lives

Show me yours and I’ll give you mine

When will there be an organ harvest for the world?

And one for Apple fans: iDonate

Just received a copy of The Cambridge Phenomenon by Kate Kirk and Charles Cotton with a foreword by Bill Gates that gives us a timeline of the evolution of Silicon Fen over the last half century. You can see a timeline on the associated website.

From the first home computer to the ARM chip in almost every mobile phone, from the sequencing of the human genome to the development of ‘magic bullet’ drugs, ideas developed by the technology cluster in Cambridge have changed the world in which we live:

• Over 20 billion ARM based chips shipped, found in almost all the world’s mobile phones.
• IVF, now responsible for over 4 million babies worldwide.
• Acorn BBC micro, used almost universally in British schools from its birth into the 1990s.
• Kinect hands-free control technology for Xbox 360.
• The world’s first webcam, was pointed at the coffee pot in the computer science department of the University of Cambridge.
• Concorde’s drooping nose cone and retracting visor.
• Sinclair ZX80, the world’s first affordable home computer.
• Sequencing of the human genome, creating knowledge for a new generation of medicine.
• In-flight refuelling capability, for Hercules aircraft developed in 19 days during Falkland’s War Crisis.
• Iris Recognition used in cross-border control worldwide.

UPDATES: The makers of the product commented below and also emailed me some of their studies. They say: “Regarding the dose, our target was to be safe as well as effective. We did an internal review of all the available studies and combined them with our own studies on human liver cells in our lab. We chose a dose that was still effective for CYP1A2 induction (for caffeine metabolism) but under the effective doses for other physiological effects such as antiplatelet effects and vasorelaxant effects to avoid adverse reactions popping up. Rutaecarpine’s most potent effect (lucky for us) is Cyp1a2 induction.” So, there may be something in this, even if at first glance it looks like they’re offering way below the effective dose compared to the rat studies. They offered to send me a sample to try, but my mother always told me not to accept sweets from strangers, so I’ll give that a miss.

Have any Sciencebase readers tried this stuff? Do you think it works? It’s difficult to know what effect it might have given that part of the stimulant effect of coffee and other caffeine-containing drinks is partially psychosomatic (people report feeling pepped up only to discover they were drinking decaff all along). Plasma analysis would definitely demonstrate raised caffeine metabolism regardless though.

Red Ferret and others have been talking about a “herbal” treatment – Rutaesomn – that is supposed to deactivate any caffeine you have had and so help you sleep. Aside from the fact that the marketing says it’s “drug free”, which if it’s physiologically active it cannot be except as a matter of semantics, the research would also suggest that the average person would need far more than is in a single bottle of 30 tablets of the product for it to have any effect.

The active component in Rutaesomn seems to be an alkaloid called rutaecarpine. There is a paper from 2011 in Arch Pharm Res that studied its effects on rats. Apparently, 80 milligrams of the stuff per kilogram of body mass in the lab rats (given each day for three days before administering with caffeine) is enough to raise two liver enzymes sufficiently to promote caffeine metabolism and subsequent excretion of the metabolite. So, there may very well be a mechanism for efficacy.

However, the product contains just 100 milligrams of rutaecarpine per tablet and there are 30 in a bottle. An average adult male human weighing 80 kg and hoping to see an effect would based have to ingest 6400 milligrams of the active ingredient for three days to experience the same relative activity as was observed in the rats. That’s a couple of bottles of the stuff every day for three days before you could have a coffee.

There is the issue of translating from a rat model to humans, however, and ratio of body surface area rather than weight is often used as conversion factor, which would mean that you’d need rather less than my suggested 6400 mg to be taking the equivalent of the rats in the study.

It would be so much easier, if you fancied a good night’s sleep, simply to avoid the double espresso after your evening meal or cut back on the caffeinated “energy drinks”. Surely…

via Rutaesomn.