35 years in science communication
Elemensus is a new board game with a geeky twist. It’s an elemental update to Scrabble one might say and you can play it periodically…chemist and non-chemist alike.
Don’t like that “NeBULaS” though…plural is NeBULaE but there is no E element…
Nevertheless, “Thorium-Iodine-Sulfur Iodine-Sulfur Oxygen-Fluorine-Fluorine-Beryllium-Astastine Tungsten-Oxygen-Tungsten!”
You just experienced the most excruciatingly embarrassing moment, and to top it all off, your face just turned bright red! What exactly is the function of blushing, other than to bring your embarrassment to a new level? What is the evolutionary reason behind this apparently uniquely human phenomenon? Is it the visible talk of shame and another reason why we have colour vision?
Definitely one for Mark Changizi ;-)
Good-old-fashioned organic chemistry with a modern twist comes in for Alchemical inspection this week as does an aqueous old favorite as it freezes. Likewise, an organic twist on 19th Century technology could bring fuel cells powering into the 21st while new clues about aerosol degradation might improve our models of a very modern problem, climate change. In pharmaceutical news, hopes are raised for a novel treatment for ovarian cancer in coming years that avoids resistance. Finally, an explosive award for a genius geochemist.
via The Alchemist Newsletter: October 12, 2012 – Welcome to ChemWeb.
UPDATE: And the Prize goes to… The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2012 to Robert J. Lefkowitz Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA and Brian K. Kobilka Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA “for studies of G-protein—coupled receptors”. It’s bio but with huge pharma implications.
I’m pleased to note that I wrote about Kobilka’s work back in 2010 although when I pressed him to hint at implications of that particular study he was reluctant to give me such a hint. Unfortunately, I don’t remember writing about Lefkowitz in the last few years.
The press release is here.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2012 was announced today. I hadn’t noticed until now that the prize money for this year’s Nobels is down 20% on that given last year. According to CNN this is “due to the turbulence that has hit financial markets.”
Turbulence? That’s whorls and eddies in a fluid that leads to a bumpy ride on an aeroplane or a bit of seasickness if you’re going by boat. It’s bloody great icebergs that have hit financial markets these last few years, “not a bit of turbulence”. Chaos theory helps us come to terms with the unpredictability of the weather, of catastrophic collapse, of fractal growth, and even economics. What is it that makes politicians and bankers imagine that they can control global finances? Haven’t they heard of the butterfly effect…
Anyway, back to the Nobels…you can watch the live stream later this morning:
UPDATE: He’s back down! Safe and well.
UPDATE: 2012-10-14 He’s going up, right now!
http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/
Baumgartner’s mission to the edge of space will try to surpass human limits that have existed for more than fifty years. Supported by a team of experts, he will undertake a stratospheric balloon flight to almost 37000 metres and then make a potentially record-breaking freefall jump in an attempt to become the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall (about 1236 kilometres per hour at sea level and 20 Celsius). Apparently, he will also deliver invaluable data for medical and scientific research on his downward journey.
We broadcast the live event at the time, but here’s the archived video from his sponsors.:
UPDATE: Serge Haroche, Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and David J. Wineland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems”.
The Physics Nobel Prize was just announced this morning, Tuesday 9th October (at about 10:45 UK time). The announcement will be made by Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Is it too soon for Peter Higgs et al, re this year’s results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? Of course, the Nobel committee will have had nominations much earlier in the year than results emerged from LHC, but one never knows…they could easily accommodate it if they wanted to. Not sure whether Higgs would be the first Geordie Nobel Laureate…fairly sure that Marie Curie and Erwin Schrodinger were not.
Press release here.
The Nobel Prize recognizes two scientists who discovered that mature, specialised cells can be reprogrammed to become immature cells capable of developing into all tissues of the body. Their findings have revolutionised our understanding of how cells and organisms develop.
John B. Gurdon discovered in 1962 that the specialisation of cells is reversible. Shinya Yamanaka discovered more than 40 years later, in 2006, how intact mature cells in mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells.
These discoveries completely changed our view of the development and cellular specialisation. We now understand that mature cells are not fixed in their specialised state. By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy.
No matter how trendy it might seem, do not drink cocktails made with liquid nitrogen. BBC reports today that a teenager apparently had to have emergency surgery to remove her stomach after drinking a cocktail containing liquid nitrogen and suffering severe pain and breathlessness.
Liquid nitrogen exists at minus 196 Celsius. If you thought eating an ice cube might hurt, then this is a whole different world. At that temperature the liquid flash freezes tissue on the way down. And, unfortunately for this girl the drink flash froze a hole through her stomach wall…
This was on the BBC news today but a quick Google reveals liquid nitrogen infusions are quite common in cocktail bars across the globe. Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is well known for using liquid nitrogen in some of his recipes, although I’m sure he has the sense not to partake until things have warmed up at least to the temperature of solid ice cream.
However, I would have assumed that liquid nitroge would actually fall under most national chemical safety regulations, such as COSHH, so presumably it would be illegal to use it in a cocktail bar and offer it in whatever form to the drinking public without proper risk assessments in place and safety equipment, screens, thermal gloves, goggles etc. Certainly offering it as a beverage does not sound like it would come under the banner of legal.
I recall a first-year university lecture, where our prof apparently dipped his hand in a bottle of liquid nitrogen and then smashed his hand on the bench. One of the students fainted…the rest of us laughed, oh how we laughed, when we realised it was an inflated rubber glove. He went on to flash freeze various flowers and other stuff and to smash those. I think the point he was trying to make is that it freezes things in a flash…including stomachs, it seems, unfortunately.
BBC – Newsbeat – Teenager's stomach removed after drinking cocktail.
The dietary supplement and weight loss spams and scams are endless, aren’t they? I’ve mentioned a few on Sciencebase previously. However, I wrote about a new quality control technology for coffee and since then have started to notice that green coffee beans are percolating through my spam filter more and more. Apparently, they are the latest subject of pseudoscientific health nonsense aimed at the overweight and obese.
I’m not even going to bother debunking this dietary silliness. You know the score, eat and drink too much and avoid exercise and you will put on weight, push it too far and you will end up clinically obese. Herbs, lotions and potions will not help. Stomach stapling or a gastric band might, but that’s quite drastic. The only people who benefit from supposed dietary quick fixes tend to be the marketing people at the top of the pyramid. Lots of us are packing a few more pounds than we ought, shed them by gradually lowering your calorific intake over the course of a few weeks and going for a few more brisk walks rather than jumping in the car or waffling in front of the TV.
Pegomastax africanus was originally unearthed in Voyizane, Joe Gqabi District, Cape Province, South Africa on a 1966-67 expedition, but it was until the 1980s that Paul Sereno spotted something special in the fossil. October 2012 it was officially classified and named. The media has had a field day this week variously calling it the dwarf, punk-rocker, vampire, porcupine dinosaur and labelling it a vegetarian dino parrot that would have made a nice pet. It’s now even got its own twitter account @pegomastax. There are lots of sketches online but by far the best image is a resconstruction by Tyler Keillor. There’s also a video showing how he works up the data into a model dinosaur.