Month: November 2016

Back in 1995, my blog (before they even called them web logs, letalone ‘blogs and thence blogs) was a chemistry news site called Elemental Discoveries, which had started life in the newly launched young chemists’ magazine from the RSC, which I renamed “New Elements” (It used to be called Gas Jar, back in the, back in the, back in the day). Anyway, at the time, chemists were trying to fill the gaps in the Periodic Table…today IUPAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, announces the official naming of new elements 113, 115, 117, 118 as nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og), respectively.

With thanks to Lars Öhrström for the idea for the graphic.

New evidence from Stonehenge suggests that travellers made the journey from what is now the Vale of York (250 miles away) with their “pet” dog thousands of years before the stone monument was even built.

You can read my comment on this scientific discovery on the Materials Today site.

Time travellers with nothing better to do just sent me a GCSE history exam paper from the summer of 2066…makes for interesting and yet worrying reading…

GCSE History Paper 2 23rd June 2066

World War III (20 January 2017-21 January 2017)

Answer all questions in this section. You are advised to spend 90 minutes of the two-hour exam on question 3

Question 1 In what way did Jeremy Corbyn’s inadequacies as an opposition leader contribute to the succession of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister following Theresa May’s abduction for anal probing by aliens on Christmas Day 2016?

Question 2 Was Russia’s Vladimir Putin given the go ahead by US President-elect Donald Trump to annexe Lithuania on New Year’s Day 2017. Discuss in the light of the attached Wikileaks document from Ecuadorian premier Juliano Assangito.

Question 3 Lord Nige of Watney was not to blame for the rapid emergence of an alt-right (also known as the neo-Nazi movement) in the US, Australia and post-EU Europe during the autumn of 2016 despite the boasts of his House of Lords inauguration speech. Discuss.

Calling Trekkies and ubernerds everywhere…fancy an exact replica of the original Star Trek communicator just 50 years after the show launched and hopefully in time for Christmas. The Wand Company who first brought you a universal remote control Harry Potter wand and a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver to change channels (oh, and a phaser!) have now surpassed even the hypergeek’s wildest dreams with a Communicator that couples to your Bluetooth phone and lets you receive calls and make calls using voice dialling with a compatible phone .

Perfect for ultra-realistic cosplay events. The Communicator was created from high-res 3D scans of the last known prop from the show. It pairs with Bluetooth phones, flips open to let you answer calls from Scottie or anyone else. Has a 1 million kilometre range when communicating with the starship Enterprise (available from 2260, hopefully) but can reach almost any phone on planet Earth via coupling to a smart phone (coupling works at < 5-metre range), up to an estimated 20000 km range. It features die-cast zinc, CNC machined aluminium, iridescent coated jewels and contactless charging. It also has 20 authentic voice clips and Original Series Communicator sound FX. Comes with a moulded foam lined transit case and leatherette pouch (whether the latter is warm or otherwise is down to you). In the US, you can get a Communicator from Best Buy, ThinkGeek.com, Amazon.com, Hammacher Schlemmer or StarTrek.com. In the UK, it's available from Firebox.com, Amazon.co.uk or Forbidden Planet. For Australia, it's Latest Buy or Yellow Octopus and in New Zealand: Mighty Ape.

I was thinking of writing an essay about how much I’d travelled in my youth. Not to brag, you understand, but just to say how I’d always felt I was a citizen of the world hopping from place to place. I worked in the US, travelled coast to coast and back (23 of the 50 states covered), backpacked around Australia (almost all the major cities except Perth amd Hobart), southern Africa (Botswana and Zimbabwe anyway) and Europe (France, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Greece, Holland, Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia), visited Turkey, Malta, Portugal, The Canary Islands, and various other places.

At one point, I was on the verge of emigrating perhaps to live and work in Vancouver or San Francisco, it didn’t happen for one reason or another. Regardless, the world seemed to be heading towards more openness and equality, more colour, despite the emergence of some nasty fundamentalist elements.

Now, on the 27th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the election of Trunt, it’s all becoming about borders and boundaries again, especially now my home country is peri-Brexit (judges ruling aside). I was going to post a map of the US coloured with a fake tan tint, to show how the nation is going to look for the next four years, a kind of orangey-bllsht colour. But, instead I just made it several shades of grey…welcome to the new world of closed systems and entrumpy.

 

Language changes as time marches on, usage becomes abusage and vice versa with phrases like “the number of people” morphing into the grammatically incorrect “the amount of people”, as if someone pureed the crowd and weighed it rather than counting everyone present. It’s only pedantic grammazis, like me, who care. Although that said, if a change introduces ambiguity that’s not a good thing. Take a word like “quite”. A Brit might say your outfit is “quite nice”…they’d mean it wasn’t actually nice at all, but they were being polite and suggesting that it’s “okay”. Conversely, Americans would assume the Brit meant the outfit was “very, completely, totally, wholly nice”.

But, it’s not just grammar and verbal structure that change. What if I were to tell you that complete piles of words have totally changed in meaning over the years? For example, “nephew” originally meant grandson, a “hussy” was a housewife, “busking” was piracy and a “cloud” was at one time a rock. Ask for a “shampoo” back in the old days and you’d have got a massage, call someone a “punk” and you were implying that they sold sexual favours, as it originally meant prostitute.

In his latest book, Paul Anthony Jones traces the remarkable twists and turns of English words, verbal hanky-panky at its best. “Hanky-panky” originally meant sleight of hand!

The Accidental Dictionary out now from E and T books.

Remember when your parents told you to eat your greens…well…there are plenty of benefits, but one of them might bear fruit if you would like to long long and prosper. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis have demonstrated increased longevity in mice fed a compound known as NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide. This substance is found naturally in broccoli, cabbage, cucumber, avocado and other foods.

They suggest that its mode of action may be to compensate for a loss of energy production, and so reduce typical signs of aging such as gradual weight gain, loss of insulin sensitivity and decline in physical activity. NMN is the metabolic compound one step back from the molecular key to energy-production, NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide biochemical production of which falls with age in mice. Given that human cells carry almost identical processes as mouse cells, it is likely that NMN supplementation could reinvigorate elderly people too and allow them to be more physical active, avoid middle-age spread and the like. The compound shows no toxicity even in long-term supplementation, in the laboratory mice, the team reports in the journal Cell Metabolism.

The effects of NMN highlight the preventive and therapeutic potential of NAD intermediates as effective anti-aging interventions in humans.

There is a Phase 1 clinical trial of NMN currently underway in Japan (product from Oriental Yeast Co., same NMN as used in the mouse studies. However, you cannot yet by high-grade NMN fit for human consumption as a supplement. So, keep eating those greens…broccoli, cucumber and avocado, in particular!

Metal-organic frameworks, MOFs, are a relatively recent discovery. They are crystalline three-dimensional materials formed from a regular network of metal ions interlinked by organic molecules. The organic groups act as spacers to keep the metal ions apart, generally giving rise to permanent porosity within the solid. These pores can adsorb a wide range of small molecules, often with a useful degree of specificity and the materials have been touted as safe gas storage materials, greenhouse gas absorbers, molecular sieves for separating different gases, sensors and catalysts. I recently wrote about the latest development with these fascinating materials for my Research Highlights column in the Chemistry Views magazine – http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/chemv.201600095

Dermot O’Hare, of the University of Oxford, UK, and his team have used a real-time technique to analyse one particularly promising class of MOFs that could help in the design of new materials with highly specific functionality for a wide range of applications.

All that said, despite more than two decades of intensive research, the synthesis of MOFs has not yet reached the level of real controlled design, although a few approaches such as the secondary building units route previously led to some successes, says Christian Serre of Paris Research University, France. “Understanding how these tunable architectures form in solution is still of great interest,” he told me. Serre points out that the role of ligands, pH and additives have already been addressed, but the influence of the metal cation over the formation mechanism of MOFs remains largely unexplored. “O’Hare and colleagues have not only proposed a new kinetic model to follow the formation mechanism of MOFs but also have evidence for what most researchers have suspected so far, i.e. how the kinetics and the metal ligand lability are related,” he explains. “This represents a really significant piece of work that will certainly be very useful for MOF researchers to construct more advanced architectures in the near future.”

We’ve all had the request…friend of a friend’s daughter is doing a science project (it might be school, university, real-world) and we all jump in with our answers hoping to be helpful. The most recent one I saw popped up on Facebook and there were lots of “Done” comments and one that added “I hope I didn’t skew her data”.

It’s fine, it was banter, and I’m sure the commenter was simply alluding to their answers perhaps deviating from the norm more than anyone else’s (I bet they didn’t many of us imagine our lives to be far more weird than those of other people, but the truth is that most of us fit well within the bulk of the bell curve for most behaviour).

Regardless, skewed data should be what scientists hope for, whether they’re just starting out or they’re academic experts in the field. Results usually fit a bell curve and the average, the mean, the norm, all sit within that bell, they fit the data…it is the outliers, the data at the ends of the bell curve, whether at the left or the right extreme that can be the most interesting. The person who does or doesn’t do that thing a thousand times more frequently than the average person, what’s going on there? The rare result that is miles from the mean is the most intriguing…although it may well be only a single data point it can point to diversity in a theory that might open up entirely new understanding or even overturn the deceived wisdom.

The most interesting science comes not from the "Oh, thank goodness everything fits my theory", but from the "WTF? experiments"