Author: David Bradley

As a chemist, I was drawn to Breaking Bad from the very start. One of the coolest scenes is in Episode 6 of series…sorry season 3, when Gale makes Walt (Heisenberg to the drug world) the best cup of coffee he has ever tasted using apparatus rigged up in the crystal meth factory lab owned by Gus. Breaking Bad is back on US screens later in July.

The opening credits for Breaking Bad based on the Periodic Table are almost as cool as the show itself:

On July 4th this year, CERN will make an announcement based on activity at its multi-billion Euro Large Hadron Collider that will probably take us a step closer to being able to say that we have found the so-called “God Particle”, the Higgs boson that allegedly endows matter with mass.

It will be just another step on the road through the world of particle physics, but will it be just another baby step or a particulate giant leap?

According to Sean Carroll:

The Higgs boson is not the end of a road; it’s a bridge from one world to another. It’s the last particle we need to make the Standard Model complete, but it also gives us a way to travel to what’s beyond, whether that might be dark matter, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, or what have you. Sadly we’re not in possession of a reliable map; we just have to cross the bridge and see where it takes us.

Hunting for Higgses.

Self-professed cyberpunk Jonty Campbell sent me a link to a site reporting that the Brazilian adventure-travel magazine, Go Outside, has collaborated with Sao Paulo radio station, Band FM, to broadcast a music program that suppoedly repels mosquitoes. The radio station purportedly broadcasts a continuous tone at 15 kilohertz, which the site says is “inaudible to humans”, but “repels mosquitoes because it mimics the sound of dragonflies – a natural predator of mosquitoes”.

Well, I wasn’t convinced. For a start a lot of people can hear frequencies from around 20 Hz to 20 kHz. I can certainly hear 15 kHz on my laptop speakers when I do the test provided here. And, while I cannot hear 16 or 17 kHz, I can just hear a really, really high and quiet tone at 18 kHz. It would explain why our neighbour’s ultrasonic cat scarer was always so annoying (it generates a swirling tone at somewhere around 15 kHz. The older you get the narrower your hearing’s frequency response.

Anyway, I suspect somewhere, two things have been confused. The first is that about 10 years ago, a manufacturer started offering shopkeepers and town councils a device that was meant to scare off errant teenagers, youthful wannabe vandals, young shoplifters and under-age hoodies, by generating an annoying, high-pitched sound that respectable middle-aged people wouldn’t be able to hear but that would be unbearable to the youths. The device was known as a mosquito (presumably because the sound was akin to the high-pitched whining of the flying, biting insects).

There are smart phone apps that generate such high-pitched tones and errant teenagers on public transport use them to annoy middle-aged passengers whose hearing hasn’t quite gone yet. There are also so-called mosquito repellant apps for Android and iPhone that generate similarly high-pitched tones to scare away mosquitoes as well as standalone gadgets. I presume that back in Brazil, this is what that radio station is hoping to do. But, it all sounds very fishy…

A report on the Rutgers website by Wayne J. Crans, Associate Research Professor in Entomology, points out that the rationale for these anti-mosquito devices and apps is that:

“…repels females who have already mated and do not wish to be mated a second time. Others claim to mimic the sound of a hungry dragonfly, causing mosquitoes to flee the area to avoid becoming the predator’s next meal. Most of the electronic repellers on the market hum on a single frequency.”

They do not work. There is no scientific evidence that mosquitoes are repelled by high-frequency sounds at all. Moreover, dragonflies do not emit such high sounds their flapping wings almost buzz…that’s at most likely to generate a sound around the 50-250 Hz range. Indeed, a National University of Taiwan study pins the dragonfly wing beat fundamental at 170 Hz. That’s almost 100 times lower a frequency than the claimed anti-mosquito tone.

Moreover, according to Crans: “Mated female mosquitoes do not flee from amorous males, and mosquitoes do not vacate an area hunted by dragonflies.” The Brazilian radio show, if it really does broadcast evening-time anti-mosquito tones has been duped, or is simply trying to boost the tourist trade by somehow showing willing that the mossie problem is being addressed.

Seemingly, a whole fraudulent industry has been created that is as effective at repelling mosquitoes as homeopathy is at preventing tourists from catching malaria. In other words, it’s most certainly not effective! It’s scurrilous that such devices and apps, some of which are rather expensive, are being touted as protection against the mosquito which carries such a deadly disease.

I strongly suspect that the idea emerged from the anti-teenager technology known as The Mosquito, which teenagers have now turned on those who are anti them through annoying, high pitched phone apps. Anyway, that’s enough whining for today.

Mosquito photo by Dan McKay

I discussed Mendeley when it first launched and I perceived it as a kind of “Napster for Research Papers”, although more accurately you might think of it as “iTunes in the Cloud for PDFs”. Anyway, I’ve accumulated quite a few PDFs during my 20+ years as a science writer. I’m gradually adding papers to my Mendeley account, which will add to their meta-database.

I’ve uploaded about 1000 PDFs so far, I’m sure there’ll be some errant formats, but seems to be fine so far. They’re all searchable and if they happen to be in Open Access journals you’ll be able to read the full paper, otherwise it will be just the abstract and meta data. Unless of course you have access to the journals via your library or IP address subscription.

Meanwhile, I now need to dig out my backup drives and search and select more PDFs from my archives.

Sciencebase on Mendeley.

Back in the 20th century, around the time quantum physics was emerging, Niels Bohr tried to explain the pattern of elements that make up the Periodic Table based on the order in which each atom’s “shells” fill with electrons. Unfortunately, the theoretical filling order governed by the so-called Aufbau principle doesn’t actually work experimentally and chemists had to adopt a sloppy version of the principle to make the Periodic Table fit the real-life chemistry rather than the theory.

This sloppy version of Bohr’s approach litters the chemical literature and textbooks across the globe. This one little lie leads to others as chemistry educators have to invent more and more elaborate kludges to explain why the electron filling does not in reality follow the order predicted by the principle.

Now, chemical philosopher Eric Scerri has exposed the sloppiness and suggests it is time for chemists to abandon the physicist’s 20th century explanation as to how their periodic table works and devise their own principle that fits not only the experimental data but is a worthy theory to make future predictions about real elements.

After all, wasn’t it Feynman who said: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

The trouble with Aufbau.

It’s unlikely to be a comfortable place to deliver a baby, but now a video documents the first birth in an MRI machine.

Christian Bamberg and a team from Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany, announced the world first in December 2010, but the movie has only recently been released.

New Scientist TV: Babys birth captured in MRI movie for the first time.

Michael McIntyre and Steven Murphy of Carleton University and Bernard Funston of Northern Canada Consulting in Ottawa, and Canada, suggest that the resources required to sustain human life are being degraded perhaps to the point of no return. They suggest that now is the time for collective action; we must take a long, hard look at the notion of economic growth and development, and re-examine humanity’s choices that encompass a fundamental shift in how we measure economic success, productivity and human happiness.

Given the West’s propensity to measure success in terms of economic growth, we seem to have produced a political environment that has a zero-tolerance for slow or negative growth. We somehow imagine that only with growth will our world, our nations, and our citizens be happy. And yet rising pollution levels, environmental degradation, resource depletion, industrial disasters and the failure of financiers seems to be plunging us into a quagmire of misery. If we consider the Earth to be a closed system in terms of materials (rather than energy), then thermodynamically endless growth was always destined to be something of an oxymoron.

Some observers have suggested that given the recent decrease in family sizes across the globe, the human population will top out at about 10 billion by 2050 or thereabouts. That is still a lot of people. We have a mere 7 billion today and many struggle with disease, poverty, malnutrition and unclean water. McIntyre and colleagues emphasise that the notion of economic growth “seems to be fuelled by a deep-seated acceptance in many societies of the idea that personal and social welfare should improve indefinitely, and that [global] gross domestic product (GDP) should grow to support this.” They point out that some people still believe that endless economic growth is not fundamentally at odds with the natural world, but their analysis to be published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics leads them to doubt that this is true. In fact they posit the idea of a growth-equity frontier that amounts to a boundary on the combination of economic growth on hand, and equalization of GDP per capita across individuals on the other, that the planet can support.

The idea of a boundary on the growth-equity frontier leads them to offer three suggestions as to how we might rebalance humanity and “save the planet”:

• Problems need to be shared – Greater attention needs to be given to what can be done to successfully manage slow or zero-growth economies and to spread the economic effects of small downturns more evenly over a population.
• Benefits need to be shared – We need equalise welfare among nations in terms of GDP per capita rather than in terms of total economic growth.
• Ideas must displace materialism – a paradigm shift must take place that sees the main focus of personal happiness move away from material consumption to the creation and consumption of ideas.

So, sharing our problems, sharing our resources, being happy with ideas and not possessions. I’m sure I’ve read about such ideas in some ancient books and scripts…

Michael L. McIntyre, Steven A. Murphy, & Bernard Funston (2012). If not growth, then what? Int. J. Business Governance and Ethics, 7 (2), 96-117