8 Squeezes for Your iPhone Battery

Battery life (Image courtesy of BatteryUniversity.com)

If you’ve just bought an iPhone, you’re probably expecting many happy years of battery power. Well, not so fast. Laptop batteries are very similar to rechargeable batteries in other devices, they wear out. I’ve had my current laptop for about 18 months and in the last few weeks I’ve noticed that I’m not getting quite the battery life from it that I was when I first bought it. I used to be able to run for about 3 hours doing wordprocessing, email, and web browsing even on a wireless connection. Lately, however, the lithium battery seems to run down within an hour or so, which is a real pain when I’m offsite.

I checked out Battery University to see if there is anything I can do to get my battery life back to normal. Apparently, there isn’t, and as a chemist, I should have known that (it’s all about crystallization of the components and such). It turns out that I basically broke all the rules concerning lithium battery use. Here’s a quick run down of what you should and shouldn’t do to help maintain the health of any lithium battery whether in a laptop, iPhone (other hybrid devices are available):

  1. Avoid frequent full discharges; regular partial discharges and an occasional full discharge are better. Lithium batteries have no charge “memory”, unlike NiCd batteries, so frequent recharging does no harm.
  2. Carry out a deliberate full discharge once every 30 charges, you can do this by simply running the battery down in the equipment (if you have power management enabled switch it off temporarily and make sure you are not running any critical software). An advantage of this approach is that it helps calibrate the battery fuel gauge and avoids premature hybernation.
  3. Keep the lithium-ion battery cool. Heat is a killer for batteries. Don’t leave your device in a hot car or window ledge, don’t use a laptop on your lap (how’s that for irony), above about 45 Celsius, a lithium will wear out very quickly.
  4. If you’re running on fixed power, think about removing the battery from a laptop to reduce the impact of internal heat. Of course, you lose the mobility advantage of the battery and also the safety should your mains power go down.
  5. Don’t buy spare lithium-ion batteries to use later on. Even when not in use a lithium battery will age.
  6. If you do have a spare lithium-ion battery, use one most of the time and keep the other wrapped in a hermetically sealed plastic box or bag in the refrigerator, but do not freeze your battery.
  7. If you have to store your battery or device, make sure it’s charged to about 40% before leaving it for extended periods.
  8. If you’ve just bought a new device, follow this advice and pop back in a year or so to let me know how you got on. After 12 months any lithium battery no matter how well looked after may lose up to 20% of its charging capacity but if you’ve lost more than that, then you probably broke the Battery University rules.

This post was originally destined for my blogging and browsing tips site Significant Figures, for more of the same and different again, check out the Sig Figs site at sciencetext.com

Electrochemical Synthesis of Metal and Semimetal Nanotubes

A rather intriguing paper has just been published by the Cambridge-based publishing wing of the Royal Society of Chemistry and highlighted by the scathing, satiricial crew at The Register (don’t visit that link if easily offended). It’s an outrage says The Register, but they’ve given the team a vulgar acronym award for their abbreviation of “copper nanotubes” and “bismuth nanotubes” nevertheless.

I’ll say no more except that apparently “Philip of Cambridge” tipped off The Register about this paper. Now, I’d like to know is “Philip” an aggrieved ex-member of the RSC’s Cambridge staff or is this another of that organisation’s rather adventurous (and some would say pointless) attempts to get its name mentioned in the media in the context of some spurious chemical happening (remember Carol Vorderman in mauveine dyed Victorian costume, or Superman on the side of buses in Hull?)

Fourteen Do’s and Don’ts for Medical Bloggers

acmedsci snake shhhh

Fellow freelance journalist James Butcher alerted me to the existence of a clutch of rather verbose guidelines for journalists and others pertaining to the reporting of medical research results.

The guidelines were published in November by the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences, an organisation that apparently promotes advances in medical science and campaigns to ensure these are translated as quickly as possible into healthcare benefits for society. The report primarily highlights the role of observational research in identifying environmental and lifestyle causes of disease, such as obesity and diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease etc, but warns researchers against overstating the importance of their findings.

The guidelines themselves actually formed part of a much wider document entitled not very snappily: Identifying the environmental causes of disease: how should we decide what to believe and when to take action?. The report’s title alone should have warned readers by now that the guidelines themselves are likely to raise a few issues.

Of course, most medical and science journalists will already have their own internal list of guidelines to follow, probably in much clearer and simple English, and directed firmly in the direction of writing the best piece they can rather than aimed at satisfying some higher bureaucratic order. Depending on the writer’s background these internal guidelines will overlap in essence with the fourteen do’s and don’ts listed below and in other areas there will be little common ground.

Some might say that the list of guidelines is a little patronising to journalists and written in an ostentatious and overblown manner. Others might point out that they assume far too much prior knowledge. Do political, legal, financial, and arts correspondents get such lists of guidelines I wonder? Would those correspondents, as opposed to a science or medical writer understand the technicalities of item 1a “What is the sample?” Well, if you know how to answer that question, you probably don’t need the guidelines, and if you don’t know how to answer it then you should maybe stick to covering art gallery openings and ministerial indiscretions. Either that or head back to school for a quick stats course.

This is not the first time an organisation like this has attempted to lay down guidelines for journalists and others. The Royal Society made an attempt at it a few years ago and recently revised them. Ironically, they did not consult the Association of British Science Writers in producing their guidelines and so they went down like the proverbial plumbum inflatable. More to the point, rulez is for breakin’ and if you’re a (tabloid) hack intent on writing a health scare story, then you’re going to write it regardless of any list of guidelines from an organisation of which you have probably never even heard. And, if you’re not a scaremonger, then, as I said before, you will already have your own endogenous list of guidelines.

Perhaps what is needed is some kind of guidance for the public rather than the journalists that allows them to make more sense of the dozens and dozens of health stories on cancer, obesity, estrogen, bird flu, HIV, MMR vaccination. Such advice might help them to see the facts when those internal guidelines have been overridden in the name of great headlines.

It would be an interesting exercise to analyse each of the news articles and others that I cited in a recent post entitled Obesity News Epidemic, to see just how well each of those mesh with the ACMedSci guidelines. Anyone care to take on the research project?

Anyway, with ACMedSci permission I’ve cribbed the guidelines below for your delectation and to save you wading through the 150 pages of the less-than snappy document. They were originally aimed at journalists and others in the media, presumably to help prevent sensationalisation and healthscares. They could be equally useful/useless (del. as applic.) to bloggers and others too.

  1. Pay detailed attention to the methodology of all studies being reported. Important questions to consider include: a. What was the sample? b. What were the measures? c. How strong were the effects in both relative and absolute terms? d. Has there been adequate attention to alternative explanations, and to good control of possible confounding variables? e. Has the finding been replicated? f. Is there supporting experimental or quasi-experimental evidence? g. Are the findings in keeping with what is known about disease mechanisms?
  2. Whilst it may not be appropriate to offer extensive discussion of all these details when writing or speaking to the general public, key aspects can be communicated successfully using clear, jargon free, language.
  3. The science or medical correspondent needs to have an appropriate grasp of the scientific issues in order to know how best to convey what was novel, interesting and important in the research.
  4. Exercise appropriate judgment in identifying and drawing attention to those points of design that are particularly relevant to the study in question – especially when ignoring them might lead to misunderstanding.
  5. Bear in mind the research track record of the researchers and of their employing institutions.
  6. Consider whether there are any conflicts of interest that might lead to possible bias.
  7. Seek to determine the theory or set of biological findings that constitute the basis for the research – noting how this fits in with, or forces changes in, what we already know or believe.
  8. Whilst paying appropriate attention to competing views, be wary of creating spurious and misleading ‘balance’ by giving equal weight to solid research evidence and weakly supported idiosyncratic views.
  9. Be very wary of drawing conclusions on the basis of any single study, whatever its quality.
  10. When considering public policy implications, draw a careful distinction between relative risk (i.e. the increased probability of some outcome given the disease causing factor) and absolute risk (i.e. the probability of that disease outcome in those with the disease risk).
  11. Use simple counts to describe risk whenever possible, rather than probabilities.
  12. Be careful, insofar as the evidence allows, to clarify whether the causal effect applies to everyone or only to a small special sub-segment of the population.
  13. Set the causal factor you are describing in the context of all known causal factors, whilst explaining that there may be others, as yet unknown or unsuspected.
  14. In writing about research, seek to educate and engage readers with the science and to encourage them to think critically.

Mickey Mouse Protein

A detailed structure of a potassium ion channel protein has been obtained by a Nobel team in the US. The structure shows the channel in a more natural state, revealing how attendant lipid molecules within the cell membrane influence channel function by their interaction with the proteinaceous Mickey Mouse ears that protrude from the protein into the lipid layer and act as a voltage sensor.

Membrane-bound proteins are among the most fascinating molecules in biology but are notoriously difficult to crystallise and study in detail in their natural, or even near-natural state. Now, Nobel scientist Roderick MacKinnon and colleagues at Rockerfeller University, have developed a new technique, lipid-detergent-mediated crystallization, which could open the door to studying the hundreds of membrane proteins previously inaccessible in their natural environment to crystallography.

More in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW crystallography ezine

Magnolia Gum, Organic Uranium, Biotech Sweetener

Magnolia flower

I’ve got a weird and wonderful mix of chemistry news again on the Reactive Reports site and my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com

Barking Up the Right Tree for Fresh Breath – A traditional Chinese extract from the bark of the magnolia tree could give you fresh breath and kill off the oral microbes that cause halitosis.

Cats Don’t Work Like That – The three-way catalytic converter in your car does not, it turns out, work the way chemists thought it did. One of the key functions of a “cat” is to convert toxic carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide.

Double Vision With Coordination Polymers – Calcite crystals can make you see double. You don’t ingest them to achieve some kind of mind warp effect; they are simply birefringent, having essentially two focal points.

Organic Uranium – The first ever uranium methylidyne molecule has been synthesized by US chemists despite the reactivity of the heavy, heavy metal.

And, in The Alchemist this week, we hear of an award to an entire nation for its efforts in energy research and development. In research news we hear of a record-breakingly short metal-metal bond that beats the textbook great, counterintuitive results of electron pairing comes to light in bismuth, and how to extract the organic impurities from water with an old filter for a fresher taste. Also in this week’s issue, a biotech solution to sweetness and a heads up for a Mickey Mouse protein involved in channeling potassium ions. The Alchemist Newsletter is available via ChemWeb.com, online since 1997.

Find Antioxidants Online

A new database of antioxidant values for a wide range of foods is now online. The main application will be in ongoing research on the purported health benefits of antioxidants. For example, many fruits and vegetables are known to be good sources of antioxidant vitamins, such as vitamin E, C, and beta-carotene, but these natural foods also contain other compounds, collectively known as phytonutrients, that may contribute to health effects. You can find the ORAC database here.

Sweet Proteins, Crystallised Proteins

Brazzein sweet protein

A new naturally derived artificial sweetener could soon hit the market, thanks to the development of a mass production technique devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison research Fariba Assadi-Porter. The sweetener, known as brazzein, is a 54 amino acid protein derived from an extract of the fruit of the tropical plant Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon. It has been eaten in West Africa across the millennia, but only recently caught the attention of the West because of its incredible sweetness. The protein extract tastes sweet only to humans and old-world monkeys and is is 2000 times sweeter than sucrose when compared to a 2% solution of sugar.

Assadi-Porter and her colleagues are using spectroscopy to help them understand the relationship between the structure of this protein and its sweetness. They have recently devised a new approach to fermenting it on a large scale and startup company Natur Research is now seeking FDA approval to commercialise the protein as a food stuff for the low-calorie drinks and food industries. A paper detailing the production process has now been accepted by Protein Expression and Purification Journal, and you can read more about the story in the NMR channel on SpectroscopyNOW.

More on proteins in this week’s issue: Roderick MacKinnon and his colleagues at Rockerfeller U have come up with a novel technique, lipid-detergent-mediated crystallization, that allows them to crystallise membrane proteins, such as the voltage-dependent potassium ion channel, in as near as natural state as possible. The approach could open the door to countless studies of membrane proteins using crystallography that have not previously been possible. More on that in the SpectroscopyNOW X-ray ezine, here

Also in this week’s round up, news not related directly to proteins and molecular biology. Researchers in Canada and the US have used MRI to demonstrate that there is something like a three-year delay in the development of certain regions of the brain in children with ADHD. The most obvious delay is seen in the front cortex, a region important in thinking, concentration, and planning. Rather than worrying parents, the discovery should be reassuring to parents and sufferers, says Philip Shaw of the NIMH Child Psychiatry Branch who led the research because although there is a delay, brain development is otherwise normal. “Finding a normal pattern of cortex maturation, albeit delayed, in children with ADHD should be reassuring to families and could help to explain why many youth eventually seem to grow out of the disorder,” he says.

The research also revealed that the regions affected by the developmental delay are coincident with the regions that develop precociously in children with autism. More on the scan results, again in SpectroscopyNOW.

Open Access Scientific Publishing

Imperial College’s Bob MacCallum runs an interesting site called Compare Stuff, which I’ve reviewed on various occasions elsewhere. Recently, he started blogging about some of the interesting results that emerge when you compare search engine hit rates for different terms against each other. One of the most interesting comparisons was run using the terms “open access” versus “journal”.

The results produce an intriguing chart in which there appear to be far more mentions of bioinformatics in the context of the term journal and open access compared with, say, maths, astronomy, or psychology. As MacCallum is bioinformaticist he says that this makes sense as many of the leading figures in the open access movement come from this field. However, physicists and computer scientists have been enormously active, if less vocal, about OA, so it is odd that those two fields do not show up quite so sharpy. What about open access chemistry, you say? Hmmmm.

Give MacCallum’s Compare Stuff site a try, it’s quite amazing what charts you can make. I just tried Organic versus Inorganic in the context of “emotions”. It looks like organic and inorganic are equally stressful but leave few people anxious, scared, lonely, happy, jealous, angry or sad.

Scientific Job Surfing

Science Job Surfing

‘Be as creative, obscure and tangential as possible,’ is Allan Jordan’s advice to anyone surfing the net for a new job. He tried every site available until he got his present position at Cambridge-based Ribotargets a small pharmaceutical research outfit, having worked on novel pro-drug approaches to the treatment of malignant melanoma (MDEPT) and other anticancer agents at Reading University in England.

Jordan’s method worked well. ‘I searched every job site for any vacancies not just in medicinal chemistry, but in assay development, molecular biology, biochemistry, and pharmacokinetics,’ he says and this eventually got him a job.

When you are looking for that perfect position, a spot of surfing could certainly speed things up. Some approaches might work better than others and in the end it all boils down to what you have to offer and what you are looking for.

A general jobs site such as New Scientist Jobs or ScienceCareers is probably as good a place to start as any. ‘The best use I’ve found of the net is the on-line newspapers, The Guardian, The Telegraph, New Scientist…’ says Bob Noble, virtual reality researcher at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Nature, New Scientist and Science took the brunt of Jordan’s searching too, but there’s lots of competition from other applicants from the print editions, which is where a more focused site like ScienceCareers or ScienceJobs can help.

ScienceCareers provides more than just jobs listings adding advice, employer profiles, careers fair information and features on job-market issues. ‘Such sites also helps you prepare for an interview,’ says biology post-doc Sarah Milburn.

If your ambitions are more focused, then a specialist site might be the next place to visit. ‘If you go to the more generalized sites,’ Paul Guinnessy, Webmaster at PhysicsWeb explains, ‘you get swamped by adverts, with a specialist site you can drill down to specific subject areas.’

In contrast, Noble found the experience of net job searching disheartening, ‘Basically, my difficulty is matching what I have to what is there. Years of research and development experience, a PhD in computer graphics, a maths degree, experience with robots and the nuclear industry. I’m a researcher more than a programmer, I like graphics but I don’t write games. How do you tell that to a search engine?’

There are more useful approaches for specialist job seekers, however. ‘The general rule,’ says Darien Pugh who headed up ChemWeb’s Job Exchange [no longer available], ‘is the more specific a site, the more likely you are to look at it and the more likely you are to come across the information you need.’ Paul Heelis of Chemjobs.net emphasizes the point, try searching for a chemistry job at a general site, he suggests: ‘You will be lucky to get more than three,’ he says.

Stephanie van Willigenburg highlights the international benefits of job seeking on the net if you’re working abroad. ‘I’m doing a post-doc at York U in Toronto, and certainly all the jobs I’ve applied for this year have been from internet lists or the Web,’ she says, ‘the web has been invaluable for reading ads in the UK’s Times Higher Education Supplement and useful for checking out people’s research interests so you can tailor your application to a particular department.’

According to Phil Mackie who did endless surfing till he got his current post-doc position at Trinity College Dublin, ‘The web sites of the learned societies and the science journals are the best place to start because the other sites don’t focus on the scientific sub-divisions.’ As far as uploading a resume though, he says, ‘Sometimes you need to ‘fine tune’ a resume to match the job you are going for – but if you’re posting your resume it has to be general.’

Chris Rayner a researcher working on nucleic acids and biotransformations at Leeds University has successfully placed ads for post-docs on the academic site www.jobs.ac.uk. But, while that has been a successful approach for finding candidates, he reveals that his own students are more likely to get a job through careers fairs than by other means, though.

Some web sites allow you to post a resume into a repository of putative interviewees. What approach might you use to boost the chances of your resume being picked from the potentially hundreds if not thousands of others out there? ‘It is crucial to put in all the important information,’ says Pugh, ‘and the kinds of ‘keywords’ you would normally include in a paper resume, such as “teamworker”, “management experience” etc.’

So, your resume is in good shape, is there anything else to watch out for in using the internet as a career stepping stone? First, you should avoid being caught by your employer’s site-tracking software by doing your searching from home – some employers are taking an increasingly hard line on Internet ‘abuse’. But, even if you do all your surfing from home that won’t hide your resume once it is posted so your employer could readily discover you are looking for a new job. ‘Candidates, can specify the companies they don’t want to be shown to at ChemJobs.net’, says Heelis, which offers some protection to the rightly paranoid. Pugh, is also now considering anonymous resume posting for those who want it, although he points out that it is difficult to hide itchy feet in the workplace!

Guinnessy does not recognize this as a problem, in physics at least, and probably the academic world in general. ‘I think most employers are too busy to go surfing around the jobs-wanted pages of various sites and the risk is limited, especially considering most scientists are on short-term contracts anyway!’

This feature article originally appeared in my Adapt or Die column on HMSBeagle although many of the ideas discussed are as valid today as they ever were. However, some of the people interviewed are not necessarily in the same jobs now as they were at the time of writing. Please let me know in the comments if you have any updates I should publish.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

AAAS Science Careers

New Scientist Jobs

Institute of Physics Job Site

Science Jobs

Chemistry Jobs

If you have any jobs sites you’d like me to add to the list, please leave a comment and a link

This Little Epo Goes to Market

Epothilone B Ixempra

One of the very first articles I wrote for Elemental Discoveries (Issue 3 in March 1997, it was) was on the subject of a novel class of anticancer compound that had been isolated from soil bacteria. The article (archived now on Sciencebase) discussed the discovery of a total synthesis for the archetypal epothilone. Well, more than a decade since, and two decades after their initial discovery, the epothilones are about to enter the pharmaceutical market under the Bristol-Myers Squibb marque.

The epothilones that Gerhard Höfle and Hans Reichenbach discovered in myxobacteria block the somatic cell components known as microtubules, inhibiting cell division causing tumors to shrink or even disappear.

Bristol-Myers Squibb acquired the license for epothilone B for clinical testing. As of this month, US oncologists can prescribe epo B, under the tradename Ixempra, for metastatic breast cancer. European approval is anticipated for 2008.

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