Author: David Bradley

Resistant to Base

It has been some time since we had a video interlude on Sciencebase, but I just could not resist this one. It’s definitely one for fans of the late, great Robert Palmer and synthetic organic chemists everywhere.

The lights are on, but you’re not home
You’re in the lab, work-ing alone
Your synthesis, is nearly done
Just add a chain to that car-bon

Don’t you know its resistant to base? The pH is past 14 and your stirring bar is dissol-ving! Dig those shoe covers and the impromptu appearance of a mop head. The only song in the world to rhyme potassium t-butoxide and ammonium hydroxide.

Thanks to Chemistry Central blog to bringing this one to our attention. Bryan Vickery has gathered together several chemistry covers on the site.

Funding the All-electric Aircraft

Superconducting motorToday, Philippe Masson of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and Center for Advanced Power Systems and colleagues at NASA and Georgia Tech publish details of an entirely new class of aircraft engine that, if it takes off, could lead to an all-electric aircraft that would cut airport pollution and reduce aircraft vapor trails to a distant memory. You can read my write-up about the work on the AlphaGalileo site here.

Unfortunately, while the science is sound, no one is yet beating a path to the inventors’ door, despite NASA backing. I asked Masson why he thought this was the case and his answer provides some cutting insights into the nature of the transport industry and the manufacturers that currently underpin it.

First off he pointed out that, “Conventional jet engines (turbofans) are very reliable and can still be improved: people are still working on NOx and noise reduction (including as part of our NASA sponsored project),” he says, “Therefore, there is a lot of inertia and imposing a new and totally different technology would be very difficult.” The major advantage of using electrical power is environment preservation because the performance of an all-electric aircraft would be unchanged unless one takes into account increased controllability and decreased maintenance requirements.

Masson’s electric jet is based on using zero-resistance superconducting materials as the magnetic components of the turbo-driving motor, but he points out that these, and cryogenic support systems needed to make them work, are still very expensive thus making funding difficult to find. It is possible that mass production would reduce costs to an economically viable level, but that is probably not going to happen any time soon.

“The motor designs we proposed can exhibit impressive power densities that would unfortunately almost only benefit airborne applications, there are no other applications with critical constraints in terms of weight and volume,” he told me, “As for the car industry in which combustion engine manufacturers are putting a lot of pressure to prevent new clean technologies to take off, jet engine manufacturers would not be happy to see electrical propulsion systems becoming a new standard.”

“An all-electric aircraft prototype is feasible,” he adds, “but imposing this technology as a replacement to gas turbines would still require a lot of research and development to meet flight requirements in terms of reliability.” However, Masson asserts that the appearance of increasingly electrical airliners from both Airbus and Boeing could hint at a future of all-electric aircraft. “I am convinced that one day in a not so far future we will see small electrically powered aircraft,” he says. He concedes that, “It will be years, probably tens of years, before we can see a truly all-electrical aircraft as all the components require extensive testing and a very high reliability before being implemented in airplanes.”

Masson and his colleagues have approached several companies and aircraft manufacturers and have not yet been successful in getting funding to build a prototype of their superconducting propulsion motor for which patents are pending. “We are still hopeful and will keep looking for funding,” he says.

Science in the Movies

Some time ago, I wrote a feature for the long since scuppered HMS Beagle on BioMedNet.com on the subject of science in the movies. I interviewed various scientists and people in the movie industry about the role of experts in advising on plot lines and details. It was quite a departure from the usual research reporting and was part of my once-monthly “Adapt or Die” column for the webzine. Sadly missed, for a short time, by many life scientists.

One thing that strikes me repeatedly is the lack of chemistry in the movies, other than the chemistry of weapons of mass destruction, of course. Carl Djerassi attempted to bring chemistry to the fore in his Nobel play, Oxygen, but that was a one-off and was in a sense a test-bed for his ethical and moral debates which he embeds in many of his science in fiction scripts. UPDATE: Of course, there was the wonderful Breaking Bad that came much later than this blog post from 2007!

Living Chirality

LeucineYet another possible explanation for the bias in life’s handedness – the fact that nature uses mainly only form of the building blocks of proteins – comes from Dutch chemists experimenting with the sublimation of amino acids.

Writing in the latest issue of my alma mater Chemical Communications, Ben Feringa and colleagues at the University of Groningen have demonstrated significant enantioenrichment of a variety of amino acids by sublimation in which preferential evaporation of the predominant enantiomer occurs from a mixture of low ee amino acids. They lay claim to this process as being a possible mechanism for the presence of ee of amino acids under the conditions found in space.

Theories abound as to why life on earth predominantly uses L amino acids. Most rely on some obscure initial set conditions and a convoluted route from a small excess in outer space to the seeding of amino acids on earth. While Feringa and colleagues discuss their findings in terms of interplanetary conditions it may be just as possible that their process had some counterpart on the primordial earth.

InChI=1/C6H13NO2/c1-4(2)3-5(7)6(8)9/h4-5H,3,7H2,1-2H3,(H,8,9)/f/h8H

Thumbing Scientific Papers

A rather eye-catching paper was posted on the ChemRank site recently entitled: How to write consistently boring scientific literature. The paper is a parody on the art of writing a research paper by biologist Kaj Sand-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen. And begins, “Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific publications. I then discuss why we should and how we could make these contributions more accessible and exciting.” Are you enticed by Sand-Jensen’s intro? Me neither. It just seems it would be as terse and as inaccessible to a lay reader as any of the papers he parodies. You can give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down on ChemRank.

Atomic Chips

Atomic chip schematicLaboratory spectrometers are great lumbering beasts, essentially tied to the bench and useless for slipping into an overnight bag and heading off for a spot of analytical field work. Thankfully researchers are working on changing all that, at least in the area of atomic spectroscopy.

Holger Schmidt of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Aaron Hawkins at Brigham Young University and their colleagues have found a way to build an atomic absorption spectrometer on a chip just a few centimetres across. I report on their work in more detail in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.

Schmidt told me that the new instrument could be used not only in gas sensors and other portable analytical devices but also to stabilize the frequency of lasers and even in the future world of quantum information processing, which will revolutionize computing and telecommunications.

“Frequency stabilization could be implemented within a couple of years,” he says, “while quantum communications applications are definitely further out, at least ten years, that work is in the fundamental science stage which makes it very exciting for us.”

Nuclear Chemistry and Web 2.0

Mitch Garcia interviewBerkeley nuclear chemist Mitch André Garcia is very much a modern chemist. He is not content with the staid old laboratory notebook and blotchy ballpoint in his labcoat. No! Garcia is a web-chemist.

Aside from his excellent work on the chemistry of the element rutherfordium, he has created a network of chemistry websites that provide answers to an almost unthinkable number of questions about the science (actually, there are about 1000 Q and A), offer hundreds of fellow chemists and students the chance to share their thoughts online, and a couple of weekends ago, he knocked together a new website that works like the voting system on Digg, the social bookmarking site, but for chemistry research papers rather than random news and images, ChemRank.

I interviewed Garcia for the June issue of chemistry webzine Reactive Reports. I asked him whether a growing online presence might present a problem for chemists, who traditionally work in a very physical science. “A complaint or compliment I frequently get from my colleagues is that I already seem to live online,” he told me, “Aside from rogue chemical developers like myself, there will always be room for glassware in a chemist’s life in our ever increasing in silico lives.” Read the full interview in Reactive Reports.

Five Dimensional Online Gifts

Online communitiesDifferent social media, such as wikis, MySpace, Flickr, and various forums have different ways for people to give and receive gifts, according to Swedish scientists.

To fully understand online gifting and the successes and failures of online communities, we need to consider the question “who gives what to whom, how and why?”

Every day, more and more people join online communities, such as MySpace, FaceBook, and Second Life, and use file sharing systems like BitTorrent. In these virtual spaces they can reinvent themselves, make new friends, and share information and resources with others. Understanding how people give and receive digital items, “gifts”, online is key to understanding the successes and failures of countless online communities.

Now, computer scientist Jörgen Skågeby of Linköping University in Sweden writing in the International Journal of Web Based Communities, explains how there are five dimensions to the way people give and receive gifts online, whether those gifts are information, mp3 files, photos, or illicit file shares.

  • Initiative – spontaneous giving and sharing, e.g. SourceForge.net and flickr.com
  • Direction – the path the gift follows
  • Incentive – exploited in point-scoring systems such as BitTorrent networks
  • Identification – anonymous or recognised
  • Limitation – access control

Gifting is a central human activity in many communities, both offline and online, explains SkÃ¥geby, “As more and more of human social activities will be copied or migrate entirely to online, we need to consider what dimensions are central to these activities, so that we can analyse their long-term impact on individuals and society.”

SkÃ¥geby’s work is reported in Int. J. Web Based Communities, 2007, 3, 55.

Power Down to Save the World

Standby buttonAccording to the UK’s Energy Savings Trust we have at least 12 gadgets on standby or recharging at any one time, including TVs, mobile phones, mp3 players, which adds up to a cost of about 40 pounds ($80) a year on domestic electricity bills. There is a strong call from environmental lobbyists for us to power down our electrical devices and now John Clare, outgoing head of one of the UK’s biggest high street electrical retailers, is calling on manufacturers to eradicate the “standby” button from devices such as DVD players and TVs.

According to Clare, when given a choice between a less efficient and a more energy efficient product, customers choose the least costly option. “Standby buttons costs so much money and produce carbon emissions,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today show, “of which many consumers are not aware.” He suggests that because our modern lifestyles demand so many electrical gadgets that the onus should be on the manufacturers to produce more energy-efficient products and for retailers to keep the consumer informed of the energy ratings of these devices and not just the “white goods”, such as washers and dryers which already have an efficiency code.

The interviewer pointed out to Clare that the standby mode on a television is very important to the elderly and those of limited mobility. Clare responded by saying that such people can “use remote controls”. At this point, I got rather confused. He is advocating that manufacturers get rid of the proverbial “standby button”, which means that a device would be fully powered down to save energy. That’s fine, sounds sensible. But, if there is no standby mode and the device is fully “off”, how will a remote control help the elderly person who may not be able to clamber from their chair, bend to switch the TV on? Doesn’t the remote control require the device to be in a ready, “standby” state before it will function.

Clare then back peddled slightly and said that the standby button could perhaps be a kind of optional accessory that those of us capable of bending to reboot our TVs could have so that we might save that $80 or so a year. But, generally the elderly are those who might benefit the most from such an annual saving, and they would essentially be excluded by having to choose the standby button option.

It is true that the dreaded standby button is wasting energy, there are claims of their using up to 8% of total device consumption. But, there is evidence that hard powering devices on and off reduces their lifespan considerably compared to standby mode.

Regardless, the “Western” lifestyle, overall is far more of a problem. The amount of energy wasted by standby mode is trivial compared to the amount of energy wasted in using a washer-dryer several times a week. Even the “A” class, most energy efficient white goods use vast amounts of water (which costs energy to produce) and electricity, and the juice pulled by a standard television when in use far outweighs even the most inefficient standby mode. The Energy Saving Trust asserts that we should power down fully and switch off our chargers (presumably that includes those that don’t have trickle mode and so use no electricity when charged to capacity!).

The real problem is not standby mode at all. It is our attitude to consumption in general. Admittedly, there is an old adage that we should look after the pennies, and the pounds (dollars) will look after themselves. But, when it comes to power and water consumption, this is simply not true. Save a few milliwatt hours by unplugging your charger every day is not going to offset the consumption inherent in running a mobile phone network (all the construction and maintenance and operation of powered masts and exchange systems) nor the same for TV.

It makes sense to power down properly, but do not think it will save the world. Getting rid of your electrical laundry goods, TV, and car, might. But eradicating the standby button most certainly won’t.

Extracting the Urine

Gamma butyrolactoneAccording to a recent report in Wired, agents at the FBI labs in Quantico, Virginia, have discovered that chilled samples of urine can spontaneously produce the drug GHB (gamma butyrolactone), commonly known “liquid E” and a well-known date-rape drug involved in an increasing number of what the FBI terms “drug-facilitated sexual assaults”, or DFSA. However, certain observers suggest that the while GBH is infamous its use in DFSA is far less common than law-enforcement agencies would have us believe; alcohol is a much guiltier party in DFSA than any other substance. The findings, based on GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) suggest that suspects could give a false positive result even in the toughest FBI forensic test.

Writing in the journal Forensic Science International, the FBI team, lead by Marc LeBeau, explains that, “Our study suggests in vitro production of GHB may increase the apparent GHB concentrations in urine during storage. To minimize this production, it is suggested that urine specimens be maintained in a refrigerated or frozen condition and analyzed as quickly as possible. This is particularly important, because GHB analyses are relatively infrequent requests in many laboratories. Therefore, specimens are likely to be stored for some extended period of time before the analysis is carried out.”

Earlier studies had hinted at increasing concentrations of GHB, GBL, or 1,4-BD in the urine of abusers of these comppunds. “It is generally accepted that urine is the most valuable specimen in DFSA cases,” explains LeBeau, “and that 10 micrograms per milliliter be used as the cutoff concentration to differentiate between endogenous and exogenous GHB in urine.”

The FBI team admits that it does not yet know what causes increasing concentrations of GBH in urine samples. It could be microbial activity, but it is probably not straight putrefaction. “Whatever the cause of these small artificial increases in endogenous GHB [in urine samples], the modification is likely driven by time, temperature, and/or changes in pH,” they say. But, also in taking the wind out of Wired’s sails, not only is GBH not considered a date-rape drug, the FBI team adds that, “It should also be noted that none of the samples in this study ever exceeded the recommended urinary endogenous GHB cutoff of 10 micrograms per milliliter.

InChI=1/C4H6O2/c5-4-2-1-3-6-4/h1-3H2