36.2055 years in science communication
A perennial point of contention among chemists is the issue of naming the chemical elements. At least at the top end of the periodic table. However, the periodic table of rejected elements provides some light relief while concentrating on this crucial chemical conundrum. Where else can you find delirium, sin, and crouton?
I’m sure they meant element 15 (Bs) to be Bosphorus, but somehow missed the s, although Boss Porous would be a great name for a Dukes of Hazard revival set in a lab…
I haven’t mentioned search terms for a while, but one that drew in the punters to the sciencebase site stood out in my recent trawl of the site logs – “crystallized ink”. Now, what’s all that about? I wondered.
At first, I assumed it was someone worrying about their little pot of Indian blue going all glacial on them (as is the wont of certain types of honey and concentrated acetic acid solutions). But, then I thought maybe the pen manufacturers, in a bid to recapture a dwindling market for handwriting implements, had come up with a way to add a glittery appearance to the extruded product of their implements…
A quick Google, however, revealed that crystallized ink, at least on the basis of the page one SERP is a product of science fiction – an ink that can oscillate between two states: visible and invisible. This product could thus be used to create animations on the page without the need for a conventional computer screen. The main citation is on this page http://lattice.mysteryandmagic.com/reference.a.html. Pull back to the top-level and you will a sci-fi game called The Lattice (semantically the name is reminiscent of another sci-fi genre, I’d say). So, that was an intriguing find.
But.
Trawling the logs a bit deeper revealed the keyphrase “clogged printer head”. A quick cross-check revealed that the search had come from the same IP within a couple of minutes. So, I suspect our inkvestigator was actually just looking for information on how to unblock their printer rather than either anything as archaic as Quink or as futuristic as animated ink.
Shame.
We’ve got a stack of information available to science students including science homework and chemistry assignment help, science fair projects and science class demonstration guides. The free stuff is fine, but we also offer science project resources in partnership with 24 Hour Science Projects, which you or your parent will have to pay for. We recommend these project packs very highly though as they’re almost guaranteed to help you make the grade in science class as well as improve your understanding of some important scientific principles.
The following pages in the Sciencebase archives will help you find the science project inspiration you need:
Apologies for those typos in some of the file names, they can’t be corrected now, but rest assured we do know how to spell science
How do you clean up waste water contaminated with the deadly metal cadmium and what do you do with the resulting material? French scientists reckon they have found the answer.
The mineral hydroxyapatite, like its natural counterpart found in tooth and bone, has an affinity for the toxic heavy metal cadmium, they say. Now, they have used X-ray diffraction spectroscopic analysis, and electron microscopy to follow the kinetics of uptake and release of this metal from hydroxyapatite and have demonstrated that a solid apatite solution of cadmium is formed. Their findings could have implications for the dual use of this material as a decontaminant and a storage medium for cadmium.
Read on…
French researchers have now demonstrated a way to circumvent one of the main problems associated with cellular imaging and can obtain nanomolar concentration readings even for complex biological samples using their approach.
The method has led to an extension of the use of spectroscopy and spectro-imaging to many more parameters associated with cellular activity in both cultured and xenografted cells, and living tissues. No other analytical technique is available that can analyse tissue sections without embedding, fixation, or reagents adding, at the resolution and sensitivity obtained by the team.
Read on…
Huángqà (huangqi) is a plant root used in one of the most common tonics of Chinese traditional herbal medicine with purported activity in cancer, diabetes, inflammation, and nephritis.
As such, there is a lot of interest in the active ingredients of this species as it might lead to novel pharmaceuticals against a range of illnesses. Now, researchers in China have used a powerful spectroscopic technique to identify the active chemical components of this remedy.
Read more…
Improving detection of toxic metals in the environment and trace elements in medical samples is often time-consuming and, worse, reagent demanding, as well as potentially having false positives as samples become contaminated by pre-treatment.Portuguese researchers have now overcome these drawbacks by using an online sample pre-treatment method.
The team has coupled an online high-intensity focused ultrasound system with a more conventional analytical technique, which they say is greener than conventional approaches because it needs less reagents but more importantly avoids contamination and cuts the amount of time taken to analyse metals such as mercury in water and urine samples. The approach should be generally applicable, the researchers say. You can read the full analysis of this research in the latest news round up from David Bradley at spectroscopyNOW.com
Jennifer Barnett and researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry have discovered that intelligence can reduce the effects and severity of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
It was already known that intelligence can protect against dementia and the effects of head injury. Now, Barnett and her colleagues have reviewed the literature to discover that intelligence can also act as a buffer against the potentially debilitating effects of schizophrenia and other disorders. They found that for people with a higher IQ, the symptoms of schizophrenia were less severe and the ability to function in daily life better than for those people of lower IQ.
The team found that a phenomenon known as “cognitive reserve” made people more resilient to disabilities arising from these disorders. Fortunately, cognitive reserve can be strengthened through education, neurocognitive activation (doing sudoku, crosswords, and other puzzles), or other treatment programs. It may also be possible to improve cognitive reserve through the use of cognition-enhancing drugs, say the researchers.
“Cognitive reserve may greatly improve our understanding of individual differences in the causes and consequences of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders,” Barnett explains. Team leader Barbara Sahakian adds that “We are very excited about these novel results. We have known for some time that it is important to ‘use it or lose it’ with regard to ageing and dementia, but it now seems that this concept applies more widely.”
The research will appear online in the journal Psychological Medicine
You can play suduko online at Sciencebase.
Researchers in the US have developed an exquisitely sensitive test, better by a thousand-fold than previous efforts, for detecting trace quantities of cholera and botulinum toxins. These two agents are considered potential agents of a bioterrorist attack. Their test takes just three hours to provide a result.
Until now, the most rapid and sensitive approach to biotoxin detection has involved coupling the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with antibody specificity for toxins.
To boost the sensitivity of this approach, Jeffrey Mason and colleagues at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Rockville, MD, package about sixty molecules that initiate PCR into a hollow liposome decorated with receptors for the toxin. When present, the toxin binds to the receptors, and when the liposome is subsequently broken open, the released PCR-initiating molecules amplify the signal and enable detection of vanishingly small amounts of toxins – they are detectable even against a background of harmless components in urine and runoff water.
The team reports details of its new test in Nature Biotechnology today.
Researchers at Imperial College London have demonstrated that an antibiotic is effective at treating acute asthma attacks, potentially providing a new way to help asthma sufferers.
The team found that the antibiotic, telithromycin, can hasten the recovery time of patients who have had asthma attacks by three days, as well as reducing their symptoms and improving lung function. Treatment for some serious asthma attacks can involve the use of steroids, which help control inflammation of the lungs and bronchodilators to open airways. However, telithromycin, an antibiotic was tested as part of the TELICAST (TELIthromycin, Chlamydophila and ASThma) study on 278 patients at 70 centres around the world, including St Mary’s Hospital, London to see whether asthma therapy could be added to the drug’s repertoire.
The patients were enrolled in the study within 24 hours of an acute asthma attack requiring acute medical care. They were then randomised double blind to either ten days oral treatment with a single 800mg dose of telithromycin daily, or placebo in addition to usual treatment. Symptoms and lung function for the patients in the telithromycin group improved significantly compared to those in the placebo group, with improvements being around twice as great at the end of the treatment period. Recovery time was also cut from an average of eight days for the placebo group, to five days for those in the telithromycin group.
Sebastian Johnston from Imperial College London, who led the research, said: ‘Traditionally antibiotics have not proven effective in treating asthma attacks, but this development could open up a whole new area of research in the treatment of asthma.”