Author: David Bradley

Detox – Don’t Bother

Feeling chock full of cr*p after the festivities, wondering about which detox program to choose? Don’t bother! According to The Sense About Science group, a charitable trust that aims to provide the public with the truth about purportedly scientific and medical claims, a glass of tap water and an early night are the best remedies.

As it turns out, evolution has endowed us with our own built-in “detox” mechanisms, thankfully. The gut, for instance, prevents bacteria and many toxins from entering the body in the first place. If you think about it you are a hollow tube from mouth to anus, the interior of that tract is essentially “outside”.

However, when harmful chemicals enter the body, the liver, that great chemical plant, rips apart toxin or makes them water soluble so that they can be filtered out and excreted by the kidneys. The body thus detoxifies itself. That phrase “water soluble” is key to understanding how to help things along. The body is re-hydrated with ordinary tap water. It is refreshed with a good night’s sleep.

These processes do not occur more effectively as a result of taking ‘detox’ tablets, wearing ‘detox’ socks, having a ‘detox’ body wrap, eating Nettle Root extract, drinking herbal infusions or ‘oxygenated’ water, following a special ‘detox’ diet, or using any of the other products and rituals that are promoted. They waste money and sow confusion about how our bodies, nutrition and chemistry actually work.

Accelerated Aging

Chemical analysis spots malfunctioning protein.

Jin-Shan Hu and colleagues at the University of Maryland, National Cancer Institute, the National Centre for Scientific Research, France, have used NMR to determine the structure of the protein thought to malfunction in premature aging conditions, such as Werner syndrome. The structure might one day lead to a better understanding of this rare genetic disorder as well as other aging-related diseases.

Wedding Anniversary

Wedding AnniversaryWell…it’s our fourteenth wedding anniversary this year, today, so a good time to remind sciencebase readers of our alternative chymical wedding anniversary list where you will discover that the fourteenth is “pyrolytic carbon“, which is used to make heart valves.

If you favour the traditional list, then it’s ivory, so we won’t expect gifts, for obvious reasons.

King Kong’s Monkey Love

Sex smells, according to Joshuah Bearman of the LAWeekly who wrote to sciencebase today to alert us to his article on King Kong’s Monkey Love (obviously, he’s well aware that Kong is an ape not a monkey, but allow him some artistic licence, he is after all telling us about the birds and the bees, well beast, actually).

Anyway, his essay meanders from Gigantopithecus blacki, the 12-foot prehistoric ape that died out 100,000 years ago to the recent re-classification of chimpanzees into the hominidae family and even discusses the biological potential for a consummated love between man and ape.

All that aside, his essay concludes with a quote from Peter Singer who, along with many other people, suggests that the great apes should be endowed with “human” rights. It raises the ancient morality conflicts of how we treat all animals, of course, and whether we should use them for biomedical experimentation or not…

Toucan Play at That Game

Toucan Beak

Engineers are hoping to learn about strong construction work by studying the structure of the toucan beak.

Materials scientists could soon benefit from the first ever detailed engineering analysis of toucan beaks. Toucan beaks are incredibly tough and have a surprising impact-absorbing sandwich structure according to the study, which could provide engineers with a near-perfect model for novel aeronautics and construction materials.Materials scientists could soon benefit from the first ever detailed engineering analysis of toucan beaks. Toucan beaks are incredibly tough and have a surprising impact-absorbing sandwich structure according to the study, which could provide engineers with a near-perfect model for novel aeronautics and construction materials.

Radical Damage

Raman reveals the radical damage that other techniques cannot see.

Italian researchers have shown that Raman spectroscopy could be a useful tool in investigating radical-based damage to proteins.

Armida Torreggiani, Maurizio Tamba, Immacolata Manco, M.R. Faraone-Mennella, Carla Ferreri, and C. Chatgilialoglu of the ISOF Institute of the National Research Council in Bologna and Naples University have investigated the gamma-irradiation of bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A (RNase A) in aqueous solution using vibrational spectroscopy as well as enzymatic assay, electrophoresis, and HPLC analysis. They found that Raman spectroscopy in particular could reveal conformational changes in the protein and locate the amino acid residues most susceptible to radical attack.

Cellular ABC

X-rays see through cellular process

US biologists have used X-ray diffraction to take a snapshot view of the tiny motor that opens and shuts the cellular portals that allow nutrients to pass into our cells. Jue Chen and colleagues at Purdue University have clarified the connection between the membrane transport proteins and how they utilise a cell’s energy to permit or deny materials entry into the interior of the cell from the outside world.

Buckyballs versus DNA

Peter Cummings of Vanderbilt University and his colleagues have discovered that those marvels of the molecular playing field – the soccerball shaped fullerenes, aka buckyballs, can bind to DNA and cause it to deform, according to computer simulations published in the December issue of the Biophysical Journal. Perhaps most worrying is that they see this deformation in an aqueous environment rather than in an organic solvent.

Cummings and Alberto Striolo (now a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma), along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Xiongce Zhao, used molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the question of whether buckyballs would bind to DNA and, if so, whether they could then inflict any lasting damage.

Cummings suggests that his research reveals a potentially serious problem: “Buckyballs have a potentially adverse effect on the structure, stability and biological functions of DNA molecules.”

What is not mentioned in the Vanderbilt press release on this “discovery”, which as you will note is essentially theoretical is that the fullerenes are not particularly soluble in water under normal conditions. Indeed, researchers at London South Bank University explain that [60]fullerene can be dispersed in water but only if it is transferred from an organic solvent using high energy sound (sonication). That word “dispersed” is crucial irrespective of the relatively sophisticated technology required to carry these molecules into water.

One thing that our bodies generally lack is a large supply of organic solvent and a sonicator. So, with any luck, the Cummings work will remain theoretical rather than experimental. While this kind of research must be carried out under the precautionary principle, it is not necessarily providing us with any useful insights into the real risks or otherwise of fullerenes. Moreover, the powerful media machine that includes university press offices these days now has another opportunity to kick chemistry.

Science Lesson Plan on Magnetism

With news that after 400 years of stability, the Earth’s magnetic North Pole could soon reach Siberia. If that happens, you can kiss Alaska Borealis goodbye as the Northern Lights go with the flow.

The pole has moved hundreds of kilometres in the last couple of centuries and could reach Siberia within another fifty years according to Oregon State University paleomagnetist Joseph Stoner speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, this week. The remarkably rapid (for geological change) movement of the magnetic pole doesn’t necessarily mean that our planet is going through a large-scale change that would result in the reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field as some people fear. Instead, this may be part of a normal oscillation, says Stoner, and could swing back towards Canada again.

Whichever way it goes, check out the sciencebase magnetic science lesson plan courtesy of Oregon’s Columbia Education Center.