36.2055 years in science communication
Scroll down to the members page for Nobel chemist Barry Sharpless and you’ll see not only is his team cross-cultural and international but trans-species too…
…meanwhile, watch out for the latest word on purity from the Sharpless lab in David Bradley’s Resonants webzine, coming soon.
One of the thousands of visitors to the sciencebase medical news headlines page, hit the site via my article on emerging viral infections with the following two phrases: “infections from rose bush” and “infections related to handling ducks”…inexplicable it seems, but if you spot somebody with thorn marks on their hands and fragments of feather under their fingernails you can take a guess at where they’ve been and recommend a good doctor.
Physicists are now paraphrasing Andy Warhol! The latest entry in the physics eprints from arxiv discusses the dynamics of information access on the Web. The researchers conclude that “while fifteen minutes of fame is still an exaggeration in the online media, we find that access to most news items significantly decays after 36 hours of posting.”
Which, is why my sites get updated at least once a day as I hanker for that elusive fifteen minutes.
Here’s an interesting trick, first brought to light by The Register. If you’re after a bit of what they call “pay-per-hump” action, then using Local Google can help you find your nearest brothel. For anyone in Cambridge, the first couple of hits are very intriguing: Google Search. BBC Radio Cambs and the Medical Research Council. A little further down the list one finds a well-known local drinking den for local people. That’s probably closer to the mark, but saying that many journalists know the BBC as a bunch of media whor
Who says science isn’t political? One of my oldest contacts in the world of crystallography recently contacted me about the Petition for Open Data in Crystallography. The initiative, like similar efforts in the realm of genomics, hopes to persuade the curators of crystal structure information (the CSD, ICSD, CRYSMET and ICDD) to provide an open access, “lite” version of their content, crystal data and powder patterns. I’d urge you to take a look and vote on this important issue before the next meeting of the IUCr in August 2005.
It sounds so esoteric, but the title of this paper, available via the Sciencebase Physics ePrints page, is all about learning how to throw a ball the furthest. To quote from the authors conclusion: “The present solution …is based on the widely applicable technique of change of variables. Although this may be implicit in the algebraic variant of the solution, both variants may serve as an illustration of the usefulness of the technique in simplifying otherwise complicated calculations.”
See, I told you it wasn’t esoteric.
One unfortunate beachcomber almost trod in something resembling a severed human penis and testicles, on a New Zealand beach and called the police: Cod story of the week!
However, it was a premature communication, according to the Oddstuff website. It turned out to be some kind of anemone, although no private dick with a marine biology degree was on hand to confirm this.
Meanwhile, fishermen reported sighting a merman, complete with requisite green-black hair, gills, webbed hands, and “protruding stomach”, reports Ananova.
Are these two stories linked? It all seems very fishy to me…
It seems that a meeting underway in Exeter this week may very well draw the conclusion that genes, the mainstay of the whole of the last half century or more of biological science, don’t actually exist, at least according to the published abstract from UPenn’s Karola Stotz and colleagues (link died since time of writing).
Stotz explains that daily findings from the life sciences continually imply that the gene as a particulate entity in the genome is not supported by the evidence. They also suggest that science journalists, as both reporters and critics, perhaps have a role to play in the public understanding of post-genomic science. Presumably, this means we should somehow be mediating the discovery of a supposed gene for this disease or that behaviour, and explaining clearly that there are very few biologists now who see “genes” as the particulate entities that explained Mendel’s findings all those years ago. Indeed, headlines shouting about an “asthma gene”, “a gene for homosexuality”, or “the gene controlling suicidal tendencies” must be spiked as of now (and maybe always should have been). I’ll be on my best behaviour in this regard from now on, although I cannot promise I don’t have the gene for being contrary and so might renege on my promise…
I received an interesting comment from reader Martin G over at OhPurleese.com following my note about the “dangers of Fullerenes”:
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some toxic effects – but . . .
They’re all around us and have been for millions of years. Any old soot contains a fair percentage of Bucky balls, tubes etc etc.
The wonder was it took so long for us to find them!”
He’s certainly right, but I still think that won’t stop the scaremongers shouting down any new research in this and almost every other chemical field.
As some Sciencebase visitors will know, I was on the editorial team that published Sir Harry Kroto’s original paper on fullerenes many moons ago. Now, I see there’s something of a reason not to be cheerful regarding this discovery, at least according to research published by the ACS.
In a challenge to conventional wisdom, scientists have found that buckyballs dissolve in water and could have a negative impact on soil bacteria. The findings raise new questions about how the nanoparticles might behave in the environment and how they should be regulated, according to a report scheduled to appear in the June 1 issue of Environmental Science & Technology.
Recent studies showed that even low concentrations of fullerenes could affect biological systems such as human skin cells, but this latest study is among the earliest to assess how buckyballs might behave when they come in contact with water in nature.
Fullerenes have until been thought of as insoluble in water, which suggests they pose no imminent threat to most natural systems. “We haven’t really thought of water as a vector for the movement of these types of materials,” says Joseph Hughes of Georgia Tech and lead author of the study.
But, Hughes and his collaborators at Rice University in Texas have found that buckyballs combine into unusual nano-sized clumps – which they refer to as “nano-C60” – that are about 10 orders of magnitude more soluble in water than the individual carbon molecules.
In this new experiment, they exposed nano-C60 to two types of common soil bacteria and found that the particles inhibited both the growth and respiration of the bacteria at very low concentrations – as little as 0.5 parts per million. “What we have found is that these C60 aggregates are pretty good antibacterial materials,” Hughes says. “It may be possible to harness that for tremendously good applications, but it could also have impacts on ecosystem health.”
It will be interesting to see how the media takes to these findings, especially given that buckyballs are nanoscale objects. No doubt it will be just one more objection from the chemophobes to the development of new chemical technologies.