The Great Beyond

On Monday UK newspaper the Guardian, known to many as the Grauniad due to its penchant for mistakes, ran the following correction:

We misspelled a number of elements in the periodic table printed in part VI of the Science Course supplement distributed with the paper on May 1. We meant Iron (not Irone); Praseodymium (not Praseodynium); Neodymium (not Neodynium); Neptunium (not Neptuniam); Americium (not Americum); Seaborgium (not Seoborgium); and Darmstadtium (not Darmstadium).

Oh how we chortled. Then someone suggested I check if Nature has ever made similar boobs...

Continue reading "Elementary mistakes" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 13, 2008
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Chemist Albert Hofmann has died at the age of 102.

In 1938 Hofmann isolated lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, while working for the Sandoz chemical company. As he notes in his book LSD: My Problem Child, not a lot happened immediately:

The research report also noted, in passing, that the experimental animals became restless during the narcosis. The new substance, however, aroused no special interest in our pharmacologists and physicians; testing was therefore discontinued.

However five years later he found himself in a dreamlike state. After concluding this was related to the lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate he had just started working with again, possibly through accidental absorption through his fingernails, he notes:

There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.

Continue reading "RIP Albert Hofmann" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 30, 2008
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A number of headlines today will surprise those who thought an iceberg sank the Titanic. ‘Low-grade rivets sank Titanic, claim scientists’, says one example.

What Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Timothy Foecke are actually claiming is that duff rivets used to hold bits of the ship together meant it sinking faster than it should have done. If the Titanic’s builder had used better materials, they argue, it would have stayed afloat longer after hitting the ’berg, allowing rescuers to arrive.

In their new book McCarty and Foecke say that builder Harland and Wolff used iron rather than steel rivets for key sections of the bow and stern. The bow is where the iceberg hit and Foecke tells the New York Times that damage “ends close to where the rivets transition from iron to steel”.

Foecke also says the iron used was not rivet quality, based on documents from Harland and Wolff and from analysis of rivets recovered from the wreck.

Continue reading "Riveting science from the Titanic" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 16, 2008
Categories: Chemistry, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A surprising number of quite dramatic stories today – one big round-up post will have to do for them all.

Dextre, the Canadian space agency’s new robot, is meant to be helping construct the ISS. Instead it’s making outlandish demands:
In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at ‘Dextre the Magnificent.’ Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.

Virgin and Google are going to Mars. They want YOU to join them (if you can score highly enough on their selection questionnaire that is).

Continue reading "A chemist, a physicist, and a biologist walk into a bar" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics, Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A mystery involving Napoleon, Humphry Davy, warring countries and an apparently angry spouse is nearing resolution.

Last week the Royal Society of Chemistry revealed a letter detailing the trouble Davy had getting to Paris to collect a medal from Napoleon at a time when France was fighting a protracted war with Britain. The letter, from a French navy officer to the general secretary of the Institut de France, explained that the British blockade of French ports made it impossible to tell Davy he had been awarded the medal to “promote and share scientific knowledge” (RSC press release).

Davy did eventually travel to France and claim his medal and the RSC wanted to know where it was. After asking the public this question a relative of Davy came forward to say Davy’s wife had thrown it into the sea after his death.

Continue reading "Where’s Humphry’s medal?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2008
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Scientists have for the first time measured the force needed to move one individual atom.

In the latest issue of Science, researchers from IBM and the University of Regensburg in Germany detail how they used an atomic force microscope to measure the vertical and lateral forces exerted on individual atoms by the probe tip of the microscope probe (research paper, related perspective paper, IBM press release, Regensburg press release).

It seems to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface requires a force of 210 piconewtons. Moving a cobalt atom over a copper surface takes only 17 piconewtons. By contrast, IBM’s press release points out lifting a penny requires nearly 30 billion piconewtons.

Continue reading "Moving atoms is easy, measuring the moves less so" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 22, 2008
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It’s always nice to see science becoming art, especially when it’s done as nicely as this. Jenn Schmitt has got 96 different printmakers to come up with their own visual interpretations of various elements and put them together into a periodic table (hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley). They’ve even tackled the elements for which no obvious picture suggests itself.

You can view the full table in its glory on the Periodic Table Printmaking Project website.

Individual element pictures range from charming and literal (a balloon and the Sun for Helium) to rather more abstract (a rooster for Gallium). It’s also nice to see that artists can also be geeks – the picture for Nickel is a graph of the value of the amount of Nickel in a nickel over six months of 2007.

Images above: hydrogen and helium.

“Knowing how the world around you works makes life so much richer. So the connection of art and science is an important one to me,” Schmitt says in an interview.

Other periodic tables we like
It’s a table, and a periodic table
Comic book periodic table
BBC’s ‘Look Around You’ spoof
Chemsoc’s Visual Elements table
CSRRI’s x-ray properties table

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 30, 2008
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The history of chocolate will have to be revised following a new discovery, along with the history of humanity’s troubled relationship with alcohol. Archaeologists working in Honduras detected residues from cacao plants in liquid holding vessels from 500 years earlier than beverages of the chocolate precursor have previously been found. John Henderson and colleagues think the beverages in question were more like beer than a hot chocolate-type drink and could have been as potent at 5% alcohol by volume (BBC, LA Times, Telegraph, NY Times, Times).

In this week’s PNAS, they report detecting theobromine in vessels dating from about 1150 BC, half a century earlier than previous finds. Theobromine occurs only in cacao. Beverages drunk at the Puerto Escondido site in Honduras were probably produced by fermenting the sweet pulp that surrounds cacao seeds. “Fermentation is also an early step in the process used to produce the better-known nonalcoholic chocolate beverage in Mesoamerica. We argue that this is a secondary use of a by-product, fermented cacao seeds, and that an alcoholic beverage made from the pulp was originally the primary consumable,” the paper states.

Co-author Patrick McGovern, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, was amazed by how many of the samples he tested were positive for theobromine. “The results were astounding. Every vessel that he [Henderson] had chosen and was tested gave a positive signal for theobromine," he said (LA Times).

UPDATE – 14/11/07

I may have slightly misled you. This is a new comment by Patrick McGovern:

It should be noted that the use of “beer” in many of the media articles is confusing. The confusion has arisen because “chichi” has two usages:

Continue reading "‘Chocolate beer’ is older than we thought" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 13, 2007
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Leslie Orgel, head of the Chemical Evolution Laboratory at the Salk Institute, has died. Orgel pioneered the theory that RNA preceded DNA as a replicating molecule. At the time of his death his work was focused on searching for a precursor to RNA

He was also one of the first to suggest that life on Earth might have been seeded by extraterrestrials. His name is attached to Orgel’s rules:
“Whenever a spontaneous process is too slow or too inefficient a protein will evolve to speed it up or make it more efficient.”
&
“Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

LA Times obituary
Salk Institute statement
The Scientist obituary

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 31, 2007
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Biochemist Arthur Kornberg has died at the age of 89. Kornberg won a Nobel prize for medicine in 1959 for his work with Severo Ochoa on the biological synthesis of DNA. His contribution to his field is detailed in a Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology piece from 2006 (subscription required).

“Dr Kornberg was one of the most distinguished and remarkable scientists in American medicine,” said Philip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine where he worked for many years (Stanford press release).

“Fellow scientists say in 200 years, the world will remember the name of medical researcher Dr Arthur Kornberg ... the same way it does Albert Einstein and Nicolaus Copernicus,” says the Democrat and Chronicle, local paper of Rochester. Kornberg studied at the University of Rochester as an undergraduate.

Kornberg’s son Roger is also a Nobel recipient, having won the chemistry prize in 2006 (Nobel citation, Nature – subscription required).

More Coverage
SF Chronicle
Arizona Republic
San Jose Mercury
Daily Telegraph
The Scientist

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2007
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And the Nobel goes to Gerhard Ertl of the Max Planck Society's Fritz-Habert Institute for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces (announcement). On his birthday, too!

According to the press release

Ertl was one of the first to see the potential of new techniques [developed in the semiconductor industry]. Step by step he has created a methodology for surface chemistry by demonstrating how different experimental procedures can be used to provide a complete picture of a surface reaction. This science requires advanced high-vacuum experimental equipment as the aim is to observe how individual layers of atoms and molecules behave on the extremely pure surface of a metal, for instance. It must therefore be possible to determine exactly which element is admitted to the system. Contamination could jeopardize all the measurements. Acquiring a complete picture of the reaction requires great precision and a combination of many different experimental techniques.

Chemists will presumably be happy that this year's prize goes to one of their own -- there have been dark murmurs about chemistry prizes going to biologists in recent years. Anyone with a bet on the prize at the Chembark blog can expect a 15 to 1 payoff.

See below the fold for more coverage as it happens.

For coverage of yesterday's Nobel for Physics, awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg of the Jülich Research Centre for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance, see this post.

For coverage of Monday's Nobel for Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for knockout mice, see this post.

Continue reading "Chemistry Nobel announced" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on October 10, 2007
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Analysis of child sacrifice victims found on an Andean volcano has shed new light on the selection and grooming of those chosen as offerings. Hairs from sacrifices found on the Llullaillaco volcano show marked changes in diet, suggesting victims were being prepared for their fate for at least a year before they were killed in an Inca ritual (Times, Daily Telegraph, AP, Reuters). Analysis of isotopes in hair from one victim – called the Llullaillaco Maiden – shows standard peasant vegetables of her diet being enriched with the ‘elite food’ maize and animal protein. These changes, states the research paper, “can be taken to indicate that the Maiden had been raised in status, presumably for the express purpose of making her an appropriate sacrifice” (abstract).

Study author Andrew Wilson, of the University of Bradford, said: “By examining hair samples from these unfortunate children, a chilling story has started to emerge of how the children were ‘fattened up’ for sacrifice. Given the surprising change in their diets and the symbolic cutting of their hair, it appears that various events were staged in which the status of the children was raised. In effect, their countdown to sacrifice had begun some considerable time prior to death.” (Press release.)

Taking each 10mm of hair as being one month and working backward from the point of death Wilson and colleagues analysed changes in the chemical isotopes present. Different types of plants use different types of photosynthesis and therefore end up with different ratios of the carbon 12 and carbon 13 isotopes – the latter being heavier as it has an extra neutron. This allowed the team to distinguish between plants such as roots and tubers and other plants such as maize. Other isotope variations can track changes in temperature and altitude and whether diets are marine or terrestrial in origin.

Image: Earth observation of Andes Mountains / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 02, 2007
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A giant X-ray machine in Oxfordshire is going to peer inside unopened manuscripts too fragile to unfurl. Tim Wess from the University of Cardiff has worked out that X-rays from the Diamond synchrotron can be used to image the writing on ancient parchments. Now he wants to look at some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have so far been deemed too brittle to read, he told the British Association Festival of Science in York (covered by the Daily Telegraph, Times, Daily Mail, Guardian, and the BA). “We’ve folded up a real piece of parchment and then done a process of X-ray tomography on it. We’ve been able to recover the structure where we can see the words that are written inside the document,” says Wess (BBC).

Collagen in animal skins used to write on turns to gelatine when wet, making the documents sticky and hard to read. Drying makes them brittle and equally, if differently, problematic. But iron in the ink used shows up on X-rays and, using computers, different layers of folded or rolled documents can be read. Wess is currently perfecting his technique on documents less valuable than the Dead Sea Scrolls and he believes in three or four years it will be good enough to read text in pamphlets and thin books. Unread works by Beethoven and Mozart would then be accessible (The Daily Telegraph, Times). So far his team has been able to read 80% of the text from 18th century legal documents they have been studying (Guardian).

This is actually the latest development in a great tradition of using X-rays to analyse valuable artefacts. They have previously peered under the surface of paintings to detect images hidden beneath, helped date and conserve sculptures and even detected fraud.

Image: unrolled parchment X-ray / Cardiff University

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 13, 2007
Categories: Chemistry, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)