The allure of aluminium

In Nature Chemistry’s first issue of  the year, Daniel Rabinovich from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, shares anecdotes about an element we use on a daily basis; aluminium. Sceptical Chymist blogger, Anne Pichon elaborates:

Aluminium hasn’t always been such a common-or-garden element: it used to be pricier than gold, it is aluminium cutlery that Napoleon III reached for to impress guests, and I’ll leave you to check Rabinovich’s ‘in your element’ article to read Jules Verne’s praise of element 13.Alum, a hydrated sulfate salt of potassium and aluminium [KAl(SO4)2·12H2O], has long been known — ancient Greeks and Romans used it as astringent for dressing wounds. But although aluminium is present in various compounds, and abundant on Earth, it is so reactive in its elemental form that it wasn’t isolated until the 1820s.Friedrich Wöhler isolated aluminium metal in 1827, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville produced larger quantities and published a detailed account of its properties and applications in the 1850s, and both Charles Hall and Paul Héroult devised electrolysis-based large-scale fabrication processes in the 1880s. Add to this the contribution of Karl Josef Bayer, who developed a route to extract and purify alumina from the mineral bauxite et voilà, aluminium became so widely used it was to be referred to as ‘the magic metal’ by National Geographic.

A to Z of social media for academics

Catherine de Lange reports in the Nature Jobs blog, that Andy Miah, Professor in Ethics & Emerging Technologies and Director of the Creative Futures Institute at the University of the West of Scotland, has set up a new email list where academics (and other interested parties) can share social media platforms and apps. The list has been up and running for a few weeks now and has 250 members from over 90 universities in the UK:

In Miah’s own words:

The list was set up after I heard about Vyclone, a cool new iPhone app that allows you to create multi-angle films, by just pointing multiple iPhones at something and shooting. It automatically edits the different videos and spits out the results. When I saw this I thought, I really need something to keep abreast of all the new tools out there, so here it is. To kick things off, I’ve compiled a list of social media platforms that you may find helpful.

Nature’s man

This week’s Soapbox Science post is by Dr Lawrence Goldman, Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He announces there has been a new addition:

The latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published on 3 January 2013, includes the lives of 225 notable figures from British national life who died in 2009. Of these more than 30 are men and women principally remembered for their contribution to modern scientific and medical enquiry. They include Sir John Maddox who was twice editor of Nature between 1966 and 1975 and then again from 1980 to 1995. The outstanding science journalist of his generation, Maddox reversed the fortunes of the journal which, on his arrival, was in some disarray. Under his editorship Nature regained its reputation as one of the world’s most important scientific journals, as it had been when founded in 1869. Maddox’s biography for the Oxford DNB has been written by John Gribbin, one of his early employees and colleagues at Nature.

Ancient medicinal tablets had Cold-Eeze-like ingredients

Kevin Jiang reveals in the Spoonful of Medicine blog,  new analysis of ancient remnants has shed light on the pharmaceutical practices of the ancient world.

{credit}Images courtesy of PNAS/Giachi et. al.{/credit}

Two thousand years ago, people could not go to the nearest pharmacy for Cold-Eeze, but they appear to have concocted their very own zinc remedy, according to a new analysis of ancient remnants. Scientists have characterized the mineralogical and chemical ingredients of medicine from a 2,200-year-old shipwreck, revealing new insights into the pharmaceutical practices of the ancient world. Their work was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

A number of small, airtight tin containers thought to contain substances for therapeutic use were recovered from the remains of the shipwreck, discovered off the coast of Italy in the late 1980s. When scientists later unsealed one of the small containers, they found six well-preserved, grey tablets, each approximately the shape of a circular makeup sponge. A preliminary DNA analysis of the tablets in 2010had revealed around a dozen herbal components, including carrots, parsley and wild onion, bound by clay. However, the total composition and medicinal characteristics remained unknown until now.

NuSTAR spies black holes in galactic web

Ron Cowen details in the News Blog, astronomers may have found two medium-sized galactic monsters:

{credit}NASA/JPL-CALTECH/DSS{/credit}

Launched in June, NASA’S NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Array) X-ray observatory has discovered what may be two intermediate-mass black holes in a nearby galaxy — a missing link between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. Principal investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena unveiled the mission’s first science on 7 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California.

NuSTAR employs a pair of X-ray telescopes that focus photons with energies between 6 and 79 kiloelectronvolts, Harrison says.  The two-year mission overlaps in the X-ray spectrum with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite, but can also record higher energies.

The new observatory’s pair of eyes has been brought to bear on the spiral galaxy IC 342, some 7 million light years (2.1 million parsecs) from Earth. The NuSTAR picture (above) shows two luminous objects believed to be black holes feeding on their surroundings. The objects are so close together that they couldn’t have been discerned with previous instruments at the same energies.

Continue to Ron’s post to find out more.

Voluntary slavery? 

Hazem Zohny explains in the House of Wisdom blog, ancient Egyptians paid a monthly fee to become temple slaves:

MACMILLAN SOUTH AFRICA

Becoming bound by eternal, unquestioning servitude as someone’s property is not likely most people’s career of choice. 2200 years ago, however, it seems some Egyptians voluntarily signed up to become temple slaves.

Not only that, they even paid a monthly fee for the “privilege.”

The revelation comes from the work of Egyptologist Kim Ryholt of the University of Copenhagen, who has been studying papyrus slave contracts found in a rubbish dump in the ancient Egyptian temple city of Tebtunis.

“I am your servant from this day onwards, and I shall pay 2½ copper-pieces every month as my slave-fee before Soknebtunis, the great god.”

That TV and computer craze, which is giving everyone cancer