Best song of the 80s? Gold by Spandau Ballet. But it seems that the frilly-collared Spandau boys were far from original in their lyrical choice. According to a survey undertaken by Santiago Alvarez, in the department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the most popular elements referred to in music are, from the top; silver, gold, tin and oxygen.

I was amazed to hear that tin was so high in the elemental hit parade, until a quick survey of the Nature News team opened my eyes to its prevalence elsewhere than in the Wizard of Oz (incidentally the tin man’s song never mentions his eponymous metal).

How could I have forgotten the brilliant And the band played Waltzing Matilda, by Eric Bogle (and also performed by the ever-slurry Pogues), with the line “They gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun”. And a quick google search shows that even soft-focussed Katie Melua mentions tin in her song What it says on the tin. I’m not sure that the suggestion that tin’s ranking was due to the Belgian cartoon character Tintin is right, though.

Other gems plucked from the minds of the Nature News team include: platinum wheels in Minnie The Moocher; lithium in Nirvana’s Lithium; silicon in the Boomtown Rats’ I don’t like Mondays; hydrogen and helium in They might be giants’ Why does the sun shine? and almost every single element there is in the genius elements song by Tom Lehrer.

Iron has to be way up there too, what with all those rockers – "Iron man, by Ozzie and friends,” one Japan-based member of the team enthused when asked what element-containing song sprang to mind.

I’m very impressed that the New Journal of Chemistry published this comprehensive opinion piece, which goes much further than simply being a survey of a “musical cyberstore”, as suggested in the press release.

Alvarez goes to great lengths to discuss the history of scientific elements in music – from the original earth, fire, water and air, to Mendeleev and the periodic table. It’s well worth a look (although you might need a subscription) to learn about elements mentioned by some of the world’s greatest composers – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel to name a few. Here’s factoid from the paper: Edgard Varese wrote a piece dedicated to platinum, called Density 21.5 – it was a solo piece for the flute, and the performer Georges Barres was trying out his new platinum flute – platinum has a density of 21.5 grams per cubic centimeter.

If you can think of any other element containing songs (Pocket full of kryptonite doesn’t count) let us know. Here’s a selection of songs to inspire you, written by school kids, set with the task of composing a song that mentions 80 elements. As expected, this is pretty difficult unless you just list the elements. Still, some imagination has gone into an elemental version of an Eminem song.

Of course, music is an element in its own right, according to the periodic table produced by the BBC’s Look around you team; symbol Mu, atomic number 4, atomic weight, 4.

Best song of the 80s? Gold by Spandau Ballet. But it seems that the frilly-collared Spandau boys were far from original in their lyrical choice. According to a survey undertaken by Santiago Alvarez, in the department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the most popular elements referred to in music are, from the top; silver, gold, tin and oxygen.

I was amazed to hear that tin was so high in the elemental hit parade, until a quick survey of the Nature News team opened my eyes to its prevalence elsewhere than in the Wizard of Oz (incidentally the tin man’s song never mentions his eponymous metal).

How could I have forgotten the brilliant And the band played Waltzing Matilda, by Eric Bogle (and also performed by the ever-slurry Pogues), with the line “They gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun”. And a quick google search shows that even soft-focussed Katie Melua mentions tin in her song What it says on the tin. I’m not sure that the suggestion that tin’s ranking was due to the Belgian cartoon character Tintin is right, though.

Other gems plucked from the minds of the Nature News team include: platinum wheels in Minnie The Moocher; lithium in Nirvana’s Lithium; silicon in the Boomtown Rats’ I don’t like Mondays; hydrogen and helium in They might be giants’ Why does the sun shine? and almost every single element there is in the genius elements song by Tom Lehrer.

Iron has to be way up there too, what with all those rockers – "Iron man, by Ozzie and friends,” one Japan-based member of the team enthused when asked what element-containing song sprang to mind.

I’m very impressed that the New Journal of Chemistry published this comprehensive opinion piece, which goes much further than simply being a survey of a “musical cyberstore”, as suggested in the press release.

(more…)

Engineers learn lessons from nature to devise better devices and materials.

Courtney Humphries

After long lagging behind MIT and other schools in engineering, Harvard has been beefing up its engineering research efforts over the last 10 years. A major area of growth has been at the interface between engineering and biology. Harvard’s bioengineering faculty members, many of them young recruits, span disciplines and draw on biology, engineering, computer science, and materials science. Some look to nature, which has evolved ways to create complex materials and organisms, to guide their efforts in coming up with novel materials and devices. Here are a few examples.

Following the herd

Radhika Nagpal, a computer scientist with a longstanding interest in biology, joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in computer science in 2004 after completing a PhD and postdoc at MIT. Nagpal studies self-organizing systems in nature—where individual entities such as cells, insects, or people cooperate to accomplish a larger task—and looks for ways to apply that knowledge to the design of new technologies, such as groups of robots that work together.

The cells of the heart, for instance, contract together to create a single heartbeat, and fireflies synchronize their flashes of light. Nagpal and her colleagues drew upon these principles of self-organizing synchronization to address the simple problem of computers that operate out of synch with each other. Using algorithms derived from the activity of heart cells, her team programmed a network of computers to gradually reach synchronization, one step towards getting them to perform tasks in a coordinated fashion. Using a reverse approach, they programmed computers to desynchronize into a “round robin” pattern as they sent information over a wireless network; by taking turns, the computers avoided network traffic jams.

Drew Endy, a bioengineer at MIT, says that Nagpal’s work adds a new dimension to computer programming. “Most computer programs don’t change the physical world; they operate over time,” he says. “Radhika is thinking about programs that operate in space,” like the biological program that allows a tree to grow from a seed. This distinction, he adds, makes Nagpal one of only “a handful of people in the world who recognize that this is an important problem to solve.”

Studying nature’s materials

Joanna Aizenberg, who left Bell Laboratories to become a professor of materials science at Harvard last summer, also sees biology as an inspiration. Aizenberg uses engineering tools to study materials in nature and then exploits that knowledge to develop better materials. Biological materials have several properties that manmade ones lack: they can respond to the environment, heal themselves after injury, and rearrange dynamically.

She is interested in the inorganic materials that biological organisms create, such as skeletons and shells. These structures do more than just provide structure and strength. A few years ago, Aizenberg and colleagues found that the outer skeleton of brittlestars, a close relative of starfish, contains near-perfect arrays of tiny lenses that sense light. In this case, she says, “nature can teach us serious lessons about how to design inorganic materials with optical properties that are well beyond what we make.” The lenses are equipped with, in effect, their own built-in sunglasses: a network of channels through which the brittlestar pumps pigments to cover the lenses during the day, and removes the pigments at night. Based on their studies of the brittlestar, Aizenberg and colleagues created arrays of tiny lenses with microfluidic pigment systems. Microlens arrays are currently used in digital photography and many other technologies; these “tunable” lens arrays could one day use dyes to change their optical properties or reduce their transmission of light.

Shaping an environment for stem cells

Debra Auguste studies a key question in developmental biology—how embryonic stem cells differentiate into various cell types—from an engineering perspective. Many stem cell biologists focus on identifying the chemical signals that guide a stem cell down different paths. But Auguste looks at the cells’ physical environment to figure out how those signals vary over time and space and how those variations may be causing stem cells to specialize into such a variety of cell types. Auguste, who did postdoctoral work at MIT before coming to Harvard two years ago, uses microfluidics technology to test how stem cells respond to varying gradients of biochemical signals.

The goal is to find ways to control stem cell differentiation and increase the yield of the desired cell type. Rather than just identifying chemical signals, Auguste focuses on developing scaffolds on which to grow cells; these structures would imitate the cells’ natural physical environment, including the delivery of the chemical signals at just the right place and time.

(All photos courtesy of Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)